LINUX Unplugged - 486: Goodbye, Google

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Chris ditches the iPhone and switches to GrapheneOS, a security and privacy-focused project that lets you take control back from Google.

Explain, we're talking really about the 486 primarily on this show, and what makes the 486 the 486? How is it different from the 386, Chad? Again, it's several different factors. The 386 had a budget of about 350,000 transistors to work with. The 486 has 1.2 million. That's four times as many. What that allows is a large amount of memory to be put on board the processor. It allows certain functional units to be replicated.

Instead of having to compute addresses one step at a time, you can compute the addresses all at once. One thing 486 does is a lot of speculative execution. It may not know what has to come next, but it does it anyway just in case that has to be done. Speculative execution. What could go wrong with that? 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. Well, coming up on the show today, I think I actually have the key to de-Googling my life without compromise. I sincerely mean it. I'll tell you about my weekend with Graphene OS, the new device I've got that I loaded it on, and how I'm moving away from the iPhone and Google, slowly but surely. And I think it's actually something anybody could approach if they're properly motivated. Then we'll wrap it out, talk a little bit of NextCloud, then we'll get to some boosts, some feedback, some picks, and a heck of a lot more.

It's a really big show today. Hopefully not two hours long, but let's get started by bringing in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris.

Hello, Chris. Hello, Brent. Well, hello. I hope everybody had a good weekend. I know I did. I really, really used the snot out of Tailscale. So go say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. It's a mesh VPN protected by Wirecard.

We love it. It'll change your game. I'll tell you a little bit more about how I'm using Tailscale in a whole new way now. Go over there, say good morning at Tailscale.com. And if you get a chance, tell them the unplugged program sent you. This is a special episode 486 we're actually going to do a whole retro thing for the episode which would have been kind of obvious still kind of wish we would have done it but i ended up getting a real bug uh up my

bonnet as they say after that that google story about the dad that had his account information handed over to the police when he took a picture of his son's medical issue using telemedicine or actually the mom took the picture on the iphone send it to the dad the dad's phone auto backed it up to google photos google photos flagged it as child porn suspended his account sent all of his 15 years of account history to the police automatically discontinued his google 5 plan and um is not letting him back on the platform this is weeks ago everybody's heard this story but it's really stuck with me it i still think about it today because that very scenario could hit me i use telemedicine i've got three young kids. I have until that story had my photos auto backing up.

And I know I just since then have been thinking perhaps the calculus about giving my data to Google in return for good services is changing now. And maybe it's not the deal it once was. And that is kind of colliding with the fact that a lot of self-hosted services are getting better and better that provide alternatives yeah that's for sure so when we went on our road trip on the west coast tour when i was at listener jeff's house we sat down and we installed graphing os on my pixel 3 old pixel 3 and i went in with low expectations. I'm not a huge Android fan to begin with. I switched to the iPhone at iPhone 7, and I've kind of just happily done so.

I was all in. I liked it after the iPhone 7. I said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do the subscription thing, and I'm going to get an iPhone every year, and I have. I have an iPhone 14. I just pay a monthly price,

and Apple sends me a phone. It's a lot of iPhones. It's a lot of iPhones, and I have not been tempted to go back to Android. And typically you keep, you know, you generally keep up with the Android side. You buy some of them to have as secondary devices. You follow the news. I have.

I've dipped in. I've kept my Android device up to date. I've kept my Pixel up to date. I've tried a phone, given it to the kids, you know, that kind of stuff. But it just, the Apple stuff stuck. But now that calculus is changing as well. I think Apple is going to have a harder and harder time, especially for the next couple of years, selling $1,100, $1,300 phones. And as they sell fewer and fewer phones,

especially because they're not doing anything crazy now, right? It's like we're kind of past the rapid innovation stage. Sort of a little maximum hill here where nothing's changing too fast. And so unless they've got some radical camera upgrades, you know, they're probably not going to sell a lot of phones. And as a result, especially since they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, they're going to try to monetize in other ways. believe Apple's plan to monetize will be to try to sell more ads, more services to their end users, to try to milk developers for more of their revenue. They're going to have more and more cuts and they're just going to double down on everything that makes the Apple experience poor. They'll have great hardware, but they're going to have all these downsides as they look to monetize their massive user base. The deal with Apple

originally with the iPhone was you buy expensive hardware and then they leave you alone. Right. That's what they're selling you. You're buying the hardware. That's not the deal anymore. They're changing it. Even if you bought the expensive hardware, they're changing it. And we document this on Coda Radio and I follow it pretty closely and I can see the direction Apple's going in. They're basically becoming their own little local Google. In fact, the new app store in the latest version of iOS literally tracks every single thing you do in the app and streams the data back to Apple. So it's like, sure, it's fine that they're not collecting information unless it's Apple. Then they're collecting all the information, but I'm just supposed to be okay with that.

And that works about as long as you can keep trusting apple but i like that nice hardware and i like that at least it's not tied to google and that i can dip into the google services i want and avoid the other services but it has that apple dependency and um that's where graphene os seemed really, really appealing to me. They pitched themselves as the private secure OS. It's built on top of Aesop or AOSP, right? I always say it wrong. I like the way Aesop sounds, but it's not how you say it. I think you got to lean in at this point.

You just pronounce things however you like. Somebody tell me I'm doing it wrong. Graphene OS has taken this approach of changing a lot of really small things and some major things, I'll get to that, has taken this approach of changing a lot of really small things and some major things, I'll get to that, that really add up to what, to me, seems like a ton of common sense improvements to Android to make it more secure, make it more private,

make it more anonymous. And as a result, I believe it improves the security of the OS and the apps running on top of it. And they support pixels. They just focus on pixels. That's good and bad. It means, you know, you got to buy a pixel phone. Right.

Not super accessible to, you know, your family member with a random Android phone they picked up. The good side is they're really focused on good hardware support. And so within a month of the Pixel 7 being out, Graphene OS had an official image for it. You're not waiting around years. And they support all the way back to the 4a, up to the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. And you can put it on like the Pixel 3 like you and I have. It will work, but with just a limited set of updates, they disclose all that information. But like if you've got a Pixel 3 and it's not getting updates anymore,

and you just want to put a modern Android on there, you can load Graphene OS. And there's so many features that I think really make this stand out than, say, Calix or Lineage or some of the other Android alternatives that are out there. I'm not an expert on any of these, but I'll tell you the ones, the features that I like, that I appreciate in Graphene OS, and I'll link you to the features overview page. I encourage everyone to read that because it just gets me so damn excited about what this project's working on. But here's the ones that are a real game changer for me.

When you install Graphene OS, it's a very vanilla Android experience. And you turn on just the Google stuff you want. There's no Google search. There's no Play services. There's no Play Store. There's no Maps. It's a real bare Android experience. But they have this Graphene os compatibility layer and they bundle a little app that lets you manage all of this that installs

the official google play app and play api no hacking no tweaking and it is fully sandboxed it gets absolutely no special access or privileges on your system. So you treat it like a normal Android application. And you have this profiles concept on Graphene OS. So like if you have a work profile and a home profile and you put the play services and stuff in your work profile, it's not available to the other profile. And traditionally on Android, all that stuff runs with system level privileges.

On Graphene, it runs with user level privileges, which does mean like if you want it to run in the background all the time, you actually have to go in and tell the OS to allow that. It doesn't just get to do that by default. That's how I prefer it. But I could understand people who want push notifications all the time and stuff. You might want to set to run all the time,

but what, since you get the actual Google play app and the actual Google play API, there's a pretty broad range of compatibility it's not a hundred percent but um google maps works the pixel buds app to pair pixel buds works okay so that means you can use pixel buds um i actually the reason why i ended up getting play services was because i needed that to activate my eSIM fully. But it can do something as low-level as that without requiring system-level permissions. That seems like a pretty gosh darn good sign.

It's nice. Have you had anything that's not worked with the compatibility layer? Oh, good question. I know banking apps can be an issue for some. And there is a community-led wiki of the apps that work. My bank apps work. One of those, try it and see. Maybe it maybe it won't i mean there's a few things oh yeah the big one android auto doesn't

work oh that stinks um i gotta i gotta be honest that's hard because that's really how i work with everything i prefer carplay even but I'll take Android Auto. But I'm working on that. You know what? I'm figuring that out. I'll tell you about that in a moment, but I am figuring that out. The other nice thing about having the sandbox method,

instead of like a hack to get these on here, you really have full, you can just remove them if you don't want them after a bit. But it does also mean that in-app purchases work. And if you want, unintended upgrades work. And the Play Store, it operates more like F-Droid. So it's kind of like on the same level of F-Droid.

It doesn't get to just run rampant. Like when you're in there and you install an app, you get that more traditional, like, do you actually want to install this app prompt? Oh, wow. Because it's just, again, a regular app and it doesn't have the system level permissions to bypass that request. And so you're managing these Google apps at the level that everybody else has to play at, which feels a lot better to me and a lot safer. And so I've dipped into a couple of things and I think I'm going to experiment with replacing Google Maps with here maps. Okay. See how that goes. I don't know. really i'm not i'm not loving that but when i look at the team over there i see a set of really sharp developers and this is another thing i evaluated

you know that lock screen bypass issue that came out for android in november yeah graphing os team found that back in january and fixed graphing os and unfortunately and this kind of gives you an idea of the dedication of these developers, because the developer was implementing the fix and testing it for Graphing OS, he did not complete the request by Google in time to get the bug bounty. And he focused on getting the patches out for Graphing OS and missed out on like $70,000. But that's how dedicated these guys are and gals to this project. But that's how dedicated these guys are and gals to this project. And, you know, it's neat that they're finding this stuff and reporting it to Google as well and getting ahead of it before Google is in some cases. And then you combine that.

