LINUX Unplugged - 485: Mystery Box

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

We dig into Shufflecake, a tool that lets Linux users hide data with plausible deniability, then let our live stream SSH into our server and see if they can discover our secret data. Plus, we follow up on Brent's never-ending desktop distro search and Chris' new Linux rig.

So I'm a little bit older than you guys. I'm kind of interested to know what your first big LAN experience was. LAN party style. Like, first video game. What was it? Oh, I think the original StarCraft for me. Oh, that's some good gaming. Right?

Some Warcraft 2 at the time. Age of Empires in the mix. Do you happen to remember what networking protocol you used for the LAN party? I think it was IPX for the most part. Yeah. That changed over the years, but that's what we started with. IPX worked great, man. It was great.

Yeah. Kind of my incentive to learn a little bit about what networking even was, you know? Like, how do we make this work? And you know the great thing about IPX, it had name resolution built into the protocol. You didn't have to run DNS separately. Which is nice because there's no way I would have been able to figure out how. No. What about you, Brent?

What was your first LAN party experience? The first I remember was probably playing the original Quake. Yeah, yeah, me too, yeah. And then, you know, the Quake 2s and the Quake 3s. Yeah. Man, some great memories there.

And just like back in the day when you just didn't have to care about anything else for hours and hours and hours on end. That was pretty awesome. Although you needed, you know, with me and my three brothers, we needed a minivan to move all our PCs to someone else's house. I was just thinking of lugging the CRTs. You had to be dedicated. That's why you didn't want to leave for hours. You're like, it took me a lot. I don't normally leave the house and I had to carry this whole thing here.

It was a big day when I first got my first LCD. Chris, I think you still have your first one. It's like a 4x3 teeny tiny little tiny terrible resolution thing, but man, that was an upgrade. Yeah. I think it's 1024x768, and it's VGA. It's old. It's a KDS, and they're not even around anymore.

And the thing's hooked up to our server out in the garage. It still works. I still use it from time to time. And literally, every time it turns on, I'm impressed. It's got to be 20-plus years old. At this point, it might never die. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, we're trying out ShuffleCake. So this is a tool for Linux that promises the ability to create hidden volumes, much like TrueCrypt and VeriCrypt are famous for. But what we're going to do is really, really put it to the test. We're going to share the details all about the project on the show, and then we're going to let our live stream SSH into the box. We're going to give them pseudo access, and we're going to see if they can find our hidden ShuffleCake volumes. Oh gosh, I hope not. Some embarrassing secrets in there.

And if they can, the winner will receive 20,000 sats if they manage to unlock all of the hidden volumes that we've set up on there. Plus, there's been just several threads, little thread bombs we've dropped on the show over the last few weeks. So we're going to follow up on those. We'll sit down. We'll do the work to update you on all of it. So stay tuned, because then after that,

we'll round it out with some boosts and picks picks, and a lot more. So before I go any further, let's say hello to our virtual look. Time for appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hey, Chris. Hello, Brandon. Hello, Wes. Hello. Hello, you beautiful bastards. We've got lots of you in there. Love seeing you in there. Of course, I'm in the

quiet listening as well. Also want to say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale is a mesh VPN that's protected by WireGuard. We love it. I use the snot out of it. It's so handy. And you can get it up and going in just minutes on any device. Try it out.

Tailscale.com. I think it's every other week that you're coming to me with like, did you know Tailscale could do this? I'm like, yeah. It's awesome. It has changed my home assistant game oh my goodness no more inbound ports on my firewalls tailscale.com tell them linux unplugged sent you so we have a lot of things to talk about today but we have kind of a special a special guest in studio well we'll uh we'll probably share the story in the baller booth but before we go any

further i just wanted to say good morning to listener John A., who's in the studio this morning. Hey, John. Good morning. Thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. Coming from Yakima Valley of Washington, you brought us some delicious beverages,

including a sparkling cider, which we are participating in right now. So thank you very much for that. You bet. And I think we'll talk to you in a little bit when we get to the Baller Boost segment. So it's a fun episode. We got in-stud got live guests we got a chat room we got a mumble room there's a lot going on and um i wanted to pick wes's brain about a topic called shuffle cake

i came across this a couple of weeks ago because i started seeing people talk about it online and i also have that a hole in my heart for TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt really offered something special, a usable interface to create volumes that were completely hidden on your system. So that way, the idea is any elite hacker or state actor, if they somehow, maybe it's a border agent, I don't know what your scenario is. You make up your own, but somebody gets your laptop and maybe you want to hide something in there like your Bitcoin wallet or your tax documents or whatever. Again, make up your own scenario. But you want to not only be able to hide it and encrypt it, but you want to be able to plausibly deny it even exists, right? That's like the next level of hiding data is not only is it encrypted and protected, but it's hard to detect that it even

exists. And ShuffleCake is a tool for doing just that. And it allows Linux users to create multiple hidden volumes on a storage device in a way that is very difficult, even under forensic inspection, to prove the existence of such a volume. So I came up with a great idea to create a server that we could play around with ShuffleCake on. And then I got super busy. And Brent got super busy with family stuff stuff we both had a lot to do and west just kind of took it upon himself to really take shuffle cake and uh experiment with it a fun new kernel module oh boy should we start there it is new it requires a kernel module and they've mostly tested it with, what, 5.15, I think? I think 5.13, but 5.15 is what

we're running, if I recall, right? Maybe that's why it's crashing sometimes. It isn't 100% stable yet. Yeah, what do they say here? A quote. We believe that ShuffleCake fills a gap in the availability of robust, plausible, deniability solutions for Linux. Yeah, it seems like it does. But,

their emphasis, the current release is still a non-production ready prototype. So we advise against using it for really sensitive operations. And yeah, we're just playing with it here. We're getting the feel for how these tools work. If you're really trying to hide stuff for people that don't like you, don't use this. Yeah. Yeah. This is more like we're checking in on this tool to see if this is going to become a solution for us down the road. And clearly some of the things it's going to have to do, it's going to have to support newer kernels. And it's going to need to be able to get simply installed quickly. So some background on that kernel business. This came out of a master's thesis. So it's

some research that some folks at Kodelsky Security had been thinking about. You know, they'd seen the gaps in this, especially after, you know, TrueKip was deprecated. The gaps in this sort of tooling, especially Linux-first sort of tooling. And so there's just sort of, you know, an alignment where there's people willing to sponsor that, companies sponsoring that, academics interested, and the right, you know, bright students who wanted to push along that path and sort of see if they could progress the state of the art. And that all came together. But when you're picking a project like this, you know, you know, you're trying to develop the algorithm and the protocols and, you know, how all the tools work. Yeah. Not trying to keep up with the latest current release. So I

suspect that's because that was the version that they started with when they started working on the project. Yeah, that makes sense. Right. And then the idea would be maybe the community could help them expanding it from there. Like they're doing the the project. Yeah, that makes sense, right? And then the idea would be maybe the community could help them expanding it from there. They're doing the basic research. They're getting the first principle stuff done. Right. Step one is, hey, it works at all. Step two is let's make it work more happily. So we want to give our live stream a head start here.

What we want to do is we want to give you the host that you can SSH into, a user and a password that has pseudo privileges. We're asking that people don't wreck the box, but we've set up a shuffle cake box on Linode with some hidden data. And the challenge is to be the first to find a secret value that we have hidden in there and then post that secret value in the matrix chat room. And what we're going to do is we're going to give you a hint that should unlock the first volume. Once you unlock that volume, you'll get a second hint. That second hint will allow you to

unlock a second hidden volume that has the secret value. That's the value you post in the Matrix chat room. We want to give it out now because as we explain ShuffleCake, we just want people to have time to try to do this because the idea is it's supposed to be hard. So get your terminals ready and SSH into Star Trek dot sexy. The username, all lowercase, Kirk, K-I-R-K, and the password, all one word, lowercase, Star Trek. You'll probably pretty quickly find a suspicious looking volume. And the password to unlock that first suspicious looking volume is my dog's name. So if you know my dog's name, you can unlock that first volume. That will give you a hint for the second volume, which is the value you need to post in the matrix chat room to win. And so log in to

StarTrek.sexy, user Kirk, password Star Trek, and begin looking around. Use my dog's name to unlock that first volume, which will probably come across fairly quickly. And it's the second volume that's actually the tricky one to find and has the goodies you need to share. Now, to be clear, we've got some of the tooling installed for that user already, but you're also, you know, you don't have to take that path. Do whatever you want. Investigate the file. See if you can find our secrets another way if you've got the means. So you could, so this Shufflecake is two parts. It's some user land tools and it's a kernel module to make this work.

And you could load it all up, create your volumes, stash your data, and then completely delete the user land tools, right? So if somebody was coming across your box and they didn't even have ShuffleCake to begin with, that makes it even harder, right? So explain a little bit of what's going on here and how you can so secretly hide files, because this sounds really cool. Yeah, okay, so the idea here

is plausible deniability. So you might not use this, and ShuffleCake as it stands now doesn't really address just straight up hiding it. You know, you're going to need to have a, you clearly have some kind of storage device. I think a lot of the threats, and if you check out the master's thesis, they talk about like the state of the art at the time and review some of the existing tooling like TrueCrypt and kind of talk about the different threat models that you might want to use ShuffleCake as a tool to help you with. That's handy. Yeah. So if you're going to actually adopt this, it's worth checking out the whole thesis, which we'll have linked in the notes. And probably waiting for some development time. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. But it talks about, you know, you're probably someone, maybe you're a

journalist or an activist or, you know, whatever. Maybe you're Captain Picard and you suspect that the top leadership of the Federation's been taken over by somebody and you gotta, you know, hide some stuff to work with your fellow captains. They got these weird things sticking out the back of their necks. What's the deal with that? Yeah. Your adversaries probably

assume that you have some secrets, right? Like, whether it's your work documents or whatever, they expect you to have an encrypted drive or a secure drive of some kind. Sure. Or if you stole Chris's laptop, you'd probably expect there to be some Bitcoin on there. Right. And you'd probably want to secure that. Yeah. So really the idea here is that you can have multiple hidden volumes and that you can have multiple passwords to get access to those multiple volumes. So that let's say, you know,

you found out that I, you you know i know you've got some bitcoin i have you under physical constraint and i want to get access to that bitcoin you can ham it up a bit you know pretend that you don't whatever but eventually i'm torturing you or i'm threatening i'm threatening your dog i'm threatening dylan or threatening the mixer who knows you know this got really dark dude something real mean to you. Okay. And under duress, you can then be like, okay,

yes, I do. You know? Yeah, I do. I am Satoshi. I do have, I do have that original wallet key.

Here's the password. Yeah. And that unlocks a volume for them. Right. And so it all looks like you're unlocking, you know, unlocking a secret volume. You are,

you couldn't, it'd be hard to find that if you didn't have the key. Pops up on your system and then they can investigate that and take a look at it. And ideally what you'd want is to have some plausibly secret data, you know, whatever, something that's not going to get you killed

but maybe is, you know, slightly clandestine or it looks like something you might want to do. So if they came across this that you've revealed, it looks like the legitimate stash you're looking for.

So like if you're trying to hide your Bitcoin, throw some sats in there. Yeah, you got a smaller Bitcoin wallet. Oh, okay, now he's just poor. Okay. But I actually have another ShuffleCake volume that's even more hidden. Exactly. And you can keep doing that. I think right now

it supports up to 15 or so. And they're very cautious in the paper to not recommend any certain amount. They just recommend that you have more than a couple. Mostly because this is all public and open source. So if they pick a recommendation, that's what adversaries will begin to expect, et cetera. Yeah.

But yeah, the idea is you can have multiple levels and that the adversary can't prove without knowing all of the keys how many there are. So you could have documents. You could have finances. You could have multiple different volumes that you are using to store this stuff. You could even do some organization and none of this is visible. How is that achieved? How does it hide it on the file system so that none of it is visible?

Yeah, okay. So you have to first create your volumes. And so you give it a device that you're going to do. And ShuffleCake writes a whole bunch of random data to that, as you might expect. And then its basic technique is it allocates space for each of the volumes. And you give it, when you make your volumes, you run this createVol command and you have to tell it how many you're going to do. And you do that by giving it a certain number of passwords, which is like the unique key, right,

for each to unlock each of the volumes. So maybe I'm going to do five. I got to put it, I got to tell it create some volumes. Here's the device I want you to use for that. And here are the passwords for all of the volumes I want to create. So it's just like a long list of stuff. Yep. And then it's going to wipe that drive and then start setting things up. And it allocates space for each volume as encrypted slices at random positions on the underlying device. Wow. So it is taking over the whole device. Yeah, it wipes the whole device. Now, that could be just a partition or something, right?

But whatever device at the logical level from the kernel that it sees, it wipes that first. You can ask it not to if you want, but by default, it'll wipe it. You can pre-wipe it if you've got your own wiping constraints or, you know, whatever.

