LINUX Unplugged - 479: Good Software, Bad Blood

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

What the heck is going on? Fedora is dropping features, GNOME is getting Iced, and the mistake we'll never make again. We've got a lot to sort out.

We've been kind of scratching our heads like what is a great task match application because we've been trying to do this, but that's not open source and TaskWarrior is complicated. I don't remember why TaskWarrior is disqualified. And it just doesn't work to sort of manually sync paper notes between us all and matrix every morning like that's not going to cut it. Yeah. But if there's like one universal law that seems to be just more and more true these days in free software you're always three solutions away from next cloud you know it's like you start talking about a problem two or three other applications get mentioned and then you always inevitably end up on next cloud of course we were looking at next cloud tasks which is one of their featured apps and i'm kind of impressed

if you look at it it's got a great UI. And then it supports CalDAV export. So when you schedule your tasks, you could, you know, Evolution, Thunderbird, iCal. I don't know what you use, but anything that supports CalDAV, you could just import the dates from your task app in NextCloud into your calendar. That's kind of slick. But, you know, I sort of feel like NextCloud is going through this transition. And I'm curious if you guys agree. But NextCloud just recently announced NextCloud Hub 3, and it is like a collaboration suite to the extreme. NextCloud Chat is more like Slack now, and you could share documents and preview widgets in there.

It's like this whole team-style collaboration that has its own file system behind it, too. And then they have these task systems with group collaboration. They have a new mail app, a new Mail 2.0 app that is a lot more advanced for a mail application. It kind of feels like they're trying to build the next version of Exchange, but the free software version. Like, they're really going for a collaboration suite. I just found here in the apps library, there's a SharePoint backend. No. I think it is. It's the SharePoint killer, Wes. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show.

My name is Chris. My name is Les. And my name is Brent. Hello, boys, back together again in the studio in the beautiful, smoky Pacific Northwest. It's good to be here with you. Coming up on the show today, we're chatting about a few things going on in the world of Linux that caught our attention during the road trip that we just didn't get a chance to talk about with the crazy schedule. And there's some doozies in there, so we'll get to that. Then we'll round it out with a few stories from our friends and from the meetups out there. Plus, of course, we have some boosts and picks and a lot more.

So before I go any further, let's say hello to that virtual lug who's here every single Sunday. Hello, Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings. Hello. What's up, nerds? Hello, Chris. Hello, Wes. And hello, Brent.

And hello, everybody up there in the quiet listening. We see you in the, what would that be? Like the lobby? Like a virtual lobby or a... Or you know when they, like at big events and they've got these like TV screens for the people that can't be in that main theater? Or what if it's more like you're behind? It's actually more like you're backstage watching the show. Oh, true.

They're like our theater techs running everything. Yeah, they're back. They're listening as we're up on stage because we're in there as we're setting up the studio, you know, as we're hitting your cussing and farting and stuff. They're listening to all of that. So they're kind of like really behind the scenes. I was going to make it a little more glamorous if I could. But yeah, that's that's basically it. You weren't going to mention the cussing and the fart scenes. I was going to make it a little more glamorous if I could. But yeah, that's basically it. You weren't going to mention the cussing and the farting?

I try not to. Yeah. Yeah, right. It's better left as a surprise. There's totally no cussing and farting going on in this studio. Totally not happening. Well, we're back. Barely, perhaps, but we're back.

Barely back. And I want to start by saying good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale is a Mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. We used the absolute crap out of it. All of us, every single person at the Airbnb had Tailscale going. We were all getting access to our systems behind firewalls, not open ports for us. No. Go try it out at Tailscale.com.

Go say good morning. Tell them Linux Unplugged sent you. Tailcale.com go say good morning tell them linux unplugged sent you tailscale.com man oh man okay so we got back in last night about oh i don't know 12 hours ago i think about maybe maybe so maybe 12 hours ago we got back into town and uh the great great part about the return trip so much fun is wes you came down to join us in portland and you caravan back with us yeah i got the full experience this time and we even got the third walkie talkie working so and then you guys like disappeared for a while but you had what the thing was is like as long as you stay together we like when you stop to get gas right you stay together the radio still

work like you know our radio doesn't work but you guys can continue to talk and then when you catch back up we can all talk again that was it's pretty neat how that works yeah it was it was fun like we could tell we're getting close again like oh that's a dia yeah also jupes is uh probably i would imagine pretty easy to spot when you're coming up on her she's sort of uh so i was realizing and i felt kind of dumb especially now after that i've spent the night in jupes i didn't really know what she looked like from the back. I was like, and I could see that there'd be like, you know, especially on a weekend,

there could be a lot of rigs on the road sometimes. Sure, sure, yeah. And when I first pulled up on you, there was someone kind of tailgating you right behind. So that threw me too. I was like, who would drive that close to a rig that they're not associated with? Oh, they do.

Everybody, it turns out. They love to draft. They draft in me. And they get right up in there. And the thing they don't realize is that I can't see them in my mirrors unless they are to the one of the sides. But if they're perfectly center, I actually can't see them when they're that close. Well, if they're close enough, you have that rear-facing camera. Yeah.

I learned that. Yeah, but that's dangerous. Yeah, I like to hang out just right there. That's how Brent gets 50 miles to the gallon in gas economy. What if we get you a Pi-powered, Home Assistant-integrated little text billboard thing? You know, like the programmatic little text board? I like this. It just says back off.

Whatever you want. Yeah. Maybe you integrate it with a little speech-to-text, too, so you can sort of shout at something, and then it just puts it on the backboard. Oh, I like that. I mean, you brought up the whole home assistant raspberry pi thing a little too soon i'm still grieving but yeah yeah but i like time for grief you've got systems to build man why are you grieving again i didn't oh come on that's salt in the wound my server and you know

now like you know like back home the kids are over and i'm like i gotta i gotta explain to the kids it's gonna get a little cold here tonight because there's no system running the heat sorry like you know sorry about that everybody ah it's embarrassing family fail we're gonna work on that we're ripping the whole system out tonight after the show and we're gonna replace it with my home assistant yellow and rebuild and rebuild eventually we'll let you know how it goes. So this came up right as we were leaving, right as we were hitting the road. Word came down that Fedora was dropping a video acceleration for H.264, H.265,

and VC1 codecs due to a legal concern. And it seems that this will primarily affect AMD GPU users using open source drivers. So if you have done the hard work of switching off NVIDIA and buying AMD Pure systems, so that way you can have a 3D accelerated environment that is completely open source. Vote with your wallet, they say. You're getting particularly screwed by this. vote with your wallet they say you're getting particularly screwed by this ironically if you install an nvidia graphics card and install their binary proprietary driver you don't have this problem you got nothing to worry about so it kind of actually incentivizes using the proprietary

driver which is funny how that works out it also affects any user who uses like any other open source graphics like i don't know intel graphics users you also will no longer get video accelerated decoding there's been talk about maybe other distributions doing this or not and ultimately it comes down to legal concerns red hat legal is concerned that they may be exposed to a lawsuit. And when a decision like this is made, it actually exposes the real power structure behind Fedora. And it's not that Fedora isn't a community-run distribution. It absolutely is. It's that when Red Hat Legal gets heartburn about something, Fedora has to jump into action

because if Fedora were to become a legal liability for Red Hat, I would imagine the project status would become tenuous. And so the project's incentivized to overreact to these concerns. And as a result, they f*** their end users over and over and over again. I was just looking, it was like July or June of 2020, where Firefox finally, finally got hardware accelerated video playback in Wayland. And it was celebrated at the time on Fedora finally gets this. And yet about a year later, here we are, they now taketh away. And other distributions don't seem to be quite as worried about this, but they don't have this vulnerability that the Fedora project has. And it's a great project,

and it's primarily community run, but this really shows us who's in charge, doesn't it? And I think it's a really kind of unfortunate thing because it's once again end users that are getting f***ed. And it once again shows us why companies like Google have to come along and create a product like Chrome OS to actually make Linux usable for end users, because we can't count on the distributions that are community run to actually be able to do these things. It's an interesting time we live in when Debian can vote to include proprietary firmware on their installer all of a sudden, but Fedora can't decode that video they were decoding for you yesterday it just doesn't make a lot of sense but in the end it's linux users who always have to constantly navigate

these changing rules and once again it's fedora that's making a change like this i just find it really disappointing i understand why they have to do it and you know realistically we're all going to be able to figure out how to work around it. It's not going to be our problem. Yeah. It's the sort of, oh, I wanted to give this a shot, and I have no idea where to start with understanding why this thing that just works and I don't ever have to think about on other systems doesn't over here. Yeah, that's the tragedy of it. And I just took a little look-skis before the show.