And again, you need to read the features overview. You combine that with all the tweaks they've made to the underlying OS that sometimes make things a little more inconvenient. Like an example of the Pixel Buds. Okay. And I don't think you'd have a problem with this, Wes. I mean, honestly, my goal here is to convince you to try it you can't just like open the app and open the case on the pixel buds and all of a sudden they just see each other and it's just like magic i actually had to go into like the bluetooth settings and discover it and then pair it that way and then switch back over to the app it's like sometimes there's just a few things that

are just a little more secure by default that require like you have to oh no i have to enable that permission uh yeah you got to take an active role in yeah allowing that to happen just a little bit more of that but i don't feel like somebody like yourself or you know our listeners would have a problem with that or you know yeah brent or anybody in the mom room i think that'd be fine we prefer it that way as long as i mean yeah you get to a place then the uh you know the earbuds work fine so for me um i wanted it to not be a compromised experience so all right take the that's my that's my new phone i got there i uh i put it back in the box just so you could see the whole experience i've had it out of the box and i've been using it but i reboxed

my pixel 7 pro that i picked up on a black friday deal and i've put graphing os on there i'll talk about that process here in a moment but i just know, wanted you to see the premiumness of the product. It's nice. This is a big, sharp-looking screen. See how it feels in the hand. See how it feels in the hand there. It's got the under-screen thumbprint reader, and I think it has some sort of face recognition,

although I don't know if I have that working or not. The screen is lovely. Oh, it's very nice. Yeah. 120 hertz, too. It's heavy, but not too heavy. No, it has a nice, I mean, it's very nice yeah 120 hertz too it's heavy but not too heavy no it has a nice i mean it's very smooth yeah yeah performance has been fantastic look at this uh camera bar yeah yeah it's a serious camera bar that thing is no joke right there and it's really high metal quality too it's a glass back so i'm gonna get a case but i wanted to try it without a case for a

bit lovely bezels as well yeah and the, the edges of the screen curve a little bit, and that's actually kind of a pleasant UI trick. This feels like a premium product. It's nice, and it's running Graphene OS. So you just have a very smooth setup process with Graphene OS, and I have to give the project prompts for this. They have a web-based installer. You need to be using a Chromium-based browser of any variety, but it needs to be Chromium. And you need to go into the system and turn on developer options and turn on USB debugging and things like that. And I believe you need to have ADB installed. I already had it installed. So you can do it from Chrome and your Linux box. I did it from my Nix laptop and did the web-based installer.

It goes through each one of the processes. Once you get it back into the bootloader area, it reflashes it. It relocks it all up for you. It locks it down again so it's not left exposed to get some sort of bootloader hack or something like that. That is fancy. And you're running Graphene OS. And I've already done one automatic system update, and it just gets it through the standard upgrade process. So you're feeling pretty secure about like just having it operationally as a phone.

Something you can depend on. I think the breakthrough thing for me and why something hasn't really clicked for me is that build it up approach. Super clean, really secure by default Android. And I can just add a couple of things. I'm not at the OS level. I'm not signed into a Google account. I went two days before I even had the Google search app installed, and I thought, well, I'll see if the voice search works.

I'm curious to know if it works with Graphene OS. I went several days before I even had that. That is a very different Android experience. Very different. Because, you know, I had to use its stock for a few minutes to make sure all the firmware was up to date and uh i thought maybe it'd be better to activate the e-sim with the stock os but i had to just reactivate anyways but anyways um there's like 50 apps pre-installed on that thing and they all have essentially the same icon it's horrible it's just like so i can't even tell any of them

apart it's a blue circle isn't it yeah a white and blue circle yeah yeah it's it's very obnoxious and the graphene os project feels much more focused and they're really heads down on supporting the pixels which means you get just top-notch support and you can go on something like swappa and you can find a pixel 4a for like 160 bucks and then you can put graphene os on there boom and now i have something I kind of would feel safe putting a mobile Bitcoin wallet on. And I'm thinking, could I use this for my family? Like, could we all use FluffyChat for our family chat? Yeah.

And could we use Graphene OS devices? And to me, there is one clear hole that I think our audience has to just come up with a solution for. And that is obviously all the syncing you get, your contacts, your calendar, your photos, all the backend services that are just table stakes for smartphones. You need a replacement for that. And if you're doing this to be private and secure, it needs to be something that's self-hosted. So I'll tell you about my solution for that.

Linode.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. And it's a great way to support the show while you're checking out fast, reliable cloud hosting. Linode has the best support in the business too, and the best performance. And on top of all of that, it's like the perfect perfect trifecta they're 30 to 50 percent less than the hyperscalers out there that just have like these borg-like platforms that you know they want to assimilate you and their performance doesn't even match linode and today linode has 11 data centers you can choose from and they're going to add another dozen next year so they're they're going to more than double their current infrastructure i've shopped around i've seen some of these like suspiciously cheap vps's out there and uh you know i've watched

them over the years too i figure like i could run a system there sometimes for a little while and of course in my definition i'm talking about infrastructure i want to last for years and i just the math has never worked out. When you look at Linode's pricing, when you look at their reliability, when you look at their track record of nearly 19 years of a fantastic product, and you look at the performance you get, and performance matters to me. I just, I can't make those other guys work. It's just Linode. I just set up a sync thing box again. I've done this before in the past, and because I have a new home server,

I wanted to move a whole bunch of data. And for whatever reason, thanks Comcast, for whatever reason, sync thing has to be, I guess, relayed when it's transferring files to my system at home on Starlink. So the way I get around that is I set up a sync thing on Linode. I have everything sync from the studio to that Linode. And then from that Linode, I sync to my machine at home and that goes direct. And so it's super fast. It's as fast as my connection can take it. And I still have the studio system on the Comcast connection. I still have it participating.

It's still in there sharing the files it's just a small little trickle compared to the fire hose i get from linode and it's just so useful to just spend i mean it probably i'm not even kidding you guys five minutes maybe maybe because it's just a it's a, it's a Docker pull away to get sync thing. And, uh, you know, I already had the Linode set up. It was just amazing. Like it just was like, Oh, this is so obviously the way to go. And once you start using Linode, you just discover more and more uses for it that just makes so much sense.

And you wonder how did you do it any other way before? Why? So go try it out because that a hundred dollars gives you a chance to really see what I'm talking about. Like, that's actual a good chunk of change. You can really try out the different services for $100. See what you think and support the show. Go see why they keep sponsoring because so many in our audience have tried it and loved it. Maybe they're on to something. Linode.com slash unplugged.

All right, you've got me interested. I would like a little less Google in my life. Maybe not, you know, maybe not no Google. What do I do if I'm still syncing to Google Photos? I definitely am still using Google Contacts for a bunch of stuff that I should clean up anyway. I do need some syncing in my life. What did you do?

Yeah, I definitely need to do some cleanup as well. I feel like this is a key thing, not just for me. I could probably make local contacts and calendar work. But I don't want to live in fear that I lose my phone and there we go. That seems crazy. And if you're going to do contacts cleanup, wouldn't you rather do it with a keyboard and mouse than tapping it on your phone for two hours?

I mean, really, that's what got me hooked on Google Contacts in the first place, right? It was early days. I was like, oh, I can just sync this right to my phone. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if I was going to try to make a family member use this instead of their iPhone, I got to make sure their stuff's covered too. And so I think for people like us that have that kind of those requirements, I think you have to heavily consider rolling your own NextCloud as a dependency to go into Graphene OS. I don't think it's required. I mean, hell, you could sync to Google for some reason if you wanted to.

But with DAVX5, the app, and NextCloud, you can sync all of your CalDAV, all your CardDAV stuff, to NextCloud, to your Android device. And it's, it's so nice. It is, it's powerful. I, like you, needed to clean up my contacts and I felt like this was the time to do it.

So to be able to sit down on my NextCloud instance and clean it all up there, and then a couple of minutes later, I looked on my phone and it was all done. And I was like, God, that worked. It worked so, so well. And then with couple minutes later, I looked on my phone, and it was all done. And I was like, God, that worked. It worked so, so well. And then with Davix, you can sync your settings there. But then also, Graphene OS just semi-recently added NextCloud as one of its backup targets.

So you can do a full phone backup to NextCloud every night. Right there, that might just cross the line. That might just really seal the deal and you know um on ios and before on my pixel 3 when i was trying graphing os for the first time i was using that handy photosync app to back my and i still have it installed it's still a nice app but honestly if you just go all in on next cloud and it's a little better on android you can just use the auto next cloud photo backup and i've been so i've been using that over the weekend i turned that on and it's pretty good.

I haven't used it for a while, but you're right. I should probably give it a proper go. It does that thing where it like detects like a new directory. I hate that so much. Yeah. So you gotta like deal with that. Maybe irrationally.

So no, I don't like it either. But the other day it's like, Hey, do you want to back up the telegram photos directory? And I was like, why, why not?

