LINUX Unplugged - 489: Brent's Secret Emails

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Brent's been hiding your emails; we confront him and expose what he's been keeping from the show.

in an interview with the verge it was disclosed that valve is paying more than 100 open source developers to work on proton and the whole compatibility layer and all the things around like the mesa graphics driver stack vulcan and steam and getting steam on chromebooks and um i just think man if we have around 100 skilled individuals working on this right now towards the end of 2022 where's that gonna where's that gonna make us in 2023 where's that gonna make linux gaming right you gotta figure it's gonna be we're gonna just really be pretty far ahead of the game like like maybe top of the pack. I don't know. I'm getting pretty excited the more I think about it. You think we'll crack 2%?

I hope so. Here, I'm hoping for 2.5%, Wes. Whoa. 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, it's a feedback frenzy.

There's things we've been sitting on in the mailbag for way, way too long. As the year comes to a close, we wanted to get these on the air and discuss this stuff because there's some goodies in there. So we'll do a big old batch of feedback and we'll round it out with some boosts and some picks and all of the other accoutrements that go along with the Linux unplug. So before we get started, I want to say good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by Wirecard. Direct machine to machine connections. They're glorious. We love it. It'll change your networking game.

It's the only way I'll do my next cloud now. So go say good morning to Tailscale and try it for free. Up to 20 devices for free, not a limited time. Tailscale.com. And if you get an opportunity to tell them we sent you, I'd appreciate it.

And also, do a little Google for, or a Bing, for Tailnet Lock, a new thing they just rolled out. It's pretty awesome. So go say good morning because tail net lock looks amazing all right now i'd also like to say time appropriate greetings to our mumble room hello virtual lug hello hello everybody now as we were we record in real time it's a double episode We're recording ahead for the holidays. So everybody here is in for a long haul today.

And speaking of the holidays, I want to mention that we're doing an AMA. Could be really about anything. That's what an AMA means. You could ask us anything, and we'll answer those questions on next Tuesday slash Friday's office hours. That's December 20th. Thank you. We'll be live. Last live Office Hours of the year,

officehours.hair slash contact, or boost in your question, and we'll be reading those on Office Hours, which comes out on Friday, but records on Tuesday the 20th. Is that confusing? Does that make sense? All good there?

I think they can also join us live. I mean, that's really the easiest way, and ask your questions as we're on air. Jupyter.tube makes it real easy. So before we get to the feedback, actually, we have some feedback in this part, too. But I want to just do a real brief Graphene OS update as I've been kind of documenting this journey. And it's probably going to be the last one I do for a little bit since next week's the Tuxes. And we got work to do in the Tuxes.

Get ready for this, boys. Did you say graphing i i wasn't quite i don't know that reference yeah do you know giraffe os it's oh giraffe oh okay 30 seconds on the iphone this past week according to screen time and again it was like settings and you're playing that game it was it was uh i was shocked when i opened it up i had the sense that i hadn't and it says one it says on average one pickup a day so and i don't know exactly what it counts a pickup i don't think that includes a full unlock i think it just like if i tap the screen and check or something which i've done that a few

times to see if i'm missing any notifications or anything. Big change for me this week is I got Waze working on Graphing OS. Oh, what did you do? It was a recommendation that came into the show shortly after last week's episode to turn off a setting in Graphing OS for exploit protection compatibility mode. So I guess the way to put that is you actually technically turn it on. Remember like in Windows, you could run things in older Windows compatibility mode and it would disable some of the security protections? That's kind of what's going on here.

You turn off GrapheneOS's superior exploit protection for like process monitoring. So sketchy ways can just do whatever it wants. Yeah. There's actually a bug in Waze that I think someone at the GrapheneOS project has reported that should solve this. It's a bug that's causing this misbehavior.

But here's how the setting is explained. It says, quote, improve the compatibility with misbehaving apps by using Android's standard address, space size, and memory allocator. So that's the, you turn that on, and now Waze is happy as can be. That's great. And here's what I've done, is I've logged Waze into a fake ID. So basically I set up a profile for Levi, my dog, and I've logged Waze into that. It's not tied to my Google ID.

So I've been running it for the week because I got it shortly after the show, the tip. And then I checked my Google location account history and none of my Waze driving's in there. So I think I've got a pretty good spot with it. I really don't like this for a long-term solution, but for the stretch that I commute, it is just a critical tool. So I'm pretty happy. So I've got functioning ways with that exploit protection compatibility mode enabled, and I've got it logged in to an account for my dog.

It's kind of cute imagining Levi doing all the things you do. I put his picture in the profile. It's pretty cute, yeah. I'm pretty pleased. I have to say I am pretty pleased. I'm excited with the path you've paved over here because I'm just going to steal all the best parts. So, yeah, so last week after the show wrapped up, Wes and

I wiped his brand new Pixel 7 Pro and put Giraffian OS on there. Went pretty good, right? Yeah, definitely. We had a little futzing around to see, like, is it in the right state? Do we need ADB to show it or not? But really, the whole Web USB stuff was pretty darn slick.

