LINUX Unplugged - 484: Fedora Falls Flat

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Why this latest release of Fedora misses the mark, and Ubuntu's quiet backing away from ZFS.

we've been keeping an eye on the steam deck and it seems valve has updated their arch install to be basically fully up to date they're syncing it up with upstream arch some people start to speculate it might never happen wait they're gonna do updates right yeah kde 526 is landing in there there's new themes and new wallpapers that that new fancy update to K-Runner. I wonder, guys, do you think we're getting close to an actual public release of SteamOS for regular PCs?

Do you think it'll get there before the end of the year? No. Really? Come on. This is Valve time. Save it for your prediction, Chris. I predict it's going to come out

before our predictions episode, actually. Whoa. Real prediction prediction? Yeah. I think it's going to come out before our predictions episode, actually. Whoa. Prediction, prediction? Yeah. I think it's going to come out around Christmas break time for schools and stuff. What are you basing this on? Just this one update? Well, I mean, because why else go through all the trouble of getting everything else synced up with upstream at this point and not do an update?

Because otherwise you're going to have to do this all over again before you release. So you think this is the hurry up, you know, little quick spit shine and then... Yeah. And then they release

the public ISO around like a week or two before Christmas and people that are home for the holidays get to play around with it. I mean, it's a Valve-y

kind of thing to do. Right? Smells Valve-y to me. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen, coming up on the show today.

We're taking a look at Fedora 37. Is this the one that breaks their streak? We'll chat about that. Plus, it seems Ubuntu is quietly moving away from ZFS. We'll see what's going on there. And then we'll take a test and see if these two can tell the difference between real Chris and AI-generated Chris. And then we'll round it all out with some great boosts, some feedback, some picks, and a lot more.

So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mambarou! Hi, friends! Good evening, guys. Greetings. Hello. Hello. Thank you for being here. Hello.

Very nice. Very nice. Got a good crew in there. Good crew up in the quiet listening as well. Also want to say good morning to our friends over at tailscale a mesh vpn powered by wireguard it's a game changer if you were early to linux you remember that time when people didn't know about how great linux was and you knew you were on to something great and everybody else hadn't figured it out yet that's how i feel about tailscale so go over to tailscale and try it out say good morning you get it for free up to 20 devices at Tailscale.com.

If you get a chance, tell them the unplugged program sent ya. Wes Payne, you're running Fedora 37 right there. Of course. What else would I be running? I've got Fedora 37 right here. On's the dev one, which has been an interesting journey. We'll get to that. And Brentley, you've been running Fedora 37, but a slightly different spin.

You've been using the Plasma Edition. It's true you went gnome oh yeah yeah so wes and i went gnome and brentley went the plasma edition well he protests when we make him use gnome uh so it's just simple he needed a break yeah and honestly you know we need to try to represent the plasma users out there that are considering these updates because i realized we kind of had a blind spot with the Ubuntu Mate spin. Like, we just really focused on the main Ubuntu release. And, you know, sometimes the spins have something really great in there. True, true. So Fedora 37 was pretty delayed.

I don't think they like that term because they basically have a window. It spans several weeks. You know, it's ready when it's ready and in this case things got delayed by a flaw in open ssl so the fedora team decided to delay the release so that way they could uh fix that and get the updated package in there and so it pushed it slow socket super slow right it pushed it to uh this week as this episode is coming out uh what is it like wednesday the i don't know the isos are final and we've been kicking the tires throughout the entire beta process and then we kind of go in deep uh in the in these in this last week or so fedora 37 i'd say off the top is a tricky blank canvas to talk about.

This is hard to review because, quite frankly, not a lot going on in here. But there's some good bones. It is a showcase for GNOME 43. Yeah. It's been a little bit since I used, like, super up-to-date GNOME. Ooh. Ooh. This is, it just feels solid.

Everything is snappy AF. It's just, it feels like a very first-class desktop. It's got that new quick settings menu. Which I love. That's been super handy. And then several iterations now really all come together in the GNOME system settings where there's just a bunch of good new stuff in there.

And like you said, you know, this is GTK4. We're doing a lot of video acceleration now there for that stuff when we can and they also shipped raspberry pi 4 support unfortunately every time i went to test that there was issues with the images either not being available or whatever which happened as we tried to uh pre-review a release but i will give it a go when i can my take is a little a little darker a little sadder a little little more disappointed than normally is I think really since Fedora since Fedora 32 I've been coming on here after a Fedora release and I've been saying this is probably worth

updating to and I cannot really articulate a reason to upgrade to Fedora 37 outside of the update to GNOME 43. And that's even with a pretty big caveat, because if you got a good GNOME setup right now on 35 or 36 and you got extensions you like. I'd just stick there for a while because most of my extensions broke. Very few of them are working at this point. So I don't have some basic things like status menu icons and things like that. So I really am not really a big fan of this release because it felt like they took us more than they gave us in some regards. This is the release where we lose hardware video acceleration for H.264 and some other codecs. And unfortunately, the change to remove the flat hub filtering doesn't land in 37.

It's been postponed to 38. So the software situation in this release of Fedora is a major step back. And it makes the software ecosystem on Ubuntu with PPAs and deb files and snaps seem simple compared to what Fedora offers now. I had a horrendous experience. It was just a huge hot mess because I went to go set up my machine and I searched for Slack

and I got nothing in GNOME software. And I searched for Telegram and I got a GNOME web link that it would install for me. I closed the application. This is, mind you, days after I've been using it. It's not like the first time I ran GNOME software. I I close the application. I relaunch it again. This time I do the same search and I get a FlatHub result. Totally different set of results. And it's just

really just confusing because the icons are missing. They don't have the right vendor icons. It's not clear who published it. It's hard to trust if any of it's legit when I just searched a minute ago and got a web link. And now I get an application, but the application is missing the icon and I can't tell who the publisher is. And this is just a hot mess of software. And there's some things that are on FlatHub that I search for that I can't get really common stuff, really basic stuff that you'd want to get off of FlatHub that are just not available in GNOME software. And then they've like chosen to partake in parts of RPM Fusion, but not all of RPM Fusion. So for some reason, I can install the NVIDIA proprietary driver from RPM Fusion, but nothing else works. And for some reason, that's okay. But yet,

But nothing else works. And for some reason, that's okay. But yet, raw access to Flathub has to be protected. So why can't we just set up all of RPM Fusion or all of Flathub? And if they're working on a proposal to bring all of Flathub unfiltered to Fedora 38, why can't I have RPM Fusion too? What's the difference? There is no difference. The difference is, and you can see it in their discussion thread, the legal team just tells them no.

Nope, you can do Flathub, but you can't do RPM Fusion. Why? We can't tell you. And it's another example of how this distribution gets jerked around by lawyers at IBM that decide what features can and cannot ship in Fedora. And it's really disappointing because it affects even this experience of using software, not to mention the issue we have with video codecs. So the software situation is just sort of this result of the Fedora project has been making transitions. There's been a focus on flat packs. There has been a discussion internally if they should be using their own flat pack repo and then putting that in front of Flathub and then defaulting after that to Flathub and then after that to RPMs. And they've been

sorting this whole thing out. They couldn't get it figured out in time for release. And the end result is it's a mess and it's just not a good experience as an end user. And it's really frustrating because between the video codecs missing and this software experience being so subpar it feels like a it feels like we just took five six years back in terms of usability there and that's my downside with it the upside is is that it is a great blank slate in which you can build a fantastic workstation on and so i'm curious if you guys got to that point how far did you make it yeah i mean i just sort of, I think you're right. The FlatHub stuff is confusing, especially if you want to come in for a, like, I just expect this to work. I sort of assumed I would just have to, like I do on most places, end up having to, like, get maybe Flatpak itself going, but at least FlatHub, you know, as a repository enabled.

So once I was over that hurdle, it kind of got, you know, working pretty well. I was actually, outside of the initial setup problems, I was kind of surprised by how few problems I had with GNOME software these days. Like, it feels way faster than it used to feel. Like, I can switch back and forth. It finds the search goes pretty quick. I still love the integration

with the various parts of my system. It feels like a nice... I don't know if I... I don't think I've installed any software on the command line this time around, which is not my normal go-to. I mean, I just pop up a terminal most times because I'm lazy and I know how to do it that way.