Maybe I do actually. Sometimes I get great kid photos or something. So I was like, all not maybe i do actually sometimes i get great kid photos or something so i was like all right yeah back that up so sometimes it's not so bad um but now i'm just letting next cloud do that automatically and it has controls in there for about like wait till you're charging wait till you're on wi-fi and so just using next cloud with dav x5 for that type of syncing and then using next cloud for the graphing os backup and the photo backup it just made next cloud like the missing piece for this and so what i decided to do was install next cloud using you guys know me the linux server io docker image he didn't use the

stamp package no although i might as well because i'm using a sqlite database you can shame me about that later because i know i'm going to regret that but i wanted it really simple and what i decided to do is only put that next cloud in my tail scale network oh hey ah so you can't get to it unless you are on my tail scale mesh land and of course i've put tail scale which is continuously connected on the Pixel 7. So it's always on Tailscale, and then it's doing all of its syncing back to the Nextcloud over Tailscale. And that's when I realized I probably could have just put this Nextcloud on Tailscale anywhere. You know, I wanted it on my local network, but whatever. And that's working

surprisingly well. I did a proof of concept on ios and it works as long as you remember to relaunch the tailscale app once or twice a day of course but on android no problem which has been nice it's been kind of a nice change of pace you really get to embrace that like mesh flat network right like yeah if you have your own thing you don't have to fuss especially since this next cloud like you're not using it you can use NextCloud for a lot of different things, right? Like you could have it be a more public sort of, here, get access to files or a public place to view stuff. Not your use case.

Why have it on the public internet at all? Why at all? Right? And so that was my big breakthrough. I was like, well, now I don't mind putting my data on there because you can't even talk to it unless you're in my network. It's beautiful. And the Tailscale app works so damn well on Android android and the notifications are so much better on android you know there's a lot of them

but you can manage them and minimize them and some you could just hide and like once you start setting that up it's a lot better but having this sync to next cloud in the background has been like the final peace of mind i could you know drop that phone in a boating accident and you know god forbid all my bitcoin was on it's all gone now and i dropped it in the ocean and i can just get a new pixel and sync my contacts back you did you do a lot of negligent boating yeah you know me and the boating so i'm blown away i knew with the pixel three i was like okay this is pretty good like when i first tried it on the older device i was like this is better than i expected my days of android roaming were a little rough. Camera didn't work so well.

Oh, that's another thing. I got the camera app from the Play Store. The Graphene OS camera gets the minimum job done. But, like, 70% of the reason I bought the phone was for the camera. Yeah, I noticed they said, like, a security-focused camera or something like that. Yeah, and it's getting better. It's an open-source project, and they're continuing to update it, but you can also, this is kind of the benefit actually. It's Google has modularized so much of their apps and they've just loaded all up in the play store

that you can pretty much pick and choose what you want from the Android experience from the play store. And so I just got the camera app and now I have both. And if, you know, I want to use the toys, I launched the camera app and I just want to take a basic picture. I have the other app. It's fine. Um, and Oh, another compromise for the better.

I think, uh, you can load Google assistant on there and you can manually invoke it if you want, but there is no like remote. Oh, you can't just yell at your phone. You cannot yell at the phone.

Not even with the pixel buds. There is that stuff ain't happening. There's no always listening that ain't happening. There's no always listening. That ain't happening. And so you got to give up that. However, I actually find that to be a nice compromise because if you want to do voice search, you can manually invoke it by launching the app

or probably setting some sort of macro, but it's not always monitoring, which seems kind of perfect to me. And there's probably a lot of folks that would, will take that bargain, right? Yeah. Especially if you don't use the voice assistant at all, then... It's even better, right?

Yeah. So it's very easy to get it going. I do heavily recommend NextCloud. I think that would be important, but I don't know if it's necessary if you have other ways of syncing. Brent, I know you've been a Lineage user forever. I know you've looked at Graphene a little bit. Do you have any questions or any thoughts on comparing the two? Yeah, I have been running this exact solution, Chris, for about four years now. I think maybe

you and I haven't talked about it enough, but I'm super happy to hear you found it. But one of my first questions is, why now? Like, what made you shift now? I know you mentioned that article, but I'm sure you've been thinking about those kind of implications before then. But I'm curious, is like, do you feel like the technology is there now or that there are some of those solutions in place that make you maybe not miss more things? more things it's several things the pixel 7 is a decent phone i haven't really been very compelled by the other pixel devices the pixel 6 almost got me um but then i started hearing reports of data connectivity issues from the audience and i thought i'll wait and then the 7 came out and i was like that's a pretty nice phone i might pick that up when it's used. But then they had a Black Friday sale. So it was like 300 bucks off. That's a pretty good deal. So I was like, OK, all right, I'll consider that. So there's that element, the hardware and the right price at the right time. The other element I think that is a factor is that I kind of see a trajectory of Apple becoming more and more customer hostile. I think the Apple fans won't

want to admit it, but I think it's happening. It's a shame because obviously they're really innovating on the hardware level, especially on the Mac side right now. But I think from a services side, they're just going to become more hostile. And so my thinking is, is get ahead of it and begin building a lifeboat that gets me away from Google and Apple and create a platform that I could move my family to. And that's where I see what I'm doing here. That's why I bothered setting up the next cloud first. I got the back end infrastructure and the syncing all figured out first, then put, then executed on the hardware. And that just happened to line up with Black Friday. But also at the end of this, I want to be able to say next year when,

you know, the next round of phones come out, I want to say, yes, I am going to get, you know, a pixel for Hadea now instead of an iPhone. I want to be able to make that shift.

And then the kids, you know, they all want phones and they're asking for phones every year. And it's like, do I, you know, do I bring them in on iOS or do I, is this my opportunity to kind of like put our family on something that respects our privacy

and our security a little more and doesn't feed into some kind of machinery. And so we're, all those things are just sort of coming together for me right now. And I have been resistant to running another NextCloud instance, but a little MVP container that two or three of us use behind tail scale actually might just be the ticket. And I really picture Google like this giant evil octopus that has been putting its tentacles around more and more aspects of my life. And they almost got me with the Google Assistant and the Nest stuff. And I, you know, thankfully, I've pivoted out all that and avoided that tentacle. But, you know, as Apple begins to frustrate me more, where else am I going to go? I got to come up with a solution and I want to come up with a solution that I can

recommend to the family and a solution I can recommend to the audience. And my feeling is the sooner we stop sending signals in to the data collection machine, the better. And so I'm taking this leap. We'll see. It's been my daily driver for the extended weekend so far. I, uh, I'm, you know,

I know I'll miss, like I have the Apple watch. I'd really miss that. That's a big, yeah. And I also have family, a large part of my family. It's all on iMessage.

Right. And that's, I don't know what I'm going to do about that. That might be why I keep the watch, because maybe that's how I do iMessage. I don't know. It's not a good experience. None of that stuff's ideal,

but that's what I'm signing up for to figure out, so that way I can make it easier for them. Now, JMac in our matrix hat has a good question, which is, does this DevEx Next cloud setup work on iPhones? And I think I can clarify there in saying that it's an Android-specific application that allows the Android system to see your NextCloud shares natively, which is really, really nice. But that question actually brings up another point for me, and I'm curious chris and wes you as well on your input i don't think you need to wait till you get a pixel and a graphene os phone to start moving your stuff uh like there's a multi-transition method you can use here so instead of you know

sitting down for an extended weekend chris like you did well actually you've been working on this for months including during our trip but you don't need to like revamp everything all at once. You can, you know, bring up a next cloud server and just move your contacts over and play with that for a little bit and gain some confidence in that system while also having, you know, the backup of your traditional system in place. while also having, you know, the backup of your traditional system in place. And once you get a little bit happy with how that's working, move another thing, you know, move your photos there as well. Or like try a few, you know, if you have an Android phone already, try a few applications that are alternatives, like maybe through F-Droid or something. And so I feel like you can make that transition a little smoother and not necessarily feel like you need to do it all at once and take a huge risk by doing that. Is that something you would recommend, Chris? Or

do you think the whole all-in approach is maybe the better one? I can see it. I could see merits of both, to be honest with you. On iOS, you can download a sync profile from Nextcloud. You got to dig around in the settings, but you'll see it. There's a little profile link there, and then you can load that into iOS to use it as the backend for syncing. In my case, I decided to make it extra hard using tail scale, of course. You know, I had to, yeah, iOS was tricky with that. But I think you're right. I think your overall points is dead on Brent.

Like you could move over just bits and pieces. So for me, it is contacts and photos. I don't have a bulletproof solution for calendar yet. I imagine I'm going to use next cloud calendar, but I don't really know how to do that because I'm not really the one that puts most of the events on my calendar. It's my wife. Yeah.

And like, so is there a calendar app she could put on her iPhone where she could manage my calendar on next cloud and then things would show up on my phone or I'm not quite sure I think I need to figure out for both Android and iOS and I would love suggestions please boost or send them in uh calendar management apps that are essentially a front end to the NextCloud calendar stuff so I've done contacts photos and I basically have a blank calendar so So I'm syncing a blank calendar. And I think what's next for me is going to be Maps. I'm going to try here Maps.

I know you have that crazy OpenStreetMap program, Brent, that you use. We'll see. I know you can use Google Maps in incognito mode, but that just sounds really annoying because you've got to invoke it every single time. What do you mean? Google Maps actually has an incognito mode. Did you know? I more meant, what's the operational cost of that invoking every time? Well, I mean, I think it means you're not going to have,

when you start typing and it's someplace you've been, it's in the dropdown, all the saved stuff. And the thing I really, truly want from a good map is that. No tapping, go home. Yeah. And I want thing I really, truly want from a good map is that... No tapping go home. Yeah. And I want to remember locations and save locations, and then I want to have access to that for years. So you want something that you can stuff some data into

and have, but just feel a little better about them having it. Yeah. Oh, and then the other thing I'm replacing, and I've just roughly begun, is something Hedie and I actually use, is we use location tracking for each other, just so we can check in where somebody's at so she can see if I'm still at the studio and we use find my right now of course Google offers a service for that but the whole point is not to do that kind of stuff so I'm using phone track with next cloud right now um that might be my ultimate solution

currently we are just using home assistant. So home assistant provides a lot of nice functionality as well. And one of them is location information. So India can just launch the home assistant app and check my location at home assistant. So I have a temporary solution for that, but I don't know if that's a long-term solution. Um, I think you'd love it. I think you would. I think you'd feel good.