I'm sure this will change with time. But it'll take time. But I just did a little look-skis before show and uh was looking up video acceleration for firefox and guess what all the wiki pages all the tutorials all the blog posts all the youtube videos talk about it like it's a working feature like it's something you can do on fedora so now imagine when you install the next version of fedora and it doesn't work and there just hasn't been enough time for google and everything to re-index and so you go searching for it and all the guides and all the things just talk about it like it actually works just fine out of the box you're gonna get totally gaslit like what a mind job and if if all of a sudden could you imagine if all of a sudden apple announced that mac os wasn't going to be able to play back h264

videos like could you imagine how that would go down and i realized fedora is no apple and they're they're definitely not but it does strike me as a decision that was user hostile and you know it's kind of unfortunate because fedora has a history of doing this and it's kind of changed my perspective a little bit and i think it's just sort of the vulnerability that they have as a project and it's just sort of the compromise we have to accept is that if red hat legal has a little bit of heartburn about some concern that might happen to them that they could just shake off financially like it's no big deal or you know i don't know here's a idea license it they're rich they could license it but no no instead

all users who help us beta test this thing that make our product that actually pays the bills they're the ones that get screwed it is sort of an interesting i think maybe it highlights the unique maybe not unique but particular situation that how fedora is structured just thinking you know we're used to community-run distros not wanting to tangle in some of these legal things just because like what they they're not going to pay legal bills or have a lawyer they They have limited funding to begin with. And it reminds me of Canonical's legal sort of being willing to step out on a limb or what some people thought of a limb with adding the CFS module compiled.

So in some circumstances, having a corporate sponsor who's willing to take those risks can be something that those type of Linux distributions benefit from. But that's not really the case. Even though Flora is somewhat attached, it falls more on that community side. Well, and that is assuming that they could buy a license. We want to buy a perpetual license forever for an indefinite amount. It may be one of these situations where they can't buy it. That makes it even more complicated complicated and it doesn't speak to linux's ability to compete as a commercial desktop platform uh if we can't even get past hurdles like

this and i acknowledge it's a tough spot and maybe and i think you might be familiar with with because this happened a few weeks ago so i'm starting to get fadey on it but what happened was a change upstream in mesa that kind of kicked this entire thing off that's why all this came up all of a sudden that's why there's a change to begin with. I don't know, Wes, do you recall what some of those changes were upstream? Straight over in Matrix has a nice little summary that before this stuff was kind of just included in Mesa, I guess some thought maybe as an oversight before, or at least in the way that it was getting pulled into Fedora.

Now you need an explicit build option if you want these codecs. So the non-free things can be cut out in a technical sense in a way that before May, I think, roughly, it was not necessarily easy to do so. So now there's a little more scrutiny and if you're going to have to, like, when this update comes out, you update that and now you have to explicitly add

build flags to enable these non-free things, that raises a lot of questions. So now you're making a proactive choice. Right. But before, it's just kind of like rolled in with, yeah. Carl points out too there's some trickiness and we can't, I think we should talk about just the very unfortunate. This would all be so much easier in a world where we weren't trying to deal with these, you know, horribly licensed codecs. Like any license that Red Hat paid for could result in restrictions on Fedora itself. Whereas like, because there are restrictions right on these proprietary OSs.

They want to know when you're installing it, you got to get it from them, whereas we don't think about that in the open source sense. And I guess MPEG LA is not really interested in granting unlimited licenses anyway. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. See, that's just what I was thinking. It's just like, it's such a tough spot for like what we think of as this basic sort of human right of like, you should have software that makes your machine fully operate. And that's not how a lot of the rest of the structures of society are set up to do it's one of those things where i get now so a willful choice is being made and that is a legal thing i get it but it would be so much nicer if

what we could do instead was wait for a letter that says hey we think you're infringing before this change happens you know before we just throw all these users under the bus or uh wait for a single person to get sued over this in this in this manner like not that i'm arguing for reactionary but at the same time when you make a change like this it's the equivalent of removing the ability to do mp3s and it kind of makes me sick that i've been doing this for 15 years and this is what we were talking about 15 years ago. And here we are 15 effing years later. I mean, it's just... Yeah, I'm thinking about switching to Linux Mint.

I know, right? So I can play my MP3s, man. I mean, that's why Mint was a thing, right? So that's just sort of wild. But I understand what you're saying. But I'm not totally sure I'm convinced in the business incentives for the H.264 consortium to sue people for using H.264 and playing back video because it only broadens their market share. It only increases their monopoly. It only strengthens their position in the market. So it doesn't seem like they're

very incentivized to go after people that are using, consuming, distributing H.264. It seems like, you know, probably they're going after set-top box manufacturers, cable providers, televisions, Blu-ray makers. That's the kind of people that, you know, that they can get, that they can extract millions out of. But going after somebody like the RIAA did back in the day for pirating MP3s, that's just not the world we live in anymore. It just doesn't make sense. They're never going to make a dime at that so i don't really know what the risk factor is i guarantee that i can't just i know i understand i can't come here and say and guarantee well they're not going to sue i can't do that so they're so since the risk factor is you know at

least one percent or whatever they're going to respond this way and carl sums it up nicely over in uh matrix this whole thing is a mess. Yeah, it is. It is. It just, you know, and I think what's so upsetting about it at the core of it is it doesn't seem like there's a right answer for the Fedora project. And it seems like it's a tougher question for Fedora than it is for every other Linux distribution. And I find that frustrating. And then the other thing that I find frustrating is that there is a history of giving and taking

a little bit in features and I find that to be aggravating. And then it's like, we just started to solve the NVIDIA driver problem. We just started to get decent FlatHub integration. We really started around the corner on Codex and being able to do all this stuff. Like it really was removing some friction

and barriers of entry to Fedora. And it was really, truly making it possible to recommend one of the great distributions to everybody. And now those barriers are starting to go back up. It is a form of free software gatekeeping. And it's happening now at one of the, I think, most important distributions. And I'm just sad about it. Yeah, there was kind of this era where like it felt like at least a lot of the sort of commentary layer would advise

you know, like, well, if you're going to go with Fedora, you're probably going to need something like RPM Fusion. You've got to have all these workarounds. We're back to that now. And for a while it felt like we weren't. Like we'd really gotten to a point that, you know, for some esoteric use cases, yeah, you've got to figure out some stuff out. But for just normal using a computer stuff, Fedora had really gotten just installed in for cat.

Yeah. I agree. And I understand it too. Doesn't mean i'm not frustrated by it i'm we're obviously still going to use and install and love fedora but yeah yeah it's just now i'm going to be getting that stuff from i don't know wherever i can get it you know if i have to go down a shady alley on the internet yeah i've got a sketchily compiled copper that you might want to check out maybe fluendo is going to get another 80 bucks out of me or something i don't know that's what i used to have to do back in the day is to go buy my codex and i'd put them in my folder so that way i could play my mp3s on fedora all right so there's another story going on on the internet right now that i thought we should

talk about because we just haven't really gotten a chance and that is that the internet has discovered through some sleuthing that pop and the cosmic desktop is going to make use of a rust-based toolkit called iced and they're doing this in place of GTK. So this is a replacement for a GTK. And the news here is that Cosmic was believed to be a GTK-based desktop environment. But it seems that System76 has evaluated their options and have picked the direction of ICE. And this was noticed by individuals on Reddit. And then a discussion kicked off from there. And I thought before we got to the discussion, maybe we'd talk a little bit about