Yeah, the fact that you can, you have to have a Chromium-compatible browser, but the fact that you can, you have to have a Chromium compatible browser, but the fact that you can take a brand new unlocked Android pixel seven, top of the line, latest model phone only been out for a couple of months or a few and just hook it up and unlock it and reflash it through a web browser is really awesome. And it actually makes it much more doable and approachable. I think it was nice to feel like I didn't have

to sign into anything on the Android phone. The only thing we had to do was connect it to the internet to get that OEM unlock. Right. Right. Right. After that, it was smooth. That's probably going to depend on where you buy it from, I would imagine. Because I think if you got it from the Google Shop unlocked directly, you wouldn't have to do that step, necessarily. But if you buy it

from a carrier unlocked, you might. You know what I mean? But what I felt like after you and i did it because that was the third time i'd been through the process first time jeff drove for me the second time i did on my own the third time you drove and my takeaway each time was this is quick enough that i would not mind doing this for a family member they get a new phone i could do this for them in 20 minutes oh yeah and once you've done it once i mean it'd be even faster yeah and it doesn't have to be a seven right it could be pixel 4 still supported pixel 5 is a great price so i'm glad you're so you're gonna do a slow transition because you've been on call so you didn't want to make the complete

switch yeah so i've kind of like it's it's moved over to my house phone and i've been using my old pixel 3 especially because i was kind of waiting to get like a case you know all the all the stuff to go with it uh so kept my Pixel 3 as the LTE connected out of the house phone. But that changes this week. That's exciting. And what are you going to do for on the road nav? Well, we'll see. I mean, I also appreciate some of the ways really for the same reason. So I might try now that you've got it working, but I have been using Magic Earth

and finding it pretty decent. Are you thinking of transitioning your Google accounts to this device? Are you thinking about not syncing with the Google backend? Like, where's your Google line going to be at? Yeah, that's an actively developing question. I think there's still some data to port.

So that'll probably get phased as well. Yeah, I can imagine. I know some people bypassed the whole Nextcloud thing and did something like a Fastmail or a Protonmail backend as well. And then so you set up Protonmail calendar and ProtonDrive or Fastmail calendar and all that stuff and get the phone syncing with that and then migrate your Google stuff over into that

because they both offer importers. It is already, I mean, I do have it at least set up so that the photos are syncing off there, not to Google. So, let's start. Yeah. Mr. Kamungo wrote in, he says, for Google apps, I use a secondary profile where I have

enabled the Google Play Store to make use of Google's excellent camera app and Google Maps. I agree, the camera apps. Yeah. In fact, I was going to show you guys before we recorded, I just forgot. I went out and did some recording with the cinema mode in the camera app, and it's... Ooh agree, the camera apps. Yeah. In fact, I was going to show you guys before we recorded, I just forgot. I went out and did some recording with the Cinema Mode in the camera app. And it's pretty compelling, actually. I think it's better than the iPhone.

Wow. Their Cinema Mode. At least, I'm sure they'll leapfrog each other. They always do, yeah. But yeah, I think the way it manages the focus differences is better. Anyways, Kumungo goes on to say, I've turned off data to both apps

and I use it in offline mode. Hey, there we go. Interesting. Why not? Interesting. And when you're using Giraffe and you install an app, there's a checkbox right there that says, do you want to give this app network access? And sometimes I uncheck that and I install it and the app never gets network access. And I love that.

See, but I have a question around that google maps doesn't it heavily rely on being online unless you download like uh location location data for where you're at which is kind of a annoying second step isn't it yeah yeah that is the downside you also don't get like real-time traffic cop light stuff but you're also not you know feeding them a real-time tracking location of where you're at choose your battle battles. Highly precise, yeah. I suppose that can make sense, right? Like, I care more about that, probably, like my day-to-day movements in regular life than I do that they knew I, like, drove to Colorado for a vacation over the summer.

Right. Different for you, but at least it... No, I follow you, yeah. In fact, I'm still kind of... One of the ideas I'm still toying with is how much signal do I want to feed them just so it doesn't look like I'm not trying to feed them signal.

I know, that's the place I've gotten toying with is how much signal do I want to feed them just so it doesn't look like I'm not trying to feed them signal. I know that's that's that's that's the place I've gotten to with it. So you just drive around randomly to try to just throw it out. Yeah. Yeah. His gas bills are crazy, but yeah, it's the price of privacy. Yeah. Out of this world. They go on to say they use their banking apps on that profile as well.

So that he only uses that profile when he needs to. on that profile as well so that he only uses that profile when he needs to uh so google services run the background only when needed adding privacy and reducing unnecessary battery consumption as well great point i like the profiles idea that's one theme that's coming in from the audience that have been using drafting for a bit is profiles profiles profiles i don't hear as many people talking about like the data scopes because they have storage scopes in in there too that allow you to like isolate things even more but profiles it seems like the audience is using a lot which i'm not using a ton of along the same lines feargabal's boosted in with a thousand sets i just moved to an iphone because i couldn't justify the short amount of time google was supporting their models to your OS updates with an additional year of security updates?

How long will Drapfine support their models? This, I think, is a developing thing, but the Pixel 3 is still getting bare support right now. Google commits to at least four years of feature and security updates for Pixel devices, and Samsung does four to five years for each device for their Galaxy series. There's a few other vendors that actually go this far or further as well, but those are the ones that I know of off the top of my head. Here's what the project officially writes. They say, when an OEM is no longer providing security updates, Drafting OS aims to provide a harm

reduction release for devices which have a minimum of three years of support. Extended support updates at a minimum will be done until the next Android version. Ah, all right. So once you're on like 12, 13's out, and then I guess after 14, 12's done. Perhaps it may or something like that.

Anyways, it's on their website. My takeaway was my pixel 3 is still getting updates from from drafting and it's not getting updates from google anymore so at least better yeah at least better uh quinn zipsy boosted with 11 000 sats on the week of december 11th drafting os updated and essentially rendered my phone useless. Oh, no. The gesture to go home or back broke. I do go both of those places.

Yeah. Wow, that's up. Yeah, I will say somehow Apple has made like their gesture-based stuff, especially with their swipe up and stuff. They've made it feel like it's hardware level. And I know it's not every now and then it locks up. I don't always have that impression on Android. There's every now and then that disconnect in performance, but I have not had that issue. And in fact,

I've been damn impressed with how many updates I've just been able to quietly absorb in the background. And it just keeps on ticking. You can go into the settings and you can turn on a standard back button again. You don't have to use the gesture mode. That is an option in there. And then the XOR with our final feedback on drafting says,

NextCloud on iOS can open every time you plug your iPhone in via a shortcut in automations. Oh, nice. Uh-huh. He says, it's a weird little hack, but I do this for Mobius Sync, and that's how I try to avoid syncing conflicts. And I was just talking to Brent this morning, talking about how one of the big shifts for me is Android handles VPNs like Tailscale better than iOS. So when the phone boots up, Tailscale connects in the background and it stays connected.