I was also... I continue to be pleased with just... As everything keeps getting updated and revved in the last couple Fedora releases, it feels like more and more of the little edge cases have been worked out. Like, I think, like, where Pipewire and some of the Gnome plumbing and just of the little edge cases have been worked out like i think like where pipewire and some of the gnome plumbing and just on the desktop as a whole feels feels

really nice like pulse who cares anymore like i just this stuff works so well i it feels i don't feel limited there was a time where i was like fedora could i make it like a like a creator space for me that felt like maybe there's some hurdles. But with Pipewire, like, there's tons of stuff in the repos, like Helvem, the Rust GTK patch bay thing that lets you, you know, drag inputs and outputs around that works with Pipewire.

Package in Fedora. And if it's packaged in Fedora, like, you know, it's recent, it's new. Like, I don't have to complain about it. So that made it... That does make it nice

as a workstation. Yeah. So once I got over a little bit and, you know, I had to go remind myself, how do I get Nick's packages going on Fedora without disabling SELinux and some of that? You know, so there's nice as a workstation. Yeah. So once I got over a little bit and you know I had to go remind myself I don't get Nix packages going off the door

without disabling SELinux and some of that you know so there's a couple things but once I got all the initial setup

you're right like I like the system. Everything feels real solid you know they've got system D

tuned really nicely they've got the desktop plumbed really nicely up-to-date software so you know I don't know the hurdle

there's more hurdles now, I guess, but if you are an experienced user, you probably expect that already. I think Fedora 37 benefits from years of good choices under the hood. And so there's a lot there to work with. I'll talk more about how sometimes it doesn't always come

together in the end, but I wanted to ask you, did you end up getting Nix packages working on Fedora 37? Are you using that to manage software right now? Yeah, I didn't do. But I wanted to ask you, did you end up getting Nix packages working on Fedora 37? Are you using that to manage software right now? Yeah, I didn't do, I just wanted to see,

you know, go through the process. I didn't install a bunch of stuff through Nix or anything. Mostly, honestly, I mostly have flat packs on this because I've been using it as a, you know, casual desktop, getting a little bit of work

done here and there. I think the one thing, I installed VS Code just as a raw dog RPM, actually, because, I don't know, sometimes the Flatpak doesn't feel worth it for that one just because if you want to dump a bunch of runtimes on your system and dealing with that layer is sometimes more trouble than it's worth. But other than that, it's been Flatpaks in the repo,

and I just wanted to play around with Nix because these days I just install it everywhere. So you enabled Flathub, just follow Flathub? I tried it at first. I was like, oh, this is not getting me the results I want. And I figured on most, you know, some desktops, like you got to install Flatpak itself first and then enable FlatHub. So by comparison... Yeah, it's quicker.

And they have a Fedora specific section on the site and you can just download the repo thing and it installs it graphically. So... Yeah. I took it on as a challenge to not add the full RPM Fusion repo or FlatHub repo for a while just to

see what that experience was to see what they were shipping yeah and it's not great because if you do want to get to that stuff if there's no instructions on how to actually officially do it so like one of the things you got to do is just follow some random instructions on reddit that tell you to install these packages from rpm fusion and supposedly they'll add hardware accelerated decoding back. But it's like, which Reddit thread do you pick? I mean, I picked the one I picked. I'll put in the show notes. But I can't believe as a Fedora user, that's what

I'm being reduced to, is finding random Reddit threads. I did notice there was a codec section at the GStreamer one in the store. I don't know if that's only there if you enable third-party repositories at the install, but... Yeah, I think so, but the nice thing is, also, is it will take you there when you

first go to play. So I'll walk you through the scenario, because here's the scenario I recreated, and then I want to hear Brent's plasma experience. But the scenario I created is I filmed a video on my phone, and then I took that video... Was it a Levi video? Yeah, of course. Okay. I took that video, and I put it on my laptop, and I wanted to watch the video on my laptop.

It's 2022. Everybody has a smartphone with a camera. All of those cameras are recording in H.264. It transferred to my laptop. It does not play. That's a failure. However, it does then walk you through the process of searching GNOME software. And if you have the third-party repos installed, you can install the GStreamer codec that has H.264 playback.

I don't believe it's hardware accelerated because I got a dev one here and I was like pegging out like 40, 50 percent watching a video from my phone. But it installs it and then it begins playing immediately. It's even a, it's slightly smoother than it used to be back in the old days when I used to buy my Fluendo codecs and then add them back when we used to not have codecs on Linux. It's a little bit smoother than that. I had to, I don't know if Fluke already had it open, I had to restart Firefox to get it.

I just installed it right now as we were doing it to check that. But after that, I mean, I'm watching JupyterTube, so. Right. So, Brentley, I want to hear about your experience i know you tried plasma i don't know if any of this stuff bit you uh if maybe you're sticking with fedora 37 how'd it go sir yeah well one of our parameters that we kind of toyed with was not changing any of the repos not adding flat hub things like that so i thought that's a great challenge but then i kind of not adding flat hub things like that so i thought that's a great challenge but then i kind of suffered for it so i had a actually quite a hard time to us yeah i i actually really suffered with that and i didn't expect that because i was just trying to do really simple stuff um like i wasn't able to find vlc i don't know maybe i broken. I couldn't find it anywhere to install, which

seems odd. I don't know why that is. But to test the video playing, like you mentioned, Chris, I installed MPV and it must have taken care of everything because H.264 played just fine for me, actually, which was good. But I just ran into a whole bunch of issues, even from the very beginning, which was unfortunate. I was really looking forward to having a great experience. And some of it was like a day or two before those official releases were out. Some of it was after and just continued, which is sort of unfortunate. So one of the main things I ran into, well, I guess I should give some stats first. So it's, I, it was running Plasma 5.262. As far as I can find, the latest is 5.263. So pretty darn recent. I think 5.263 just got released on the 8th. So a few days ago, but I ran into some issues that have sort of been my experience with KDE the last six months on various OSs,

unfortunately. So one of the main ones was that the lock screen after being suspended, when you try to wake it up, was just a complete mess of distortion. And Chris, I included a few screenshots for you in our doc there so that you could kind of have a look at them. And it was bizarre because the mouse pointer was perfectly fine, but everything else was like this jarble mess. I was able to find a workaround. So I was able to use the old control alt F1 and F2s and F3s to kind of bounce between terminals and get back to the screen. And then it presented just fine. So that was an interesting experience and it just kind of persisted between restarts and, uh, it was unfortunate. And I had just application crashes out of nowhere and, uh, some notifications that came up immediately,

just suggesting that things were broken. And so I actually didn't get very far before losing all of my enthusiasm. And that got me thinking about spins in a bigger context. And I feel like the main release, especially with their release window, tends to focus on the GNOME implementation, which is logical. But it gets me thinking about spins and how they're at kind of the mercy of that release cycle. And sometimes they have to release maybe when they're not quite ready. I would be interested in knowing a little bit more about how that works on the backend, but I feel like using the spins on release day is just rough, really, really rough. Maybe it's better in a month or two and I'd be interested in looking at that, but. I don't, I don't disagree with you on that. I know that, you know, Neil would tell us that the Fedora project has made critical bugs in Plasma a release blocker for all the spins.

But my experience has also just been that it doesn't have the same focus. I think that probably could be a topic we could dig down on in the future. You mentioned errors. Do you think they were SELinux errors that you were getting? No, they weren't SE Linux errors. I think I meant to screen grab them, and then I had the other issues, and just they got lost in the mix. But yeah, I can't speak to them. Maybe I'll have another look and find them. But they didn't seem to affect at least what I can tell, the operation of the OS. It seemed just fine.

Might have been a notification subsystem error. Hey, I'll take viewer notifications as a good thing. Yeah. You still want to get the important ones, though, don't you? This is an interesting sort of pause in what has been, in my opinion, really strong releases, especially starting at 32 and 33

when ButterFS came in. And I think it's still a really solid base. I don't know if it's worth upgrading today. I'd probably, if it was me, I'd probably wait a month or two at least. Unfortunately, sort of ironically timed, after the show today, I am playing tech support for my son. I installed Fedora 36 on his Asus laptop. It's been working great for a long time until about a month or two ago.