First of all, you got a pixel three. I've been there and some of the stuff that just didn't run very good or was a little crashy on my Pixel 3 has been flawless on the 7. No problem. The screen is fantastic. I can tell that already. great feeling of having this stuff and not being tied to Google. And what it does is it flips the relationship to where I feel like it should have always been, where I'm choosing to use Google and I'm choosing how much access they get. Yeah, that part seems really nice. You know, I don't know, I don't necessarily need absolutely no Google, but on a regular Android phone, even on a Pixel, you really don't get any say. And there's some really sharp security folks that I follow who really have gotten behind Graphene OS.

And I know KalyxOS is really well-respected as well, but the Graphene OS stuff, all the changes, plus the way they handle the Play sandboxing, I feel like is the real nice one-two combo. Okay, I got a next question for you, Chris. scene i feel like is the real nice one two combo okay i got a next question for you chris when do you think you'll feel comfortable with deleting some of your google services like information even possibly would you even consider getting rid of your account that's tricky because some jb stuff is tied into it um some back end like like the youtube account is tied into my stuff oh yeah fair enough but conceptually yeah that's my goal is basically to minimize it as much as possible gmail would be hard but not impossible um could do that i probably should have jumped on that proton mail black friday sale that'd be nice you know the one that's really really hard for me is youtube

i have new pipe or whatever that app is and like you got to do like a whole account export to like import your, your watch subscriptions and references. That's tricky. Yeah. I've got, I've built up a YouTube habit. I'm with you there. It's fountain has helped break it a little bit,

but man, I just, so that's a tricky one for me. And I like it on the TV too. I like the YouTube. I just, I got YouTube people I've been following for years. It's a tricky one for me. And I like it on the TV, too. I like the YouTube on, I just, I got YouTube people I've been following for years. It's just tricky.

I suppose one benefit, at least, is just the more things you shift, the less your remaining Google account has any, you know, it's just a worse and worse representation. It still has some of the historical stuff, sure. Less and less signal. Yeah, I think the email would be a big one. And you'll have, you're no longer,

like, if something bad happened, it could still be, you happened, it could still be detrimental, especially from the business connection, but it would not be nearly as bad. It's just like a complete lockout of your digital life. You got it. All right, let's tidy a few things up around here. In fact, let's start with that geocache. We've got some great news in that regard. Yeah, Jared and his family went out searching for geocaches again, if you remember. They tried at the Folsom geocache where, I guess, that one vanished.

Someone found it or something like that. But they were traveling for Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving, and just happened to plan a detour to the Grants Pass geocache that we dropped. And they found it. That's so great. I love that it was them too. You know, Jared and his family, they've worked hard for a geocache. And if I recall, Brent, you were concerned that particular geocache might be a little hard to find.

Yeah, that geocache was, let's just call it a giant pile of boulders or, you know, hundreds of feet worth of boulders. And we hid the geocache under one of them. We made it sort of obvious if you were standing within the boulders, let's just put it that way. But it was, you know it's not the easiest search so you'd have to work at a little bit and jared was great sent some photos and a video of them searching and finding it with kids and it was just so great so jared mentioned that he took a few of the stickers and a little mini computer that we threw in there, but left some of the swag in the geocache for someone else to find. Well, that's nice.

Yay. So the geocache is still there. Mm-hmm. That, okay. Really cool, Jared. That's very cool of you to do. We've been talking about this internally, and I think our thought process is like a little bit before the spring, we get this rolling again, A little bit before the spring, we get this rolling again, hoping that our community can help us with a website where we could kind of give instructions, hints, list where they're at roughly, like an index of that, but also a form that people could fill out to request that JB send them a geocache swag capsule that they could then deploy in their area and then add it to the list on the website.

So that's, I'm hoping something we can offer next year. We'll see. I love it. This is so great. And it lights everybody up. Like, when these came in, I sent them around. I know you guys sent them around. It's pretty cool. So congratulations, Jared. I'm glad you guys found that.

You can go find our other little geocache out there in Las Vegas. It's Alex. He's at AWS Reinvent this week. You can go say hi. I think he's at the airport right now. Or maybe he's boarding as we record to go to Vegas. Oh, that's great. And he just got his six out. So hopefully he won't end up catching anything. So go say hi to Alex. He'd love to see you. All right. We have some baller boosts to get to. And I mean, baller boosts.

So thank you, everybody. We want to get to those at this point in the show as a big thank you. Our first one is Zach Smith, who boosted in with 555,555 sats. Wow. That is impressive. 55 sats. Wow. That is impressive.

And they just said, thanks for the great show week after week. Cheers to a healthy, independent podcast network long into the future. And P.S., lighten some PETA. Hopefully it improves over time. Yeah, it definitely can be. That's why when Zach's and others boost in, it's like, wow, not only did you take the time to do this and there's real value attached to this, but sometimes it's not easy. And depending on the trajectory you take, it can be very obnoxious. So thank you, Zax. That was a record setter right there.

I think that's the largest boost we've ever gotten to the show. I'm pretty sure it is. And it definitely put us up on the charts, too. So big, huge thank you. True Grits came in with 149,312 sats. Keep the change, you filthy animal. These sats are for the hard G in gnome. And by that I mean pronounced genome. Just kidding, I really like gnome better. As for Dylan's laptop, why not just boring old Ubuntu? On an LTS, why not just boring old Ubuntu?

On an LTS, possibly. His needs don't seem that high. Or the distro he had before Fedora Elementary? Keep the extra sats. Let's beat that other podcast. And I just want to hear Janeway again. There's coffee in that nebula. So I think, Truegrips, you just bought the pronunciation.

So now it is Genome. Genome. It's Genome. Officially, the Genome desktop environment has been changed to Genome here on the show. If you hate that, well, then you need to beat 149,000 stats. I'm looking forward to Genome. I'll picture Captain Janeway every time we see it and say it. So I love it.

Gene Bean, who's a frequent booster, came in with a big old baller boost of 115,000 sats. Hey, Rich Lobster! All right, guys, here's the problem. John A. used inside information because he was in studio last week to mess up mess up the pronunciation okay well there he got it it is now pronounced gif on the show and at 115 000 sats i assume gene bean did the accounting we will now officially pronounce it gif on the show should we pronounce it gene bean then i think so yeah gene bean so thank Geenbean. And then some guy named Chris Last boosted in with a weak 30,000 sats last week. I know. Jeez, rude.

Trying to pronounce gnome, gnome. But Geenbean beat him. So we're going with Jif. And we're going with, and then, what is it? God dang it. We're going with Jif and Genome. What have we done? What have we done? What have we done?

Let's get out of here. Let's stop talking about this. D3XBot boosted in. Says, long-time listener, first-time booster with 100,000 sats. Keep the change, you filthy animal. Just wanted to pop in and say hi while watching the live stream. Thanks, Bot. Appreciate it.

Marchie boosted in with 69,000 sats. Hey, Rich Lobster! 69,420. appreciate it oh marchie boosted with 69 000 sats 69 420 uh i get it uh marchie says here's a contribution to beat that other pod and let's boost up in the ranking enjoy the sats the amount was chosen at random totally 69 420 totally well it worked you crazy generous bastards between november 17th and the 24th linux unplugged was the number one boosted show on the entire platform we were in the top 50 self-hosted there at number nine heck yeah two Two JB shows in the top 10. And you know, I am so grateful for you guys because a Linux podcast will never be in the top rankings of iTunes. It'll never be in the top rankings of Spotify or iHeartRadio or any of those podcast platforms. It will never. It just doesn't, those platforms don't work that way. They't cater to those listeners but this is actually

a platform i really do care about and it's incredible to be ranking so highly on one that i personally do care about and what really stands out to me is this is genuine signal people voted with value and they supported the show in the process and they supported the show in the process. It's not downloads-based. It's sats-based. And that is real, genuine votes that signal. Like, it came out a few weeks ago.

iHeartRadio has been buying ads embedded in mobile games that download their shows in the background to boost their download numbers on the charts. So they're gaming the charts by embedding MP3 downloads in mobile apps. And that signal just doesn't work, right? Because a million people could download a dumb show. But here we are. When people have to vote with real value

and we are in this peer-to-peer lightning payment system, which all runs on top of Linux, by the way, there we are, number one. It's pretty awesome. And it means a lot to us. So thank you for the support, especially to our ballers. We'll get to more boosts in the show. I just want to say a big thank you to the ballers this week.

And of course, to Zach, who came in with just a 555,555 boost. I just can't even believe our channels took that. But they did because people have been generously contributing and we've been reinvesting that into our channel capacity. So thank you everybody. That's really awesome. And one of the things we're going to do this week and for the next, I think for the next couple of weeks,

I think I'll leave it in there for a couple of weeks is we're going to do a 10% split to the graph, you know, as project. And then I'm also going to personally match up to 120,000 sats in that contribution. So I hope over a couple of weeks, as you boost in and support the show, we'll give a 10% split to the Graphene OS project to help them invest in future development as well. So I'm very, very grateful.

And we have another possible pronunciation we need to sort out. very grateful and we have another possible pronunciation we need to sort out um apparently it's been noted that every now and then debian gets pronounced as debian on the show and uh i believe it's spelled d-e-b-i-a-n i have heard of that project before and uh amanzer says you guys we gotta get this sorted we gotta get this right i can't listen anymore we have to have this figured out uh brent in one episode called it both Debian and Debian in about a 30 second time span. I've only heard one other person call it that. Maybe it's a thing, but we need to sort this out.