So I can have my calendar and my contacts and my notes sync over Tailscale. It's fine. I prefer it. But on iPhone, it sleeps that Tailscale app eventually. Eventually, it'll sleep it, and then you are no longer connected to Tailscale, and stuff that's communicating with your Tailscale network just sort of sits there and spins for a bit until you reconnect it. And that's what I found. The next cloud photo backup didn't work so well same situation android it ran all the time

ios it would get paused which was great when these phones had like a gigahertz single core processor and 256 megs of ram but now like the iphone's got like 12 gigs of ram and it's got like a freaking m1 type processor yeah you don't mind if it does a little background job it's okay now so that's been so much better on android but it made me realize you could probably use shortcuts and automations to trigger tail scale and next cloud maybe every time you put it on a charger or every time you get in the car or something like that and that would probably refresh those connections and make that more doable. Because I do think it's worth exploring this entire de-Googling and de-Appling on the iPhone as well. Can you de-Apple fully on the iPhone? Yeah.

I don't think so. But maybe you could get close to removing dependency on iCloud, maybe. And I think you could switch over to NextCloud. You could get some privacy that way. So if people are out there trying this, let us know. Tell us how it goes. 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

with the best support and the best performance in the business. And they're 30 to 50% cheaper than the hyperscalers that have these crazy ecosystems that are all about lock-in and upsell. And one of the reasons why Linode is here on this show after almost three years now is because our audience loves the service. They sign up and they become Linode advocates. They become passionate about Linode.

More and more of you are trying it and more and more of you are just loving it. And so go to linode.com slash unplugged, trying it and more and more of you are just loving it and so go to linode.com slash unplugged get that hundred dollars support the show and see why everybody's been checking it out i think you're going to find the performance is outrageously great today they have 11 data centers around the planet and they're going to add another dozen next year they have features that we absolutely love like s3 compatible object storage cloud firewalls backups that are easy transparent and totally understandable and i really believe that everyone

should at least try play at least try maybe stick with it but at least try playing with next cloud everybody should next cloud at least once you could throw next cloud on linode really quickly i mean they make it super simple they also have directions if you'd like to do it manually and you could put tail scale on there and you could just have your own private network up on linode and you could do it with that hundred dollar credit you could do it for a while right it'll last you 60 days if if nothing else so go try it it's pretty great everyone should next cloud at least once and linode's the place to do it and then you layer on like a VPN on top of that.

Something like Nebula or Tailscale. That's such a great secure setup. You're never going over the public Internet. There's so many things you can do with Linode, including one click deployment of Mastodon and things like that. So go try it out while you support the show and get that one hundred dollars by going to Linode dot com slash unplugged. That's Linode dotcom slash unplugged. That's linode.com slash unplugged. We got some big old boosts coming into the show. We always like to call out the baller boosts at the top of the show for really supporting this particular production and Daja boosted in again with, well, okay, it's a little bit of a story actually. First was 47 474 sets but that that wasn't quite the amount they were going for so instead of just sending in the difference they started all over again

and they sent us a boost of 474 747 sets so that brings their total to 522 221 that's a number so big uh i'm glad i got the liquidity inbound up on the on the node there Two hundred and twenty one. That's a number so big. I'm glad I got the liquidity inbound up on the on the node there. And it's hard for me to even comprehend. Thank you very much, Daja. And they say, I want to say thank you for all the hard work. You guys have gotten me through many hard times. Life sucks sometimes, but I always look forward to JB release days.

So keep them coming. Every episode, I learn something new and it's enhanced both my professional and personal lives. So thank you. Wow. Wow. Also, I just finished up the back catalog.

I'm sorry about that. Any suggestions on additional podcasts to check out between JB episodes. I listened to the Bitcoin dad pod and I also listened to all of joe's shows i'll give a plug to linux out loud because i know they give some seuss love on there and then i also wanted to mention uh dan carlin's hardcore history if you're going for a road trip that's such a great road trip show and if you are a star trek fan i would like to recommend The Greatest Generation. And they have several shows over there that are basically a Star Trek podcast by a couple of guys who are a little embarrassed to have a Star Trek podcast. And so it's a lot of fun. So I recommend those two.

Do you boys have any pods, either in the genre or outside? Maybe give us a few surprises that you listen to. I've been enjoying the weird place lately uh which is from dana carvey and it's kind of like if the twilight zone also involved a lot of just irreverent humor that sounds amazing not the podcast i expected you were gonna say and they don't i mean so dana carvey does an awesome job with all kinds of wacky voices but then they've done just a great job at the like you know know, theater of the mind level of production details. So like the first episode is about a,

it takes place on primarily on a pirate ship and it's, it's lovely. All right. All right. That's incredible. We'll put a link in there. I want to check that out. Apparently,

do you have anything you want to mention that you watch or listen to? You know, I do. I just, just discovered the dark net diaries, which I know is a big thing that people know about, but it's brand new to me. So there's an episode I want to suggest, which is Knaves Out. It's an episode that covers JP Morgan getting hacked and the whole background and story and weird manipulations that went on. I think that was back in like 2014 or something like that. It's super fascinating and very well-researched and just one of those things you can put on

and just drive around because you don't want to get home. You want to finish the story. So great, great episode. That, okay. Great recommendations there, guys. Thank you very much. User 6248, also known as Dennis V, boosted with 93 369 sats keep

the change you filthy animal uh dennis you can go into a fountain and you can set your name in your profile if you'd like what's great about dennis's boost and this has been happening and it's it's pretty special is uh long timers who upgrade to a podcasting 2.0 app and then boost in for the first time. And a lot of times they'll come in just at the baller level right away. And that's what Dennis did. He said, long time listener. I bought the Ergodog split keyboard after hearing about it on the show. Then I later migrated to a self-build 42 key split keyboard programmed with the open source QMK.