Iced and kind of what it is and what the goals are. So simply, as I understand it, is a cross-platform GUI library. And it is, as you may have noticed, written in Rust. And it has a focus on simplicity and type safety, as many things in Rust do. And Wes, you were mentioning that it's been inspired by something that maybe is a pretty good sign for this type of use case. Yeah, it's inspired by Elm,

which is a front-end framework and language, but heavily inspired by functional reactive programming and functional programming in general, and it's a, it's a different model of how you think about modeling UIs and states. And instead of sort of the older style that, that GTK definitely is, this promotes like you're separating the things that implement,

how your stuff gets rendered from the data that describes the tree that you are rendering. And so you can kind of operate in a style where you describe what you want it. It's a, it's a more declarative approach where you say like, I want it to look like this and the underlying engine can figure out how do I take what we've got now

and make it there instead of a much more imperative sort of procedural style that a lot of traditional UI programming has been. Right, but it would seem like the mobile operating systems have been making a steady march towards declarative UI design

which accommodates a lot of different mobile use cases and screen sizes and whatnot. Right. Well, I mean, yeah, you saw it in the front end, and React has some of its underlying principles. Elm really defined the data flow model in one way data flows, and you sort of update your data, and then that sort of can reactively cascade and then update the parts of the UI that need to get updated

without you having to sort of explicitly say that. And it turns out people like that approach or similar approaches especially if you can get the efficiency right which seems like rust has a lot of opportunities to do that but you've seen like swift ui as an example of adopting some of that compared to the you know the older objective c standards swift ui is embracing some of the same things so i don't know know. I've never used ICE. I can't say how nice of an experience it is. But I think if you're trying to target developers

who do UI work in the modern world, they'll have heard of that. Maybe they haven't used it, but this is a model that they're going to be familiar with. And I don't know. I still haven't really learned

how to use GTK. Yeah, I mean, GTK is certainly popular, but it doesn't seem like it's lit the world on fire. And there's a lot of momentum around Rust-based stuff. There's that element of it. And I don't know if I could really, you know, declare which one has more technical merits,

but it seems the team at System76 really likes what Iced has to offer for what they want to build. And obviously it seems, I mean, it's obviously new, right? System76, as we'll get into here, there's going to need to be contributions to make Iced fully functional. GTK has a lot of functionality. I think, no, we're not trying to say this could be directly comparable. Yeah, it's not feature to feature for sure. But there are some reasons why just use GTK maybe isn't interesting

to all developers. Do we know of any other projects using Iced at this point? Are there any projects we can look at to see maybe its capabilities? We were taking a look earlier today at the Iced Toolkit, which we will have a link to in the show notes. And so you might be able to, from there, figure out who else is using this.

They have a lot of examples. So I would like to try some software that's using this. That might be something we track down. It is. They do note on their GitHub that it's currently experimental. So who knows? Things may change. And I don't, we'll get into this too,

but it didn't seem like, you know, System76 weren't really coming out and announcing a whole bunch of this, right? So I think it's maybe we should also view some of this as like exploring, oh, hey, we know that they've heavily adopted Rust internally. They've got people there who are comfortable using it, who like using it. And so if you did see like, oh, there's a new approach to doing cross-platform GUI stuff, I wonder if this could work for some of our some of our software yeah that was the sense I got is they were building

widgets internally that kind of reached a point where like we got to decide on what we're going to do here and I just seemed like the way they wanted to go they want to say this is our GUI toolkit for cosmic and they said they deliberated about it a lot and decided to go with iced and I I have seen the reaction to this and we'll get to that in a moment. But my general take on this is that we'll see. We'll see where they go. We'll see if they get the accessibility stuff added. I think they've got the motivation and the determination to do it.

And Pop is a reasonably sized distribution, but it isn't the largest player out there. And it seems to me that it's in that almost perfect market position to experiment with this kind of stuff, where they'll get a good user base, they'll get a really good amount of varied feedback because they have a diverse user set. They have feedback channels, right? I mean, they have support lines and it does seem like they have conversations with their user base to some extent. Yeah, they absolutely will get support tickets too when things don't work. There's that element because they're selling a product

that runs this stuff too, so they get that channel. It's not getting thrown into the void, really. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I think that's probably a fair assessment. And I think it's a good size to experiment and see how things go. And it's not like they're creating a bunch of proprietary code that's only going to work on Cosmic.

So if they build something that seems pretty reasonable, well, then maybe the folks over at Mint can take a look at it, you know, something like that. So I feel like they're kind of in the perfect position to be an R&D lab for this type of endeavor. I think that's just fine because if it goes horribly wrong, it doesn't really hurt the rest of the Linux desktop in the upstream upstream projects and if it goes tremendously well then that's free software that anybody can adapt and use if they want to will they that's the other question the as they say bad blood here is i think getting to an impasse and this time around as Cassidy put it on Twitter, the annual flare-up was kicked off based on a comment

made by a different System76 engineer, in my opinion. It basically was just stating kind of matter of the fact why GTK wasn't working for them. And I think you could argue the original iteration of the post wasn't probably as delicate. And I think you could argue the original iteration of the post wasn't probably as delicate as it could have been, but it wasn't really necessarily hostile either. It was just matter of fact.

And it essentially said that GTK just wasn't the best choice for the job and they preferred ice and kind of went to some reasons. But the way that GTK was described, I think kicked off a whole new round of online battles. Just has been a mess since then. And it can be tough sometimes when you're looking, you know, and especially in various community forums. What's the scope? Do you interpret this as a statement of fact from someone who's trying to assert a position?

Or is it a more of a like an, you know, IMO? This is how I view this and think about it for my use cases. I don't know you never say those things so they're just sort of implicit yeah they're stated as an implicit statement and we'll have links to all of some of this all of some of this in the show notes it's kind of ridiculous for the most part a brief summary I would describe it as I think the GNOME team has been sensitive about comments made by engineers at System76. And I think they've transitioned from being sensitive about those comments to being sensitive about the fact that something hasn't happened to those employees to penalize them for those statements or prevent them from making future statements. And so now it's kind of become gnome camp against system 76, which of course creates a hostile work environment and they throw shade back

and forth at each other. And if you think that one side is, has the moral high ground here, then you're probably not familiar with the argument because there is, I think a point on both sides. And it's one of these things that i think also in my personal opinion is spurred on by the fact that there may be a bit of concern that uh iced once it's been properly contributed to and has enough features may be a

genuine alternative to something like gtk and perhaps it's created a little bit of defensiveness from the gnome side may or may not be true but that is how it's kind of coming across especially when you see the discussions that are going on in their matrix chat room and i think we've all been in places rightfully or wrong wrongly you know when we see ambitious or not new approaches in the linux community i think we're sensitive to like another one of those you know we already have several cross-platform gui toolkits, like, right? Or we have a package manager like that, and I know you have your own ideas.

I don't think, you know, we're allowed to have those thoughts. We should be careful maybe how we articulate them, because that's always going to happen. That's what happens in our free software world, right? Things change, new stuff gets adopted, it wins contests either on merits or just on popularity. The other part of this I found interesting, though when cosmic was sort of first launched we weren't sure what it was because it's kind of like a collection of plugins and is it like a is it really just a desktop or is it

just you know yeah so this to me signals like there might be a lot more interesting to watch in the cosmic space generally right that's kind of how i see it's like okay well now we all of a sudden have ourselves a genuine new contribution here that's actually based on some technologies that, you know, if you're just looking at things from the surface level and you're like, I would like my desktop to be built with these tools or these tools. I would actually, if I was just hitting the reset button, I would also probably pick Iced. I mean, look at it. It looks pretty great. And then Jeremy's got, I mean, the team does, but I think Jeremy's been primarily updating it. He's got a checklist going, which I have linked in the show notes about things that are going into Iced for Cosmic, about accessibility features and font issues. And they have identified a lot of things that they want to contribute upstream. And they

have been, I found at least three, and there may be more, but I found, I think at least three contributions from the System76 team to Iced upstream. So the work is going in and this is just beginning. And I think you're right. Let them experiment. I feel like they need a summit. Like they need a Switzerland to come in and a GNOME System76 summit. If I were Carl, I would be considering maybe flying out some of the GNOME team to System76 and just showing them what you're doing showing them your team meeting the team in person because that's always a different experience taking them out treating them thanking them for their contributions for what you can build on top of and and recognizing that stuff and celebrating that stuff and seeing if that doesn't create some kind of bridge because when i watch the discourse this time around i feel like the foul is maybe on the GNOME side.

And I grant that initial language could have been a little more diplomatic, but the reaction, the plotting, all of that, that's really on the GNOME side. And unfortunately, I still think it's on System76 to fix it. You know, the GNOME side's volunteers. They're people scratching a niche. System76 side, they're employees. They're people building a product, trying to make money. Maybe have a stronger notion of a sort of collective representation that the GNOME folks don't. You know, it can be tough to interpret, too. Like, are you speaking as a person in the project or just as a person who has your own opinions about these things and the people involved?