And it started to just slowly have issue after issue. One of the first problems that crept up was his NVIDIA binary driver just broke. It seems to almost segfault during boot or something. And then the Nouveau driver has to load. But so it does fall back. It's not like it totally has to come up yeah so that's but he but he uses it to game so it's kind of a downside so then it starts up and you're like wait why is my gaming suddenly way worse yeah and of course he's always paying attention to the frames per second and whatnot so this weekend you know i just this is on Fedora 36, I just took all the NVIDIA stuff off, went totally back to a free driver stack, completely back to stock, right?

And then went into GNOME software, made sure I had the repos enabled, all that kind of stuff, and reinstalled it from, you know, following their prescribed process. And I'm still having issues with it. But on top of that, when he shuts down now, hangs at like kvm trying to do a some sort of kvm hardware shutdown process and his system just hangs there forever and he has to hard physically turn it off and of course he's doing that more and more because it also doesn't sleep anymore when he closes the lid it did when he first started using it but it no longer does and this morning i found out that now some sort of process in the background is just going absolutely crazy. I would not be surprised if it isn't related to KVM.

And his fans are going crazy. His CPU is getting pegged. It just seems to me that Fedora 36 just didn't turn out to be as durable as I wanted because he only installs stuff from Steam and he just does the system updates that's all he's doing and he had elementary OS for like three years and it was fine we just moved because it was an old base and he was getting a new machine yeah and at the time I was like Fedora seems to be working really well but I'm concerned about this durability issue because i'm not really clear what he's done other than you know i've looked at it it's just updates and things broke and i think that means it's probably not going to be the family os for me and i really hate that because i like just that clean

blank slate that i can build a little family setup on i mean obviously like right there's lts there's lots of options here but it felt, in a certain stride, like, the updates, the update process itself, just everything kind of coming together, reaching a very cohesive whole, like, that even though, yes, there are more updates in the Fedora model, you could still feel kind of comfortable being like... You know,

I'm glad you brought that up, because I say elementary OS was fine, but we were starting to have packages that were like... You can no longer get an updated enough version from the repo to support this. Or like a repo was no longer online. So it was because it was like a, you know, probably a four-year-old distro by that point. Yeah, was that the 1804?

Probably. Yeah, it's probably the 1804 base. And it was about a year ago. And everything still installs, right? DNF completes. Everything's good, every package is still working, all the dependencies are resolved,

there's nothing broken in regards to package management, which is honestly what I was trying to solve for because I was very frustrated because ultimately what happened to elementary OS, I couldn't update Chrome, he couldn't use something he needed for school, blah, blah, blah. Right.

One too many PPAs, some weird stuff happens, who knows anymore, yeah. And I solved for that with Fedora and it's working well but it's just disappointed me in this way so my exit interview for Fedora 36 is if you're a sysadmin you're set it's going to be fine but I can't recommend it for the set and forget it family type computers because it has not been that and this has not been problem free the entire install, about once every couple of months I'm fixing something for him.

You know, two or three times, not the end of the world. But it's also, I think, honestly, it shook his confidence a little bit in desktop Linux as a result, which was not great, you know, because we were doing really good. But when he sees the frame rate drop and, you know, he's having issues with it not shutting down and he closes the lid puts it in his bag and he pulls it out it's like 110 degrees and it's the battery's drained you know that's a bad experience and now if i were to put fedora 37 on there and not set it up for him you know if he were to just try upgrading to fix it he would upgrade and he would

lose video accelerated playback on it and he has an amd graphics in there too he's got both and that's just that's a hard sell i mean could you imagine trying to tell him that how do i even explain that to him i don't think you would you probably just end up installing you know i gotta do a couple maintenance upgrades real quick before you use this but uh now i have a question for you both or maybe it's more of a pondering we've seen some of the major distributions like fedora for instance we were excited about it for a long time and now it seems maybe this one's a slump for a little bit but we saw the exact same thing with buntu in recent years kind of some maybe less exciting

releases and it seems maybe they're on an uptrend now for us. In that context, how do we choose? Well, I'm going to make it personal. How do we choose an OS for my dev one? Because I need something and I'm finding it really difficult, you know, in the shoes of a listener to just say, well, what does JB recommend as the OS that I should run for the next year or two? God, it really comes back back to like what problem do you want to solve for because in a real way the problem i was trying to solve with dylan's laptop was system updates that worked every time and didn't break and i was sick of fixing a broken app to install that if you run it in ubuntu install long enough eventually just doing updates something breaks to install right it just happens at least on all of mine it has over time.

And it happened on his. And I was solving for that. So it's like, what problem are you willing to put up with? And then there's this other element that I don't think we talk about, but it matters a lot, and it's what's the corporate influence? Because a lot of what we're complaining about today is not really because of a technical issue it's because of legal issues so what what is the corporate governance look like and what are the corporate politics look like and that's

a whole other element you have to consider too if you really get into it and i don't know how you explain that to people and it's going to be different at different thresholds and different preferences for each individual so i think the option is is distro hop for a while I think that's why distro hopping is so popular it's why it's such a meme I'm not convinced that solves it because you could try one version and have a terrible experience

six months later have a great experience on the very same distro I don't know is that true though I mean I think that's true for people trying it but I don't know I think you either have to be willing to accept what you get or be hands-on in the Linux world willing to accept what you get or be hands on in the Linux world. You know, either

you can't be that picky and you gotta just take what the LTS gives you and realize sometimes you're gonna get old, slow stuff or you're gonna be running something like Fedora or Arch because you know how to take backups or know how to roll back software or how to deal with the paper cuts

that come yeah i mean maybe not but that that's usually the way i end up as a extremely jaded using linux for way too long person i end up kind of approaching it yeah like either there's a kiosk or it's somewhere that i fiddle right it's a tinker toy or it's an appliance or another another way people like to put it as a pet or it's cattle i think think what it is is when you pick a Linux distro, it's what set of problems do you want to solve for? And Fedora has, I think, in whole, when you look at all the different distro options,

a pretty good understandable set of compromises. NixOS is the one that seems to be kind of hitting my sweet spot right now. Yeah, I was just waiting for that. But there's another set of compromises there. And that is complexity in installing software and just a new paradigm that you kind of have to wrap your head around. And there's just sometimes an extra step or two. Like I downloaded a piece of software the other day.

It was actually the first time I, this sounds weird, but the first time I ever tried an app image on my NixOS desktop, I just don't really use app images that much. No offense, but just don't really use them that much. And I discovered there's an app image run package in Nix that essentially creates the necessary environment for an app image to run successfully and then lets you execute the app image. It meant I don't just download an app image and double-click it. Right. And it meant that when I double-clicked it, because I was curious what would happen.

Yeah, yeah. And nothing happened. Like, my response can't be, well, this damn thing. You know, it has to be, all right, well, let's go Google this, you know, because that's what I'm going to be doing for a few minutes. And usually the solution can be found in a few minutes. And that's a different set of compromises. But those are the ones I'm living with right now, you know?

That's the real, that's the success to Linux. Well, it is nice, I think, at least, too, that we can, you know, distro hopping is something that does work. Yeah. So you can have backup, you can dual boot if you, like, I think, at least, too, that we can, you know, distro hopping is something that does work. Yeah. So you can have backup. You can dual boot if you, like, you know, find one OS that you really like for X activity and want some other LTS setup for, you know, this workflow doesn't change a lot. And I just don't want to ever have to mess with it again. And since so many of our tools, especially with flatbacks and app images and containers, you can bring them with you.

And you got the choice. And if one distro maker chooses to do something that bugs you, there's several other ones you can try. There's always Arch. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. It's a great way to support the show while you're checking out fast and reliable cloud hosting the best in the business with real human beings behind the

support number and a solid linux infrastructure over 11 data centers today right but they're working on another dozen for next year and a whole new concept for a micro data center too which i'm sure we'll talk about at some point. Everything we've built for the last couple of years, we've built it on Linode. In part because it's great pricing, 30 to 50% cheaper than the hyperscalers out there. But also the performance is better. It's not just me saying that. There's been benchmarks out there, but I've also just tested it. It really is just truly great for the price and the performance and the mix of machine that you can build. Nobody gets it.

Nobody gets it like Linode. And, you know, they've been at it for like 19 years practically. So that's kind of why they've really dialed it in. And I bet some of you are thinking about potentially setting up your own presence in the Fediverse, maybe deploying a Matrix server or a Mastodon server. Linode's got a guide on how to set up Mastodon on Linode in a way that's going to work perfect for you. And what I love about this guide is they actually

make it available for one, two, three, four different distributions. I'll link to the Ubuntu 2004 one. I don't know. Personally, for myself, I think that's I'd probably be considering CentOS Stream. They have a guide for that as well. That's what I love about Linode.