That's the quantum mechanical keyboard firmware. Got me completely off using the mouse, except for gaming. How about that? He says, I've had a lot less RSI since then. I've been using the Nobra Linux. Nobra, N-O-B-R-A-R-A? Nobra?

B-A-R-A. Anyways, Nobra Linux for the last few months. It's Fedora optimized for gaming. Oh, yes. I've seen this LinkedIn a couple of times. Yes. It's a,

it's kind of like in the spirit of Corora, but optimized for Linux. I mean, for gaming, sorry. And has some of the proprietary software things you need. Well, independencies,

OBS studio, third party codec packages. Yeah. That kind of stuff, you know, the stuff you all like. And then in the show notes i'm gonna have a link to dennis's keyboard this is the nerdiest slash awesomest keyboard

i have ever seen it is a split keyboard with all white keycaps remember it's 42 keys none of them are even necessarily pretty like i don't see a backspace or a delete key this has got to be one of the coolest projects a little usb interface on there so if you if you are a keyboard nerd you got to go see this link we'll have in the show notes it's uh very very cool looking thank you dennis for sending that in yeah that reminded me of some of the prototypes that we saw at system 76 for their launch keyboard so yeah yeah who knows what's in the future for this one? It makes me wonder how long it took Dennis

to learn how to use that, you know? And we'll put a link to Nobra Linux in the notes as well. And then Active Shadow came in with our last baller boost this week with 50,000 sats. I've been listening since mid-August, including all the shows. What? Wow. Make sure you just get the all shows feed then.

This is my first time boosting in. I've been listening to Brent's OS woes and sounds like maybe he settled on OpenSUSE. I run Arch Linux with Sway as my daily driver for a few years now, and I've never looked back. I love all my shortcut keys, and I use ThoughtBot's RCM to manage all my.files across machines. Mmm. Anyways, just thought I'd share my setup and say thank you for all the great discussions. Well, thank you, Shadow. And, Brent, I know you have been looking at.file managers quite a bit, so I think we're going to have a conversation about that soon.

I think we should. It sounds like there are many options. And I need to like actually do my homework and pick one. That's or maybe I'll pick one after I after I hear from you. I don't know. Oh, Jeff. Jeff comes in with four hundred and eleven thousand sacks. What? Live as we're going right now.

He says wanting to help love at the top of the charts for the Christmas week. Well, thank you, Jeff. Such a sweetheart. Thanks. That's great. I love the live boost, too. That's a special kind of exciting. So this is our last live Sunday of the year.

And on the 27th of Decembercember we are recording our 2023 predictions episode hey it's our old day of tuesday yep and we're going to be back on tuesday for one time if you would like to get a prediction into the show boost in with 2023 sats you could do more but they just need to make it clear in your prediction that it's a prediction boost like the golden dragon has already boosted in his prediction it was more than 2023 sats but he just made it clear but i will batch all of them together because i would imagine we're not going to have a lot of boosts for that episode since it's an out of time pre-record weirdo yeah yeah it's a weirdo so it's also a good opportunity to be a baller because the price will probably be a little lower than normal

but we'll be recording off schedule i'll batch all of the 2023 boosts or all the boosts that are clearly marked as prediction, and we'll have a section in the show for the audience predictions. And I want to give you a hot tip. If you'd like to do this, but you don't want to go through the hassle of switching podcast apps, I got a real fire solution for you. Wes and I have been testing it, and it's just so slick and smooth. There is a browser extension out there called Albi, A-L-B-Y, getalbi.com. And Albi is a really solidly designed browser-based lightning wallet.

I've talked to the founders of it. I've looked at it. I really think this is some impressive piece of software. And you can boost directly from the web just using the podcastindex.org entry for our show when you go there there's a form you fill out your boost you send it right from the web page once you have albie you don't have to switch podcast apps it's crazy easy anybody can do it you can throw a few sats in there directly because albie now also supports topping off your wallet directly using moon pay so you don't have to use a separate app to like buy the sats and then send them you can do it directly inside albie you guys it is absolutely fire and you can now boost from the web the entire stack is self-hosted free software using a completely decentralized peer-to-peer network all of it

running on top of linux it is fantastic and the albie guys are all in on open source as well it is a nice stack so you get the albie extension you put a few sats in there using moon pay top it off directly then you go to the podcast index you look up linux unplugged you go there it'll be right there at the top we'll have a link in the show notes to make it even easier send it in your boost with 2023 with your predictions we'll batch it up and we'll cover it in our episode on Tuesday, the 27th. You know, a little Levi told me that there was some maybe news that we should share about splits this week. Oh, yeah, you're right.

You're right. Wes is in there now. Wes is officially in the splits now. He's getting. Yep. Graphene OS has been removed. We raised about 200 bucks after I had my contribution to graphing OS. Thank you everyone.

I'll be sending that to them over the holidays. And now what we've done is we've just re organized the splits. So it's me, Brent West, and then the show for the production fund. So we'll have a little bit of personal stash in the splits and we'll change it up from time to time. We'll throw projects in there. I think we're going to play with that throughout the year to just sort of kick back to

free software projects that we talk about or if a listener makes a big contribution to an episode like you know if we maybe have a guest on and they have a lightning wall we could throw them in the splits those are all ideas we're going to be playing with and so i'm looking forward to just kind of starting next year with that kind of in mind so they we've went through, we kind of cleaned it all up. So it's at the base point. So when you boost into the show now, a little bit goes to me, a little bit goes to Brent, a little bit goes to Wes directly, and a little bit goes to JB. And what's nice about that is it's transparent for everybody to see.