Yeah. I don't think the situation gets better until some side just puts their hands up does the mea culpa and just bears and grins it and uh i think it was neat right because i mean i respect really all the people involved there's a lot of important work happening i use all of the software and i want to continue to do so yeah i hope i hope it gets worked out i really do and uh i'm also very interested to see what gets built and if any new ideas can get explored from this so stay tuned we'll let you know linode.com slash unplugged go there to get $100 in

60 day credit on a new account and what a great way to support the show because you try out something fantastic like Linode and you support the show Linode makes cloud computing simple affordable and accessible they're 30 to 50% cheaper than the hyperscalers that want to lock you into their crazy platforms. They also have fantastic support. And the thing you guys know I always care about, performance. In my opinion, it's the best, and it's just not something I just randomly came to.

I've tried them all. I've tried them all, and nothing's as good as Linode let me tell you and I'm not the only one that says that there are independent studies that verify that as well you know it's it's kind of a simple math really they started about 19 years ago they had to be really good to survive especially when businesses that started as bookstores came along and realized they had a bunch of extra infrastructure they could sell and make even more money and then other cloud providers got in the game because they realized hey there's this cloud thing and we can call stuff whatever we want and charge whatever we want it's great it's just so great and so they invested from their other products maybe their operating system market or their book sales or maybe some vc guys just came or gals just came in and just started dumping

money in there linode had to compete with all of that while just building a good product to do it. So that means they've got fantastic dedicated support. That means they have the best performance. They've got 11 data centers today. That's fantastic. And they are their own ISP. But coming soon,

there's going to be more than a dozen new Linode data centers. They're turning it up past 11. 2023 is going to be such a great year for Linode. And that's kind of the point I think I just want to leave with you. When I'm deploying infrastructure, I want something I can just leave running for three, five, maybe even longer, you know, years. I'd love to have something that's up there eight years, you know, if we could keep it up to date, maintain it. I don't want to have to rebuild and move this stuff. So that's one of the big calculuses

that goes into who I pick as my cloud infrastructure provider. And that's why when I just look at all of the things, it's Linode every single time. And that's why they're willing to give you $100 so you can try it yourself and you can form a complete opinion because $100 at their pricing

means you can really try things out. So go support the show and grab that $100 and try out Lin you can really try things out. So go support the show and grab that $100 and try out Linode. It's linode.com slash unplug. You go there, you support the show. It's a great way to thank them for supporting our road trip, making the West Coast tour possible as well as checking out their service and kicking the tires. Linode.com slash unplug. We do have some things to chat about here in the housekeeping. I want to give a big old plug skis for the matrix room.

Any of them, Jupiter broadcasting dot com slash matrix. Join our decentralized chat. It's pretty simple to go create yourself a matrix dot org account or set up a home server. Not as simple that way, but you can do that as well. You come in here and you join us.

We're going to keep our West coast crew room going because we're going to have future West Coast trips. And as we expand out and do our next future thing, we'll set up chat rooms. In fact, there's a petition going around right now to create a Portland-specific chat room. Yeah, I may have made some promises. Actually, I guess I'm making promises for you, Chris, because you're the one who ultimately makes the room. I forgot about that. I thought Wes had to do all things like that.

But it turns out I do have the power. Also, I want to just put on your radar for All Things Open coming up. I know Alex from Self Hosted is going to be there and there's going to be some other community members that are making it to All Things Open. But we don't have any current meetups to plug.

That's it for right now. We'll find out about future events pretty soon. But doesn't that feel kind of weird? I've got a few in the works that I may or may not have. Well, you know,

shower thoughts. But Wes and I may have one coming up, but we don't quite want to announce it just yet. Wow. So you guys are going to just hold your own little

private meetup without me? Is that what's happening right now? No Chris's allowed. It's a whole thing. Oh my gosh. Audience Chris's are fine. Audience Chris's. Right, right.

Just not this one. Yeah. Geez, I gotcha. Wow. You'll be busy with some other things that we're cooking up. This is interesting. We do have some baller booths to get to. We like to feature the high amount booths that came into the show to really support

the production each episode and the first one this week came zins from what what came zin it came zins from sir lurks a lot 52 118 sats the truth is you bought them because you like them they have value to you that's what matters he says i listened to the double live stream on my last day off, and these stats reflect the duration 5 hours, 21 minutes, and 18 seconds. That's crazy. That was a long live stream. We might all be crazy, including you, Zerluxalon. No wonder why we were exhausted when we hit the road.

He says, I hope you enjoy the stats as much as I enjoyed the show. Now, BooCLI does not support the raw Linux unplugged RSS feed. Uh-oh. It's like if you just go to our website. Really? Yeah. That's embarrassing.

Well, it's because we don't generate that one. Yeah. It keeps coming up, doesn't it? Yeah. That's a thing for the future. We'll talk about that in the future. But if you do grab the feed from Podcast Index, you can point BooCLI at that. I can barely talk.

You're trying to get some boost first place to start podcast index. But so when Boost CLI fails it gives you a broken heart emoji as the error message. If that's not a reason to get Boost CLI installed

what is? Lurkslot came in though with Podverse and Albie to the rescue. He says you sure did tout Boost CLI as the leap man's boostagram which got me to figure it out it worked for office hours oh okay good it is i honestly if you get boostogram working

it's sort of like a litman's test of just like a certain level of technical excellence that you must hold yeah boost ali requires a domain of knowledge multiple domains of knowledge so i feel like if you get boost ali going well then uh we should be sending you sets yeah really yeah we should maybe that's something we should think about actually if people include like a lightning address or something or an invoice and their boost or like their boost for boost lightning url we should boost them back some sets if they use boost cli and thus declare them the master of their own domain. John A. comes in again.

Is this six? Is this six? Yeah, this might be six. This is insane. I wonder, how long can this be kept up? We need a counter.

John A. says, well, now I'm just trying to keep my streak alive. Maybe we can get like a JB website subdomain like you know Yeah

A John A streaks Is it broken yet sort of thing Right That's an interesting idea Is John A still a baller.com Somebody set that up and then we'll get that going

And then we just need a little whale on GitHub where we can just flip it yes no and then the GitHub action No no we can automate that stuff Right Yeah yeah

Okay yeah I love it I love it Thank you John A for your support. Also, Sir Lurks a lot. We have some more boosts that will be in the show in just a little bit. We really appreciate you guys for supporting us.

Ask not what your podcast can boost for you, but what you can boost for your podcast. So since we got together last week, we had one last meetup. We had a few things we wanted to chat about, but we also have major breaking news on the show. The Pasadena geocache has been located. Tell us, Brent, what are the details? Live on the scene in the studio. What are you learning, Brent? I'm here on location.

It's a little rainy but i did discover an email this morning that suggested that listener jd found the geocache they write as luck would have it i was at a nearby doctor's appointment while listening to linux unplugged on monday morning amazing which is literally the morning it aired the advantages to listening when it's just been published. That's right. I went to the park immediately after and honestly found it in the very first tree I searched.

Okay, that's great. There are a lot of trees in that park. Yeah, and it took you guys forever to find it. They give a little bit more information just for our sakes. I'm a recent listener having just started sometime after the JPL signups. Whoa, that's great.

Otherwise, I would have loved to have put my name in the hat. I'm new to Linux in general. Last year, I installed Ubuntu, then Docker, just to run a Minecraft server for my son and his friends. Hell yeah. I've also just started testing paperless NGX in my office. Thanks for all that you do and feel free to leave more caches in Pasadena. We'd had a good time doing that. I think that's something we could do more often because we could come up with like a perpetual cache to one that's like designed to like have a note.

You leave something, take something. We could have a special matrix room for people who found the cache, you know, with the URL club or something. Oh, that's a fun idea see what when you can build your own rooms at willy nilly styles

you can do all kinds of things that's great I am so glad that they found that if you found we have another geocache we have one in Sacramento

and there's another oh yeah the near Grants Pass not quite in Grants Pass southern Oregon area we also failed to drop one near Portland. I think we meant to yesterday and totally forgot.

We had a lot of things on our mind. So I may just grab it on my way home and drop it off somewhere in the mountains. Yeah, somewhere up there in Canada. Well, it could be in the U.S. version. We'll see. Oh, no, I say do Canada. All right. If you can.

That makes it a cross-border adventure. Oh, I guess the problem is there's nobody up there. Well, the 16 of us can go searching for them. Yeah, it might take a

while. It's got a sealant and syrup. It's a whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. You got to like bait them in.