So, Brent, do you want to put an opening bid on the pronunciation of Debian? See, I'm not convinced I know which way it should be. I mean, Joe has a very strong opinion on what I should think is the right way to do it. Oh, I know how it's pronounced.

It's also not pronounced genome, you know? Hey, hey, I mean, it is. No, it is. It is right now. It is, it is, it is. And that sticks until there's a higher bid. I think my French-Canadian brain keeps going to Debian. So I'm going to put a bid out there of 13,000.

13,000 sets. All right, it's Debian until we hear otherwise going to put a bit out there of 13,000. 13,000 sats. All right. It's Debian until we hear otherwise. Sold to the handsome Canadian. Sold for 13,000 sats. Perhaps if somebody were to boost in with a correction, we could get to the history of how it's pronounced and why it's pronounced that way. We'll see. I don't know.

I think Debian is kind of fun. I like it. It's fun. People listening to the show like, why are these idiots saying it that way? They'll be out of the loop. You know, they won't get it. It'll be our little secret. You know how much I love secrets.

I really like Genome on Debian, too. Yeah. Yeah. If you get a real solid Debian base and then the Genome desktop environment on there, that's going to be great. That's my preferred platform to watch my GIFs. Bitwarden.com slash Linux.

Go there right now to get started with a free trial for yourself as an individual or a team. That's Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Bitwarden is simply the easiest way for yourself or a business to store, share, and sync sensitive data. And Bitwarden is fully customizable. In the enterprise, you can adjust policies to adapt it to your business needs. And the thing that we love about it here, it's open source. It's open source and is trusted by millions in the community.

It's what Wes and I use for all of our credential management, our recovery codes. You can use it for two-factor as well. It really streamlines all of that process. Speaking of two-factor, actually, I'll have a link in the show notes. They have a really good Speaking of two-factor, actually, I'll have a link in the show notes. They have a really good primer on two-factor authentication on the Bitwarden blog. And they say it's, you know, their headline is the top 10 burning questions on 2FA.

But when you read through it, it's really just a fantastic primer on two-factor authentication, why, when, how. If you are trying to suggest to someone, and I think this is something, as we approach the holidays, as the techie in my family, this is something I'm going to do, is I'm going to advocate for a responsible two-factor. You know, you got to do this right

because it's really easy to mess it up. And Bitwarden, I think, is that secret sauce that makes it approachable for normies. But it's a system I want to use as a power user, so it makes it also possible for me to support them if I need. They can turn to the community, of course, Bitwarden support. So there's a lot of options there. That makes me feel pretty comfortable about recommending Bitwarden

to teammates and to family members. So I'll have a link to this what is two-factor authentication and the top 10 burning questions on 2FA in the show notes, which could be a good primer for folks. And in the meantime, just send people or yourself to bitwarden.com slash Linux and try it out. It really just keeps getting better. I've been a user for a few years, and that experience is just getting more and more better. Very impressive.

I love to say that. It's nice to see them keep at it. They got a good team over there. So try it out and support the show. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. the show. bitwarden.com slash linux. As always, we got some great feedback in our mailbox this week. Thank you, everyone. We are holding on to a few of the special ones for some of the holiday episodes that we're going to record. So, on to the boosts.

And now, it is time for the boost. We start today with 11,000 sets from Quinn Zips. I bought a Pixel 6 for Graphene OS. I'm using NextCloud to sync photos, calendar, and context, and it works well. Here, here. Yeah. Quinn, that's fantastic. I'd be curious to know other people's experience, especially if they've tried it it over tail scale and if that's gone sideways or what I should watch out for don't want to go down the path of like getting pissed and that's my one concern is like I hit

the wall and go back to iOS I'm like I'm never doing this again so any tips right you get real busy in a little moment of just everything falling down around you and you decide I can't rely on this it's not working the Android Auto was a tough one to swallow. The overall goal, I feel like, is more important than one particular thing like Android Auto. But that was a tough pill to swallow. And I've never, I've prided myself

on never pairing a Bluetooth phone to my car. Everything's always been physically wired. Wow, yeah, okay. So I never have it like connect to the wrong phone but for this time i decided all right i'll use bluetooth because you know i can't use android auto and i don't want wires because i got a wireless charger for it car mount it's not so bad and now i discovered that like the the meta data information of what's playing actually shows up on my head you oh nice yeah i guess that's handsome and handy and beautiful and all that but i don't know i'm

still a little little sad about it i'd have like my music app or my podcast app up on the device screen and then i'd have my maps on the big built-in screen on in the car oh yeah you know yeah i do a monitor while i'm driving and I can't do that. Maybe for everyone's safety. D3XBot boosts in with 486 sats. How appropriate. You may

want to look into Neko for the headless JB peer tube peering. Uses Firefox or Chrome to display the browser to multiple users for remote viewing parties. And this is just a handy dandy looking app. I know I've not tried it. I've never seen it floating around. It does look quite nice if you want to watch something in sync with some friends. Huh. N-E-K-O.

We'll have a link in the show notes for that. Not sure how feasible that might be to run or maintain, but pointing the config's homepage at your livestream page might be a good start. And then, oh my, this was a double boost

with another 486 sats. If I remember to do it after Thanksgiving, I'll spin up a Docker container on my home server and see how it works. All right, well, this is your reminder. Let us know how that works. I'd be very curious. Oh, gosh. Okay, triple boost?

Yeah. Also, happy episode 486. What a number. And no, I'm wrong. It's a quadruple boost with 10,486 sats. Also, plus one for the hard G in GIF. Oh my goodness. Are you serious?

They were a gift to the internet. But if you want to equally infuriate the hard G and soft G crowds, you can go with Mike Rugnetta's proposed pronunciation. Zife. I'm not, unless, unless somebody beats 115. I'm not,

I'm not doing it. Here's the, here's the rationale. If you can't beat them, leave town and set up camp in the wilderness. That's actually a pretty good motto. That's kind of my life motto. So.

All right. Zife it is. No, I'm kidding. No. All right. You know, know um we have more on the uh peer tube peering stuff so uh d3x bot stay tuned for more discussion on that momentarily mg boosted in with 22 222 sats which i think is a row of grandpa ducks this old duck still got it i always heard how are we pronouncing it now? Gif?

That's my French Canadian in there. I always heard Gif came from graphic interchange format. Graphic has a hard G. All right, fine. I'm calling it. I don't have anything to say on the GIF. Did I say it right? Did I say it right?

Okay, good. All right, very good. We need a tracker. Ready One Take Four also boosted in with 22,222 sets. Thank you kindly. Move to Fountain and loving it. Thanks for the great content. I am going to beta test Fountain.

And so I'll be back on Fountain FM for a little bit. So I have it installed right now. And I like it. You know what? It's been a minute since I used Fountain. And again, the thing that's really solid is if you just lean into the clips and let them wash over you and curate your clip feed, you can discover a lot of stuff. I've already started listening to another podcast again, now that I'm back in fountain. It works. It works. I say, all right. So on the topic of peer tube and for those of you

that don't know what we're talking about, Jupyter.tube is our self-hosted PeerTube instance. And we've been trying to come up with a way to create a poor man's CDN. So that way we could spin up some VPSs on Linode over in a region maybe where we don't have enough listeners that are locally seeding it. And we could provide a peer in that region and smooth the JupyterTube experience out. And we've been wondering if there's a way to do that headless so we could just do it all from a VPS or something. Well, the podcasting consultant, Sir Alex Gates, boosted in with 10,000 sats and says PeerTube uses a JavaScript library, the P2P media loader for sharing.

You can plug it into a Node.js server, get the tracker in the HLS files, and you're set. Alex continues with 1001SAT saying, the podcasting 2.0 work I am doing for PeerTube will add the tracker information to the RSS feed. You pair it with Podping and you get instant notifications so he's come up with a way to add some rss podcasting spec standards to the rss feed that peer tube generates so you could consume peer tube content in a podcast player in a 2.0 player in theory and you could get

notifications in those apps using pod ping when something goes live he says activity pub works too if you follow the account that publishes so you could also yeah nice i like the uh just use the same library they're using approach too i was just chatting before the show with the tears arm over in our matrix room who'd been playing with uh automating it using sonium and python to talk to the peer to api but hey if you, if you go the Node.js route, just skip the browser part entirely. I like it. Yeah.

I wonder, do you think YouTube will get its Mastodon moment where everybody gets pissed off about censorship or whatever it is, whatever topic it is, and decides to move to a decentralized platform? Will that be PeerTube's moment? I really don't understand. And it's okay. But I really thought after PeerTube 4.0 came out,

which was a really good release, or maybe I can't remember, maybe it was three. I thought maybe we'd see open source and free software events or projects switch to using PeerTube. But they didn't. Nobody did. Nobody did. Instead, they're just still publishing on YouTube. Like Ubuntu on Air for the Ubuntu Summit, it's all on YouTube. Linux Kernel Plumbers Conference, it's all on YouTube. It would at least be nice to see PeerTube getting into the mix. You know, still published to the proprietary stuff. I mean, that's what we do, right? But yeah, it has come a long way. And I think we're continuing to be glad we set it up that first time. It it wasn't quite ready for us we weren't sure how to best take advantage of it but

the second time around it's been going great yeah the sort of minimum viable peer tube setup and i feel like other projects could use it the way we've been using it i don't know it's one of those things where uh just the youtube habit even for me is hard to break so i i get it maybe it'll benefit if uh if sort of a more general interest in ActivityPub picks up and stays around for a while. Perhaps that'll help. I wonder if that isn't the long-term trend that we see from Mastodon. We may see some folks move back to Twitter,

but maybe we see broader adoption of ActivityPub. Wouldn't that be interesting? I'll take it. Crypto Kyle boosts in with 22,223 sats. You're doing a good job. Says Debian. I'm sorry. Thank you.