Everybody can see it. It's right there. There's no secrets in how the math works or who gets what percentage or split. So check it out. And Albie's a great way to do it. All right, boys, let's talk about Tailscale DNS because Peter has a tip that I think is probably directed at me.

For SSL on Tailscale, I've been using CertBot and a DNS challenge. Since Tailscale also gives each device a public IP, I can point my DNS at that IP with a fully qualified domain name. I have Home Assistant and Nextcloud set up, by the way. It's a publicly addressable subdomain, which I choose, that is only reachable on the tailnet. For DNS routing on Android, I tried to make my Pi hole available for local web filtering, but I read that the official API

hooks in Android for VPNs break custom DNS, so it will just fail if you have that turned on. Some VPN providers get around this by using other API calls for routing the traffic. Tailscale, though, uses the official documented ones, and so therefore, no Tailscale plus custom DNS on Android. Yeah, it does seem like that can be a little bit tricky. I've not tried to do anything quite that fancy so far, but Chris, I know you had some issues, right? I did, and I kind of fell back into it accidentally,

just trying other things, and realized that there's probably more I need to do here. I think to make it work perfectly for me, I'd like to get a DNS server in my tail scale net. In my tail net, I believe is how you say it? Indeed, yeah. I'd like to have a dns server in my tail scale net in my tail net i believe is how you say it indeed yeah is i'd like to have a dedicated tail net dns server i think that could be really useful they have just recently been building out a feature where a little mini dns resolver can run in the tail scale client itself so maybe that's worth maybe that's easy enough you know machines

are plenty fast i have to try both i don't I honestly don't mind using the IPs for the most part. And I also don't feel the need to have an SSL cert for most of these systems because, again, it's all over tail scale. I do think with the Peter solution there to just sort of use like regular old DNS but just resolves to tail net IPs, that seems pretty popular out there, too. If you don't mind, obviously people can see that you're running whatever you put in there. But if you don't care about that, it like also that yeah that feels like the easiest way to go straightforward yeah i don't know if it's the right way to go but it feels like the easy way to go i could kind of see myself going that way i gotta be honest with you because you'd suggest your next class very secret you know because you're not going to like talk about it

on your podcast or anything well yeah that's true but you know there's kind of a freedom of being able to talk about saying hey i have this service and there's just no way you can ever know about it. Cause it's all in this private tail scale network. Right. But if I start like registering domain names, it's amazing what people can figure out. It is, we have like private detectives in the audience. It is incredible. I mean, I have been tracked down out there in the wild several times and people have just pieced it together by things I've said on the air. It's always been a pleasant experience, if not a bit awkward, you know, like, wow, like you got to respect their game a little bit. So I just I'm always very cognizant of that.

You know, like we don't always do this, but we try to before we ever like expose, like, say, the next cloud instance for the taxi survey. We try to like update the next cloud instance and update everything just just in case, you know, we don't want to put it out there with a big old vulnerability. That's how I feel. It's like, I'm going to update my next cloud instance and I'm going to be pretty good about it. But one of the things that I'm allowing myself to do is be a little more low key about how frequently I update the NixOS base and the containers. And I just kind of doing it at my schedule now because none of it's publicly exposed. I'm not saying that's a good idea. I'm not saying just putting the DNS registration out there would publicly expose them, but it's one more bit of

information. But it also would make it so much easier to do things like an SSL cert. So I may just end up going that route. We also got some feedback that had me paused and thinking from David who touched on some ZFS stuff. I'm dabbling with Ubuntu server on an old Mac Pro and Ubuntu desktop on my ThinkPad X1 and did the unspeakable ZFS en route on both devices. This brought me tons of trouble though. Always Always full bpools that cause kernel updates to fail. Huge Docker problems when I would end up not being able to spin up my containers one by one. Due to that, and as Ubuntu is moving away from ZSYS, I'm wondering, how would one migrate Linux or Ubuntu to another machine or file system without starting from scratch? I had some thoughts on this.

Now, I have less experience than probably both of you do with a ZFS system, but as a general, like moving one system to another, I've done this a few times because I thought it was going to be easier than doing the whole reinstall. And it turns out it's just a different kind of heart, but I've used our sync quite a bit to do it. Specific flags that were helpful was like capital H, capital A, capital X, and capital S as well. Go look at the documentation for all of that. But mostly it just transfers in archive mode with a bunch of like transferring ACLs and ownership and permissions, a bunch of that kind of stuff. And so just try to preserve everything. Basically. Except it won to preserve everything. Basically.

Except it won't preserve file ACLs. File ACLs are not supported in rsync at all, as far as I'm aware. Actually... Dash A, dash capital A is specifically preserve ACLs. Well, it preserves extended attributes and all the other things that are understood as

mainline extended stuff, but file ACLs are special. They're namespaced attributes that not everything knows what to do with them. So, for example, dash A will preserve most things like SELinks extended attributes and things like that. But if it's not aware of a namespace, in some cases, I don't – again, I'm not completely certain because, thankfully, I don't have to screw around with file ACLs very often, but, but faccles are sufficiently weird that if you are depending

on them, I would really recommend that you check what the, what happens when you do an rsync-a with, with faccles in use, because I know that different tools handle this differently, even if you say sync all the extended attributes. So that, that's important. Also, I sort of spaced a little bit. Is this about moving from ZFS to non-ZFS? It sure is. Okay, yeah.

Then rsync is pretty much your best bet. I would also recommend that regardless of what you do, do a ZFS send and receive to a file and just archive the whole volume as a send stream. And if you ever need to unpack it or import it into another ZFS pool, you can totally do that and then retrieve it. But as a send stream, it's stored basically in ASCII as block command sequences. And while it's not super compressible, it's more compressible than storing

the ZFS file system itself as an image. So that's another way to archive it in case you need to retrieve it ever again. Plus that way you can do some archive it off that machine, and then you can try some restores if you were trying to do this whole hog transfer.