That's how it works. So since our last show, we had the Portland meetup, which was our last meetup on our way north. We had we just have

never stopped in Portland for a meetup because we're always blasting through to get home. And we felt like we owed this audience, you know, a little bit of a get-together. You know, for how much we talk about Seattle, Portland's a special place.

It is. We've got to treat it right. And it's not that far away. So Wes came down like a legend. He showed up during just like, you know, like a total boss. He shows up about a half hour after it started. So, of course, he has a grand entrance. Everybody's sitting down.

So when Wes comes in, oh, it's Wes, everybody. Oh, it's so great. That's the benefits to hitting a little traffic. Yeah. And that was really great. I thought it was the highlight of the night that you made it down. And it made it so much fun. And then afterwards afterwards you got to

carpool with, or I guess caravan with us for a bit and stay in Lady Joops. You got your first night in Lady Joops. I know. I mean, how long have I known you now? And this is my first time? I couldn't believe that was your first time. I mean, I've stayed there what, like 40 nights or something? You're paying rent at this point.

I'm sorry you had to be there when the automation systems were down. I just felt very embarrassed about that. It's kind of nice, actually, because I think the next time, you know, next time I stay a night there, it's going to be,

all the slides will be working, automation will be top notch. That's true. You'll have a modern Zigbee setup. You're right. I'll be able, yeah, yeah,

that's a good point. I'll be able to top the current one, whereas if everything was working, it would have peaked. Yeah. Yeah, okay.

I'm going to see a huge improvement. I'm excited for that. Right, at least now the pressure's on. Plus, it would have peaked. Yeah. Yeah, okay. I'm going to see a huge improvement. I'm excited for that. Right. At least now the pressure's on. Plus, you got a little time with Levi. Oh, yeah. I got some morning snuggles with that cute dog there.

Yeah, he's a good boy about that. These were great meetups that we went to. And the amazing thing is every single location was sourced and ID'd by our audience by our listeners like micah i'm wearing a nasa t-shirt in honor of the occasion the road trip very very thoughtful and uh did you come up with this place if i remember correctly i i did suggest it um i've eaten here before i live about 10 blocks away so so you just wanted it to be convenient for you. Is that it? Well, it worked, didn't it? And I noticed you grabbed a bunch of swag and stuff. Is it nice to hang out with a bunch of like-minded people here? Yeah, it's great

because, you know, my wife is a very intelligent person, but her eyes glaze over when I start talking about Linux and she wishes I would change the subject. So it's fun to be around people who are interested in this stuff. And is this your first JB meetup? It is not. I went to Chris's birthday bash in January. I wanted to be there, but I couldn't be there. How was it?

It was great. I thought I was going to have the record for coming the farthest, but there was actually a listener there from Puerto Rico who happened to be in town on business. So I lost that contest. Of course. Well, you were second best. That's good enough. Yes. It's funny how at these meetups, like there's always the, okay, who came the furthest? It's always shocking. It's shocking how far people come for these meetups. You know, that was listener Jose who showed up both in Colorado. Do you remember that? Yeah, of course.

And then here at the studio. And I was half expecting him to also show up at one of our meetups. I know. I always do now. I always think about Jose. You're always welcome, Jose. Yeah, he's always welcome. They're really all great.

The Portland one felt really easy. It just felt like just clicking and talking to old friends. And there was such a broad range of topics at the entire table. And it was a long table. They gave us basically one end of the building, which was great because we needed that space. And they were very accommodating. All of these breweries were so super chill and so accommodating. Yeah, that's what's nice.

It's like you can have a really mixed group. It's not super crowded. There's a lot of nice space. There's, you know, there's non-alcoholic drinks, alcoholic drinks, different types. There's stuff Brent can have. There's usually a pretty good food menu. And just the general vibe is, you know, come as you are and hang out for as long as you want. Yeah, and just, you know, come as you are and hang out for as long as you want. Yeah. And just, you know, make for great conversation and listener Nick and listener Joel put some of the best things

about these meetups into their own words. It's been great. We've had some wonderful cold beer here from Migration Brewing and a lot of good people, fun people. And it's just good to sit and talk with people about self-hosting and Linux and, you know, yeah, not get the glossed over stares. And so a lot of really good conversation tonight. And was that your experience as well? Yeah, the meetup has been a lot of fun. We've been able to talk about all kinds of topics from Linux related to, you know, jogging or running or TV shows. Everybody's familiar with ads and ad blockers. And so that's been a common topic as well

for techies and non techies alike. So yeah, there's plenty to talk about. It's been wonderful. Yeah, I agree. And at our end of the table we were talking about like no-till farming and all sorts of things so it's like amazing to me the breadth of topics that we can just connect on really easily and that's what i find about these meetups is it's just great fun and people that you could just become friends with really easily so thank you both for being here yeah thanks for having us and putting all this together. It's been great, and it's great to put faces to your guys' voices and get some great swag here from Linode. And thank you as well. Thank you. Yeah, it's been great to chat with people, all kinds of interesting conversation, and like you said, putting names to faces. It's been great. Thank you. You know, the real trick is once they see our faces, do they keep listening?

Yeah, that is. We'll find out, right? I think we have a good shot because several of these meetups that we went to, afterwards there's talk about they want to organize their own event. They want to keep it going. Even if the JB crew can't be there, they want to be there. Big meetup energy. Yeah, there is a lot of big meetup energy. And I always think, man, I just wish we had a website we could tell them to go to and self-organize. I want to build a self-hosted meetup site that the audience can use to self-organize. I think they'd use that.

I will say there's some cool energy at the meetups as well. Like SUCD at the Portland meetup just gave us some gifts, like some weird 3D printed, what would you call them, Chris? Fidget spinners, kind of. They were really neat, though. We sure fidgeted with them. The kids are fidgeting with them right now. That was really great. And other folks brought other gifts at the other meetups. So everyone who gave us all sorts of things, thank you very much. Very nice audience. So generous. So nice.

Too good. Too good. We should probably just fold in, fold the cards, close up shop, end it right now. End it on a high note. It's just always so nice when you go see these people. How could it ever be any better? How could you ask for anything more when you're doing these shows? I was chatting with someone at the Portland meetup, and they put a nice contrast on it.

This gentleman went to a fair number of regular sort of tech meetups, and I think, you know, did sort of DevOps things professionally, which many, you know, many of our audience are developers or do full-time tech stuff. But that's really all you get at those sort of tech, you know, tech-focused meetups. And a lot of these JB meetups, it's just such a nice mix of people who do it for work, yeah, but not the people who only do it for work. Occasionally, but it's enthusiasts, right? And it can be like you're just doing home automation at home. A lot of strong self-hosted showing i think in portland or you know you just like this stuff at work and you want to learn you you're so interested like i think you know we have been that you just want more of it so it's an interesting thing because you know brent had a chance to chat with a few people and i was listening back to the audio this morning and

just based on the conversations i had had too uh yeah, not everybody is doing Linux as their day job that comes to these meetups. And some of them, they're just people who like to geek out and go deep into topics. And Linux is one of the topics they're going deep into. And I think they're just looking for content that has high production standards that they want to listen to that digs into this kind of stuff. And so they begin to build a whole set of knowledge around this topic by listening to the show and then by checking out the things we talk about because they're just intellectually curious. And then they take it to the next level and they actually go to these meetups

and I think these people are better than me because I just don't think I'd ever take it to that next level. But they do. Two things I love about that is, one, yeah, right, they can take it to levels I don't have because I think there's an enthusiasm

that sometimes, you know, the professionals, you get a bit tired and jaded over time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you just seem a lot of stuff and you got to make it work and you have to get up at 1 a.m. and like do the thing. But like when it's your release, when it's something you're genuinely excited about, it's good to have that energy. And then the other part is once you've got the Linux bridge, yeah, like for folks with so many different backgrounds, it's a chance for us to really learn a lot. Although I gotta say some of my favorite conversations are the jaded professionals that

have like, you know what I'm talking about. Those are great conversations. We always have a good chuckle with those ones too because yeah, we know. We've been there. We feel it. We're part of that set. Yeah. I think it's probably also important to note that Wes, the only reason you and I are here from a bunch of JB meetups.

It's right. Oh, weird, right? Yeah. The meetups are us and we are the meetups. Whoa. We are made of the meetups. Ocean becomes the drop. Yeah.