They're really distro agnostic. Whichever distro is going to work best for you, they're going to try to work with that. And if you ever get stuck, they got the best support in the business. It's available 365, seven days a week. I think it's probably the best out there. Nobody else has built that because nobody else had to compete at that level. And when you get that $100 by going to linode.com slash unplugged, you can actually try out the different features of Linode

and see why we love it so much, see why we deploy stuff on there all the time. And honestly, the one way you can really, one of the ways, not the one way, but one of the ways you can really tell that we trust linode is when we do live things like deep fusion image generation or or ssh into a box publicly and having everyone on a live stream try to figure out how we broke docker we always do those events on linode hardware because it's the only thing that holds up to it and it just it's so impressive every single time so go try it support the show build something or learn something it's a great platform for learning things as well linode.com slash unplug get the hundred dollars try it out and support the show linode.com slash unplugged

we got some baller boost this week to support the show. Wise Papa John came in with our first big boost, 40,000 sats. Keep the change, you filthy animal. Here's 40,000 for a hard G in Jif. And also, Matrix can be a little intimidating for new users. and also matrix can be a little intimidating for new users i feel something that's like more mainstream type social apps aka mastodon might make the audience interaction a little more approachable for the newbies it also could be another way to discover old show topics i'm thinking a social media post for each new episode with a comments thread and whatnot.

Yeah, this Mastodon topic is going to come up again today later in the show. It's a big hot topic right now because as we record this episode, Twitter's a fiasco. People are trying out Mastodon in numbers. It's a whole Pandora's Zoo, not just a box. Yeah, Pandora's Zoo is a good way to put it. And so I've noticed that the podcasting 2.0 show does this. They do a mastodon post as a comments thread section. Oh, yeah, sure. And we could probably talk to Alex Gates, the podcasting 2.0 consultant on this on office hours more about this.

But there is also work on cross podcasting app comments using ActivityPub. I like that. That sounds like a nice idea. Yeah, so they can be like, part of the federation, which I think would be really cool. So we'll keep an eye on that development, and maybe that kind of stuff could pull us in. Or maybe I should just start using my Mastodon account

on the podcasting 2.0 social thing. I mean, I could could i don't know matrix has worked so well for me because i can dip in and dip out but i realize that's the exact opposite for some people they don't want something that's moving all the time me i just dip in yeah sometimes you feel real uh chatty or broadcasty and uh you want to follow up on what's been going on some days you don't't. But I gets it. I gets it. And then we got another baller boost from Johnny. He's back. Hey, Rich Lobster!

25,000 sats, and he says, I'm back, baby. Yes, you are, Johnny. It's nice to see you again. Thank you for the support. I hope you can make it over before the snow gets too high. It's going to be tricky over those passes soon. I also want to mention that the baller support has really been great for the show in terms of discovery. We've got new listeners that find us because your boosts put us high on the fountain charts.

And pretty neat is I have a call scheduled with some of the Fountain FM leadership on Tuesday next week because they've noticed we're so frequently on the top boosted charts. They're like, well, we got to talk to Chris more. That's wonderful. So I'm going to take some feedback that I've been hearing from the audience and talk with them about it. for a living, where my actual livelihood depends on this, having these channels of communications with the app developers are kind of really important and critical. And so your booths put us up on those charts. We had new audience find us and the developers of Fountain FM. We got their attention too.

And now we're going to have an ongoing dialogue with them thanks to your support and the booths. I really love how it's working. I really appreciate it. It's like a little uh audience vouch you know yeah yeah yeah it's it's a real clear signal is what it is it's better than any algorithm that the platform maker could come up with it's better than stars are cheap yeah upvotes are cheap yeah yeah it's better than a thumbs up or a retweet it's a real signal because people use their sats and that's a it's a data point of enthusiasm. And if people take note, it's really cool. And we appreciate it. The sats are cheap. They'll probably be cheap for a while. Don't buy a bunch, but just grab a handful and send them our way with a new podcast app at new podcast apps dot com.

newpodcastapps.com. I wanted to follow up on a couple of items and one that just, I haven't really seen much discussion and it's kind of been developing, I think for about a year. And I've been hoping that we'd get some sort of official announcement from Canonical on the state of ZFS in Ubuntu.

Because it seems that they are transitioning away from some of the tooling that they have created to manage zfs specifically the zsys tooling and it's even kind of in a deprecated barely maintained state there's even potentially some bugs that are impacting data and it doesn't really seem advisable to continue to use zsys with zfs on ubuntu and i don't know what it means for the long-term zfs on ubuntu in general wes i know you sniffed around a little bit can you kind of summarize what you found yeah it just seems like um you know internally at least at canonical there's no longer a lot of prioritization around ZSYS. So it hasn't had any active development. And then people started noticing

that there had been various issues in launchpad suggesting like, well, we're not working on this. We're still installing it with the installer. We should probably update this. We should clean this up. If we're not going to be maintaining it, then we probably shouldn't be installing it. So it doesn't seem like there's any indication of like,

so far, anything changing in terms of, you know, shipping the ZFS pre-compiled module, keeping that in sync with the kernels they deliver, all of that good stuff we've had since 2016. But in terms of their more ambitious sort of, you know, deeply integrating ZFS with the desktop experience, with the, you know, base underpinnings of the system, not a bright future there, at least at the moment,

would be my guess. Yeah, it seems that the team has just been reprioritized. They're focused on other things, and this tooling just isn't a big priority. But it's funny because these things come triumphantly. We get this big, triumphant introduction of a feature set, and it's really cool and we talk about it and then sometimes things change and they just quietly fade away

and it seems like no one's really been working on this since you know late 2021 and there's just been a couple of wham bam fixes to just kind of cram into the installer but now like you say there's a launchpad ticket right here to just remove ZSYS from the installer altogether. That feels like a downgrade to me. And I wonder what your opinion is in terms of, well, they should have gone with ButterFS. Because that was the first thing I thought of. Not just because of the kernel module stuff and the licensing stuff. of the kernel module stuff and the licensing stuff.

But to me, it felt like if Fedora and Ubuntu were working on tooling together around ButterFS and SUSE is out there working on tooling around ButterFS. And we have these three large distro makers that just standardized on ButterFS. Not only would that likely help us improve ButterFS even further, but then if one of them faded, we still have other vendors in the mix but now what we have is we have ubuntu with zfs with tooling that's just kind of being deprecated we've got

susa that's doing their own thing integrated with their own snap with their own package installer with their own setup on butterfest which is probably the most mature and then we've got fedora that's you know move the ball forward since 33 but not significantly like we're not seeing like after you complete a dnf install like snapshots that you can then go boot from grub or anything like that which it clearly could be if they continue to iterate on it we've just got three different kind of hodgepodge's with open susa in the best condition and i just look at this whole thing and i go, well, you know, when they announced this,

my first thought was, boy, it'd be great if they all just went in on ButterFS. And now we're at the end where they're apparently deprecating ZSYS, and my thought is, God, it would have been great if they just would have gone with ButterFS. Yeah, but I mean, does that ever, does it ever work that way, right? ZFS is kind of their sauce,

their thing that they know they can bring that other distros can't or won't. Plus, I mean, does that ever, does it ever work that way, right? CFS is kind of their sauce, their thing that they know they can bring that other distros can't or won't. Plus, I mean, we know, not necessarily in a bad way, they've made some very nice tools that I like a lot, but Canonical has a particular way that they build tooling and approach and tool chains that they want to use, right? They've got people who know how to use, they seem to use Go a lot for a lot of these tools,

but they've got, you know, particular ways to go about and build these things. To me, it just makes me think it's kind of that ebb and flow that we see, you know. But at a time, maybe there's a little more interest in some of this, like, enterprise-y desktop in that space. And maybe that's just kind of faded a bit recently. Well, you know how I found out about this is if you ask the folks at the OpenZFS project, they'll just tell you to just avoid Ubuntu now. folks at the OpenZFS project, they'll just tell you to just avoid Ubuntu now. And they have on their front page news about, at least they did this weekend, news about how this is being deprecated and don't use it. It doesn't seem like that's in a good place, that relationship.