Okay. Slices are allocated dynamically. So as soon as the kernel module decides that you need more space, it's going to go make some more slices for you. But that's where the whole shuffle cake sort of thing is, right? It's not just volumes laid out sequentially, each of the different volumes. And again, you can't know ahead of time how many there are, are all interspersed on the same storage device. I see. Okay. I did a little test. I set up a volume. Well,

I set up a couple volumes, copied the file. And I did this all with just I set up a volume. Well, I set up a couple volumes. Copied the file. And I did this all with just like a loopback file, you know. You could do it with a USB drive or an external storage or an internal hard disk or, you know, anything that shows up as a device to the kernel. I copied this file, mounted all the stuff again, modified just one character in a text file on one of the volumes, and then took a look and used some tools to do like a binary diff on the two files okay and yeah like like you'd expect again this is not like i'm no i'm no cryptographer but just trying to see like from a casual observer like what does this look like and a whole bunch of that file has changed right like it's not it's pretty hard they talk about being so you really couldn't pull much out of that right yeah um they talk about different methods in the paper. You have

security versus single snapshots where an adversary just gets a single snapshot of your data and how that's different than if your adversary can see changing data, so that'd be multiple snapshots, right, where they can sort of see like, oh, here's the encrypted drive now, I look at the encrypted drive later. Shufflekick doesn't quite defend

against multiple snapshots yet, but they have some ideas in the paper about how that could happen, which is why I was curious about, how does it look if you can see the file changing? So the, again, I got to just underline, it is a little unstable. Some folks are having issues. So I just decided to reboot the box.

So I just kicked everybody out. Yeah, do let us know. We have had the kernel panic a couple times with this module. But that just adds to the security, Wes. It sure does, yeah. My box is not highly available. Right.

And every time it reboots, they got to log back in so they need your credentials. So if you like layered this stuff and you did some, you know, volume encryption

on top of that, you know, maybe a BIOS password. I was thinking it'd be kind of fun. This isn't built into ShuffleCake, but because it's just

like, it's super easy to build. So you don't need a bunch of dependencies. It's, you know, you need your headers for your kernel if you're going to build the module yes uh but the userland stuff i think it's just a simple little c program calling into it so you just you know as long as you haven't got make installed um you can go ahead and use it which means in the sort of

classic unix style uh and it's just using device mapper um in the in the kernel side you can layer it on stuff yeah so i was thinking you could maybe, if you had like a USB drive, you know, you just dump like an ISO on there or something that doesn't take up the whole of your USB drive, and then use the kernel's ability. Like if you use LO setup, loopback setup, you know, for making a loop device, you can give it an offset and say like, hey, of the underlying storage, don't start this device

until you get to this byte offset. Sure, sure. So you could just take some of the underlying storage, don't start this device until you get to this byte offset. Sure, sure. So you could just take some of the unused space at like the end of the drive. Yeah. And stick some of your ShuffleCake there. Right. If you wanted that, again, ShuffleCake's targeting plausible deniability where you know that you have an encrypted thing. But if you want to add just a fun layer of obscurity, the kernel's got some, you know, got some stuff you could use.

And if you, so, you know, perfect example perfect example right would be a ventoy kind of thing and then you have just a little bit extra free space on there that you dedicate to shuffle cake right and you started got lots of distracting stuff on there yeah i mean you could even use it legitimately for ventoy yeah as long as you don't change the partition sizes or whatever right yeah so and this just also happens to have your super secret volume on there operationally there's some things to be aware of because you can't prove ahead of time how many different volumes are on there. It can't know how much space is allocated to that. And so the way it works operationally is you can, as you go to more secret keys. So like if I want to unlock the first volume, I put in one password.

That's get me that. If I want to unlock, say, like the third volume down, I just put in one password, which is the password for that. But it unlocks all of the earlier volumes. So that the encrypted header of each of the previous volume contains, or of the next volume, contains the password for the previous volume. And that's because the only really robust way to, like if you're going to be making a bunch of changes or adding new files or stuff, you always want to mount all of the volumes because that's the only way it can properly account

for all of the space that's used. That makes sense. Otherwise you can risk corrupting it. So if you are going to use this and you're worried that adversaries might start messing with it, as with everything, have backups of your actual trusted secret stuff. Yeah. Yeah, this really seems like it has potential, though. I think it needs a community.

It needs packaged. It needs to be just a, you know, app get shuffle cake away. Yeah, really right now, you know, it started as like some research. And then some folks at Kudelski Security took the next step to sort of package that up, get a working prototype out there. But that's it, right? That's where we're at. Once people start packaging it, making it easy to use, getting it updated for modern kernels, and perhaps building

some tooling around it. It could. I've been sad since TrueCrypt faded, and VeriCrypt doesn't seem to really have the faith of the community. Something like this comes along, it's free software, it's built specifically for us Linux users, there's a lot to like here. It doesn't have a GUI tool yet.

Another note, one thing about the TrueCrypt Paracrypt model is you had to have a specific type of partition setup to make the hidden volume. That's not true of ShuffleCake. ShuffleCake's also much faster. At least in their testing, the IOS slowdown is basically

half the speed compared to a normal Lux encrypted disk. But you get all this plausible liability stuff built in. And it only wastes about 1% of the available disk space. That's all right. Totally worth it. And also, it doesn't feel like this negates the use of Lux, right? The two could easily be used together.

In fact, Lux could even be the forward-facing encryption you have to protect yourself. And Shufflecake's actually how you hide stuff. Yeah, totally. If you want to be really sneaky. Layers and layers. All right, so the host is back up. StarTrek.sexy is running, and the race is on. So let us know in the Matrix room if anybody manages to find our secrets.

Linode.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to get $100 in 60-day credit, and it's a great way to just support the show while you're trying out something really solid. You guys know that Linode's been around for a little while now, and there's a reason. Our audience loves Linode, and we do as well. I think you guys know that we use Linode for everything we've built in the last few years, but even today, the show today, we're hosting a live login session on the node with potentially hundreds of people i mean you never really know right like recently we did the deep fusion stuff and had a ton of people generating images in real time in the past we've had people log in and find intentional vulnerabilities

that we've left in docker because you can also use Linode as a learning place, as a playground. And that's a great way to spend that $100 credit. You can then go from playing around to deploying in production. And they have really fast rigs. That's one of the things that we rely on when we just open it up to the live stream. We need to have a name like Live Bash or something, some kind of name for it. Because, you know, it's like you're opening up the floodgates. It's fast. It's reliable. It always holds up for us. I think you're going to love it for your next project. And Linode's been rolling out upgrades for a while.

Recently, they upgraded our machines to MVME storage. Ooh! And Linode's turning up past 11. They have 11 data centers now, but they're going to have a dozen new Linode data centers across North America, APAC, LATAM. That's what they call it. And Europe, of course. Don't worry, Europe. Yes, you too. It's all coming by the end of 2023. So they're just adding more capacity, more options. And if you're a performance

hound, I think you're going to love it. But if you're also a price hound, is that the right term? If you're value conscious, is that how I should say it? You'll love Linode too. 30 to 50% cheaper than the hyperscalers out there. Linode's been in it for the long haul. It's not a fly-by-night that's doing a race to the bottom and they're not trying to nickel and dime you with upsells and crazy terms and lock-in.

It's just a really great mix of support, performance, price, and for us Linux users, some real options that we'll appreciate. So go try it out. See why they're the best and support the show. Linode.com slash unplug See why they're the best and support the show. Linode.com slash unplugged.

One more time, go support the show. Linode.com slash unplugged. Well, we do have a spot of housekeeping. We didn't clean up around here last week. So we wanted to do something just to make it like a little bit livable. And my buddy Alex from Self Hosted is going to be at AWS reInvent in Vegas. Oh.

The week after Thanksgiving, so that's next week. And he's, you know, looking to say hi. So go say hi to Alex if you're going to be at AWS reInvent. You could probably track him down in the Matrix room. We have a bit.ly slash westcoastcrew room that you could join. Just ping him in there and let him know if you're going to be at AWS reInvent.

I assume you'll just find him at the poker table. You know, Alex, he's going to go out and take some pictures. That's what he's going to do. Yeah. You'd be at the poker table. Alex is out taking pictures. And then you two just, you know, trade off. I could see that.

I could definitely see that. So definitely go say hi to Alex. That's really fun. I didn't really even realize AWS reInvent was coming up. And I'm thinking Vegas in late November could actually be quite pleasant. So I support this. Check it out. And again, bit.ly slash West Coast Crew for the dedicated matrix chat room for folks on the west coast that are trying to meet up now let's do some baller boost as we like to do in this here segment and

very appropriately our baller boost comes in from our very own john a with ready for this boys are you ready for this one 2 299,998 sets. Wow! John writes, John writes, this is a shameless bribe to put you all on a pleasant disposition towards me when I visit in person this week.

Well, you didn't need that. You brought us delicious beverages. Well, you know, John, when you showed up, I didn't expect the beverages because of the boost. Yeah, I wanted the digital version of, you know, walking into the club, slinging the Benjamins, but I didn't actually have any $100 bills. Satoshi's was all I could afford. It's easier to acquire, too.

You don't have to go to the bank. You know, the good news is they're on sale right now, too. So $299 sets is a better deal than it's going to be in a couple of years. Thank you, sir. That is a fantastic boost. So, John, is this the only show you you boost do you boost other podcasts at this point uh so i've been boosting pretty much all of the jb shows at least at least with uh with the streaming you know sats and uh pretty much any of them since i've been listening to all in cast

amatic any of them that uh accept them, I'm streaming that way. That's fantastic. I love it. It is right now the perfect time to really get people on board. And our Baller Boosters, not only do they kind of, you know, come in with some fantastic support, but like I've mentioned before, they help in the rankings on the podcast charts too. the help in the rankings on the podcast charts too and that's really something too because you know if you're a cast-o-matic or a fountain or a podverse user and you see somebody's getting 299 000 sats i think oh they must be doing something right right and people find the shows because of that so that's fantastic night 62 boosted it with 20 000 sats keep the change

you filthy animal all right here we go boys so we gotta we gotta do some legislation here i don't know we gotta call a like for a quorum or something wes will you read this one so i don't accidentally mispronounce it the words the file format spelled uh g-i-f oh god, I thought you would nail this. It's pronounced with a soft G like Jif. You got it. Good job. Alright, so, okay. Jif. Not Gif. Jif.

This is the position that Knights62 is laying out. Knights has thrown 20,000 stats behind this. Right. Jif. That's because choosy programmers choose Jif. Wait a minute. Okay, so Jif is the peanut butter? I guess that's, according to Knights, who's done the research here,

in the specifications, the team wrote that, quote, choosy programmers choose Jif. Oh, so he's coming at us with like the original spec. And then follows up with, lots of people spell their kids' names in a weird way, but we learned to pronounce us with like the original spec. And then follows up with lots of people spell their kids names in a weird way, but we learned to pronounce it the way their parents intended. Can we just put this argument to rest? All right.

Well, we could, but then CB comes in with 33,333 sats. And CB's throwing 33,000 sats behind a hard G. So that would be GIF. No, GIF. So it's, no, oh, right, that's the opposite of, oh my God. So we have two disagreements. Yeah, CB's coming with what I think is maybe the more popular one, just sort of like in common culture, or at least on the internet.

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. You know how hard this is for a guy like me? This is rough. Yeah, right. Pronunciation was never your strong suit. No, no. I was never good at this.

And now... Can I interject something? Yes, John. So I am old, but I will tell you the original developer of it pronounced it Jif. There's a video you can find out there. And yeah, in the original spec, in the original developer, they absolutely pronounced it Jif. Gif didn't come out until way later. People started calling it that.

Now, it does seem to be more popular, but Jif was the original. That's fascinating. I think that's where it's an interesting societal question. It's sort of like, there's lots of times, and I mean, in Linux Action News, every other week we're trying to find some, like, did the project say how they want this pronounced? But Jif's GIFs, they're such a, they've become such a part of internet culture. It's like, is the original team still relevant? Maybe they are.

I'm not saying they're not, but like it seems like a worthwhile question of at some point, you know, words change meanings. Are you throwing? Pronunciation change. Wow. Are you throwing that at us? You're like, maybe the original team,

like that's like, does the constitution still matter? But it's not like, that's like, does the constitution still matters when you just drop it? It's getting constantly updated. And it's some like, you know, it's, it sort of was thrown out there and it's evolved. Okay.

All right. Okay. All right. Okay. But then, okay. So that CB came in with, with a 33,000 sats,

but then why is Papa John comes in with 40,000 sats? Okay. all right. Hard G is Jif. No, Gif. Gif, right. All right, so is this two now? Okay, so we've been thinking about this. And, you know, there's two ways to approach this.