It's crazy. Thank you to Linode, too. If you're thinking about getting some hosting, seriously check out Linode. You know, they invest in these kind of meetups so that way our community can connect. Professionals can talk to other professionals. They can network. I overheard people exchanging details for jobs, for contact us for getting a job. That kind of stuff was going down. Linode, they're investing long term in the community and that I think is a particularly keen insight

into how they think about this stuff and how they try to support it at a real like grassroots level so linode.com slash unplugged yeah we had plenty of tech failures but none of that was linode's fault the stuff we hosted on linode that just works bitwarden.com slash linux bitwarden is my password manager it's west's password manager and they have been just going at full speed. They recently announced FastMail email alias integration. They have great new features for your vault, a browser extension that has been turned up to,

I'm going to say 13, not even 11. And they've even been giving love to their command line interface. Yeah, Bitwarden, I don't talk about it, but they have a command line interface as well. They have a Flatpak app too, which is like the first thing I install now on my GNOME desktop. And Bitwarden wants to remind everyone that October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. So this is something just as a moment as just, you know, if you've been trying

to bring up that conversation, this is something you can do to kind of put your foot in the door. It's Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And using a strong password is like number one with a bullet, which you can do to protect yourself online. And Bitwarden can generate and store strong passwords for you. It's easy to enable multi-factor authentication. It's also recommended you keep your software up to date. And honestly, you should be aware if your passwords are being used online. And watch out for phishing as well.

These are all things along with a great password, keeping your credentials unique across your websites and your services, you can do to really protect yourself online. As Bitwarden would like to tell you, and I would like to remind you, there's really nothing better you can do than just having a great place to store your secrets

and share them privately and securely. Because these are things you're gonna have to have. You're gonna have logins. You're gonna have two-factor codes. You're going to have secret information like passphrases or maybe bank account information, those types of things for families. Bitwarden can be the place to store that. You're going to have that kind of information. It just happens. It's life. And multi-factor authentication is a great way to add a little extra security to your accounts there too. And enabling two-step login on Bitwarden improves the security of your password vault.

You've got options like verification through email or authenticator app or FIDO2 or YubiKey. You could also do that. And premium subscribers can also have Bitwarden generate time-based one-time password authentication codes for your accounts, which adds a little bit of strength there, doesn't it? All of this added together makes Bitwarden a fantastic, an incredible, maybe even the best, I'd say, tool to protect yourself online. Bitwarden supports security for all,

with fully featured free accounts available to everyone as well. So this Cybersecurity Awareness Month, protect yourself and help protect the loved ones around you, your friends, your family, by educating them on password security. They probably already think of you as the tech person they know. This is a great opportunity to use that influence for good and send them to bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go get started with a free trial for Teams or an individual plan right now at bitwarden.com slash Linux. As always, we got some great feedback. Thank you everyone for sending that in. Paul wrote in and writes, I want to thank you for introducing me to Silverblue. For the first time, I don't want to throw my ancient HP stream laptop into the trash every time I use it.

This distro seems to run crazy fast compared to Kubuntu running on the exact same system. And it's not nearly as glitchy with the suspend and resume. It's the first time I've used red hat and fedora anything and so far i gotta say i'm impressed you know i he didn't say which version of kubuntu he was switching from but some of this i don't know what do you think west but couldn't some of this just be explained by a new kernel well a new kernel is always a nice upgrade yeah i mean especially when you're talking like. Like a big jump. Yeah.

Performance improvements, sleep suspend improvements. There also could be something about Wayland. I notice a general smoothness with Wayland that I don't get on X11. So if you're coming from Kubuntu using X, you go over to your Silver Blues using the Waylands, it's going to be a smoother experience there too. And I don't even know if we need to dissect it. I think we can just be happy. Like people live in that silver blue lifestyle. Like that's true, right? Like silver blue works for people.

It's not a, you might expect sort of the reverse, right? You're like, oh, well I did silver blue, but all of these weird exceptions I had to figure out, but that's not what Paul's writing it about. No, you know what the kids say? They say glow on, glow on. And they're really into immutability. Ian has a pretty close tohome request here for meetups. Ian writes,

When is JB coming to the East Coast, like East Coast of Canada? Surely you know there's a big audience here in Toronto. A big audience in Toronto, you say? Well, I believe that leads us right in to Les Boosts. And now it is time for Le Boost. Sam Squanch boosts in with 16,180 cents. Coming in hot with the boost. You guys ever plan to come up to BC for stuff?

I mean, Vancouver and Victoria are pretty large tech communities these days. Thanks and keep up the great work. Also, Sam Squanch here reveals that 16-180, first five digits of the golden ratio. Nice. Ah! But I think here we have to defer to our local Canadian, right? I think we should.

Well, I think one thing that's fascinating about where we're sitting exactly right now geographically is Sam Squanch here says, when are you coming up to Victoria? And it turns out it's kind of at the same latitude I think. So that's a fascinating thing about Canada. There's one tip

for you. Oh god, it's going like this already. I haven't even mentioned maple syrup yet. I would actually love to see a Canadian road trip, although I feel like that's maybe a little bit more of a dedication than what we just did on the west coast here but certainly there are a few locations that would be great to do a

small little thing chris vancouver's not even that far for you yeah yeah i definitely want to make it up there gosh i mean it's hard to talk about it right now when i'm feeling like i never want to do another road trip for the rest of my life and i live in an RV so that really tells you how hard it was earlier you said you didn't want to do an American road trip I pretty sure I remember you saying the country name right no actually I really would like to do it I wonder I know there is a season of life that I am in now where it is really hard to travel and so I just kind of like cram it in there like a maniac and then just sort of like chaos ensues hate yourself a little yeah but i feel like there will be a season of life where dad is not as interesting and then maybe dad will travel more you know i'm saying i'm not saying i'm your dad i'm saying i'm literally my kid's dad you know i get right you

get where i'm going with this and so maybe i'll travel more but i don't want to wait that long at the same time so um well i'll just you know what this is just the boosters listening now so i'll i'll get into it if you are in a city that has a venue that would be willing to host a couple of crazy podcasters and host you know 30 40 60 of our closest friends get in contact with us if we could start finding venues in these areas where when we get there, we can produce a show. Because I'll tell you what happens, friends, is we kill ourselves getting to these places, holding these meetups, doing the driving, and then we don't have any show afterwards. We don't actually record a show there.

And then you didn't, because you're driving, it's hard to find the time to do the work to figure out the plan of the show. Yeah, we're doing seven hour drive days, then we're prepping for a show, then I'm waking up at six in the morning, four in the morning, whatever it is, to drive or do a show. And I'm either driving or I'm doing a show. And I just realized that's crazy. So instead, let's go to a location, we'll do a show there, we'll do it live.

And, you know, maybe moderate, like take something cheap, something that's affordable, but maybe we could pay for our tickets to fly in or something like that. So if you're in an area like Vancouver or, I don't care, Ohio, I don't care. If you've got a venue, they've got food I can eat, and they can host some of our friends and the three of us. They're willing to watch some buffoons make a podcast in real time?

Let us know. Chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com, or better yet, if you really want me to see it, boost it in. Oh, speaking of boosts, a young dookie boosts in with 4,048 sets. I wanted to point out three projects that help me mapping location

searches. On Android, I use an app called Acastis Photon, which you can use to search for points of interest, and then it lets you open the result in whatever your map or navigation tool of choice. By default, it uses the Photon Project public instance, but can be self-hosted. Alternatively, you can use the Polyus Project,

polyus.io, which can also be self-hosted via geocode.earth. Safe travels. So the mapping situation on Android is an interesting one. I've been running Graphene since the road trip was like a weekend to the road trip. I started using Graphene and I quickly realized that I still was, I kind of ended up needing to use Google Maps. There's just not a lot of great mapping options when you really are like

really depending on this thing like i need because i also i i need satellite images to check out gas stations to see if they can fit jupes to make sure i can get in and out and man google makes that really crazy easy and if you don't have apple maps which i didn't on graphing os i kind of ended up following back to google maps which kind of stunk. I'm sure I could figure out a better solution. I'd love to hear what people do for like the satellite images. I don't necessarily need it for navigation, but I need it to review an area.