That doesn't seem like a healthy thing. Because when you have the upstream projects saying, oh yeah, just don't use Ubuntu, even though they're still shipping the kernel module. It should be probably one of the better experiences. I think it actually is. Yeah. I don't know, man. We'll have links to the Launchpad issue as well

as the issue on the Zsys project itself where the user ran into a data loss bug. But I want to do another follow-up story. I'd be curious to know what the audience thinks and what their experience is with ZFS there. And honestly, if anybody's impacted by the deprecation of the ZSYS tooling,

did that really take off? Maybe that's an element. Maybe it just got really low adoption or something. I don't know if they could measure that. I did see some folks in the various discourses and stuff wondering, what are the KPIs you want to see how do we how do we tell you if some people really like this i don't know i don't know if we have a clear signal on that yeah that

could be part of it too well send us some signal if uh if you have an opinion out there dear audience and then i want to go back to the topic of these deep fusion generated images and deep fake audio. Listener CB had a lot of fun generating some images that are creepy, eerie, close to me. Like the first one in this album that I'll link to in the show notes. I think if I sent that to you, you would think that actually was me. Yeah.

Writing a penguin. Totally would. And I'm disappointed it wasn't you. There's me talking to a penguin. There's also me watching myself on the screen also happens. Yeah. Very, very interesting stuff.

But of course this here is an Aja podcast and a listener CB generated something that is pretty close to the real thing. So are you ready to hear what the current state of deep fake Chris after it's been trained on our podcast sounds like? All right. Listered Chris decided to create a virtual Chris Fisher. So going forward, I do not need to do these podcasts anymore and I can just go on vacation to

relax. Ah, I mean, you can kind of understand it, right? After you started listening for a few seconds, it starts to make sense that vacation they may be coming there. Wes,

it kind of sounds like a Chris Fisher on his third podcast of the day. I thought you were going to say third drink of the day. That's also the third drink thing. What are you doing a show without it? Come on. And then here CB sent in

what he believes is the value for value exchange for this experiment he engaged in. I need to acknowledge some value that a listener sent in over email. Listener Chris had created some fake something and I just want to say that his contribution is worth more than $900,000.

Coming in hot with the boost. Over $9,000. It's obviously a little rough. But what about in a year? Right. What about even in a year isn't that something a little more effort you know get some more build a bigger bigger data set i'm gonna play the first one again and i think it does actually capture some of my tone blizzard fris decided to create a virtual

crucifixion so going forward i do not need to do these podcasts anymore, and I can just go on vacation to relax. Isn't that remarkable? That's a lot of fun. I would let that guy guide me through a phone tree. Yeah, you could totally see that. Welcome to Dubin and Branghazen. Press 1. It's like a version where you get Linux Action News, but you just have to call a hotline.

Like telephone banking, but it's telephone Linux news. Yeah, exactly. Member special. Yeah. Press two if you're a member. Enter your member code. You guys will have to, if you, I mean, if you care, you'll have to. Ooh, look at that handsome gentleman.

I know. Some of the images it generated are really something. Me talking to penguins is a theme, which is great. One thing that I do really appreciate about the AI is that it, the one thing it really honed in on that's consistent is, wait, I'm overweight, but two,

the hair, right? The hair is consistently good. It really, it really does that quite well. Also, you could learn a couple of styling tips from AI Chris, I think. I am also,

I was just going to say, I look good in a military uniform. Like this is the right look for me hoodie not so great military uniform editor-in-chief or commander-in-chief yeah I guess my I guess my uniform left I've been lurking on building a personal uniform I'm gonna have to just go for like the uh you know like the actual like military style you know because it looks good it looks good yeah I feel like uh I want to set up another one of these deep fusion instances. Oh, yeah. We're not.

It's too much fun. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun for screwing around. We use it for just low-key stuff, like over at jupiter.tube, all of the, you know, instead of doing, like, silly YouTube thumbnails, we just generate a silly AI image. Why not? It's been working pretty good. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go there right now to get started with a free trial for a team

or an enterprise or try it as an individual by going to Bitwarden.com slash Linux. I haven't mentioned this before, but enterprise plans include complementary family plans. So that's a great way to extend security not only to your entire organization, but also to your team members, your coworkers at home. So if you haven't advocated for Bitwarden at your organization yet, that might be a great direction to go and send them to bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's the easiest way to store, share, and sync your sensitive data. And Bitwarden is open source. It's trusted by millions of us in the community. It's what Wes and I use all the time. I'm using it now for my two-factor codes as well, which makes that so much more reliable

for me, especially the way I move machines. You can use it for other sensitive data too, like account recovery keys or other types of secrets that either want to store in one secure central place that you can trust, or also something maybe like a secret you might need to share with a team member or a friend or a family member at some point or a spouse. Bitwarden is fantastic for that while not messing up your whole OPSEC, as they say. And the mobile clients have made it really feasible to have secure passwords, unique usernames, and unique email addresses for every site, service, or even app you use.

Which is fantastic since I'm moving between my desktop and my mobile devices all the time. And Bitwarden's rolling out features every single month, including they just recently rolled out DuckDuckGo email aliasing, support for fast mails, email alias, password protected encrypted exports. I love to see them working more with DuckDuckGo too. I think that's a real positive sign. So go try it out for free right now by going to bitwarden.com slash Linux. You sign up there or if you've already taken care of this, and I hope you have because a password manager and something like Bitwarden that can

help you store your secrets and all your sensitive data very securely that you can trust. That's just an absolute critical tool for staying safe and secure online. So I hope you already know about this. You probably do. But I bet you have a friend or a family member. Maybe it's Brent. Maybe it's somewhere you work. I don't know.

Maybe they need a little convincing. So have them go try it. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's good for you. It's good for the internet. It's true too. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. As always, we've got some great feedback this week,

but we do have a special little something from listener Jeff. Let's just call it a geocache update for the Folsom location. Captain, I am on location at the Sacramento geocache. It is missing. I repeat, missing. Abort the search.

It is no longer here. It has been found. Data conclusive. Thank you, Jeff. So, of course, for those of you who just need to be caught up, Chris was right all along. Folsom was one of our first successful, maybe the second successful geocache that was found by an audience member. That's clearly what happened.

And Jeff went on location to verify and he confirmed via visual data that the Folsom Linux unplugged cache has been discovered. Like I knew all along. Like I knew all along. Like I knew all along. But there was kind of another kind of funny coincidence while he was there, Brent. Yeah, he ran into listener Jared again and his family, and that's the second time that happens at that particular location, which I think is super fun.

That is so great. Jeff mentioned that listener Jared's daughter, I think, or son ran up, one of the kids. Are you looking for the JB geocache? That's adorable. Second time that happens. So good. I mean, if you're going to meet strangers in the woods, I would hope they're fans. I think we got to do more of these.

We should have given Jeff a geocache. We needed, you know, oh, oh, what we need are geocache bundles that we can mail out to listeners that they could stash in their general areas. Now you're talking. That's what we need to do. I bet the listeners will be way better at hiding geocaches than we are also. Yeah. So what we could do is we could have, so somebody email into the show and let us know if you want to do this. See if anybody's interested.

And what we could do is we'd basically send you a little tupperware container full of swag that you hide in your area then you got to send us video of you like kind of in the area hiding it but we don't want to give away the location exactly so you just give us a little narration of where it's at you know this is what you'd have to do if you want to participate in this so that way we can play the clip to give people a hint gotta get yeah craft your clue clue gotta craft a clue and then uh let us know and we could send a few of these out i think oh it's great to know i was right about the fulsome cache that's good that's good we also got some mail this week benjamin wrote in about jupiter.tube and uh i think he's looking for some peers he writes for me over here in the UK, I rarely see more than two peers,

usually one, and I get about 15k down if I'm lucky during live LUP streams. So it's usually two seconds of video playback, a minute or so of buffering, and just repeat that cycle. None of the other RTMP, RTSP, or radio streams seem to work for me either, so I rely on the YouTube streams for the most part. I can, however, watch the published stream the next day without any problems from JupyterTube, so just not when it's live. Well, now that is interesting.