It could be total sats behind a way to pronounce this as the winner, or it could be highest bidder. And the issue with the total sats behind the winner is quite simply that requires that we do the accounting and keep track of this. And which I'm not totally opposed to, but we probably should have started that two weeks ago and we did not. So I think we have to go with highest bidder. I think we have to go with highest bidder wins in this one, which means it's always kind of available for a bid, but I think it's going to be settled. Wise Papa John also said Matrix can be a little intimidating for new users. And I feel like something more akin to mainstream social media like Mastodon might make audience

interaction more approachable for newbies. It could also be another way to discover old show topics, thinking maybe a post for each new episode with comments and whatnot. It does seem like it addresses a little bit of a different, obviously you can have more real-time sort of, you know, toots and tweets and that, but Matrix is primarily real-time. It doesn't have to be, but that's how our community operates, right? Which can be, like, if you don't, if you just want to casually browse and check out what people have been chatting about, it's not always the best medium.

And I think we'd all agree the Matrix experience isn't still, like, super streamlined. There's still some rough edges. That's kind of why we like it, but it's also, it is a problem, right, Brent? Yes. One thing that comes to mind initially is when Matrix was first getting popular, there were all these bridges. You remember how many issues happened with the bridges between the various services, which was trying to make it so that users who weren't totally committed could still participate in the conversation? And part of my question is, are we seeing that with Mastodon? Is there a Twitter bridge to Mastodon or something like that?

Anybody have any feedback on that one? I know people cross post. You know, there's like some cross posts. There's various ways to do that. That might kind of solve it while you're transitioning, I suppose. I have thoughts. You know, I noticed Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux Project just announced that he's leaving Twitter for the Fediverse. I wonder, guys, is that not the way we should talk about this?

Is instead of saying I'm leaving Twitter for Mastodon, maybe it's more like I'm just joining the Fediverse, which is a lot of different things, really anything activity pub based. Right. Yeah, it does seem like that's I mean, that's part of the value proposition, right? Is that you're not constrained to this one implementation. We've got a we've already got a nice protocol, which is what so many of us were like, why have these walled gardens when we can have interoperability?

Yeah. All right. So, we'll have more to say about Mastodon, but moving on, we have one last Baller Boost. This was a banger Baller Booster,

so thank you everybody for the support. Gene Bean came in with 60,000 sats. Hey, rich lobster! GIF is like GIF, not a hard G, as that would be spelled in particular to a peanut butter. So he's throwing 60,000 sats behind GIF.

Wait, no, I think gift, right? So GIF. GIF. All right, so which one's hard? GIF is like gift. Okay, GIF. I think maybe we've interpreted what hard and soft is the opposite of what Gene Bean did. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

But the GIF part makes it clear. Okay. You're right. So thank you, Gene Bean, for making that clarification. So he's thinking GIF. Right now, I think that means GIF's at the top. That's hard to say. But I think that means if we go by the biggest... Don't look GIF of look a gif of a gift horse in the mouth right of course yeah the 60 000 stats was a gift horse and now it's

definitely in my mouth but i think we we have to go by the biggest the highest bidder because i just cannot keep track of this at this point i'll fix this in the future lesson learned but right now and i'm not sure i love this, I have to say Gene Bean wins and we're going to say it like the peanut butter. At least for the week. Wait, I think, but no, but Gene Bean's endorsing

GIF. Okay, alright. So you don't have to say GIF. Okay, so I'm going to say GIF? Is that what I'm saying or am I saying GIF? You're saying GIF. Okay, I'm going to say what i'm saying or am i saying you're saying gif okay i'm gonna say if you're going if gene bean wins you're saying i just need somebody to show up and tell me what to say so i'm saying gif yeah all right it's gonna stay that way unless somebody can beat 60 000 sats i'm sticking with gif i'm gonna write it down on a sticky note i'm saying

gif next up we decide how to pronounce that popular GTK desktop. Oh, man. You know what? Can I just say, I'm willing to throw 20,000 sats behind gnome. Oh, is that right? Yeah, I am. I will. I will put 20,000 sats behind gnome.

I guess we'll find out next week. I try to say gnome. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. Set a reminder in three hours to boost into the show about. What is it? How to pronounce gano. Oh, yeah. All right.

I can't believe I forgot about that. You probably don't remember how to pronounce the animated image. No, I do now. I'm going with with gift i can remember gift because it's holidays so if i just gotta do i think that's the trick you gotta do association all right set a reminder for tomorrow at 9 a.m to send a boost into unplugged about gnomes there we go that's how i'm gonna remember you see oh that's how i'll do it all right thank you very much everybody the ballers out there we go that's how i'm gonna remember you see oh that's how i'll do it all right thank you very much everybody the ballers out there we really appreciate you um not everybody is able to join us in studio but there is an open invitation to come out here and join us in studio from time to time we love that and we also appreciate the support if you'd like to boost into the show

go grab a new podcast app at new podcast apps.com. Hold on. Late breaking news. John A. Boos in while sitting in studio 28 seconds ago. It is J I F. All right. Peanut butter.

It is peanut butter time, everybody. All right. There we go. 61,000 sats behind peanut butter time. We are going with Jif. Thank you, John. Ooh, I see eight little login sessions for our Kirk user right now. So folks are hard at work.

Good, good, good. Amazing. I can't believe that changed during the show. Before we leave the Baller Boost segment, you guys have caught the attention of some other podcasters out there, including Guy Swan of the Bitcoin Audible podcast, which seems like a really high quality production from what I heard. And he's not so happy with some Linux podcast beating him out. Oh, and one last thing to point out, actually, is that Bitcoin Audible is actually number seven

in the fountain.fm hierarchy for like the number of boosts and listens. But the Linux Unplugged guys are literally like neck and neck. They are like right behind me. And I feel like it would be wrong for, it needs to be a Bitcoin podcast. I want to get Bitcoin Audible to number one. So if you use Fountain, if you have the Fountain app, go over there and boost it or clip it or something, share it out. Because I think a good Bitcoin podcast needs to be number one up there. So jump over there and give me a bump. I'm just saying, what if Guy looked at the numbers and saw a big surprise and Linux Unplugged was crushing it?

This is a great opportunity because I think we could get some exposure on another podcast too. So this is your chance, audience. Be a baller and let's show Guy what the Linux Unplugged audience can do. All right. So we have several things we've been talking about on the show over the last few weeks that we want to follow up on. And we thought we'll buy the audience some time while they're trying to hack our box by covering some of these. And we wanted to start with our dear, poor friend, Mr. Brantley, who has really not been able to move in since we gave him the dev one. He's been struggling with his setup. He's had some never ending desktop issues. And I kind of thought, Brent, I wanted to open the floor to you, cover several topics. I know you've been looking at different things and trying to find your Linux home.

So tell us, sir, about your journey. Yeah, I would say at this point, I'm using a desktop that I feel is not serving me that well, but I don't know where to go. And this has been a topic that I think we've touched on a little bit, maybe throughout the last several weeks. The dev one, when did I get that? Like late September now? And I just kept the sort of default

Pop! OS installation on here as a test to myself to, you know, try the GNOME ecosystem. And I hate to say this, but I think I failed at that test and it's not going well for me. So I'm looking for a new place to go. Um, and we've been talking about this back and forth and we haven't really landed on a really

solid place. Now, some listeners have been pretty amazing. Um, for instance, Nev sent in physically a gen two thumb drive that he suggests that I should, I should, uh, get running on this laptop. thank you Ned for that and uh TuxMM last week in Matrix suggested that I actually tried Debian which is feels like I don't know maybe the totally opposite direction can I can I just jump in I've also gotten some notes privately people message me and email me and they tell me what you should run and they've also been suggesting Debian I've gotten several people that have reached out and said, why isn't he just trying Debian? This is like the perfect intersection of what Brent needs. Well, so I'd be curious, Chris, from your

perspective, then why you think we're getting so many recommendations for Debian for a Brent? You know, it's a similar story. I've tried a lot of different stuff. I'm not really happy with anything. But if I just go with Debian, it just works. And I don't need the absolute latest, but I can go with testing if I do. And it just seems to be pretty solid. And there's no shenanigans involved. Right. You don't get, you know, whatever you think of Canonical's projects, that's not a layer that you get.

There's not a company pushing a direction, good or bad, on top of it. You just get this community distro. That's sort of the common base level of the W universe. That's what I refer to as the strategy tax. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad. It's just totally dependent. But there's a strategy tax when you use Ubuntu.

I don't know. I could see something there. For me, it's just not a super compelling option. It doesn't really move the needle for me. Maybe it's too boring. But maybe that's exactly what you want. super compelling option, you know, doesn't really, doesn't really move the needle for me. Um, maybe it's too boring, but maybe that's exactly what you want. Well, I guess my question for you both and maybe for the audience as well is, uh, when's the last time you tried it? I don't, I don't think I ever have tried for like a real test, you know, for more than an hour, uh, a Debian install. I,

test, you know, for more than an hour, uh, a Debian install. I, the closest I came was probably many years ago. Um, when I, I think it was mint desktop edition, uh, or sorry, it meant Debian edition, which is the Debian rolling, uh, base to mint. And you know, that, that didn't go so well, uh, mostly because I was tinkering and I broke it all. But I got to say, like the audience suggesting the audience suggesting Debian is actually feels kind of intriguing. So I think I might give that a try for a little bit. But I'm worried because I feel like what I have in my mind about what Debian is, is stable, which is good. Very good. But also quite slow releasing. stable, which is good, very good, but also quite slow releasing. And, you know, being a host on maybe a Linux podcast that likes to look at newfangled technologies and things, is that

going to be a problem for me? That's the question I have. Hmm. I think, you know, the question there is how much do flat packs and snaps cover you there? Right. Are you, is the stuff that you really rely on and you want the latest features from? Because some of the software you don't care, right? Command line utilities, random notes or whatever. But if it's an app in your wheelhouse that you rely on to get your real work

done, that you might. Are all of those covered in flatbacks or sideloading in whatever way you feel comfortable with? And you don't get PPAs. You know, that's one of the things that makes Ubuntu a little more livable is ppas and i guess my question for you is i'm sure you must have reconsidered just going back to kubuntu i have

been hesitant to say it i don't know why you know it's like it's like recommending a like a friend to go buy an accord it's like a super reliable very solid car but like there's nothing fun about an accord really especially if you get like the lower end, but there's nothing fun about an Accord, really, especially if you get the lower-end model, right? There's nothing fun about an Accord. He's more of a Corolla guy. Maybe, or a Corolla, right? It's a great, solid car that's going to last years,

that's going to hold its value, that's going to get great gas mileage, it's going to have decent performance, it's going to have a lot of great features out of the box, and yet, for some reason, I'm not buying myself a Corolla and a Chord. There's also that second layer of the host thing, you know? Because if you do find a distro that just works for you,

like Kubuntu is just kind of hitting the sweet spot, we probably won't hear about it. It's funny you mention that because I was actually very happy with Kubuntu. And what got me started on this whole thought experiment and therefore suffering at this point happy with Kubuntu. And the whole, what got me started on this whole thought experiment and therefore suffering at this point is that I did a little bit of beta testing for Kubuntu, uh, 22.04 and ran into a whole bunch of things that made me pretty unhappy with that experience. Many of which are still being looked at and haven't been solved. And it just got me

wondering, is it maybe not the Kubuntu that I came to love for many years and ran and recommended to, you know, friends and family. And, uh, so it got me really looking elsewhere. And I, I can't say, you know, we, we, for the last year now have been testing things like KD Neon when I was at Alex's place for however long I was there, a long time. Ran into a bunch of issues there. And Fedora, you know, our last two tests on Fedora 36 and 37, I was like, oh, maybe this is the one. And that was a disappointing experience for a variety of reasons. Now, this is mostly the plasma experience i'm referring to but at the same time i just it got me thinking about a bigger topic which is well is it just me who's not very happy because i'm learning more and more and more about

how linux works and how the development cycles work and how hard it is to make a really super solid software experience. Like making a distribution is extremely complex and I have a ton of empathy. The more I learn about it, the more empathy I have with how difficult that is to do perfectly. And I don't think that's even possible really because software is changing constantly um but there's something about maybe what i've seen in the last year that just gets me i don't know maybe down a little bit about the choices out there and i i want to be wrong about that so i'm open to uh being excited you know no no no no no you're you're absolutely in fact you're 100 right and this is something that wes and i had a conversation last week after we wrapped up, and we just kind of realized it just sitting here after we disconnected with you,

is we are watching you take a journey that both Wes and I have taken, and that is becoming a hardened, cynical Linux user. Right? Are we totally? And it's one of these things where as you begin to acquire a deeper understanding of how the technology works the communities that are creating these things you begin to switch from i feel like something should do this to i understand why it can't do this and you go from how come it doesn't work like this to I'm surprised it does this at all. Right.