I need to either be able to plug in an address or GPS coordinates. You know what I mean? Let me know. Michael B. boosts in with 3,000 sets. Chris, I would love to hear which of the GNOME workflows you've learned. Ah,

GNOME workflows have been a very popular topic on, like, just, I don't know, every morning

or every, like, constantly Brent and I are talking about this because he's been trying out Pop!OS. You're trying to get him to fundamentally change

how he uses a computer. It's true. And, so workflows have been coming up a lot. I'll tell you, here's a real quick rundown of how I've used GNOME. And I found it really effective. It's the very first thing I did around the GNOME 3.12 era, but I think you could do it any time,

is I just decided to spend a month each day or each week or whatever I needed at the time learning the GNOME way of doing things. So I just decided, well, if GNOME doesn't want me to use minimize and maximize I'll try without that for a bit I didn't always stick with it like that one I didn't stick with but some of them I did and one of the things I adopted that I find to be pretty effective on GNOME especially now with horizontal or workspaces on laptops is I full screen a couple of apps but I do that thing where I put two apps together. So maybe like one screen will be element and it'll be big and wide. And then I'll have like a small version of telegram on that same desktop. And that is always desktop too.

And then I, I use an extension. I think it's called like auto window or something like that. Or there's an extension that will automatically, we'll find it for the show notes, right? Wes? Oh,

surely. Yeah, sure. That automatically opens applications on specific workspaces so desktop one is always my web browsers desktop two is always my primary chat applications desktop three is going to be steam and desktop four is usually just like a catch-all where i just put all kinds of stuff on there and the console kind of just floats between the desktops where I need a console. I also have a drop-down console. I think it's called D-Turn, but there's a few options that I like a lot.

And I combine all of that along with a couple of essential extensions. Like I like to see a workspace indicator. I like to have a few more system tray icons than you get by default. So I combine all that together. AutoMove Windows. You already found it and it is in the show notes and that'll automatically put certain windows in certain virtual desktop spaces and i find that to be an essential way to use gnome and chris do you use a different

workflow depending on whether you have three monitors or not more or less mostly with gnome if i have a if i have multiple monitors I leave the external monitors on a static workspace and I just switch the main monitor workspace most of the time. Not always. Most of the time. We got a boost in from user 6475. Just 64 humble sets. B-O-O-S-T. Coming in with my little fountain FM boost.

I wanted to say thank you and keep up the great show. I'm curious, though. Are there fewer emails to read on the show because people have moved to boosting? Or have those been getting put to the side? Podcasting 2.0 seems like a great way to support creators, but I don't want to see those who haven't come over being left behind. Kind of like the boosts, we do the same thing with emails where we select for content and there's definitely been less emails now that there's more boosts but you also get more boosts because the lengths are shorter than probably 80 of the emails that we get yeah it makes them very

easy to select them because they're already essentially cut for the show and so you can get to more of them as well but there has has been a shift, which has been interesting. Also seeing that on Coder Radio. Not a huge shift, not like a ginormous shift, but a noticeable difference. And that's fine. In a lot of ways, these are easy to process too. So that works for us. What I've noticed is actually the emails tend to be the long form ideas that are sort of deep dives, if you will.

be the long form ideas that are sort of deep dives if you will and the boost seems to be the place where all the the quick ideas or the just quick questions come in and they're not lesser either way but they've just evolved i think yeah different things and kind of what but each is best for i suppose cypress boosted in with 1200 sats hey guys have you thought of doing an os int i guess that's like a open source intelligence episode i've only just discovered loki net which looks like tor but seems to use blockchain behind it so i went and looked at loki net have either one of you guys seen this no oh man i don't know if this is anything actually worth totally trusting but they sure make a cool looking website totally like no there's no it has a dark mode oh i better check that but uh when you scroll down look at that black hole animation they have on there that's

how you know it must be high quality software it's got a black hole animation you see that okay it is it does seem to be gbl3. Yeah. I actually, I mean, I joke, but here's what they pitch. Decentralized network, onion-routed traffic, and no IP address. LokiNet hides your IP that you're connected from and to. Your location and identity are unknown. All traffic is onion-routed. Your browsing is private, secure, and anonymous. LOKINet.org if you want to check it out.

They do seem to have a fairly extensive FAQ there. I'm actually kind of interested. You start talking blockchain for this kind of thing, and I'm a little skeptical. Blockchain hasn't been great for much other than as a distributed ledger for Bitcoin. Maybe we'll see something else. I'm kind of impressed by Hive.

So maybe they're onto something. We shall see. If you guys want to check it out, I'd be down. If anybody, actually, let's start with this. If you've tried LokiNet, let us know. Give us your first impressions, your thoughts. And if you get us interested, maybe we'll check it out. Yeah, why is it worth spending time on?

Yeah, why that over Tor? Because Tor seems like it's got the network effect but maybe i'm wrong on this kind of thing but they don't have cool graphics so yeah tor doesn't have a black hole do they wes and not that not last i checked i didn't check today so yeah we'll have to check back maybe they will uh true grits boost in with the traditional trek boost so i had been asking just to get an update on how far behind people tend to fall from time to time. And then they've been boosting in to let us know. And True Grits says, I got about a month behind on all the podcasts. But I'm glad to say I'm officially caught up now.

And thanks for the exclusive member feed bonus last week. Well, you're welcome. Yeah, we didn't have a traditional live show. But we had something we wanted to turn around for the audience because you know what we love our members and so we wanted to get them something even if we weren't live and we have a boost from bronzewing this week 9001 sats over 9000 it's over 9000 okay so this is really awesome. We mentioned that JPL used to use Solaris. Well, Bronzewing writes in that the Shadow UAV, the drone that the US Army uses,

is currently in its second version. And the first version didn't use RHEL, it used Solaris, but the second version of the Shadow UAV is running RHEL. They run RHEL on the stations to control it, and they run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the actual drone that the U.S. Army uses. That's pretty wild. Also, Bronswig wanted to say that Fountain FM

now has CarPlay support. Nice update. And so he can now earn sats while he drives. Glad you guys had a great time at jpl hoping maybe you guys can swing by boise sometime thanks for the show boost you later yeah we gotta get to eastern washington we gotta get to boise well spokane boise uh that'd be fun yeah i'm not taking the rv though i'm parking that thing never do another road trip again oh yeah just a car caravan this time. Yeah, why not? Why not?

It's a race, you say? I love a race, so let's go. But, I mean, that sounds a lot of fun. But no, actually, one day I will road trip again. But in the meantime, I'm taking a break. Soltros boosted in with 11,000 sets. The coolest thing about Stadia was its portability. I have a really nice gaming rig with Ryzen 5600X, a ton of RAM, and an RTX 3060,

but I also enjoyed gaming like Destiny 2 on my phone. Oh, Destiny 2 is a great game. I know it had its issues, but it was just so ahead technologically compared to things like Amazon Luna, Xbox xCloud, etc. It's a shame to see it go. I agree. It was technically better. So for example, the NVIDIA GeForce streaming stuff is pretty great for a Linux user because you can import your Steam library. So if you bought a game on Steam, you can stream it on GeForce Now. Stadia didn't get that. Stadia had to buy the game, but it was like a headless game like you would hit

play and it would launch you like way into the game into like the menu of the game but on things like geforce now you're actually like remote desktoping into a windows virtual desktop just renting yourself like a temporary windows vm to game on and then it starts steam.exe and you sign into your steam account including like you got to go do the two-factor stuff. And then like it's got to like super fast download the game, which works pretty good because they got fast internet connections. But it downloads the game and installs it on the Windows VM, then launches the game. And then you're playing the game and you go through the first time setup for all the game stuff. And while it detects your hardware, right, Stadia didn't have any of that.

I talk about like it's already gone. So soon. Marcel wrote in with 3,000 sats. Stadia is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone knew Google would cancel it at some point, just like they cancel everything, so nobody used it. So Google had to cancel it. It can't be Linux's fault alone that the stadia failed it's the old school

thinking of game publishers even a windows vm would trip up anti-cheat they're referring to marcel's referring to the verge kind of pinned some of this on the fact that you had to target linux and vulcan which is funny because i'm sure the same Verge would be happy to run a piece about what a hit the deck is. It's just so backwards. 4.12 Linux boosted in with, what do you call that, two megs of SATs? Thanks for the shootout last week. I didn't purchase a Stadia because I didn't trust Google to keep the service operational and leave me hung up to dry. When money is tight, it's hard to gamble on these types of devices. Perhaps if they stayed at launch, they would keep it operational for a certain number of years.