Debian has worked excellent as an HTPC box for me. And if you run testing, you get some pretty recent and quick updates. Plus, it works beautifully with CFS, including as a RAID 1 boot and root. Give it a shot. Way less BS compared to the others. So, Brentley, have you considered grand old Debian? It's been around for a long time. It's sort of the tried and true standard. People keep saying Debian, Debian, Debian. They just say Debian all the time, writing in. And that's definitely a

signal that stood out. Are you considering putting Debian on the dev one? I wasn't at all until about last week when we kept getting this feedback saying, Debian's the way to go. You got to try it. It's a good blend of, especially if you use testing, it's a good blend of super stable and somewhat recent hardware. Yeah. And somewhat recent software.

So I feel like I got to try it. I have to be honest. My question would be, could you do Debian stable and flat packs? I know every, I mean, I feel like half the people that write in say do testing, but then why not just use like Ubuntu or something? Uh, like it seems like the whole reason you're going Debian is to go stable. So why not go all in on Debian stable with flat packs? You just sideload Nix on there, you know?

Well, you could actually put Nix on there, too. I knew it would come to this. You could put the Nix Packager on there. That's what I'm saying. Might hold you over for a few things that you might need on the command line. This might be worth trying. Good old vanilla Debian, tried and true Debian, with Nix and flat pack. Plus, you always have, you know, whatever Docker containers to fall back to if you need.

I hate running desktop software that way. I prefer my flat pack containers. I don't know. You guys want to try this? I mean, I wanted to get to Windows 11, but I have to be frank with you. I'm more interested in trying out Debian. Just haven't done it in years. Just straight old Debian.

I'm down. It's probably the only way we can actually convince Brent that he should go through with this exercise. But you got to wipe the dev one yeah i have a few questions about warranties and such around there which i think you're fine you're fine well i gotta get this laptop charging we'll see where your warranty right here oh yeah yeah but what's hp what's hp gonna do about a bad outlet uh i'm hoping it's just the church we're gonna see i don't know i have no idea yeah we'll find a report soon okay all right but i really want to try it to find out because i really think you know uh i've had this experience now

with silver blue and nix where like using flat packs using that kind of stuff really gets you pretty far you know we just tell brent to use a clonezilla take it back up that way yeah you and clonezilla wes you're has it been like four episodes in a row that you've snuck clonezilla in like somebody needs to check that i don't but and i don't mean this ironically you could get an older version of plasma if you go with db and stable and you might like it better because i know you were kind of in a golden era there for a while so you could maybe go back a few notches on the plasma belt and also get a real stable apt base that you're familiar with you know i hadn't even considered that because i feel like plasma's been doing a

bunch of work lately and i feel excited by that. But I think there's something to be said about stability on your main production machine. So I think we just got to try it. Yep. Yep. All right. TrevDev boosted with 2,000 tasty sats. Well, I've hit a cynical point where I mostly don't even have much of a desktop. No display manager.

No DE. Just my TTY and a window manager. Keeping things simple prevents a lot of frustration for me. It's not exactly suckless, but the less you have, the less you break. That is true cynical. That is peak Linux cynical user. I just have a TTY. I fire up my X server when I need it.

No window manager. No desktop environment. Can we do the podcast that way? You could probably. I have to say, I hope I don't ever go that far, though. I like I want the desktop environment to work. I feel like I've stuck it out with computers long enough now that they've got to nail this. I refuse to give in at this point.

You know, I've put up with crap for too long. Damn it. Daja boosted with 4747 sats.-o-o-s-t you're doing a good job i know you're technically not supposed to do this but i've been running db and sid for three-ish years as a software engineer don't tell uh canada and it's been fantastic you add time shift backup and it's been no less stable for me than Ubuntu. I would hope it's been more stable. Right? That's my thinking with Debian.

Is it simpler than a full Ubuntu system so there's less stuff there? And, again, with a workstation, that's probably what you want. Right, and you're not going to get sudden directives or things included from upstream that you didn't really expect or that might go away in a couple releases. 100%. Well, I am glad we got that settled moving right along gentlemen martin abort boosted in with 10 000 sets it's over 9 000 hi chris wes and brent i think it would be fun if brent would try open suza tumbleweed on his dev one now we're getting conflicting information here oh i thought we had it settled on debian That would bring him back to the latest KDE.

It's AMD, so graphics work out of the box, and he would always have the latest software. I can help to get him set up if needed. Well, that's very generous. Oh, that is nice. Forget OpenSUSE and MicroOS for the desktop. All documentation online is based on a writable root directory. That future takes a little bit more time to mature. Kind regards, Martin. You have any

inclination to want to try SUSE? Well, the last time we tested it, I think it was in the spring. I got really intrigued, especially with the really nicely built-in ButterFS rollbacks. Right. It's been at the top of my list for throwing that on this

machine. So I feel like maybe we need a few weeks of just like, Oh my God. Trying stuff. Maybe we need a tournament style, you know, I can't with Debian versus OpenZoosa. I feel like you have been suffering since the road trip.

You got to get this fixed and sorted. Yes. And I don't know, this to me kind of feels like a measure twice, cut once kind of a thing. You can spend three months trying out different distros. I suppose at least with Debian, you don't have to change your package manager. Yeah, that's true.

I think the reality for us is this question might just never be sorted. And I just need to jump into one, give it a try, see how much I suffer and try the next one. Or the other solution would be to have like eight computers, just one for each distro you might potentially want to try. Oh, I have eight. That's not the problem. You can install Ventoy on a hard drive. Dark Year Elite boosted in with 2,222 sets. I'd like to let people know about NAS from QNAP, TrueMaster, and Asystore. know about NAS from QNAP, TrueMaster, and Asystor. Where it's possible to install an OS like TrueNAS Scale or Ubuntu, I learned it from the YouTube channel NAS Compares. He has several videos

showing how to install power consumption and even video capabilities. I'm interested in QNAP TS464 with four bays in it. It has two NVMe slots. One could be for the OS and a PCIe slot as well. Four cores and up to 16 gigs of RAM. As a cheap, always running box, and it's small too, it seems like a really great solution. I have a QNAP here that I unfortunately got with a bad drive slot. And so I never really got to fully... Oh, yeah.

And it's such a neat little box. It came preloaded with Ubuntu and an Ubuntu desktop. Wow. Yeah. It's got a little HDMI port on there. Yeah. It's pretty weird. And it's a cool little machine and it had virtualization support,

but that dead bay. And then I tried to get it RMA and it just went back and forth forever. And I ended up moving on and I still have it sitting upstairs on my desk. And it reminds me staring at me. looks nice up there I always wondered what you used it for uh I I used a QNAP server that is ancient now it was surprisingly nice because it sort of has all the features that you would want and it was pretty stable too so I'd say give it a shot and they're compact and it's a go it's a cool way to have like a little embedded Linux system. A little noisy. I did try it briefly in the RV and you could hear the whine of the spinning rust.

Sure. I also will say the one I used was extremely slow for network throughput. So that's something to consider. I mean, I'm sure that's improved these days, but there's always those things are just a compromise. Sometimes they're the right set of compromises. The golden dragon boosts in with a row of ducks.

Coming in hot with the boost. On the topic of family support, I wish I could convince my older hardware home to move over so I could support them, but they have needs that require windows. And yes, I've tried using bottles in wine, but so far have been unsuccessful.

Also, for those with better opinions than mine, that's assuming a lot, I'm seeking a new distro home. I'm on a 6th gen i7 and an RTX 2060. Debian seems alright, but... And then Golden Dragon continues with $2,223. But I've never had to install NVIDIA by hand. Maybe it's time to learn? Great show. Boost you next week. Good to hear from you, Dragon.

And admittedly, it's been 100 years since I've set up an nvidia gpu on debian but the process is pretty straightforward first you just have to verify that yes indeed your system is seeing the nvidia card and then my understanding is they actually do have a semi-recent driver although you might want to double check that, in the Debian contrib package repository. And if you add that repository, do your apt update, enable the non-free stuff, then you actually can just do an apt install nvidia-driver. I don't know for sure, so I would love feedback on that, but it seems to be that's one of the many options available, and this one

seems to be the simplest because I reviewed a few for you. And I'll link to the simplest solution in the show notes so you can just review it there. Let me know what you think. I look forward to hearing how it goes. MG boosts in with 2023 stats. Prediction. Chris will mispronounce a user's handle. I can't believe it.

Has anybody ever made that? That seems like a solid one. That does seem like a solid one. Yeah, I could do it right now. I think this gentleman's name is Manuel, but the username? You want to give it a shot? Is it a J sound or a G sound?

Right, right. Gammanuel 89. Well, Gammanuel 89 boasts in with 222 sats. Have you ever checked out Tuxedo computers? But mostly I'm thinking they're Tuxedo OS. I think they're kind of like the System 76 of Europe with a sort of Pop OS with KDE Tuxedo OS. I guess the version 2 is about to be released. Solid Ubuntu, stable base, updated KDE Plasma and frameworks, advanced tools, and a lot more. It's a good question. So I put this one in the doc because I wanted to open up a conversation

on the show about Tuxedo OS in particular. I don't know if you guys have any thoughts. I generally am skeptical of vendor spun Linux distros. It took me a long time to come around to POP. Yeah, we were pretty skeptical at first there. However, every time I've kind of implied that I'm a little skeptical of Tuxedo OS on air, I've gotten notes from users that say, actually, it's working pretty good for me. So I'm curious, what have you thought? What have you heard? Honestly, I didn't know it existed.