Like, and you're in that journey right now of going to why doesn't this work like this to I'm surprised this works at all. This is amazing. Did you know what it takes? And unfortunately, it takes like a lot of constant hard lessons of what works and doesn't work and what doesn't manage to stick around. We should get him like a pad for his forehead, you know, so he's hitting it on the wall. Yeah, it's one of those things where like, and you know,

I think a lot of folks along this path that you're on right now, which is you're basically upgrading your knowledge and you're learning about the backend infrastructure and all these different tools. And this is sometimes where folks that got just too much going on, I think, bail off of Linux and end up on a Mac or God forbid Windows. And, you know, I understand that it can be frustrating. Yeah, you sort of threatened me with that idea last week. And I think my heart sunk quite a bit because actually that's that's how i

got onto linux was using mac and being pretty unhappy and having maybe some similar feelings that i'm having right now and linux was like extremely exciting for all its possibility and how mature it seemed to me considering it's you know thousands of people just putting their ideas together, which is an amazing feat. And I think I'm just full of mixed emotions because learning about the backend and the communities and all the hard work that goes into making a Linux possible, it's like super exciting and amazing. It's like fascinating to watch all of that progress. But as a user, sometimes when I just want to get stuff done, it's like, oh gosh, there's this thing that's just keeping me from just getting it done. And I don't know, those two don't compute. Yeah. I think part of what

makes Linux work for me, and I don't know, maybe this is true for you too, Wes, is like kind of years of hitting that wall, figuring out what kind of sustainably works and figuring out what doesn't sustainably work. And then just kind of, I don't want to say finding a compromise, but like finding the logical conclusion of that. You have a very practical outlook on the Linux desktop, I think. Like you have a very practical set of expectations. I'm curious if you want to share a little bit of your philosophy on like what your expectations are of a Linux desktop.

I mean, I guess you, Tiny, in our matrix chat kind of puts it, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And the more time you're in an environment, the more it sticks out. Yeah. And that's just it. Like you got to find, it's sort of an optimization problem to find the trade-offs that work for you. And some people, like Chris, right? I think you're bothered when you notice performance degradation right and i don't love that i notice it too but doesn't bother lesser degree than you yeah so like my acceptable trade-offs are just going to be different in that regard and i really value

having the customizability the the ability to just sort of like pop under the hood and break stuff or change stuff or just override the system for a little bit when I really need to go get this weird task done. Some people don't care about that at all and never want to do that. And so we're just going to be on very different spectrums. And then there's a little bit, and I think there's some folks in the community that do this, some folks don't want to do that, and where you will fall on this decision is a very personal thing but how much do you invest how much do you rely on some of the stuff that commercial software and operating systems are better at providing you know so like i use plex i have plex i have a share for plex because there's people in my life that that's their primary way to consume stuff

but i not because i don't value plex or think that it's useful software, of course it is, but I find that if I don't commit to all the things that Plex offers, I don't have a lot of problems with Jellyfin. Now, if I was using Plex all the time and trying to switch that workflow to Jellyfin, I think it would go pretty poorly. But when I'm just like, I expect this set because that's what I get in this tool, at least for me, and really my needs are much simpler than folks with families that they're supporting or multiple different friend groups that are all watching off your same thing.

But you know, you adapt, you adapt to what it provides. That's a great way to put it. And it just takes a while. It takes exposure, right? It takes exposure.

And as you say, right, you learn some things seem like they should be really simple to solve. And it's not until you've sort of like read through the bug reports and realize that, oh, no, this actually, this little subsystem here, they could make that tweak and it would fix my issue, but it would break all these other things or cause complications for use cases I had never even considered before. Yeah. And it's like, I don't know how to make that trade off. So I kind of get that they don't

maybe know how either. And then there's also kind of this whole like if you zoom out and you take the 50 000 foot view and you look at like the like the multi like decade trends sometimes you take the l today so that way you don't get rugged in five to ten years do you know what i mean brent like it's sort of like you kind of you kind of learn and adopt i think you've you you've done this with photo management tools you figured out how to work with the open source free software photo management tools. And you maybe had to adapt your workflow a little bit from what the commercial tools like from Adobe offer. But you're never going to get rugged, right? You're never going to get surprised. You're never going to launch Darktable or whatever it is you use and get an error message that your subscription is expired. And so you adapt. Yeah, I think you totally hit it there. That was the main motivation for me in my photography workflow way back when I was like, okay, well, maybe I'm losing a feature or two, and maybe I won't have this fancy new AI feature they're talking about. But touching on Wes's point, like I never had that. So I never knew what I was missing. And actually it turns out

dark table does a heck of a lot more than a light room can even do these days. And so, so I think you're right. Like taking the long view five years down the road, actually this really great situation for photo workflow stuff now. And it, yeah, I think that's a really good point. One other thing I'm thinking about is I wonder if our kind of discovering many different distributions in the last year and a half plus has just got me thinking like some distributions are really good at a particular subset of problems. And that I've kind of picked up on each distribution's top you know, top quality. And I just want all those squeezed into one. That's not a thing. That's just not a thing. Yeah. That is the distro hoppers. I think a dilemma right there. You've nailed it. It's hard, I think too, to, to properly, I don't know, especially when you both use a computer for fun, for play and for discovery and all those

things, but also for work, I think it can be hard to commit as much as sometimes you might need to to get an optimal experience, to being willing to totally break apart your workflow to properly explore some new system. I think maybe sometimes for Plasma users, this can be particularly

hard because there's so many different ways you can use that desktop environment. If you've made yourself a bespoke thing, which is great and part of why it's awesome to use, and then you're like, well, some of these other systems, like, they don't even have a concept. There's no concept in here that can even map onto the way that I want to use this system. Or I see it a lot with, like, programming language paradigms. Not that they're better or worse, but some folks will just be like, that doesn't make sense to me. I'm not willing to explore that just because they've never, that's not a type of workflow that they've ever explored.

So there's not a little seed in their brain. And you and I both know Brent's crazy. He's got like 60 windows open on one desktop. He's not using the virtual desktop. I wasn't going to go there. I know, and I know you were very, very, very politely trying to call out Brent for his crazy work style. And it is true.

Well, and that gets me to another question, which is like you've both noticed that I tend to be a one machine user. Like I have a laptop. One monitor, one machine. Yeah. One desktop. You know, at least I have a second monitor. Actually, I don't because this laptop doesn't connect to it yet.

But because I travel so much, it's nice to have all of those tools always in my bag. But for you, Chris, I know you have the office upstairs. You've got, you know, a laptop or two that you have in jupes and they all serve a little bit of a different purpose. Almost like when you're in a certain mindset, you use a machine. And when you're in a, like a more, I don't know, gaming mindset, you use a different machine. And so I wonder if maybe there's a way I can change my workflow in that respect, maybe in a more physical way and have different systems for different purposes. Right. A podcasting machine, a work machine, a play machine kind of thing.

I think we forget in our modern era, Linux is pretty darn good at dual booting. It's super easy. You can share home partitions or share some data volume that you mount between all of them. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. Plus and vms you know all the things i think you've got to be considering you must have thought like is nix you know because you see how much wes and i are loving nix these days you've got to be thinking about it right you must be well especially that you know that i hate re setting everything up on my laptops because i guess i'm particular about certain things oh you know no and so i know nix is an answer to all of this but i feel like that's just kind of boring for the podcast because you guys have already chris especially you're you already did that so i feel

like i don't know i want to keep my feet wet into the other distributions just because yeah there's a lot of potential there yeah there's there's a bit of a of a content element just because there's a lot of potential there. Yeah. There's, there's a bit of a, of a content element to it. He's a micro OS guy. I feel like, uh, what we need is like, we should just have like an afternoon or an evening where we jump on a call and we all just talk about our setups and then we all just kind of help, you know, figure, dial it in. That's what you need.

Cause I know you're suffering too. And we talk about it on the show is from an abstract standpoint, but you really are struggling with the workflow and you're not working as optimally as you could be on your laptop. And you know, we got you this nice fancy laptop. We want you, we want it to work well for you. So it's worth,

I think we'll get there. You are in a period of transition right now. You're just using an entirely different stack, a slightly different version of plasma, different version of cute, different version of the kernel version of cute different version of the kernel probably on x11 right and now we've moved on it's the linux 6 era we've got wayland we've got it's towards the end of the 5 series of plasma it is a different generation of software

and you're trying to build a workflow around that from scratch right now yeah you're right yeah there's been some pains there uh wayland especially, I will say. But I'm optimistic. What if we just get you like a Kubuntu 1204 or something? Can we just see how that does? I mean, you know, 1204 is solid. I like 1204 a lot. Can we get Flatpak on that? No.

Maybe Snaps, though. Maybe. Maybe. You know, Wes and I have been thinking about trying Windows 11 for a week. And just giving that a go. Trying to get WSL2 and a package manager and seeing what it's like to live trying Windows 11 for a week and just giving that a go, trying to get WSL 2 and a package manager and seeing what it's like to live in Windows 11 for a week. I think it's going to happen.

You should join us, though, Brent. Yeah. All right. Totally, totally wipe the DevLon, and that way whatever next distro you get, it's like a fresh start after you get that. You always feel way better wiping Windows. Yeah.

Yeah. Nothing makes you appreciate Linux like going to a nice corporate meeting and installing Windows, you know, sitting down and really getting your arms around the issue. We can have like, you know, hang out for our patch Tuesday. Little patch party. Please, Microsoft, give me my updates.

Please, can I have them on this Tuesday? The blessed Tuesday. I wanted to follow up on troubleshooting my son's laptop he had fedora 37 or he had fedora 36 i should say yeah not even updating was right it was it was it was my primary problems was it was hanging at shutdown it wasn't sleeping when i closed the lid and his nvidia driver broke and i continued to troubleshoot those issues and i was not really able to resolve them as much. I tried to turn off all of the KVM stuff and it still hung at shutdown. Only after I disabled the KVM stuff, it would hang at shutdown but not let me clear the splash.

So I couldn't actually see the console to see what was hanging. So it actually got worse. And then I didn't get the NVIDIA driver working, which sucks. So I decided, you know, I do the right thing and just bail and try to upgrade them to Fedora 37. But unfortunately, that also failed. The first thing I did because I was feeling kind of lazy and I wanted it to work, I guess I was feeling optimistic, is I tried the GUI update, you know? Software Center said, hey, bro, you got an update. So I hit the old download button.

And after downloading on Starlink for a while during peak time, I got an error message about some 32-bit software that ain't going to work on my 64-bit system. Okay. I don't know why he has 32-bit libraries. I know he has Wine installed, and I know he has some old Wine games. Dang it, Steam. Right? It's probably something to do with that. So I decided should have done it like this in the

first place. I'll drop to the command line, and I'll install, make sure the DNF upgrade plugins all set up, do all that kind of stuff i ran that and i got the pre-upgrade air which to fedora's credit it checks this stuff before it upgrades your system it lets you know there's going to be problems so before anything gets wrecked it warns you and it came up with four different problems i had to solve and it it literally lists them out as problem one, problem two, problem three, problem four. And it tells me problem one is Java latest open JDK has an inferior architecture, which is I686. Problem two is Java latest open JDK development.

And then problem three is Java latest open JDK headless. And problem four is actually ML latest open JDK headless. And problem four is actually Mlocate. Just kind of randomly. God, I love Mlocate. But anyways. If you weren't so hooked on being able to find

your files again, you know, this wouldn't be happening to you. You know, and I was talking to you about this, Wes. I was like, I don't really understand

why this is happening. He installed all of these from Fedora repositories. I don't understand why it's having a problem and then he came home and i was asking him about it he's like no it's something called copper i'm like oh okay all right and then you're like sorry dylan you voided your dad warranty you gotta fix this well i kind of did i was like listen man here's what's gonna happen it's my upgrade it's gonna remove these packages and it's going to break minecraft so he's like no don't upgrade um go a

different route do not proceed so i bailed and i did not do the upgrade for him but so now he kind of still has the same problem because his system doesn't shut down properly uh he doesn't have an nvidia graphics driver he doesn't doesn't sleep when he closes the lid i'm frustrated because my daughters are on elementary os and my youngest daughter actually has my son's first or second computer actually and it still has the original elementary os installed it's based on 1804 and it's working just fine i did the updates i can install flat packs. It's just fine. And I looked at this and I thought, you know, what if I just pulled the old maneuver of a base Nix install that I updated once every few months and they just kept everything installed via flat pack. And I don't even mess with this

anymore. So that's on my radar we'll see i don't know i'm really kind of disappointed i'm really struggling the fedora thing for family members just hasn't really worked out there seems to be like which let me put on my cynical linux again i know my fedora for for family plan didn't work out it seems obvious i was not really because i mean recently it's been so good it has and the upgrades have been so solid this is the first time i've ever had an upgrade and you had your whole but i guess you didn't really wait you didn't follow your wait for that release to just about be out of support and then go to the next one i was gonna but then when i couldn't get

anything working i thought well maybe if i just rebase on 37 and start over, maybe I can fix some of this stuff. Or some of this is just going to get solved. I know. So it has not really worked out for me. And I don't know what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll go back to an Ubuntu base. Maybe I'll go to a Nix base. I'd be curious to know what you out there, listener, are doing for your family members. And I got a couple of boosts on the topics.