Spin up something, put all that data on there see how it goes and if you need to do it another way or try again at least you've got the backup i'd also just say i plug butter fs here now just just in the future just just just do that because i don't know if i actually said this on the show before but like when z says for came out, I basically expected something like this to happen and for eventually all the people who were using ZFS on Ubuntu to kind of get sort of orphaned. So, but

Butterfest, it's everywhere. It's on all the things. It's pretty easy to use, and it has many of the same capabilities. For most people, it's going to be fine. And if you want those kinds of capabilities, for most people, it's going to be fine. And if you want those kinds of capabilities, try it out. We actually had a note in the doc.

It's like, is ZFS the right solution here? Is that the way to go? Could something like Clonezilla be of use here to move and migrate and just not try to do it at the file system layer as well? That's a possibility. And a nice opportunity, perhaps, to take stock of what all, if you were going to do a whole hog move,

what all are you concerned about? Do you need separate ideas or policies for your personal data or whatever stuff you're working with on the machine? Or is it OS and application configuration you're trying to keep? There might be some things you can set up to be able to back those up differently going forward. And move to Fedora. Do that. Or join us on Tumbleweed.

Just not that dang workstation spin, right, Neil? Not those. No. No, no, no, no, no. Don't you dare go there. That was entirely because of your specific situation. Most people will be fine with workstation. Okay, good. You're right. You're right. I agree.

Now, to counter some of Neil's suggestions, Daniel wrote in with a question. I've started experimenting with ZFS on NixOS. I'm hoping it'll be better at providing rolling release ZFS experience than Arch has been for me, since perhaps the Nix package manager is smart enough to avoid breaking ZFS. I followed the OpenZFS NixOS ZFS on root guide on an old laptop, but I'm still new to the NixOS and haven't used it long enough to provide perspective

on that reliability. Does anyone else have any thoughts or experience there that might be helpful? He also linked to a guide, which also has a bug in it that you should be aware of. So we'll link to both of those. It has to do with swap partitions. But Chris, have you played with this much? I know you play with tons of NixOS, but I don't know if you've done the ZFS thing. No, in fact, I think all of my Nix systems have been butter FS, but I did get a lengthy note from a listener who has done extensive ZFS on Nix. I can't remember if they're using the main kernel or if they're using an LTS kernel. I think there's, you know, there's that element. I agree though, that if the packages failed to

build or the module failed to install, it wouldn't complete. The Nix packager would not complete, it would error out. And so you'd have have basically the downside is you've got a broken package manager with errors that you now have to decipher what the hell it's trying to tell you and it's not always super clear but the positive side is you have a fully functional still working system you won't rebuild reboot into a kernel that can't build the zfs or doesn't have yeah it doesn't have a zfs module that seems like good prediction on the uh I noticed on the Nix wiki, yeah, they know

new kernels. The other problem it doesn't solve here is, yeah, if it's broken, you just have to wait for OpenZFS to support

the kernel you're trying to upgrade to. They do have a boot.kernel packages option that you can say, like, the ZFS specifies the latest compatible Linux package. So there is something you can do in your Nfs specifies the latest compatible linux package

so there is something you can do in your next os config oh that's nice that'll just sort of you know only let you get up to the latest supported kernel to match cfs well that seems like the way to go that's super killer actually if you're going to do that that seems like a nice little safety check to have that could also create some other awkward situations, though, like when kernel rebases occur and new versions are rolled out with features or hardware enablement or bug fixes, you might wind up forgetting that you've actually been kind of blocked on receiving them until ZFS uplifts. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you've done ZFS on root, which is also part of the reason I don't recommend ZFS on root. But this is a thing you have to be mindful of. Like when you're doing ZFS on root, you are accepting that you are not going to be able to have a continuous update stream of

all the other stuff that makes your distribution useful for you. So if you're on Arch, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Tumbleweed, even NixOS, right, without these special add-on constraints, you are putting yourself in a bind. And you might actually create other problems down the road, because my understanding, at least with NixOS, is that you can declare capability dependencies in the various Nix packages. And as you upgrade, you might wind up in a very complicated broken cycle because you can't upgrade your kernel because of your file system constraint or something like that. Similar issues have happened to me before when I've been working with running CFS

on Fedora or on Ubuntu in the past in Ubuntu rolling before they added their own thing and whatever, like in and that that is obviously a concern, like the only real place where I feel comfortable saying, if you want to rely on ZFS, even for the root file system is you probably want to run it on rel, because then you can have a pre compiled kernel module package that shipped by the open ZFS people themselves that you can install and kernel updates aren't blocked on OpenZFS updates. That's kind of the irony is that RHEL, CentOS, Alma, these are some of the most popular ZFS platforms out there, despite what Red Hat might do. I just find that hilarious. And that's a great point, Neil. I think before you go

on, what I wanted to actually kind of double down on there is i would say it's probably the position of this show if you can avoid zfs on root like uh there's nothing sweeter than a little butter fs on your root and a little zfs on your large data sets like i think those two combinations are really powerful and that's why i think the whole butter fs versus ZFS debate is sort of silly on its face. All the reasons we just went through here are the reasons why ZFS isn't great for the root and ButterFS solves all those problems, right? But there's clearly market demand for ZFS. It's a fantastic file system with a fantastic track record that we use here at the studio. like i think like neil is really well illustrated don't use it on your root file system if you can't yeah i mean if you want to you'll have zfs that's

your you know your go-to file system you're well versed in it then you do whatever you want i would also maybe suggest depending on what we mean by root here uh i mean why not use butterfs you might as well but with nixos you get a lot of stuff you know as long as your version controlling or otherwise keeping track of your NixOS config a lot of the stuff that you would normally be snapshotting on root you kind of get again depending on what you mean by on root here

and where we're drawing our partition boundaries and all those things and what stateful stuff you have lurking you get a lot of that stuff already just with Nix bitwarden.com slash linux that's where you go to get started you get a lot of that stuff already just with Nix. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. That's where you go to get started with a free trial for a team or an enterprise plan. Or if you're an individual, you get to try it out for free.