I mean, I'm familiar with Tuxedo, the company, but they're European-based, as we've said here, so I've never had an opportunity to actually... Maybe I've seen someone with them at a conference or something like that, but I've never actually used one for any length of time. I did not know they had their own operating system, so I'll have to check it out. Well, yeah, it's been around for a bit now, and they have version 2.0.

Wes, Brent, would you be inclined to use something like Tuxedo OS if you got some other hardware, or would you be inclined to use something like Tuxedo OS if you got some other hardware? Would you be inclined to just nuke and pave? I mean, I think I'd give it a try. What gets me interested is it feels like one of the few distributions out there doing KDE as kind of their main interface. KDE seems like it's sort of the secondary in most places. I know that's not exclusively true, but you can write it and correct me. So this gets me kind of interested. And if they really are akin to the System76 of Europe, and they've been around for a while, as we know, I think there's something there. So I'd be curious to try it.

Well, you know, they've got a download right here. He doesn't have to get a Tuxedo computer. You know, I don't know if, I mean, it does seem kind of compelling. So it has a kernel 5.15, Mesa 22.2.3, Pipewire 3.6.0. Okay, okay. Wire Plumber is in there as well. They're going to ship the final release of Tuxedo S2,

and I don't know when this page was updated, but I'm on their website. They're going to ship the final version with Linux 6 and the NVIDIAvidia driver which we were just talking about for golden dragon version uh 520 and then you're going to get plasma 526.3 it it does seem kind of good doesn't it do we have a date on that release by chance i don't know let's see i'll go over to their preview page looks like it was last updated on the 17th so it's a pretty fresh beta i mean all that seems pretty fresh to me.

They're working on it. Interesting. I think this is one where our focus should be on Debian right now. But down the line, we could be outsourcing like opinion from the audience. Just kind of start getting some input on what people think about it, what they've tried, what hasn't worked. And then maybe down the line, it is worth a look. Because one of the things I would like us to do not that I have any reason to be suspicious but I wouldn't mind if we

poked around, looked at how it was built, see if we see anything odd to us, anything set up a little off, you know, just because I'm curious. I doubt there would be anything but if we're going to take a look at Tuxedo OS, I feel like that should be part of it. Like wobbly windows or something? Is that what you're thinking? No, I mean I'm just

thinking like weird kernel modules or strange little bits here or repos that don't make sense. You know, just little things that could be a red flag. I'm sure there's nothing, but again, as Linux users, I think we also have to check for this stuff too, especially when there's so much choice out there.

We're just curious also, right? Part of the thing about using someone's distribution they put together is seeing all the choices that they make, all the little knobs and tweaks and setups that you have to do to make a coherent distribution. Awesome Matt boosts in with 6,969 cents. Coming in hot with the boost! I like Session and the concepts they use, but it has all the same problems as Library and Odyssey. It runs on a coin-based network on the back end. Red flag. Right.

On the other hand, Signal is implementing their own coin for payments, and, well, Telegram rolls their own message encryption. Yeah, that's true. All red flags. That pretty much just leaves Matrix, which is more difficult to onboard normies to. Yeah. Yeah. How did the state of encrypted messaging become so dismal? Boy, Awesome Matt nailed it there.

That is truly the state of things, you know. And Telegram tried to go all in on the crap crypto stuff, too. They just got knocked down. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Remember remember they tried to go for the whole ico thing and now they've had to switch to this membership stuff i don't like moxie's justification for the coin i think that's it doesn't hold up i'm disappointed in all of it

that's why i mentioned i'm i'm kind of keeping an eye on fluffy chat you know maybe maybe dendrite or maybe it's just easier down the road to run a matrix server too. They are working on that. And maybe the techie in the family or the social group sets one up. And, you know, then you put everybody on FluffyChat. And if you're only using it for a family group, I mean, one, you might be, you know, like in your case,

you could locally administer and get it set up so they can just chat on it. And I probably would use Dendrite in that case. And then two, like, again, depending on the use case, but maybe you don't need to, you know, if it doesn't federate at all,

it's much, it seems like a much simpler server to administrate. Right. You wouldn't necessarily need, I mean, I'd probably want that, but you wouldn't necessarily need it if you're just doing it for family chat. Or if you were using it for your small business or,

you know, whatever, just internally. Like a Slack alternative. In fact, that's kind of compelling because then later on, if you wanted to federate you could yeah something there all right peg nut boosts in with 3333 sats not sure which podcast

you asked about this but uh on where to collect flack files there There is dmix.app, which downloads tracks directly from Deezer. As far as I know, with a premium sub to Deezer, you should get flacks there too. Okay. There's also LIDAR on steroids, which bundles that whole process with LIDAR and lets you use LIDAR's interface.

I experimented this as part of this transition. I was telling the guys in the pre-show, by the way, just an aside, we've had some banner pre-shows recently for the members. I'm using Plex part of this transition. I was telling the guys in the pre-show, by the way, just an aside, we've had some banner pre-shows recently for the members. I'm using Plex amp right now. I know about, I know about jelly amp, jelly fin amp,

but I'm, I'm using Plex amp and I just got a whole bunch of flax of Christmas songs and I'm just making my own playlist and I'm loving it. It's working so much better than the streaming service for me because I'm at a point now where every single song plays. I like that's huge, huge. NorCal geek boosts in with 8080 cents people who pronounce gif as shiv probably also have their toilet paper roll feed down the wall instead of the correct way over the top it doesn't make you a bad person but you're definitely sus yeah i mean i i just

can't believe it when i sit down and i see it go in the wrong direction i'm like do you want to smash your hand against the wall am i like am i so odd like it just seems intuitively obvious which direction the tp should go i just assume that you know they were in a rush the last one was used up and just got replaced with that much though but you're just basically screwing future you, right? Like getting the paper toilet roll on right is a gift to future you potentially for days. I don't know about you and your role usages, but it's a gift that could last days. I just can't even with that. I completely agree.

I'm old enough that when everybody started talking about these animated things, they pronounced it the wrong way and you know what i'll adapt you've always preferred life always preferred it so much so much so much marcel boosted with 25 000 sats keep the change you filthy animal if you guys want a good Bitcoin podcast on the top of the charts, then you should boost into the Bitcoin Dad Pod. Oh, thank you. I haven't mentioned that in a while. And the Bitcoin Dad just got back from El Salvador. He went down there for a Bitcoin conference.

He went to Bitcoin Beach, got a real sense of what it's like on the front lines. And it's just last episode is just loaded full of his experiences and all kinds of news. He's a lot of fun to do a show with, you know, because he really is clever and he stays on top of this stuff. So go check out the Bitcoin Dad pod if you haven't.

I'm having a lot of fun over there. Beer Dad 0234 boosted with 10,101 sats. Binary sats. All of this really is a battle that took place this week. Something our audience stepped forward to help us do, and that is defeat Guy Swan

and the Bitcoin Audible podcast from the charts. Beardad0234 came in with 10,001 sats. Cyberfighter came in with 3,000 sats. And Nomadcoder came in with 1,555 sats. It's a boost battle! And the Bosch threw 300 sats into the battle. All topped out with those 25,000 sats from Marcel to fight the charts, as well as our baller boosters.

We did. We came out number one. Thank you, everyone. It was a fight of the ages. And we are all honored in your sacrifice. You are true warriors out there. Circus Freak came in with 12,000 sats. I've been

a JB listener since 2007. My wife doesn't really know what Linux is, but she sure knows your voices. Keep up the good work. Hopefully many more decades of listening to come. Well, hello, Circus Freak's wife. Thank you for putting up with us. Then Circus Freak tossed another 4,000

sats to say, just forget figuring out the distro thing, guys. Here's a 2023 challenge. Build a JB Linux distro. Oh, I mean, then we would have an answer to that question, right? Of course we have to use the show's branded distro. And then he sent 15,000 sats just to say, Wes Payne, 2024. You're doing a good job.

You know, I have to say, I don't think I'd vote for you, Wes. I mean, you're a good guy. But I think if you gave Wes a lot of power, you'd turn into a dictator. I mean, he's a good guy now because he doesn't have the power. I don't know. Right? But you know what I'm talking about, Brent. You give Wes too much power.

I think he's better than the alternatives by far. So there's that. Okay. All right. Okay. That's fair. That's just because my motto is build it back. Or enter.

It's true. He got me with that one. Curious concept boosted with 25,000 sats. Keep the change, you filthy animal. I've been really enjoying the live stream. I'd love to see the value streaming enabled for the members. A long-time listener, first-time booster go podcasting yes that's hopefully an early goal of 2023 if not the end of this year we'll see you know we don't move quite

as fast as we did when we were part of a bigger company and had more people uh but it is something that is on the top of our priority list our sites yeah sites. Yeah. In fact, redoing the whole RSS feed infrastructure, which we talk about on Office Hours. If you are curious, it's coming, and it's going to be a lot. See Candor boosted with 6,000 sats? B-O-O-S-T! 10-year listener.

About time I share something with you. Oh, wow. Isn't it amazing how many first-timers, long-timers we're getting with the boosts? Yeah. Incredible. Freaking awesome. I have a suggestion for a new protocol for decentralized social protocols solving a lot of the issues with the current systems. I think you guys should check it out. Look into Noster.

N-O-S-T-R. Missed opportunity for nostril. He says good luck pronouncing that one. Yeah, has been a listener for a while. Which means notes and other stuff transmitted by relays. It's quite simple, but really powerful. And it has a dynamic community behind it and a lot of interesting services. More details linked here. We'll have a link in the show notes.