Yeah. Strange. Now that's a curveball. You're able to pull data from that server. How does that make any sense? Because when it's live, it's doing a web torrent from that server anyways, so it's still coming from the server how does that make any sense because when it's live it's doing a web torrent from that server anyways so it's still coming from the server if there's no peers so how does that make any sense yeah and it should just grab that hls files at the end of the day right yeah this feels to me like one of those pieces of mail that gets us um trying to figure

out a problem that we didn't know existed because we've had listeners uh especially in the mumble room who have used jupiter tube while we're live for the most part and it's not you know we've had to add a peer or two but it's for the most part i think working yeah it would be nice to have more people kind of taking us up on the jupiter tube peering stuff i understand it's tricky because in some circumstances, YouTube or Twitch just works better or it's what you have an app for or whatever. But, you know, these self-hosted open source platforms are only as successful as the user base for them. And it's like, if anybody's going to use them, it's probably going to be us. So we should try to actually be there to be customers for these things and demonstrate a demand and we could use more people

peering but the other thing that i think is doable and maybe somebody out there knows the way we've gotten close is a way to essentially set up our own peers like maybe a headless linode that we deploy somewhere in the world that's just adding a peer over there and it's not just as simple as a web torrent it is also so a peer tube it uses torrents to distribute the hls files and it uses web rtc to communicate something in some data channel so you have to have a web rtc communications channel as well and there is an electron app there that does re like that does seeding and does the WebRTC stuff. You can't run that headless. Maybe we can.

Anyways, if people out there have tips for us or want to just participate. But we need to update it with each new live stream too, huh? Jupyter.tube though. That's our per tube instance where we video stream the recording of our shows and then we archive them over there for playback if if people would like no also wrote in with a potential odroid killer he says what do you guys think of this particular single board computer has intel nix six serial ata ports doesn't quite have raid support but might just be an option for jb the n5105 or the n6005 nas board it does look really good you know what is nice is it's intel nix and yeah way more sata six yeah that's pretty

sweet so the base price is 195 us greenbacks then it looks like it goes up to about 480 depending on when you buy it and what you spec it with uh yeah you can either get a seller on So the base price is 195 US greenbacks. Then it looks like it goes up to about 480, depending on when you buy it and what you spec it with. Yeah, you can either get a Celeron N5105 or a Pentium N6005. It's got NVMe. That looks good. DDR4. That looks good.

Lots of SATA. Yeah, dual M.2s, looks like. Oh, man. How many USB ports does this freaking thing have, too, or whatever? Like, there's just a ton of ports on this thing. Yeah, this looks like oh man what how many usb ports does this freaking thing have too or whatever like there's just a ton of ports on this thing yeah this looks really nice this is always the problem is there's always so many options and this came up with the raspberry pi too as soon as you you know you mentioned you got a raspberry pi there's like oh have you tried this and sometimes it's like there are better ones and this could be a better one and then sometimes you want to get behind the one that has a bit of an ecosystem. Right. Do you have case option?

What's the form factor? What do you know about the manufacturer? Are they going to stick around? Yeah. Yeah. Ugh. It's hard. This is a hard choice to make.

And we're not even done yet because we want to replace a couple of machines here in the studio too. And it's like, we don't want big computers. I think we've got to crowdsource it, right? People just got to start buying these things and let us know. Yeah, let us know.

Does it work really well? Yeah. We just have people buy a whole bunch of different ones. We can all run the Pharonix test suite on them, get a big comparison suite going. Well, I think to add one more to the pile, Matthew also wrote in just about at the same time and suggested a Nexcom mini PC. He writes, Chris has been talking about that Odroid on Linux Unplugged and self-hosted quite a bit, and I wanted to suggest the Nexcom devices.

They're an industrial, mostly fanless x86 platform for a variety of applications. In particular, I use the Nexcom NDIS device. It's meant to be a signage player, but I use the device as a fanless application server running Ubuntu server. And I love the thing. Mine is an i5 base PC and it's gone as far as testing 4k Plex trans codes. And it handles a couple of the trans codes at the same time without issue. Praise quick sync. The device can be had on eBay relatively cheaply. You should give them

a gander. All right. Jeez. Yeah, this is the way, if you ever want to find out what's really great out there, you buy something, get really hyped about it, and then you'll discover all the other options. But some of these are really cool. I dig the built-in heatsink and the mounts and the DC power. Oh, man, that's checking a box.

We could just screw that onto the back of you. I feel like we almost need a tiny PC library. You can just check one out for a week or two. Give it a try. Yeah. I am really enjoying the small low power PC. I mean, you know, it's one thing to just like get a crazy fast. I mean, that's great. I absolutely love that too. But like there's just something about these that are just

enough machine. Just enough machine not drawing too much power, which is another big thing for me i feel like there's a big future in playing around with that kind of hardware and seeing how much linux you can get you're just going to try to fill all of your places with as many tiny little pcs now aren't you yeah man yeah i mean why have big computers when you can have lots of small little computers that's that's my thinking now right swarm swarm boost to gray all right we got some big old boosts into the show this week that we want to cover and then i kind of also want to

talk about just as an aside this whole ftx situation if you're curious what's going on there why this whole coin casino crashed around them we just published an episode of the Bitcoin Dad Pod, and you can find that at bitcoindadpod.fireside.fm, and it's slash episode 50, so slash 50. Effective scam tourism. And we break it all down in plain English. What's going on there? Why the price of Bitcoin goes down with it, which is essentially people have to sell to cover their positions. Turns out that FTX was sitting on two Bitcoin. So they didn't have a lot of Bitcoin. They were mostly dealing around with these scam coins. But if you have questions or you'd just like to know a recap

that's just a common sense recap, go check it out in episode 50 of the Bitcoin Dad Pod. And then we get to, i think it's going to be mentat i think i don't know if i have that right but we're going to go with mentat all right and mentat sends in a row of ducks 2222 uh since you guys started talking about the shift in podcast advertising i have noticed several podcasts and podcast networks i listen to doubling or even tripling up on ads as well as starting up membership subscriptions at the same time man that's rough i hope that this goes smoothly um i've been following the financial news

of some of the big podcast sponsors in this space and they are having a rough time of it the tech sector in general so i think it is if you if there's a podcast out there that you really like and you've been considering joining the membership it might be time to consider because i think some of these podcasters are probably panicking if i were trying to get a membership program launched right now i would be in like you know disaster mode it'd be really scary i'm so grateful for our members they because they really it's like it's that's how we know our ongoing production is covered like if we may have to make big changes but like the shows will continue and that's you know the members are like the insurance program for that and i'm very, very grateful, especially now. Marcel Boosin with some Enterprise at 1701.

Make it so. As a one-off during a busy week, I think I actually would listen to a fully AI-generated show. I think it'd actually be pretty good, but I don't think I'd want it every week. Well, that'll be if you can tell. That would be the benchmark, I think. I think an AI-generated show would only make sense for a holiday show where you're trying to do essentially a best of, but with new content generated from the

old content. And you'd have to have editorial control, and it would take so much more work than just doing a show. Would we be able to generate the whole thing? Would we have to edit together some of the stuff that did pop out? Would this part be generated? How do you have that? How does the AI know how to

give Chris enough sass? That's finely tuned. Yeah, you really got to figure it out. Well, it's going to be a couple years at least. And then Rustic Castaversa came in with a row of ducks. And just simply says

BOOST! B-O-O-S-T! 4.12 Linux boosts in with 2,048 sets. Regarding packaging on distributions, Ubuntu Mate enabled Flatpak along with Snaps in 2204. This has been a fantastic experience for me. Initially, I found it beneficial to quickly switch Firefox from Snap to Flatpak. Now I can use whatever packaging system works best for the application

I am installing. The Ubuntu Monte team have made this easy. It's a really underappreciated feature. That is nice. Flatpaks on an Ubuntu system out of the box, that's just giving your users what they need and want. You've got to respect that.

And then, I think to Fortel's point too, it's like, well, maybe, you know, if you're already sold on some snaps, maybe you're doing the next cloud, whatever,

like, you know, you've got best of all, all, all them worlds. The facial hair boosts in with 6,000 cents. Boost! I recall Chris mentioned he got his hands on a popcorn pocket PC.