We got 2,500 sats from The Musso. He says, Hey, Chris, I'm wondering whether you considered using Fedora Silverblue on your son's machine. It is possible to install the NVIDIA drivers with Silverblue, from what I've read, and it'd be interesting to see what the problems he's experiencing if they're reproducible in the Silverblue environment.

Does that make more sense than, say, Nix? It depends on how much you want the Fedora stuff, I guess. If RPMs are in your wheelhouse, you like RPMOS tree, you want what Fedora's got, you want access to that kind of stuff. I don't know if it is providing me anything I need

anymore. If I were to switch to Nix... Because you're probably going to be doing flatbacks for stuff in both cases, right? Both systems run flatback well. And he's got an AMD GPU, which means out of the box on Fedora, he wouldn't get hardware accelerated playback. I'd have to fix that, but I'm not even sure if RPM Fusion

has an official guide yet still. I'm not sure. You know, that's actually kind of a fun little challenge. Dylan, go watch a Twitch stream. Figure it out. Figure it out, yeah. We got 10,000 stats from Martin De Boer.

He says, hey, Chris, regarding the topic of your son's laptop on Fedora, I use OpenSUSE. I support my mom, who uses OpenSUSE now, and she's used it for years and loves it. She still finds problems that I just haven't encountered, though. With OpenSUSE Leap, which is better for NVIDIA, you need to add the Pac-Man repository. Flathub is already enabled out of the box, and OpenSUSE at community.org will let you easily install your codecs. Using software.openseuse.org, you'll find all the other RPM packages.

Seuss's GNOME and KDE computations are also very good. Too many options. Too many options. We should make Brent try out OpenSUSE's GNOME and KDE computations are also very good. Too many options. Too many options. We should make Brent try out OpenSUSE. I mean, we need a spreadsheet or something. Think about poor Nev. Brent still hasn't run Gen 2. That's true. That's true. It is a unique experience.

In the show notes, George Castro wrote up a great post comparing OpenSUSE's microOS with Fedora Silver Blue 37. So we'll throw that in the show notes for you. See what you think. And then we have one more thing to update everybody on. It has arrived. It is here.

It is still in box. But the new Thaleo that's going to replace our Linux OBS machine has arrived. And I wanted to share the build with you all. Talk a little bit about what we have planned and what you can expect. So we have a machine here in studio that is responsible for running OBS and records our member streams and all that kind of stuff.

And it's pretty busy, actually. When you really combine all the stuff it's doing, it actually manages to tax the system pretty decently. Plus, OBS has a pretty high set of requirements itself. And it has been dying. In fact, this morning, before the stream started, I spent about 30 minutes just trying to get the damn thing working at all. Did you try the eagle strike? Brent, how many times do I gotta tell you? It's the hawk strike!

You come at it like a hawk! You gotta make a beak in your hand and come at it like a hawk. The best part is you're using the sound clip that everyone thinks is an eagle because that's what they do in showbiz, right? But deep! It is actually a hawk.

Yeah. Okay, a little update on our shuffle cake. So someone, don't know who, put a little bug in the kernel module. What? So anytime someone tried to load it, it would just automatically panic. That is sneaky. At least for the moment,

I cleared that up, got a fresh one built and loaded. How did you figure that out? Well, I noticed that it immediately panicked after I tried loading the module. I was like, the module's not loaded. Someone loaded it earlier. They have it now. I'll just give a little help here and load it.

And then it printed a fun little message. Oh, yeah? You little hackers out there. I love it. No, it's great. All right. So here is the Thaleo that I got into the studio. I know this is a weird thing to say,

but I'm actually proud that it's an all Intel build. Stick with me for a second. I was going to do a Ryzen system, but the 13th gen Intels came out and it just felt like the way to go when we're also combining it. Oh, it's the 12th gen. I meant to get a 13th gen. I wonder if that's a typo on the specs. We'll find out, but we're going to pair that with the arc gpu that nev sent in and uh see how that combination works on linux we got 32 gigs of ddr ram we have a 500 gigabyte pci gen 4 uh mvme disk in there as well as a two terabyte ssd that will be for like the obs recordings and the whole thing which is supposed to be 13th gen yeah

okay there it is down here on the specs it has the upgrade to the 13th gen and i went with an i5 i decided to go with an i5 on this build i5 uh 13 6 600k turbo is up to 5.1 gigahertz 14 physical cores 20 threads and it's a 13th gen intel i think that's going to be plenty for an obs machine but here's the thing i really like we managed to spec this whole thing out like a killer live streaming obs machine for 1977 dollars so for under two grand we got ourselves a killer thalia workstation. I'm really looking forward to trying this thing out. It's in the box still.

So we haven't even done a build. But I think our intentions, they're not going to surprise you. Our plans, slide the Arc GPU in there. And then guess what? We're going to load NixOS. We're going to try NixOS and OBS as a live streaming system. Yeah, we are. I don't know how that's going to work with OBS plugins

and things like the virtual camera and all of that, but there's only one way to find out, and we'll report back here how it all worked out. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go get started with a free trial for yourself or for a team at Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go get started with a free trial for yourself or for a team at Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Bitwarden is just quite simply the easiest way to store, share and sync sensitive data. I also kind of want to put the word out there that this could be a great option for open source projects as well that have multiple members on a team. And Bitwarden itself is open source. It's trusted by millions of us in the community,

teams, organizations, just worldwide. People use it for secure password storage. And two-factor, I also use it for longer keys for certain services that need very long keys. It's what Wes and I used to manage our password for years now. Wes got ahead of it before me. He honestly got on the Bitward and trained a little before I did. But a couple years ago, I realized which way the things in the password manager space were going and decided to switch to Bitwarden.

And throughout that time, it's just gotten better and better. The mobile experience is so slick now, it makes it exceedingly easy to use safe, secure passwords, usernames, and unique email addresses for every website, app, and service you use i think you're really going to love it i recommend it if you already have a password manager in your life perhaps you're already using bitwarden because after all you're probably savvy but maybe you know a friend or a family member maybe it's a group you work with that could use better password

management practices send them to bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's really straightforward, and it's probably, in my opinion, the number one thing they could do to improve their security online. If you look at how people get taken advantage of, it's when they're using the same username and password everywhere. Sometimes those password databases leak,

sometimes they get phished, and they just have those credentials, and they can use them anywhere. The consequences can be pretty dramatic, especially with online banking. So send them to bitwarden.com slash Linux. Have them check it out and then you'll know they'll be taken care of. They've got a great active community, a forum and a Reddit too. So if you yourself ever need problems and you prefer to do the DIY troubleshooting method,

there's a lot of resources as well. So it all starts for yourself, for a team or an enterprise at bitwarden.com slash Linux. One more time, support the show by going to bitwarden.com slash Linux. We got some amazing feedback again this week. Thank you everyone who wrote in. Sam has some tips for me on desktops. He says, do you want a rolling distro? Up-to-date, well-curated packages? Excellent support for everything you can imagine? Root on ZFS, NVIDIA Linux, Surface devices, Snap, Flatpaks, you just name it.

A rock-stable OS? A plethora of packages? An OS usable by regular users? Well, time for Debian testing. Seriously, they bridged the UI gap now with GNOME 43 with nice fonts and all that. Everything else got broken for me to one extent or another over the past few years and it made me sad. Like, sort of like we're slipping backwards with Linux desktop. Until I tried Debian testing. After I failed a Manjaro experiment. I couldn't

be happier and it does everything you can possibly want and does it really well. I run it on a Surface Book 2 that I purchased to run Linux and it's great. Kudos to Debian and making a rock solid Linux distribution for two decades and the most capable distro of 2022 for me. You should revisit it and report it on the show. It is really that good. Wow. What struck me in there is it sounds like he kind of had a crisis of Linux faith and Debian sort of stopped that spiral. And I'm wondering, have you felt that way, Brent? Have you felt a little bit of crisis of faith in the Linux desktop at least?

There's a bit of a crisis happening. And I feel like maybe that's just like a coming of age for many of us. It's just like you eventually get to that point. And it's nice to hear that users and listeners are getting past that because I was really worried I'd just stick here and suffer for many years. But it sounds like there's light at the end of that tunnel. I mean, don't get us wrong. There's definitely some suffering. It's just manageable suffering, perhaps. Don't get us wrong.

There's definitely some suffering. It's just manageable suffering, perhaps. Milton also wrote in and suggests that I run Manjaro with Plasma, which has been very stable until recently with Plasma 5.2.5, and some instability has continued with 5.2.6.2. Similar to Brent's experience on Fedora 37, there have been application hangs, in particular with Evolution, crashes with LibreOffice. I suspect KWin is likely the culprit. Hopefully the KDE team will resolve those soon. It is seriously disappointing that Linux distributions cannot produce a stable system which could be upgraded and run for many years without a degradation over time. I too experienced such issues on Ubuntu

flavors and ultimately found Manjaro the most stable. Distro hopping is fun, but I don't have the time or energy to continually build my laptop every few months. For sustained Linux growth and adoption, there needs to be a concerted effort to uncover and fix the underlying issues with Linux stability and correct them. It would benefit all of us. I wonder, too, if some of this is, you know, we use these distributions for so many different things. You know, so if you're, I don't know,

I think it's fairly rare that your basic operations, right, like I can, whatever, I can pull up my Firefox, I can go to my social media platform of choice in my web browser, like that kind of thing is usually broken. But there's no, I mean, not that there aren't people helping direct this stuff. Obviously there are. But maybe not in the same way that like an Apple has various product managers

who are insistent that like, no, we are marketing and solving for these workflows and they must be rock solid before we're even going to think about releasing them. And that kind of stuff, I don't know, it doesn't always happen. I mean, not that it never happens in Linux, but, and that can vary, and

now you put emphasis over here on this quadrant and suddenly Brent's niche use case over here is not getting tested as much. You know where it does happen? And maybe this is actually worth saying, because we've been talking about being cynical and all of that. Real beauty and elegance happens low down

and just low level. And all of a sudden one day a problem you've had in linux for years is just solved like that's work is being done right now for the nvidia driver to just one day linux users are going to just install linux and have fully accelerated nvidia drivers without having to do any other work It's just kind of like this remarkable aspect of the development. Or they solve something in the kernel deep down inside that now just automatically does something when you boot your system. You know, there's just these things that have happened over time that have been these major blockers that eventually, once they're solved in Linux, they're solved in such an elegant way that you never even really knew it was an issue.

And it's coming. It's happening. We're just, you know, you're kind of running up against some of those right now. And so I think it's worth mentioning that because we've been very cynical this episode, but there is the flip side of once those problems are solved and amazingly so many of them do get solved,

they're solved in a way where they never felt like it was an issue to begin with. They really, you know, they nail it. I'd also like to say that just because there are a few little things that I'm running into that are kind of annoying on the surface, I still am completely in love with Linux and the Linux desktop and the way everything works and how hard everybody works and stuff. So I don't want that to be lost in all of this.

I feel like it's just part of the journey that we're exploring. And certainly I think there's going to be some good news down the road. And now it is time for the boost. I wanted to move to the boost because we have a lot to get to and there's just so many great boosts and gene bean is a consistent booster with some great thoughts and he sent in a sat stream of thoughts and he started with 10 24 sats he said fedora 36 drove me to try out pop os 34 and 35 were nice but 36 just wasn't stable so there you go right like different people different things work. Gene Bean, like I said, it's going to be a stream of thoughts sent in a follow-up boost for elite set of stats.

Regarding Ubuntu ZFS at all, I really wish everyone would just build on the ButterFS work OpenSUSE has done. There are plugins to take snaps and generate grub entries like OpenSUSE does. In other distros, it would just be really handy to have that out of the box the experience is not nearly as good i agree guys like why the hell hasn't what the the good work that open sews has done why hasn't that really been acknowledged and and moved over to other distros why aren't the fedora folks working on that what's going on there guys i wonder if there's some amount i don't know i Admittedly, we didn't use it enough in Anger, I think, to really fully appreciate it. And we haven't run like a rock-solid Seuss setup,

you know, over multiple years or multiple upgrades or really in super production. Compared to some of the stuff, like some of the early ZSys work and some of the other, like the FreeBSD boot system, I did not find Snapper as intuitive when we had it in the Arch setup as I kind of expected. And again, I'm not saying, I'm sure

if I had spent more time learning it and operating it, I would think better of it. And I don't think poorly of it. It just, it wasn't quite that like, oh my god, suddenly my system feels resilient and I can roll back with ease and I understand how this works. So I wonder if maybe there's aspects of it that are harder to,

you know, you gotta be willing to redo how you set up your system to make it play nice right we had to like follow some guides to be like well how do i get all my butterfests laid out the right way to be friendly with snapper and yeah you gotta that doesn't jive with like how installation team's already doing it or how users have it installed in practice from old installations you gotta be willing to lay it back out differently yeah there, there was that. Gene Bean continues and wonders with 1024sats, have any of us really had any experience with Session instead of Signal? I'm a Telegram user.