The reception would have been a bit better. Thanks for the quality content and great job, everyone. So this makes me wonder, I have a question for both of you. What does google have to do in the future now to get you to think their next product they're going to launch maybe it has a subscription maybe it doesn't what do they have to do to convince you to actually try it would something like a minimum years like 412 linux is suggesting like we we guarantee this will exist for five years would that get you to try it? Or is that ship sailed

because of the privacy concerns? Like, what does Google have to do comprehensively to get you to trust their next product? Boy, I mean, on the face of it, that sort of guarantee sounds nice, but can you really trust that guarantee? You know, like there's the next level

question to that because like four years in, they're just like, wow, I know we said that, but we're going to do the same thing where we refund you. So we're not really like breaking our promise in that way. Yeah. I think I'd need to hear, you know, I mean, if they just had a product that legitimately went well and that I wasn't interested in, but there was like, you know, I could get over that hump to the next phase that could do it.

Barring that, I feel like I would want to either understand how it was connected to their sort of core ad business. That could maybe justify like, okay, if I can understand how this is like directly in that bottom line, then. Like a type of transparency almost. Yeah, maybe I could understand like, do they have strong incentives to keep it working because it is part of their business. Otherwise, I think I'd want to hear more from ex-Googlers or like some more of the culture. hear more from ex-Googlers or like some more of the culture because we just hear so much about like how segmented everything is sometimes internally, how there's this sort of like launch a product to get promoted and then, you know, you move off that team and go do some other things. So until that changes or there's some kind of inkling that they have more of an overall

holistic organizational focus, I don't think it'd be hard to trust anything. more of an overall holistic organizational focus, I don't think it'd be hard to trust anything. Brent, what if they guaranteed that everything they do for this product, if they ever shut it down, will be GPL'd? Does that change the calculus for you? This is such a hard question. I think that would at least get me really looking.

But then it becomes almost like very different than everything else they've done. So is it just a new business? It's an interesting question. I feel like surely there are certainly some wonderfully intelligent people working there who are just like us and like the people who showed up at our meetups. And I want to get to know those people, but Google as a huge, massive business has always tripped me up and i've i don't i actually don't think they can really do anything to get me signed up i wonder if that's how i'm wondering if that's that's how most the audience is feeling too let us know what you think out

there what would google have to do or could they do anything to convince you and i mean think about it like if there was some sort of transparency approach like Wes is talking about, and some sort of commitment to a time, and maybe a release of code, maybe transparency on privacy, what would it take? Let us know. Boost.in or linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Because I'm wondering if it's just they're too far gone as

a brand. Could you imagine if they released Stadia's source code? Just be like, oh, we're shutting it down, but you guys can have it. Well, the issue is, and I'm wondering, I'd like to hear somebody address this, is how do you solve the infrastructure aspect of something like that? I mean, the only way I can think of it is if they had some sort of portable,

self-hostable version of Stadia that they let you download or something as a talker container. But the Pi can't do it? Yeah, right? I mean, that's just, I'm wondering. I'd love to hear the audience feedback on that one. We got a thousand sats from Happy Listener.

Aww. I thought y'all should get a boost for recognizing the fact that you maintained a really high audio quality standard, even when on the road. I'm impressed. Oh, you should see what we had to do to make that possible. I don't know. We want to admit on air we might get in trouble by Airbnb, but we had to make modifications, temporary modifications, but I'll just say this turns out beds, mattresses,

sheets, blankets. They all make for good temporary sound. 60 pillows too. Yeah. Way more useful for podcasts. Yeah. For any of what you usually use it for.

And I wanted to say to happy listener, thank you for recognizing that kind of value and then returning that value to the show. That's exactly the kind of value for value exchange we're talking about. Or like how listeners that helped us source great locations for breweries or listeners that show up to the mumble room or participate in the community. Those are types of a value for value exchange that we also really appreciate. So when you recognize something you appreciate about the shows and you boost in to recognize it, it means a lot to us. Also, I think we should give a special shout out to our editor, Drew, who did extra work to make sure that we sounded as best as possible.

No matter what we throw at him. Yeah. And also when we had technical difficulties, that meant that we recorded, what, like three hours later than we were expecting. Right. Still got through it. Right. That is very true. That really was pretty flexible and pretty awesome of Drew.

So thank you to Drew for making it sound as good as it possibly could too. And then last boost of the show goes to Mr. Rustic Castaversa. Comes in with a thousand sats. I've been a listener of JB for a decade. You spoiled my ears with amazing audio quality. Stop it, you guys. Oh my gosh. JB is the best in the biz when it comes to high quality consistent audio i hope to try out robosat soon the reason i actually included this boost right here i hope to try out robosat soon uh and i hope to have time to spend in the matrix channel and have someone hold my hand as well lol robosats is a great way to get uh anonymous bitcoin really simply through a system that i think is a great experience.

See, I was hoping I could buy robots with sats. You could probably one day. Probably. I mean, I don't know how you do, Wes. Could try it. And I do have a few thank yous out there. We got 2,600 sats from Grounded Grid, suggesting that we try out software-defined radio. We heard that at the meetups too, so something we'll be playing around with. 10,ats from deleted who is testing out his new breeze install because he don't want to switch podcast apps we got 500 sats from dm marowski not sure about that i don't think so demarowski all right with their first boost and a shout out to real maple syrup yeah one of your brethren uh One of 16. Good.

And we got a thousand sats from CouchFox, which is a great username, who is a member and also boosted in and would like to have the member feed boostable. We do have member feed upgrades scheduled as one of our next projects. And then Bandai boosted in with Leetsat saying they're also looking forward to those member feed upgrades.

Okay. Okay. We got it. We got it. And then Nomad Coder or Nomadi Coder 5 boosted in 557 sats. Just great to see you guys in Pasadena. Cheers, sir. That was so much fun. It was. Yep.

If you'd like to support the show, get a new podcast app and get all the new podcasting features like chapters, host info, sat streaming, search, and boosts. Well, then you need a new podcast app new podcast apps.com

go get a podcasting 2.0 compatible app or if you want to nerd out and go with boost cli you absolutely can and if you don't want to switch apps albie alby something worth checking out and so is breeze b-r-e-e-c dot technology if you're interested in more of our back behind the scenes adventures, Office Hours this week is going to have some pretty juicy content. I think we ran into, let's just say, a few little issues. And so stay tuned for that one. Office Hours 14 coming up.

And also, we'd love to hear from you. If you have any ideas on how we might have done the trip a little differently or ideas on maybe a pick since we're missing one this week uh please hit us up linuxunplugged.com contact yes and it's a pick let's get some audience picks coming in like that remember if it's a certain language then it gets a soundboard clip but you're invited to hang out with us for the live stream as well we do it every single sunday we and we don't have technical issues at jupiter.tube at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern generally, but we'll convert it to your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. If you're in the

industry, you owe it to yourself to check out Linux Action News. Or if you just want to stay apprised of all the things going on in the world of Linux and open source that really impact the industry, linuxactionnews.com. It's really a companion to this show, wouldn't you say? Oh, yeah. I would say. I mean, we're on it, so we might be biased. No, I think so, too. Yeah, okay, Brent's not on the show. We can't fit all the news in this show because we have, like, you know, stuff to talk about,

projects to update, ridiculous servers to update live on the show. So the news goes in the exact same news. That's right. Links to everything we talked about today, well, that's over at linuxunplugged.com slash 479. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you right back here next Sunday. අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි I have a little update that I think I should probably share. Well, lay it on us. Well, as you know, Chris, intimately, I've been using the DevOne the whole trip.

Yeah. And we decided to leave my X two 50 here at the studio. A big moment. The trusty think pad was left behind for the newly deployed dev one with cosmic, not with plasma. And I, you know,

despite some listeners at some of the meetups trying to convince me, otherwise I did stick with cosmic the whole time. You did. I did. And I even resisted adding 13 extensions to make it look like chris's setups yeah yeah i kept trying to tempt you uh but i'm curious did you stick with it because you were committed to sticking with cosmic or did you stick with it because the schedule was so unrel, we didn't even get five minutes to install packages, let alone switch a desktop environment.

Yeah, you know, it's both. I certainly haven't updated since we left the studio. Was that three weeks ago or something? So I feel like, yeah, the schedule was tricky in the sense that we were just moving constantly every hour of the day. But now that we're staying put, now that we're in the studio, what happens next? Does plasma go on there? Well, I don't know. I feel like maybe, you know, we've got, what, an hour before our dinner's ready?

I feel like we can come up with something more adventurous than that. Oh, God. Don't you think? And I just want to take a nap.