I was wondering, whatever happened to it? Well, we have it in-house. And I kind of fired up from time to time. I dust it off and I play around and see how things are. This is one of those things that's tricky to talk about on air because it's got a lot of promise, but it isn't quite there yet. There's not a firmware that is really like, I could just say, Hey, go grab this and throw this firmware. Right. And I don't want to come on air and talk

negatively about it and sort of undercut any progress. But at the same time, there's nothing really to say that's positive yet. So I'm kind of in a waiting phase and I have been for a long time. Hasn't found its way actually like into your life in a meaningful way yet. Yeah. So if you're not familiar with the popcorn computer, it's about the size of a Game Boy, but a little wider, and it's got a full QWERTY keyboard, LCD screen, some USB-C ports, and, yeah, it's supposed to run Linux. And you grab a video out port, and you can hook it up up and now you've got a full computer and you disconnect it

and you're just walking around with a little tiny 5-inch screen kind of a thing. But so far, so far, I have not really found the firmware that really brings it home. But I'm keeping an eye out there. So if anybody out there wants an update or you hear something, maybe I missed it, shoot me a boost or shoot me an email or something, let me know, and I'll give it a go again. now we got quite a bit of feedback about mastodon we got a bunch of boosts in and we also got a bunch of plus ones via you know the old email tech of 751 specifically boosted in with a mini row of ducks 222 sets i tried to build out a

smaller mastodon server for a small community of 50 or so people. Later though, I had to kill it in the beta trial. It was obvious that even if I was really to put hours and automation into place, it was just going to be too much. The instance needs a load of resources, mostly for storage. And the bigger issue is that massive moderation is required. At least a couple people with good moral compass to make it happen. Yeah, there's that whole element of having to manage that whenever you run a community thing. But I was wondering about what it is to run a Mastodon instance on the back end. Because my experience with Matrix is that the federation aspect actually is quite a bit of traffic. with matrix is that the federation aspect actually is quite a bit of traffic and if you're if you're following people across multiple instances your home server has to be pulling all of that in and

subscribing to that on activity pub i would imagine and so if you have hundreds or thousands of users that are doing that across multiple servers, the backend's got to be managing all of that. It's got to be quite the load, actually, I would think, to run a Mastodon server. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's simpler than I'm picturing because I'm basing my experience on Matrix, which this is a pretty big amount of data with Matrix.

But I'd love any insight people have from running a Mastodon instance. Not that I'm thinking about doing it. Cinemotive also boosted in with 2,048 sats. Coming in hot with the boost! Another plug for Mastodon. I never use the JB Matrix due to chat and having to be there live. I hang out one to two times a week,

and when I do, I just never know what's going on. That's fair. I hear a call in that same vein for a discourse or something. A place for offline chatting. Yeah. Yeah. We also got 1,000 sats from OP1984, just a plus one for Mastodon. Just moved to podcastindex.social and already follow Chris there.

Hey, Chris, you have followers already. That's nice. How about that? Oh gosh. Where he talks about that podcasting 2.0 nonsense. And another 128 sats from Paul asked a luck who says, can JB set up a social network that keeps me social? So far you're,

so far you're batting a thousand with your recommendations. I'm still on matrix. Admittedly only in JB general chat. Great show as always. Thank you. He also tosses a few sats for, well, Chris, how am I supposed to read this? I don't know. Jif? Yeah, but isn't that supposed to be a vote for how to say it, but it just is written. It's supposed to be a vote for how to say it, but it just is written. I don't know how anybody's supposed to know, because when you're reading it, it's hard to tell. This is part of the problem with the whole GFGIF thing.

Maybe this is a meta vote for a better name. I mean, I don't know how anybody's going to beat Wise Papa John. He put 40,000 sats behind a hard G. So, until somebody surpasses that, then officially on the show it has a hard G, and that's how it is. Boost aside, I guess. Awesome Matt wrote in with 69.69 sats as a boost. I haven't really used Mastodon, but I've used

Pleroma. Have you guys used Pleroma? I haven't even heard of it, actually. Heard of it? A lightweight Fediverse server. Never used it. I've actually kind of heard disparaging things about it, but whenever a technology gets cast in one way or another, I always think, well, is it the technology or is it the people or is it just marketing? But it looks like a leaner, lighter Mastodon, essentially.

It lets you participate in the Fediverse, but just is a little cleaner, maybe simpler to implement on the back end as well, maybe a little more suited for a smaller group. Tire boosts in with 2023 Sats, a little future boost. I predict that JB will start its own Mastodon server in 2023. I'm calling it. I know how Chris thinks.

The seed has been planted. Yeah, it's our first 2023 boost. Ah, I like it. Nice. All right. Future prediction there. So Amastadon instance in 2023. Viridian boosts in with another 1701 Satoshi's.

Life forms. You tiny little life forms. I assume it's in reference to Viridian 3 I mean, it must be, right? Your discussion about Signal was poignant as I've been eyeing alternatives The lack of support for CarPlay, backups, and HTTP proxies, along with the devs' attitude, make it

abrasive. WhatsApp solves all of these issues, but... meta. I hadn't considered switching the family to Matrix. Intriguing, but as far as I know, no clients support CarPlay. I'm also concerned about not being able to move accounts between home servers.

Any suggestions? Otherwise, I'll just keep waiting for the One chat app. For the One. I've been giving more thought to the Matrix One. I've been really kind of considering if I were to move the whole family to another chat platform, I don't. My first thought actually was maybe I'll just stand up an XMPP server. Sure. And that feels like a great idea until you think, yeah, but all the clients are not really as featureful now.

And then that's a real challenge because I think your family now expects stickers and emoji reactions and all that stuff. And while Matrix doesn't have all of the things that those apps do, it's adding more, it has more stuff that people expect in a feature set. So I think that's another plus one for moving this family to a private matrix instance. I think the question just becomes, um, which app,

you know, which, which front end. And that might take a little experimentation. Dreams void boosts in the row of Duck. I'm a Duck, D-U-K Duck, loaded with talent. Something profound. I've finally caught up with luck now.

On to Office Hours, Episode 9, self-hosted, Episode 81, and LAN, Episode 259. That's nice. Nice. I wondered, were you on a road trip? Did you go through a tear? What happened? It's nice. Welcome. Couldn't sleep at night. Nice to have you here.

Whatever the reason. Keep it up. Micmac boosts in with 3,141 sats. Well, as the influencer that inspired me to buy my own raspberry pie, I'm saddened to hear you've moved on. I'm also saddened that I now have a new toy that I desire. Yeah, we're all feeling that.

Don't worry. Feel free to ship me all your unused pies. I'll throw them in my micro K8s cluster. You know, I wonder, I'm not really, I guess I actually do have a couple that are not currently in use but i don't imagine i'll stop using the raspberry pies i just don't know if i'm going to buy any more pi 4s although i did hear some rumors that there's some new pi hardware we're going to get teased with you know for me if they if they uh if they didn't have a huge increase in cpu

performance on the pi if they just had a a moderate CPU increase and a moderate memory increase, but had a big increase on storage in terms of IO, not size, I think that would put the Pi in contender category again. I mean, it's nice being on x86 again. There is that whole element as well. But we'll see.

We'll see. Maybe we'll get a tease. SOHAM boosted in live last week with a row of ducks thank you kindly and it was a live boost so that's pretty neat but what is even more rad about it is he used boost cli you delightful nerd that's pretty awesome and he says nix is the greatest package manager ever created that may be true we uh we'll have to have someone confirm that we'll put somebody on that truly there's research going on And then our last boost this week came in from JPC,

who sent us a row of Grandpa Ducks, 22,222 sats. This old duck still got it. He says he loves the show, and he's also using Boost CLI. Well done, JPC. Thank you, everyone, for the support. We really appreciate it. We still love the sats. Sats are sats to us.

So grab a handful cheap using something like Strike or the Cash app. If you're outside the US, Blue Wallet. I really like RoboSats too if you want to get really geeky. But then you gotta have Tor Browser. I'm imagining if we had like a fancy like downtown SFJB office or whatever, we could have like a little

boost CLI terminal set up and ready to go. It's got like retro term on there, right? Like're just oh man try your first boost retro term or just a really old crt yeah you could go you know gold clacky ibm ps2 keyboard as well someday with enough boost we'll get there that would be pretty neat that would be yes thank you everybody if you'd like to send a boost into the show newpodpodcastapps.com. That's where you go to upgrade to a podcasting 2.0 app. We got more in the works there, too, as far as podcasting 2.0 features. So go check out Office Hours

16, where we talk about some of that stuff we'll be working on. Also, just a random shout out, because we got some boosts in that we don't make it on the show, but we still just wanted to pick a handful to say thank you. And thank you, everybody else, if we didn't call out your name or read your message. We still got it, and we really appreciate your support um i wanted to do this one because let's see if i got this right let me know if i got your name right 1000 sats from

fear has balls figure has a balls something like that is this deep fake chris we got 100 sats from the bushosh asking about our thoughts on Signal adding stories, which is actually Office Hours as well. So go check out Office Hours 16 for that, The Boosh. And then Oppie1984 says that it's GIF. GIF is peanut butter. Well, you're going to have to send in more than 100 sats, buddy. And then NachoLin Linux sent a row of sticks. He says, I cranked through my Fountain FM subscriptions to earn some sats so I could boost in.