Brent, I know you use Signal a bit. Have you ever tried out Session Messenger? I would say I use Signal a lot, actually. The only reason I use Telegram is because of you. Thank you very much. Which, Telegram has been great, to be honest. Our community is there, and it's been awesome. You know, that's how I got started, too. The JB fuck.

They sucked me in. Yeah. Well, if you guys remember, now, Brent, it was a little bit before your time, but, Wes, if you might remember, we were on Viber. Whoa. Yeah. Right. And it was, we needed something that could handle LinuxFest.

And so Viber wasn't doing it anymore for us. We switched to Telegram for Linux Fest. And it just kind of went from there. Now all my family's on there. Look what happened. Yeah, yeah. I got tons of family on Telegram. Yeah.

I know I'm totally hooked. So that's why I've not tried out Session myself because of that. I've certainly read about Session. And it just kind of, I think, came to me at the time where Signal and also Telegram were solving the problems that Session were solving. I forget the specifics, but I remember thinking, well, Signal at the time, and this was probably three years ago, I would say, at the time was just felt more mature and felt like it had a larger network of folks using it and just had a better reputation

at the time session was kind of new but i'd be curious to hear where session is coming at that time i think gene bean is thinking along my line of thoughts another set of 10 24 sats i love matrix too fluffy chat is a nice chat interface for matrix and i really have been thinking about a small scale maybe it's dendrite a small scale matrix server that i run on my odroid and then i just set up my kids and my wife with fluffy chat and i just set it up for them and maybe we just all use fluffy chat and i don't know um that could work pretty well that could pretty i mean the only downside right, is now I'm responsible for maintaining the server that makes it possible for my family to chat. That's a lot.

That's a lot. Don't love it. But if you're kind of getting annoyed with them and you just don't, you know, you need to be. Oh, server maintenance. Sorry, team. It's down. Sorry about that, everybody. And then Gene being continued with a row of 6666 sets which sound ominous when

you ask me and he writes respect should be earned i hate how accurate neil is but i believe in regards to legal issues and maintain about bankruptcy it is going to be a problem uh deckbot comes in with 1100 sats live as we're recording. Using all my sats from Fountain to pair Brent and the other Canadian, Alan Jude. He says, Brent, go give FreeBSD a go. You know, that's

come up a few times, and I think you were both thinking of putting that on my dev one before I got it. I don't think that went so well, right? Yeah, the issue there really is just simply you have nice new hardware and FreeBSD is old, busted

and doesn't have nice new hardware support. Now, if you got old crappy hardware, you could totally run FreeBSD just fine. Well, I have plenty of that laying around. Yeah, me too. Me too. I agree. So yeah, there's there's i mean maybe there's something there for it but yeah nay i say nay the golden dragon coming in from all i mean it's been weeks

coming in from a long break with 2,222 sats and as our show mascot i would hope he'd boosted more often to maintain that status. He says, long time no boost on the subject of Fedora. Well, guys, this is why I had to stop using Fedora. The lawyers at IBM and the usability of Gnome combined. It's wild to me that Fedora gets jerked around and then gimped because IBM wants everything to be on the up and up. Maybe it is time to fork. Oof. The champagne that John A brought in has hit me. It's hard to get through these boosts now. All right. So I said something as kind of an off the cuff burn. And I said IBM's lawyers last week. I didn't actually mean

IBM's lawyers are making decisions for Fedora. It was hyperbole. From what I know, from people who still are involved at Red Hat, the legal team that manages that stuff and works with Fedora is the same legal team that was there before acquisition. So I want to make that clear. I've heard that from multiple sources. I was joking. That said, one thing that I wanted to bring up, and I'd love to see continued discussion, because I think it allows the Fedora project to talk about this issue without exposing themselves to too much potential legal trouble. And that is, why is it okay for us to have unfiltered Flathub, but not unfiltered RPM Fusion? I think I know why. I think I know the reason, but I think the Fedora project should probably articulate that reason to

the public because I think it would give insight to the public as to how things work without having to expose themselves to specifics that might actually get them in legal trouble. That's all I can say on this matter. But there is better communication that could be happening here between Fedora and the community. Instead of just telling us, tough luck, the lawyers tell us it has to be this way, and we can't tell you why. I think what has to happen here is the onus is now on the Fedora project to communicate as much information as they can without getting themselves in trouble. And if that means writing a blog post and running it past the lawyers first and then modifying it

based on their suggestions, then for God's sakes, do it. Because right now the project looks handicapped. It looks gimped. It looks like it is under the control of lawyers. It looks like anything cool you do is eventually going to get overridden by lawyers. And that isn't the truth. That is not reality. So meet us halfway. Explain to the people. That's all. You know, and if you, I think, started with why RPM fusion bad, flat have good, I think if you just kind of explored that particular question,

I think you could give a lot of us in the community an explanation that people could understand. Yeah, maybe like some expectation setting, just so we know like where to expect the boundaries to be for future things. It's not, obviously, we still love Fedora. There's no, it's nothing there. We just want to know what we should expect from it going forward and where the guardrails are. Bitcoin lizard boosted with 25,000 sats, which is technically a baller boost for this episode. Hey, hey.

Hey, hey. And I have to say, this is probably the boost of the week that moved the needle the most for me. Hadn't really thought about this very much. And I really appreciate this because this was kind of, I think, the issue that was rattling around in the back of my mind, and I had not put words to it. Bitcoin Lizard writes, I have run a single single user mastodon instance for a year it is not for the faint of heart it is much more difficult than a family matrix synapse server which that tells you something because synapse isn't necessarily easy uh mastodon needs to improve on its cache management. Seemingly, the storage will grow forever.

I agree with your idea to just start with JB Staff and then maybe grow later. That definitely seems like the way to do it if we're going to do it. I don't know that we have to do Mastodon either, right? As we were saying earlier, part of the fun is ActivityPub itself. So, I mean, maybe we want to try Mastodon

just to be where everyone else is going, but maybe we want to try Mastodon just to, you know, be where everyone else is going, but maybe we want to find some other client we work better that's easier to host or has other features.

I know there's forks of Mastodon too now. Doesn't this feel a little bit like the dendrite versus traditional matrix server option? And like if you're

doing like a really big matrix community, it kind of makes sense to use the traditional matrix daemon, but if you're going to do something light and lean, it kind of makes sense to use Dendrite. Maybe try something else, yeah. Yeah.

I wonder if that isn't the situation here with Mastodon. Sort of the same thing. All right, we got a live boost. Are you ready for this, gentlemen? No, I can't be. It's live. Big old baller boost coming in. Hey, Rich Lobster!

Live boost of 100,000 sats from B3XBot. Long-time listener, first-time booster. I wanted to pop in and say hi while watching the live stream on Jupiter 2. Yes! That is the combo, man. It is pronounced DexBot. That's different from the booster who's DexBot.

Thank you, DexBot. 100,000 sats using Podverse 2, which is the GPL3 cross-platform new podcast app. That's very awesome to see. Thank you, Dexbot. 100,000 sats using Podverse 2, which is the GPL3 cross-platform new podcast app. That's very awesome to see. Thank you very much. And then Martin De Boer boosted in with 18,000 sats. Keep the change, you filthy animal. Hi, Chris, Wes, and Brent.

I'm a longtime listener since 2011. Wow. That is a long time. That's impressive. Moment of silence. Wow. That is a long time. That's impressive. Moment of silence for that. That is respectable. I think that's got to be roughly the era I started listening. And that's like pre-two kids, maybe?

Like one kid, at least it's not that old. When I hear about listeners that have been listening since before I've had children, that's remarkable. This is my first boost using Podverse, Albi, and Blue Wallet. All right. I think you guys should join Mastodon. It fills a different role from Signal, Telegram, and Matrix-type messages. These platforms are aimed at private or group conversation.

Mastodon's like Twitter. It's aimed at public conversations. You set up your own server for the JB crew and you then advertise to your listeners how to join. Thanks for all your work. And by the way, here's my private address. So that's in there for us,

you guys. You know, when somebody sends 18,000 sats and they go through the trouble of switching to pod verse and setting up Albie and blue wallet to send me a message, I'm going to listen to that message. I think this is something we probably need to do. I think this boost puts me over the edge.

I think we've got to figure out a mastermind. Because you know what I'm liking is this idea that we have the crew, so you know it's us. We have a Jupyter broadcasting address. We keep it tight so it's not too much for us to manage so we can keep it running on the long term. And maybe we do use it for comment threads or something it also solves the old problem you know i mean i've been wanting i've thought about master on activity for a long time

especially now these days right as uh what little tweeting i do becomes less and less relevant it solves for us at least the problem of uh what server do we use well we use the one we made of course yeah definitely that is actually one of my problems with using master yeah i was just at least the problem of what server do we use? Well, we use the one we made. Of course. Yeah, definitely. That is actually one of my problems with using Mastodon. Yeah, I was just thinking like, okay, I gotta at least dip my toes in again now during this little zeitgeist, right? But what? Do I want to make a profile over here to launch it and just be like,

no, I don't really like that home server. It was either I'm going to spin one up for myself or maybe we just make a network one. Yeah, I've enjoyed the podcasting Mastodon instance, the podcasting 2.0 communities Mastodon instance because it's very specific. I see someone spun up one for the Clojure community.

I thought about that one. But again, I don't know. Maybe I want my more social show account on something a little more general. I don't know. Nothing matters. It's all better. I get that.

TrueGrid's boosted in some enterprise sats. Make it so. 1701 to uh plus one the idea of setting up mastodon i'm gonna link in the show notes to a a pretty solid blog post around the issues of scaling mastodon the blog post written november 14th 2022 scaling mastodon is impossible. And I kind of feel like this is the deal with matrix. Like if I would have known what I know now, I would have set up a matrix server that is just limited to the staff at JB. And then I would have had everybody go create a matrix.org account and then join our server.

Yeah, we didn't, we opened it up and now we have 4,000 accounts on that server. 4,000 accounts. And it's, it's a big server and it's a lot to manage. But like now I know, right? Like I tried PeerTube once and that didn't go very well. And then I came at PeerTube again and I did what I call the minimum viable PeerTube setup where it's very focused. It's very limited.

It is part of the Fediverse technically. Although I don't think it's federated. It might be technically federated, but I don't know. Maybe not. Like, I do see some posts from other people on there. So it's in some sort of federation, but I don't... I went for very minimum, right? And I could see doing something similar with the JB server. I could see us being kind of connected,

but overall being pretty much on our own little island um live boost coming in right now we got 15 000 sats from user 47 5 saying westpain 2024 that's circus freak i believe i would vote for westpain in 2024 if i could vote i would too i have to warn you if you put west in charge you'd be surprised he does have a little bit of a dictator in him. I mean, you know, I like things a certain way. Now, everyone who listens to Jupiter Broadcasting shows won't have to change their lifestyle. So you guys won't be affected. No, yeah.

You'll be just grandfathered in. We'll have to take a few more math classes, though. Sorry about that. We did get 25,000 boosts just a couple of seconds later. Curious concept boosts in live while listening. Hey, really enjoying the live stream. I would love to see the value streaming enabled for the member feeds. Long-time listener, first-time booster.

Go podcasting! Yes. It's on the list. It is on the list. Wes, what can we say about the custom RSS feeds? What update do we have for that? Because I know you and I have been discussing it a lot. Yeah, we've got some prototypical work in the

offing. Yeah, there is that. And we're getting pretty serious about essentially building a lot of the backend infrastructure we need to move off of Fireside 2 in this result. So the results may be we end up self-hosting a lot more infrastructure than we expected to enable this. So it's kind of, it's not like the scope is like going crazy, but when we start talking about what's really involved in generating our own RSS feeds, it kind of, we end up at the question of, well, what's Fireside doing? And that's what we use today to host our shows.

You know, there's a few different, call them generations of plants, you know, because we've got to keep things, A, operating as they are, B, the shows are the focus, and then C, we want to test the waters out as they make sense and have smooth transitions. It's one thing when you have a closed platform and you make updates where you can just forcibly tell all your clients they've got to refresh, but in a distributed world like podcasting,

you want to get it right the first time because you never know what system cached what you just put out there. I would expect that we would probably start experimenting with office hours first, right? And so if we, you know, want to make any radical changes, that's probably where it happens. Yeah, I think office hours and then some of the,

as mentioned here, some of the member feeds. Yeah. You know, folks that obviously appreciate us enough to put up with some of our shenanigans. Yeah.

Shenanigans, exactly. Running with scissors, as they say. Mm-hmm. We got even more boosts in. Elray boosted in of our website fame. A row of ducks. He says,

How about Mastodon for comments on each episode? He links to an article for using Mastodon for comments on a static blog. So I think his idea here is to use Mastodon for comments on our website, which sounds kind of intriguing. He says, I've always wanted a comment section for JB episodes. Well, you know who we should ask about that? We should ask Elrey about that. Elrey might know. Yeah, Elrey might know. Elrey double boosted in with another row of ducks. Double boost?