N-O-S-T-R. I've been seeing this pop up everywhere. I've been seeing all kinds of different sites and services use Noster. The Noster protocol, which bills itself as the simple protocol that creates censorship resistant global social network once and for all. It doesn't rely on any trusted central servers, hence it's resilient. It's based on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it's tamper proof and it does not rely on any peer to peer techniques and therefore it works. I like it. It totally makes sense, but it's just kind of amusing.

They say, this is a work in progress. Join the Telegram group. Ah, which is a centralized social platform. That's spicy. That couldn't be Matrix. No. All right. It's our last couple of boos, and we round it out

with a ditty from Mississippi Mayhem with 2,000 sats. Since we're getting all sappy and telling stories, I guess I'll tell mine about JB, playing a big part in my life's history. My wife and I adopted our son right out of the NICU. I'd just come off of deployment and was on R&R, so we were able to sit in the waiting room all day, trying to take every chance to just take it in.

But he was too sick and coming off of a dependence of his biological mother's drugs. So we only got to see him for a few minutes per day. At the time, I didn't have a podcast app, he continues. So I spent a bunch of time downloading podcast MP3s and I played them through VLC. That's how I started listening to JB on the regular. So it's got a tie-in for me that goes just beyond liking Linux. I just thought I'd jump in on this and say congratulations to people getting married as well.

That's a powerful story. That's wonderful, yeah. That's really amazing. You know, it's hard for us when we make these shows, it's hard for us to even fathom what you're doing when you're listening, where you're at in your life. It's really cool to hear these stories because that's just not something i would have pictured you know it's just not my experience and so right it's amazing to see that i and i really appreciate you sharing that with us mississippi it just means a lot to us you know i do this now i do this for bigger reasons than

when i started and so hearing that kind of stuff is really awesome. We also got a hello from Germany, 600 sats from user 593, just giving us a shout. And then Manuel, 222 sats from Italy, trying out Fountain FM. Well, hello there. Hello there. I'm right there back with you.

Find Chris Lass on there and follow me. I'm going to be clipping more. If you'd like to send a boost into the show, we do love them. You can do that by upgrading to a podcasting 2.0 compatible app at newpodcastapps.com and if you really want to knock our socks off see if you can get boost cli working good luck set aside a couple of weeks that's all thank you everybody newpodcastapps.com and of course you can always send us an email at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. A couple of picks before we run.

I have been collecting tools to replace Evernote with potentially NextCloud, it seems. That's the direction I'm trending. Maybe it's a Joplin-NextCloud combo. Maybe it's an Obsidian-NextCloud combo. I'm not sure yet, but that's the general direction. And I wanted to cover two picks this week that are really useful when you're trying to cover two picks this week that are really

useful when you're trying to capture data and store it long term one is an app where i can take something like a low res picture or something that maybe like i have a i had a picture that my a kid that my kid generated using the deep fusion stuff and it was really small tiny little output i'm like, well, I want to save that, but I want to save a bigger version of it and I want to make it look bigger and higher resolution.

Right? Well, that's where an app that is simply named upscaler comes in. Hey, and it upscales and enhances your images with that, uh, nice high end Vulcan and all that kind of stuff. So it can really kind of crank it out or,

you know, it'll do it on the CPU as well. It'll run a little slower, but it gets it done. I got it done on my Intel laptop just fine. So it's just simply called Upscaler. And so I dropped in a tiny, like, three-something by 500-something image and put out, like, a 2040 by 2040.

So it'll be much larger. That is quite the upscaling. And it worked. You know, it's a little softer or whatever but it does the job and so for me with like pictures of license plates things on documents that i want higher resolution it's going to be great for that and it's also it gives you just one kind of option to tweak besides the size like is this a drawing or is this a photo give it a little bit of information and it can do a lot. I love that this is just a flat pack too. Takes two seconds to install.

So easy. And then you've got a high resolution image upscaler. You mean I don't have to like go get some sort of proprietary software suite that has its own installer that has to do a bunch of updates and then sync and then I have to put in my license key and then I can finally upscale my image?

Nope. I mean, nope. You don't even have to put a Docker thing together and fire up a container and run it through there through some web ui it's just a good old little gtk app and a flat pack can i ask for a little bit of clarification is this just doing like good old classic interpolation or is this like some kind of fancy ai rendering of your original well it tells you this tech i just don't i'm not familiar with it it's a real esr gan so i think it's like a it is a more intelligent type of upscaling than just your traditional old school upscaling so and this real esr gen is an open source project itself

that's up on github separately you could set it up and run your crap through that and it has support for intel AMD and NVIDIA acceleration. And what this developer did is just put it in a really easy to use GTK front end that you just drag and drop the image on and it's preset to a high res, but you can adjust that. That sounds pretty lovely to me. It is lovely. And then one last super handy pick for you all before we leave you this week.

And it's called Frog. Frog made by Tender Owl, also available on GitHub. What are these names? I'm intrigued already. It's available in the elementary OS app center as well. It has the elementary OS design ethos. And Frog extracts text from images, videos, PDFs, etc. Its tagline is extract text from anywhere. Quickly extract non-selectable text from PDFs, screencasts, webpages, photos, etc. It does just that. You give it an image and then what it gives you is a text document. So you feed an image in and it just scans all of the text it can find. And what

you get is just a plain text document with everything in there. And I had surprisingly good results. Oh, nice. Now picture this. You're going by a store that you want to revisit or something you want to check out or the price of something. You take a quick picture with your cell phone. Now I would use Google Photos in the past to search the text of that photo. Apple has recently introduced this in like an OS ago. And this is something that I've become reliant on these big commercial platforms for. It's super handy. And so going away from them, going away from Apple and Google, I needed my own solution for this.

And that's where Frog came in. So it'll let you get the text out of any picture or video, or for some reason, a PDF, if you can't select it. And again, it's, it takes something that's rather complex on the backend and it gives you a simple,

clean GTK application. You just drag and drop and you get the output and it's also available as a flat pack. So really easy to get installed. I'll be curious to hear more about how you fit that all into your workflow. Thank you. As you build it. I'm glad you're interested because I'm going to try to get you to do it one day to hear more about how you fit that all into your workflow. Thank you. I'm glad you're interested because I'm going to try to get you to do it one day.

You know that's going to happen. That's why I put the pixel in the box. Just so that way you'd be like, that is nice. That'd be nice. You know, we could be Graphene OS buddies. And then we could give Brent a hard time for using lineage, even though it's fine. This is the part that's selling me. I know, right? We love giving Brent a hard time. So, I know it's fine. See, now, this is the part that's selling me. I know, right?

We love giving Brent a hard time. So, I know it's great fun. And I love you for it. All right, well, if you want to get together with us in person, we do the show every single Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. We've got a mumble room that you can listen to live or jump in on the conversation. Of course, we've got the Matrix chat. All of that every single Sunday at jupiter.tube.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And links to everything we talked about today, linuxunplugged.com slash 486. That's where you'll get all that stuff. And if you want a little more Linux show, go get Linux Action News. that stuff. And if you want a little more Linux show, go get Linux Action News. Wes and I are breaking down everything that happens in the tech industry that impacts Linux in the world of open source. Lean means just what you need to know. Get you in and out. Keep you informed. LinuxActionNews.com. Also, a big thank you to our members. Our core contributors keep us going, and they're getting

some crazy great content these last few weeks. Big pre- and post-shows. So if you want more Linux Unplugged, you can always become a member as well. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode. See you right back here next Sunday. Thank you. You know, I think old Leo is still using Linux. That's so great. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, given it's episode 486, I'm curious how many of us have actually used a 486.

I was thinking earlier, and I don't think I ever have. Wes, have you? Oh, my gosh. I guess you were Pentium and older. Yeah. Okay, all right. Boy, I'm not sure that I... What? Really?

No, I must have. Not even at school or anything? Well, at school we had a... I grew up on Macs, actually. Oh, yeah, yeah. But I know my mother had a i grew up on max actually oh yeah yeah but uh i know my mother had a dos pc that she used to complete her master's thesis so i played a lot of pac-man and tetris on that i don't know what the architecture is off the top of my head my school spent a lot of money on either

a mac or the ibm ps2 series which i believe started as 286s. And this was like IBM's consumer PC. That's where, by the way, the M model keyboard also came to the masses. And I seem to recall those were 286s. And then our school skipped the 386 line. My dad had one, but our school skipped the 386s and went hard on the 486 and then later on the pentiums but we just leaped right over 386 and went to 486 and it was considered like this this massive upgrade everybody was uh buzzing at the time i mean like in our opening clip we played the fact that that's where they introduced speculative execution for better or worse. But it's also when they introduced user-upgradable BIOSes. Wow.

You couldn't update your BIOS. I mean, I still don't, so I don't really need that. But I know I can. You do, too. Come on. I mean, you don't probably unless it's easy, right? But now that it's integrated into, like, GNOME software and stuff. Yeah.

That's GNOME software? Oh, right. Thank you. I forgot. GNOME. and stuff. Yeah. That's GNOME software? Oh, right. Thank you. I forgot. GNOME. Thank you. I'll get that right. Yeah, I actually have a lot of fond memories of this era of computing because it's also kind of the very last before you could run a system without a heatsink.

Wow. Yeah, that's kind of what I remember is like computers I built after that, you had to have heatsinks and it just seemed really complicated. Everything gets really complicated. Everything gets more complicated. The 486 was pitched as this big improvement in multimedia as well. Check out the Intel commercial from the time.