Just go to Bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's really the easiest way to just securely store, share, and sync your sensitive data. But on top of that, it's really a platform to protect your identity online. That's, I think, one of the easiest things you could do to protect yourself is to get Bitwarden. Because there's all kinds of information that sites have about you. And when you use the same credentials and information across multiple sites, that increases your exposure to data breaches. And data breaches happen all the time. It's like the whole thing's automated. Now it's ridiculous.

Bitwarden is a solution for this problem. It attacks the problem at its root by identifying that the core issue is sharing these credentials and tracking them back to yourself, linking them back to yourself, right? That's the problem it solves. It allows you to generate a unique username, a unique email address, and a unique complicated password for every site, service, and app you use. Across your mobile devices, across all your devices, because it does the syncing and it does the encryption locally. So you're moving things that are completely secured by each of your machines, and it's so transparent in the background. Bitwarden also has things like account switching support. So it's super easy to switch between like your personal account and a business account.

And here on this show, we always recommend, too, if you're participating in an open source project, put those credentials in their own separate vault. Treat that as almost like as a side job, right? So you have a separate account for the open source projects that you're participating in. So you can switch between those identities. You can easily share those types of things with Bitwarden. And of course, Bitwarden itself is open source. That's why it's used and trusted by millions in our community out there. You're going to love it too. And I think if you've already got something like Bitwarden, hopefully it's Bitwarden, but maybe you know somebody out there that needs something like Bitwarden in their life, or maybe it's the place you work or the

group that you participate with, send them to bitwarden.com slash their life. Or maybe it's the place you work or the group that you participate with. Send them to bitwarden.com slash Linux too. I think it's just low hanging fruit. And unfortunately, we just don't have enough people using tools like this. And this is something that we can attack as the people. This is a problem we can address. A lot of us are influencers in regards to technology in our own little social circle.

Yeah, I just called you an influencer. But it's true, right? Like people come to you for technical advice, at least for a lot of us, or you're getting there. And I think Bitwarden is one of the things that you can recommend even normies, right? You can recommend it to family members that aren't even technical. And it's going to just significantly improve or upgrade their security online. That's a pretty significant thing and it's not too hard to do. So go to bitwarden.com slash Linux or send them there as well. bitwarden.com slash Linux.

Ilya wrote in with some Mastodon suggestions, which I think might be topical for our 2023. They write, I've been running a single instance for the last about six months. I'm using GoToSocial. It's still in heavy development and not everything works, but it's written in Go. So it's very light.

It would be great to have you guys on the Fediverse. I think GoToSocial would be a super lightweight option to self-host yourself in an instance and to make open source succeed we have to use it if we use it they will come i had a question for you both gentlemen since you've been probably talking about this behind the scenes are we leaning any way for like an activity pub solution

for jb well we got pure tube which participates in activity pub is on the fediverse and we got PeerTube, which participates in ActivityPub, is on the Fediverse. And we got The Matrix, which is in its own weird Fediverse. But we also, I am, I mean, are you both on Mastodon? I'm not yet. I've been biding my time, but I should be. So I think I have to set up a new account because I am on the podcast index social Mastodon. Because you're a podcast nerd, we know. Right. And it's very focused to that

but people have found me over there and so now my feed is beginning to fill with non-podcasting stuff right because everybody's using mastodon now and i'm like oh this is not why so i thought if i set up another account and made it clear this is where you want to follow me somehow it might be worth it mostly because i'm interested in investing more in Activity Pub and just wrapping my brain around that. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see. I feel like if I was going to invest time, I'd like to invest it in our Matrix community because it's been a really, really positive experience. The Matrix community has really grown incredibly, and we've had just like some of the best discussions in there.

But I could see it. The issue, I think why I drag my feet is I don't really like social media. I don't like that whole thing. So I sort of have a very utilitarian, practical approach to using it because I use it as basically a mechanism to interact with the audience.

So I guess I should probably move over to Mastodon, but yeah, I'm slow about it. Seems like Wes is too. So chrislass at linuxrocks.online is not you? I mean, maybe. You know, here's the thing is I've been around. Linux does rock. I've been around for 100 years, you know, so.

Right? Yeah, I got it. I thought Linux rocks was down. I don't. I mean, I search for chrislass and it shows up. Linux.rocks doesn't load for me. Linux rocks.online. It says it shows up. Linux.rocks doesn't load for me. Linux.rocks.online. It says it was joined in 2017.

So it's as legit as anything else from you. So like if I logged into it, then I could flip the script and be like, I'm a Mastodon OG. How come you guys aren't on Mastodon yet? Exactly. Right? There you go. Also, my hesitation is part of my thinking is, boy, wouldn't it be great if it was our own server? So it was Chris Lass at chupitabroadcasting.com.

I think that's the real intent of how you're supposed to do this in the first place. Because it's like email and any other truly federated system is that you're supposed to have ownership of both parts of of the realm like you're either you're supposed to have ownership of the the system that you are coming from yeah and you're supposed to have ownership of the identity that you are and so like it would make sense like you have chris at jupiter broadcasting.com that you would have you would have chris at chris at jupiter broadcasting.com just you would have Chris at Chris at JupiterBroadcasting.com. Just happens to be a Mastodon address. Right.

Just like it's Chris Lass or whatever it is on Matrix 2 at Jupiter Broadcasting. Yeah. All right. You know, instead of just like being traditional and using JupiterBroadcasting.com, you know, we have a lot of other domains. We do. You could be Chris Lass at Tuxy's Dumb Party. Yeah, you're right.