Oh, thank you. That's very awesome. Thank you, everybody. And we appreciate the members out there, too, who support the show. They invest in our ongoing production. Unpluggedcore.com if you want to become a member of this show. Or Jupiter.party if you want all the shows. And as a thank you, we give it to you ad-free. and we also package up the live stream and we make it available to you

we put lots of extra content in there sometimes too much jeff uh who went out on location to you know look at the fulsome geocache specifically left the live show the mumble room today so that way he could listen to the live stream while he's road tripping that's a thing uh at the meetups some of the listeners that drove quite a ways to make it to the meetups were like yeah i just listened to the live version on the way up here it kills like you know a few hours sometimes it is that long you know there's only so much content in a week and the more the better yeah it's pretty wild links to what we talked about today and all that kind of stuff we're over at linux unpluggedugged.com slash 484. Is that right?

484. You heard our mumble room? We got a mumble room. It's over there if you'd like to join it. It's a great way to listen in real time or participate in the show if something strikes your fancy. We have details for that at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Find the mumble stuff. It's a slash mumble.

Same with the matrix details. And, yeah, shout out to our buddy Carl George who got the latest and greatest mumble packaged up the matrix details yeah shout out to our buddy carl george who got the latest and greatest mumble packaged up in fedora 37 so you know pipewire mumble it's a great setup to join the show all i'm saying yep if you're gonna upgrade might as well upgrade in style and go mumble with pipewire you know what else speaking of adding pipewire support as we record today a new version of mpv is out that has a pipe wire back in too loving that mpv glad we gave it a mention today because we just don't talk about it enough uh and then last but

not least if you're not doing anything on your sunday and you want to hang out with your linux buddies head over to jupiter.tube around noon pacific 3 p.m eastern and uh you know watch the show we stream it live over there and you can see how handsome Brent is, see how we make the sausage, hear all our mistakes. Noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, Jupiter.2. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station.

All right, gentlemen. Did we do it? Is that it? I don't know if any of us are... Ah. I don't know if any of us are sticking with Fedora 37 after this. I don't think I am. I might give Fedora 36 a go.

Yeah, I got to go fix Fedora 36. Right? I'm going to see how long it sticks. I'm not going to get rid of it right away. We'll see, though. We'll see. I am really enjoying this GNOME. It is nice.

They are doing great. Don't miss Linux Action News. There's more at linuxactionnews.com. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And 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 Minimac, you had a question though during the deepfake talk earlier. I want to learn something today.

So the idea is, how does it work? I try to imagine how it works. Like you have a lot of episodes and then first you have to define the voice patterns. So this is Chris, this is Brent, this is Wes. Once the AI has recognized these voice patterns, you can probably pause other love episodes and just let them separate the voice streams. I would think it's more like he has to cut me out and just only supply it with my cuts. So maybe we will have an answer afterwards.

Then I would probably, you will have to pass a voice to text pattern to have a text database with the words. Like under the button, you have a database with like 50 is and if the home and I don't know what then probably I if that is possible I would try to level that thing so that the is is always like the same kind and once you have like if you have 50 times the same words so that that AI engine could level it so it would define Chris normally uses the bird home like this and then once you have it leveled then you can start to

yeah make some sentences well I used a tool it's actually developed originally by Mozilla it's called Koki coqi and the way it works actually is you you feed it um lots of samples um generally between one second and up to 10 seconds that really depends on your training hardware i have a rtx titan that i use for training. And so at 24 gigs, you kind of top out at about 10 seconds with, what did I use? A batch size of, I believe I used 48 samples per batch.

And what you do is you get as many samples as you can. And what I did was a very painstaking process. I went through a whole bunch of episodes, including LUP, C Coder and SSH, and I manually went and found clips of Chris speaking. I got about 48 minutes worth, broke it up into various clips. Then I ran a speech totext parser over all of it. Then I re-listened to everything just to ensure that the transcoded text is correct. And then that gets fed into the AI trainer. And then as it goes along, it spits out the model after various steps.

And then you use that model to, then you just feed it a line of text to work out. The problem is I just did not have the time or patience to get any more audio. Already a lot. 48 minutes is way too low. You need minimum two, three hours. Some of the larger data sets

that actually are used to build these exit speech models are in the range of 20 plus hours worth so if i had if well if i had the time and i went through all of that catalog of the shows of um chris talking i could probably build a very comprehensible model yeah i would know i would not wish that on anyone don't do that hands a bold model yeah i would know i would not wish that on anyone don't do that a jb intern so if you had some snippets uh of chris reading some text let uh like some pages of text it would be much easier right now you had to really cut the the the speech uh pieces of of Chris from the show and feed it manually. Yeah, exactly. I think really you just need a few topics that Chris can rant about on his soapbox and then you've got enough content right there.

It's a great point because you actually need a variety of phenoms, I think. Is that the right word? Basically, you know, like the individual parts of words, you need a large range of that for the AI to be able to learn how the individual speaker says that to then be able to reproduce it. Yeah, if you don't have enough variability in the base set, right? It's like in the clip I generated,

I didn't write one million sats. I wrote 900,000 sats because none of the clips I had pulled out had Chris saying the word million. So whenever I tried actually doing million in the generated speech, it just sounded kind of garbled. It didn't actually make sense. Very interesting. Thank you for that. And to actually just put a finer point on it, if you've seen the show Kenobi, the voice of Darth Vader was not actually voiced by James Earl Jones. That was actually the same thing.

It was an AI-generated model that they had built from James Earl Jones's voice. I've seen the news, but he has signed basically, I'm not sure what it's called, but basically a perpetual permission for Disney to now use his likeness, his voice for Darth Vader going forward. So going forward, any appearances of Darth Vader are going to be AI generated voices, not James Earl himself recording it. Yeah, I've read an article about that. You know, CB, it too, that, like, say we were serious about ever doing something like this. One thing that, if you were working with JB, like, we have stems of just my track, to a degree. We don't have, like, a lot of them, but we have probably weeks' worth of just my track in the episodes, too, which would probably make it easier, I would think, to sample from, because then you could just drop the silences and essentially just have. It would be incredibly easier if someone had just, you know,

handed me these, these, these pristine audio files with nothing else extend. Cause I had to cut past some of the other speakers and. Overspeaking. Yeah, exactly. Like there's someone using the soundboard. Yeah. Soundboard mixed in yeah organization feeds some example text that makes it easier right because if they're working on that it would be also cool if they uh hand out some example text that someone could read

and somehow you get really a good sample of the voice. Like a script that helps train it a little bit. That's true too. That's true too. There's, for example, even doing like some of the visual deepfakes, so deepfaking a person's face. If you're trying to get, you know, trying to do it of a celebrity, you know, for whatever reason,

you're trying to get uh you know trying to do it of a celebrity you know for whatever reason um it's harder to find all the um different angles and the different movements of the mouth and the expressions however if you're doing it yourself you want to deep fake yourself or you're doing it for a movie or whatever you basically stand somebody in front of a camera and you have them there's i don't know what they're called but there is these phrases that you can say that force the speaker to move their mouth in a in a particular pattern right so to capture that exactly and so that so in the same thing uh with with doing the audio um if you had a script you have a variety of words something that forces the voice, you know, do the expressions in the different ranges that you would normally say in regular conversation. Now, read it again as a prospector.

Yeah, get the prospector voice. Yeah, you got to get all the different iterations. And you got to make sure you capture all of the terms that we use a lot. ZFS, Linux, you know, that kind of stuff. It actually did pretty well with all that stuff. Did it? I was going to ask you, how does it handle those kinds of terms? Is it just because I say it and so it just learns it? Well, yes, because you say it, but also because when it does the learning,

it doesn't learn individual words. It learns the little, the parts of the words, right? So you say ZFS or Zebra, you still have that Z sound in there that it's going to learn and then piece it together. Yeah.