I've personally loved the ZSYS auto ZSYS snapshotting when I installed the package. I've trialed packages out before and took note of auto zsys id, rolled back when I didn't like it. Much cleaner than apt remove. Definitely not all rainbows and sunshine though, and feels a bit kludgy at times. For me though, I go out of my way to use Ubuntu Mate. While I do like and prefer KDE and install Kubuntu on top, because Kubuntu doesn't or didn't have ZFS in their installer. on top you know you can you know then switch back over to whatever you're with mate you've got your baseline you don't have to worry about zfs setup you can set it up yourself and then install whatever de you want on top because i mean the spins are that right like you can still get all the back yes and that's pretty much how it works for all the other distros anyways so you know i

have to say el rey i say el rey because i have a neighbor named El Rey. So it's very hard because that's how they spell their name too. So it's very hard, but I agree. I think as long as Canonical continues to ship that kernel module and all the software packages you would need in the repo to use that, then go with your traditional Kubuntu install. Maybe do like, you know, the real base layout in the installer and then keep your data drive separately and just set that up after the install is complete, maybe using gparted or using the command line tools, because as long as you have the ZFS packages and the kernel module, you're good to go. Now, Chris, do you have any recommendations

for what file system you use on your root partition? Hmm, hmm. You know, Wes, it probably should be something that's free software, that's upstream on the Linux kernel, ideally supports compression, maybe snapshots. Oh, oh, oh. No, not, I don't want shadow copies.

I want real snapshots. So, Wes, I go with butter. Not margarine. I go with butter, FS. That's right. Butter, FS. It turns out El Rey triple boosted this week with another row of ducks. This one's about the geocaching mixups we've been leading to the last few weeks.

Who? Us? No. We're not tracking stuff properly? I think last week we tried to clear it up. I'm not sure we successfully did that. properly. I think last week we tried to clear it up. I'm not sure we successfully did that. He says, I definitely think we need a better way for submitting, updating, and displaying geocache info on the website somewhere. That way listeners can update the info and not

have this kind of confusion happen again. It does seem clear we need some kind of coordination somewhere. GitHub repo, website, anywhere? Yeah. No. Although there is one part I like. If we were better, if we set like one specific method, I do like the reveal on here, you know?

I agree. Like there's something about the like, if someone boosted in or emailed in versus, not that I'm not, I love GitHub, but you know, it's sort of a like, we get to decide when we announce that like, it's been found. That's a great point.

The downside is there might be a little delta between shows, a weak delta, where it's been found and someone might be looking for it still. But it's a trade-off. First of all, I'm embarrassed. El Rey is completely right. This obviously should just be something that we have on the website. And I'm still so used to a decade of a website that we hate and don't use that I didn't even think of that.

And I apologize because our community has done incredible work on a new website and I'm still wrapping around just my whole noodle around the concept that our website's usable. So we totally should have like a geocaching spot. However, we end up updating the information at the... Right, we could have like a extent, like these are the live geocaches to go.

If you want to go help find a geocache, boom right there's your list of ones that are still out in the field and here's how to contact us if you'd like to deploy a geocache in your area and the fact that i didn't think of the website as the ultimate destination for that is totally my bad it's it is just a it is a bad habit that i'll try to break. But Wes is right. He brings up a good point. We do need to consider the reveal and how we want to do that. So maybe this is something we move to office hours. Well, I feel like maybe El Rey just volunteered to help make this a reality.

I know I pledged a few weeks ago that I would make it happen, but clearly I didn't. And so we do have an issue open, if anyone's interested in helping us with this, that has been, it's many weeks old, and there are some amazing ideas on how to accomplish this in there. And I feel like maybe that's a great place to start. So help us out. gentlemen thank you for all your efforts every single week i know it can't be easy just know that your efforts every week help boost my spirits in those trying times no matter what life throws at me i know there's always a bright spot each sunday evening waiting for me and my podcast player i know that your efforts are and i want you to know that your efforts are greatly appreciated. Onwards towards 500. That is so gosh darn sweet, 412. Yeah, my math is like mid or early March, we're hitting episode 500. I'm not ready.

And I like, part of me wants to do like a real extravaganza. And then like part of me just wants to do a regular old episode. I don't, part of me doesn't want to make a big deal because I'm aiming for a thousand, so. We could do a regular episode and put out like a special bonus or something. Hmm. That's, no, wait, make it more work for us. Yeah, right, right.

We're going to take 500 off and just, we'll see you back at 501. It's a clip show. We burned it, right? But you're definitely going to have like a 500 brew series, right? We should. Or a cider? Yeah, cider. Ooh, I'm into that champagne i i mean a cider would be really nice i would really enjoy i personally would enjoy cider i'm enjoying some ciders today let me tell you what norcal geek boosts in with 8080 cents coming in hot with the booze. So, impossible idea to increase peer-to-peers.

JB creates a headless peer machine image that can run on a Linode. Audience members add the image to their Linode accounts, and then on a Sunday morning, audience members could spin up a Linode using that JB image. Then at the end of the day, just destroy the Linode, keep the image. Might cost a few bucks a week to run the instance and store the image, but I'd do it. Thoughts? You know, this is clever, especially if we could do like a stack script because Linode has stack scripts. Yeah, something we could just easily publish on there and be like, here you go.

And it's all preset up. The challenge is how? Like, how do you get a headless instance to act as a peer to a peer to a stream? Because it's, it is both, um, BitTorrent, but it is also,

there's a web RTC component as well. I bet something like playwright or Selenium, uh, you know, that might work, but maybe you can have like a full instance that, that federates and restreams. I'm not sure what,

what the options are. We need to do a little more research, I think. But some promising tools there, NorCalGeek. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much. You know, I want to say on that topic that Jack reached out to us as well from the UK and offered some hosting on our part. So I think we're going to have to figure that out and take them up on that offer.

Yes. Yeah. Now we just got to figure out how to, how to add a peer to our peer tube stream headless. And I think one of the other tricky things in there is say you have a, a bit of bandwidth and you have some hardware you want to throw at it. How does your machine know when we have a new stream and how do you become a peer to the latest stream?

If you want this to run 24 seven7, how do we manage that? And I know PeerTube offers an API because we use that for our new website. So maybe there's something there. But I actually don't think there's anything built around this right now. Maybe we need like a little, like a fun bootstrap script that sort of like detect, pulls our PeerTube, looks for like a live stream and then get something going that'll just start watching it i don't know i think that actually could be it wes we just need somebody to create it i think this makes circus freak the biggest baller of the episode because just right now as we're recording 40 000 sets coming in live uh forget figuring out about what distro to go with. In 2023, JB needs to create the JB Linux distro.

Fun story, Circus Freak. That's how Jupyter Broadcasting started. That's how we started. Brian Lunduk and I were going to create a new desktop OS. Don't call it a Linux distro. And we were going to call it Jupyter. And we had all these ideas about the design and the flow. And we'd probably have

some bookmarks in there that when you opened up Firefox it would take you to like our website or whatever. And we were coming up with this idea and we were talking about it

on this new podcast that we had called The Linux Action Show. I've heard of that. Yeah. And we realized that we were way better at talking about it

than we were at doing it. Ain't that the truth? So we realized that we were way better at talking about it than we were at doing it. Ain't that the truth? So we realized maybe we should focus on this podcasting thing and let other people do this Linux thing. And then these crazy cats came together at this elementary OS project and their first release was called Jupiter. And, well, the rest is history. so thank you for the baller boosts uh circus freak uh we appreciate it dex sword boosts in with a prediction boosts of 2023 sets i predict that by 2025 jb is earning as much in boosts as jupiter.party subs per quarter. In 2025, huh?

Yeah. Maybe. 2023 stats, not 2025. A little discrepancy. Yeah, well, 2023 is because it's a prediction boost. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a prediction for 2025,

so it probably should have been 2025. Anyways, we'll see. I'm curious about that, really. It's two different total business models. The membership system does kind of encourage exclusive access, right? Whereas the podcasting 2.0 system and the boost kind of encourages it's open to everybody, but then you just supply the value you think it's worth. And both of them seem like they have their roles.

Like I could see, to me, the memberships seem like the Jupiter Party and our Unplugged core contributors, that's really investing on the ongoing production. Say like next year, every advertiser walked from the show. Our members would be what's paying the bill for the show to still get out, right? The boosters are coming in, thanking us for that particular production

and the production itself, right? That's the end result. They're boosting us for the end result. They're two different things. And I wonder, do they even supplant each other? I think the challenge for us going forward is to offer the same things for each groups. A consistent, unified experience. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's probably our 2023 strugs, but we're totally up for it. We're here. Oh, well, right on topic. Someone that's been doing a lot of work that helps us in our schemes here. A boost from Alex Gates, the podcasting 2.0 consultant. Coming in hot with the boost! and one satoshis activity pub services are just inboxes and outboxes of json payloads mastodon specifically tries to pull in everything media included and now here's where i reveal

it's a double boost we got ten thousand and one sats linking to an activity pub post in PC 20, super easy. I recommend spinning up Pluroma or GoToSocial. PC 20, PC is actually podcasting in 2.0. So he recommends Pluroma. Pluroma or GoToSocial. Sounds like Alex is running Pluroma on a one Corolla node personally. And again, right, that's the whole activity pub stuff is run whatever client speaks activity pub and then, you know, it'll display the stuff. Now, you might have different features implemented or experience or what your timeline, all the things look like, but you can still interrupt.

Can I tell you, this is me because I'm such an asshole. I am inclined to want to load Pleroma just simply because everything I've been told so far, it's like the tool of the alt-right. And I'm like, all right, I hear this all the time about Bitcoin too, and it's always bulls**t. And it's a technology and people can choose to use it in different ways. And so I, I almost want to run Pleroma just because I want to be counter to the narrative out there that it's used for like, whatever. Doing your fun new socialist Pleroma instance. I'm all about it. Yeah, exactly. The progressive Pleroma home.

No, I just, I'm contrarian and I don't like ascribing one technology as evil or good. And I also, again, feel like this might be the dendrite to the core matrix instance. So I'm kind of thinking Pleroma could be what we need

for just a handful of us. Could be. Okay. Well, another reveal here. It's a triple boost. This time, 10,002 sets. And this one, I think, I mean, Alex knows what's up generally, but right here.

It's best to get your ActivityPub domain now and start the habit of posting. Mastodon sucks, but its API is becoming the S3 of ActivityPub. And it just seems like that, I mean, who knows what happens, but at least in the current

moment right now, it seems like picking a spot, getting your domain, getting your namespace and all set up so you've got an identity in the Fediverse. Is there a better time than now probably not probably not and i think alex's point that activity pub itself is what's going to become critical especially for podcasters that is i think some really solid insight and then to say it's kind of becoming mastodon itself is kind of becoming like the s3 of activity pub is an interesting insight because s3 has kind of become this universal way that people linode offers s3 object storage right

minnow offers s3 object storage for anybody that wants to deploy it on their own system like it's become a standard yeah right instead of activity pub are we just going to hear like oh yeah this is another uh mastodon compatible uh media platform that you can self-host? I think so. Maybe. Okay. Okay. I know. I lied before. It's actually a quad post. What? This has got to make him a baller. I think so. Because it's 10,003 sets this time. You see the nice little indexing going on there?

sats this time you see the nice little indexing going on there that's hold up stop the show alex you are a freaking genius he he iterated his boosts to make it clear to me what sequential order they were supposed to go in and i actually have to say it worked because i threw him in or out of order and then realized that he sequenced the sats to increment so that way i knew what order they were supposed to go in. Alex, this is why you're the podcasting 2.0 consultant. That was brilliant. Although it did get cheaper. It started out with a 1K increment

and then, well, maybe just a sat increment, which is entirely reasonable. Alex boosts in this time just to simply say that his ActivityPub user is at agates, at activitypub.agates.io. Yeah, these usernames are weird. They got an at in front of them. So this is something I got to learn. So it's at agates, and then it's at the domain, which is activitypub.agates.io.

I think the way to think about it is like with your regular, you know, with the old school Twitter world, you got the at at the front and then your username, right? with your regular, you know, with the old school Twitter world, you got the ad at the front and then your username, right? But now, because it's federated, your username, well, it's got to have its own little namespace somewhere, right? And that's where that second ad comes in. Okay. Because you can just think of it as like always a second ad with at Twitter.com,

and now we're just sort of making that a little more flexible. I love it. Okay, so I'm rethinking. Twitter is kind of like that's the public forum where all interests collide it's the general you shout it out into the void and you can maybe net more fish that don't listen to or whatever normally but like mastodon at the core of it why we care is because of activity pub we want to be participating in the federation and activity pub i really really really really appreciate you guys working with me on this because i really wasn't seeing the value i wasn't getting it i was just looking at

it as a twitter alternative and now i really appreciate something much larger and uh i definitely want us to get involved so i think that's something you'll hear from us very soon delphin we boost in with 2048 sats. Thanks for the great shows, guys. I really like how you cover a fairly wide range of distributions with some focus on more up-to-date ones. Together with Joe Rez's podcast, who seemed to focus a bit more on the stable stuff, I find the two of you cover most of what I need to know about Linux.

So keep it up. Thanks for providing these sats as well. I agree. I love it. And, you know, our buddy Joe was just on the Self-Hosted podcast. So if you are a Joe Rez fan, go check out selfhosted.show. AC Bennett dev boosts in with 400 sats. First boost. Hey, congratulations.

That's great. Thank you. They go on. Just started my first software engineer job this year after a decade as a musician and educator. Wow, that is a huge transformation. Big transition. You know, I got to say, though, at least from my own, whatever this means, personal experience working as a dev, some of the very best developers I've ever met

come from all kinds of different backgrounds. And I think creative fields like the arts are often where some folks, once you've learned the base tool set, that creativity, the open-mindedness, the ability to think outside the box, really pays dividends. So you think that some of those skills you learn

when you're kind of mastering another skill, that translates to software development? You just apply it differently? Well, I think folks think of it, and it's a huge field, right? There's a lot. Some of it is more rote, and you just take this thing and apply the principle and move on, right? But I think people think about it a little bit more like it's cut and paste when it's much closer to what the art side of the world is doing. It's sort of trying to figure out, well, I know what could work here, but what's the right solution? How do I tweak it to make it fit all the things? You know, speaking of our buddy Joe Rez and our editor Drew, both of them are very creative.

And I feel like that creativity has made them better audio editors. Right. So I think I could kind of see what you're talking about. Like Drew's an amazing audio editor, but also like an amazing network engineer. editors. Right. So I think I could kind of see what you're talking about. Like Drew's an amazing audio editor, but also like an amazing network engineer. Yeah. Yeah.

And he makes great cat songs. So it's a great point. We could have a whole segment praising Drew, and we should, but he's too cool. He'd cut it out of the final podcast anyway. Okay. Okay.

AC Bennett Dev goes on. It was a difficult change, but Linux Unplugged and self-hosted really helped me get into the tech world and have something to be excited about. Thanks for what you do. I'll boost in again when I have some more stats. Well, thank you. That's fantastic. I don't know if we can take credit for all of that, but...

No, you did the hard work. We're just here spouting nonsense. Yeah, we're just hopefully getting you motivated from time to time, but you're the one that did the actual work. So give yourself a good old pat on the back from your buddies here at the Unplugged program. We got a couple of first-time boosters as well coming into the show. I'm going to say it's Menno Arby. Let's go with that. Coming in with a row of ducks. This old duck still got it.

Finally collected some sats on fountain and i'm boosting it right here well welcome meno glad to have you hydrogrum don't know if i got that at all hydrogyrum boosted in let's go with hydrogyrum boosted in with a row of mcducks 22,222 sats this old duck still got it finally got some real sats in the wallet and wanted to say thanks for a great podcast you know i want to say thanks um this was a standout week in terms of support from our boosters really a standout week and not an easy week for me personally and to see these boosts coming in truly made the difference you guys brought daylight into my nights and you did it after all of this SBF and FTX news, you know, all of this bogus crap in the crypto industry that is

just totally out of control. And you guys saw the signal through the noise. You bought the sats and you boosted or you earn the sats and you boost it in that's really remarkable like you guys get it it's really something to have an audience that is that is smart enough to discern that signal but in the noise and if you haven't boosted in yet and you've been thinking about it why not the sats are super cheap right now so you're not like you know jumping in when they're like sixty thousand dollars for a Bitcoin. It's cheap. You can play around. We don't care that the sats aren't worth what they were a couple of months ago.

We love getting the sats. So if you haven't yet and you're in the U.S., try the Strike app or the Cash app. If you're outside the U.S., try Blue Wallet and then go grab Podverse or go grab Fountain and boost in newpodcastapps.com because this next next boost it almost made me cry when i got it and there's just there's something about the boosts that are just at the next level beyond anything i've ever experienced before and wise papa john came in with 7777 sats coming in hot with the boost and he says it's not really related to the show, but I wanted to let you guys know I just proposed to my girlfriend and she said,

yes. How awesome is that? Right? Like, that is amazing. And his first thought, I don't know if it was his first thought, but one of his first thoughts, I got to boost it

and tell the boys. Wasn't even listening to her response. He was too busy boosting. We get it. Wise Papa John, congratulations. Yeah, congrats.

Very exciting. And Mississippi Mayhem also wanted to boost in and also had a great story to share with 8,000 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. Hey, all. So if you look back at my last full boost, I want to let you know there's a lack of a certain CLI program. He's talking about Boost CLI.

You know how much we love Boost CLI. We do. We love the Boost CLI. Before you guys chastise me, though, I swear I have a good excuse. My son has recently developed an interest in free software. Maybe my influence, maybe not.

Okay, it's definitely my influence. He's only six years old, so I don't expect deep conversations around the philosophy of different licensing models, but you know what he's plenty old enough to understand concepts like altruism and sharing since then he has roped in his 10 year old cousin into building a mind test server in our house which is incredible not only is he enjoying minecraft but he's also been taking the opportunity to learn Lua.

And on that front, he says that he now has his own custom blocks and they can build that in their mind test server and they absolutely love it. And all the other things just beyond like his son going on. He's also had a Pine phone. He's been rocking the Pine phone despite its SMS issues and despite two factor authentication. He's been enjoying it and he wanted to try to boost in and tell us all about it so he says what am i going to write about i looked back at all this and i realized maybe i'll tell you guys about my dog but that'll be next week and that that was a series of boosts he sent in 8 000 each time so that was a series of boosts that came out to be three separate messages all 8 000 sats thank you very much mississippi mayhem and to round us out circus freak comes in

i know again again with 12 000 sats he says i've been a jb listener since 2007 stop it wow stop it You might just have a stalker. My wife doesn't really even know what Linux is. I've tried. She just doesn't care. But she knows your

voices. Keep up the good work. Hopefully many more decades of listening to come. We'll get her circus freak. We will.

It's like osmosis man. I think as long as we get like a laugh or two occasionally. That's all I'm going. Wow. What a week you guys very humbled by all the support. going for. Wow. What a week, you guys. Very humbled by all the support.

If you'd like to send a boost, go upgrade to a podcasting 2.0 app by going to newpodcastapps.com. And if you really, really want to impress those, you don't gots to us, but if you wants to, try out Boost CLI. It just requires that you master so many different things. No hard feelings if you don't use Boost CLI. We love getting your messages. But if feelings. If you don't use Boost CLI, we love getting your messages. But if you do, you'll get our attention. Okay, so we got a couple of picks before we run. And I felt like maybe all of the talk about Mastodon could kind of influence the picks this week. So we're a bit on theme. You know how I like to be on theme with the picks.

of influence the pics this week. So we're a bit on theme. You know how I like to be on theme with the pics. And the first one I want to recommend is maybe you're not feeling Twitter, but you still see conversations. You still see discussions going on. Someone sends you a link over there. This is for you. It's a bookmarklet that will take the current Twitter page you're looking at, and it will then regenerate a knitter link, n-i-t-t-r dot net a knitter link which is not only not twitter but kind of a cleaner simpler way to look at so much i saw you throw this in and uh it's funny i was like oh i've already been using that yeah i thought you were actually i think you found it and then you didn't tell me about it but you're like yeah i found one i think i tagged it for the show and then like it never made it into the actual show dogs.

Okay, okay. And then, yeah. So then I went and found it. I'm like, what is he using? So it's Twitter to Knitter. We'll have a link in the show notes. It's just a bookmarklet. So here's the problem, right?

You're at work. I'm not signing into my personal Twitter account on like my work machine, but sometimes you still got to like browse Twitter and they have, maybe this will change, who knows, but the least unlocked and friendly experience i mean like reddit and twitter seem to compete for that yeah and that's where like knitter is especially handy it's just none of that nonsense yeah read the tweet move on with your life also old.reddit.com which also thank god but okay so maybe you don't

want to just generate a link maybe you want to go even further maybe you want to stop using all of these commercial platforms that just want to take your information and run with it friends i want to tell you about lib redirect this is an extension you install in your browser and it redirects all the popular sites all the mainstream sites that you use to alternative front ends or back ends if they're available and this is really really fun it's really slick it's called lib redirect and it'll redirect your youtubes to your various different options like piped or individuous it'll redirect twitter to knitter. It'll redirect TikTok to, I guess

there's something called proxy talk, libreddit for Reddit, Wikipedia to Wiki less, medium to scribe, Quora to something called QWERTY. There's all kinds of options and it just does it transparently. Now, I don't know, maybe, maybe you're fine using YouTube or maybe you're fine using the main Reddit site. But isn't this an interesting experiment? I kind of challenge each one of you out there to try this. Live with this for a few days. Actually, I'd like to know how long you could live with lib redirect. What happens if you replace these centralized services with these privacy respecting alternatives? And maybe it's never been easier than a web browser that lets you just do it automatically. You go to YouTube, it'll send

you to the correct place, quote unquote correct. I'm going to try it. I'll report back next week and I'll let you guys know how it goes. But I'd also love to hear how it works for all of you out there. So this might be something you could boost in about or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. How did lib redirect work for you? you spending a week off of the big commercial services can you cut it and be honest with me because i'm going to be honest with you guys if it doesn't work for me like my i have a bad youtube habit right now if this doesn't cut it i'll let you guys know so it's lib redirect we'll have a link in the show notes for that as well. And you can put it in Firefox or your Chrome. So how is that shuffle cake server of ours doing, Wes?

I think we're testing the limits of shuffle cake right now because, well, the folks that are on there, we've been walling each other. What? You know, like wall, W. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Basically the original group messenger. Yeah. So we've been chatting that way back and forth on the box, which is a lot of fun.

I don't know who y'all are. You're all Kirk to me, but you're all the best. Someone, one of the Kirks, got the correct, figured out the clue, tried the correct password. I don't know what command exactly they ran, but because we've got so many folks in play like the same image is loopback mounted multiple times and then those are mounted and they've opened like the first volume so i'm i i'm not i said i didn't try that right because i was only one there's concurrency of one when i

was trying this over the weekend uh so i never tried like can you open the second volume if you've already opened the first volume so i suspect what needs to happen is all the like unmount all the current mounted volumes use the close volume command to shuffle cake close stuff and then try to open it again so So I'm thinking I might just reboot the system and let folks try it again. And then whoever gets there first gets the $20,000. And I don't know who all was logged in when that person posted the password that they tried or who all saw that message because, you know.

But if we just sit here and talk about it for a few seconds, we're giving them a heads up. And then before you reboot it, they'll know. Yeah, well, I'm rebooting now. All right. Here we go then. We'll find out in the post show. So if you want more Linux Unplugged, remember, we get together every single Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at jupiter.tube. And we'd love to have you join us.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And if you're in the industry, be sure you're never missing a single episode of Linux Action News. LinuxActionNews.com. Wes Payne and I sit down and tell you about the stuff in open source that actually matters every single week. Small correction. I'm usually standing when we record Linux Action News. Are you?

Yeah. I got to like totally change my mental image now. That's right. I just picture you right here, but just in your place. Wow. Okay. Blown my mind. In the meantime, links to what we talked about, linuxunplugged.com slash 485.

And of course, our subscribe stuff is over there. And then all the great shows, all the great shows at jupiterbroadcasting.com. I made it. I made it. Thank you. I tell you what, that cider really hits. Well, it was really probably the cider and the champagne. I was drinking both of them during the show. But oh my gosh, that's why we don't do this every show. I'll tell you what. Barely held it together.

We don't have OG baller booster Johnny with us every show. John, thanks for joining us. And thank you for bringing the champagne. Thanks for letting me come by. Appreciate it. Oh, yeah. Now, I saw my wife stop by. She pulled you out of the room.

Did she chastise you about something? Oh, man. She was yelling. Yeah. That sounds like Hadiyah. She's so angry all the time. No, I parked in the neighbor's spot. I didn't

know which side was your guys' got here. I was going to ask actually. Well, you don't expect a house, right? You don't expect a townhouse when you do this. Well, I think I'd heard you say it was. So I did expect that. I just didn't catch the A and B, so I didn't even realize there were two. And I wasn't sure which side to go to. I picked didn't catch the A and B, so I didn't even realize there were two.

And I wasn't sure which side to go to. I picked the right side and came here, but it didn't occur to me that the other side was another. You know what? They don't need it. You know what? They don't need it. Right? She just needs to go over there and explain to them they're podcasting right now.

That's right. You don't think they don't do a Windows podcast? Wouldn't that be amazing if they're like, rival podcast? Just to the other side of the townhouse.