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go crazy's go crazy what no i want to go crazy no all right yeah probably not all right guess what i just logged into my linux rocks.online master.io yeah i did i just got logged in he's back baby i'm an og yeah thank you bit warden no kidding it was it was thanks to Bitwarden, actually. But that, I guess, brings me to a question. It was like, Chris, you seem to have, what, is that two or three different identities on various servers now? And so if you add one official one, that's four.

So how do you, is there a way to like combine those? Or how do you manage when a server goes down that you... You can forward them all. You do forwarding. Okay. manage when a server goes down that you you can forward them all you do forwarding okay but let's say let's say he has one on some strange server that you know his cousin's brother's nephew created like 10 years ago and they shut it down today and so how do how do you forward those things uh well they turn into a black hole and disappear from no so it's the email problem

sounds right yeah like normally if a server stays up right and you can log in you can go through the mast on instance settings again this is mast on specific other things do it differently but you can go into the mast on settings and you can go and say i am now at this other address uh port and forward and it will push all of your stuff over there like It'll send a Fediverse message that will make it so all of your followers that are on your old address will then be told to go to the new address, and their Mastodon instances will then start auto-following for you. Your message paths will be linked, and it'll start migrating things over. It's not perfect, but it's at least there, and so there is a way to do essentially uh pulling your

audience around when you move that's nice i could move these 33 followers over to our jupiter broadcasting instance those are those are loyal followers those are you're right so oh geez true yeah they are you should send them a little message probably you're right this is the ones i should probably be talking to those guys over the podcast index they're noobs i've been around since 2017 you know so apparently uh ted unangst has a has a little activity client called honk so maybe we want to check that out i like the name yeah the button to submit a new honk says it's gonna be honked. I'm kind of sold already. Yeah, that is nice, right? I want something lean, mean, and simple.

That's just it. I like the Go implementation. My preference would be something like Ghostedon or something like that. I'd like a good name. And just to really make things twisted, I like it written in Rust. It's Go, but it's written in Rust. I just keep it fun like that if anybody knows of a rust based mastodon server that's how we'll decide yeah regardless of the quality yeah it could just mine some sort of coin and it doesn't run

you log in the javascripts mine in monero or something this is how you get like some random cryptocurrency bundled inside of it because it's been WASM compiled in and like whatever. Yeah, we'll do it in the browser. All right, Brentley, let's get into the box of lizards. I know we have some feedback there before we get out of the feedback. Yeah, I got some really helpful feedback from the audience this week. I think, what is it, like two weeks now since I'm on OpenSUSE on this dev one.

And it's nice to be home on Plasma, I gotta say. But I did have some things in the last episode that weren't working for me. One of those was GNOME boxes. And Callum wrote in saying, Hey, I've submitted a fix for the GNOME boxes service file issue Brent was having on OpenSUSE. It'll need to be accepted by the GNOME maintainers and then factory before it makes it into a snapshot. But that was like the day after the last episode released. And so I'm impressed. Callum, thank you very much for fixing my personal problems, but also the problems for everyone else as well.

That's so great. That explains the SR that I saw go through factory. There you go. All right, cool. Let's move right along then. So you just wait by maybe next episode, Brent, and the fix will be ready for you to download and install on your machine. Right? I mean, I've done that for Chris before with Fedora. So like, it's not unheard of. If somebody's listening and paying attention, and we like what you're saying, and there's something

that we can do to help, we will try. It was the easiest bug report I've ever done. Oh. Because I basically didn't have to say anything will try it was the easiest uh bug report i've ever done oh because i basically didn't have to say anything and it just got fixed which is which is a beautiful thing don't expect that past is not prologue yeah i was just thinking like it would be both an interesting and controversial segment to review the bug submission process for like four four distros or five distros or so you know i could do that for us i could do that for us i'd love that i know you could but it could be a little controversial you know controversy is good sometimes nobody wants to hear they're the one that's hard to submit a bug to

but something to think about if people are interested let us know we'll we'll give it a go you never know also failed to mention last week that i had other gnome boxes issues once i got it booted up it just didn't really do anything i thought it wasn't fair to mention that because it was probably something i was doing and sure enough listener wrote in and said hey brent for gnome boxes on tumbleweed uh it's really helpful if you do the following you have to add yourself to the libvert kvm and qemu groups and of course everything just kind of started working after that how am i really helpful if you do the following. You have to add yourself to the Libvert, KVM, and QEMU groups. And of course, everything just kind of started working after that. How am I supposed to know these things? But that may seem obvious to other people because once this listener wrote

it to me, I was like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I just didn't really look there yet. So thank you, audience. You're amazing at solving my problems, and I really, really appreciate it. That's a pretty good tip for Linux in general. Those groups have been given permission to access some of those things. Maybe they require kernel permissions or whatever it is. And so a lot of times you'll have, like, if you install Docker, you'll have to do everything with sudo unless you add yourself to the Docker group. Because the Docker group users, everybody that's in that group has the permission to run those commands. So then you no longer have to invoke sudo.

So that's just a good pro tip in general. If you all of a sudden installed something and you can't run it or you still have to run it as root, it's probably a group thing. I did also mention last episode that I was struggling with KDE Connect. And, you know, I got to say OpenSUSE's documentation, especially their wiki, has been really helpful. I just kind of went over there and thought, hey, maybe there's something. Sure enough, there were a lot of suggestions on how to get the firewall configured, and then, boom, it worked perfectly. So we'll make sure to link to that if someone else wants to play

with KDE Connect as well. I was a firewall thing, of course. If I thought about it for a few, I probably, you know, because when I installed SUS'd thought about it for a few, I'd probably... You know, because when I installed SUSE, I turned off the firewall, but you probably left it on. Why wouldn't you? Security-conscious brand. Right. I feel like the default is where we should start, but I also have to admit, firewalls is not my forte, so I think I need the help there. It's tricky if it's a LAN machine.

You know, if it's... I mean, it just depends on your usage. If you're doing it on your laptop and you're traveling with that laptop, I actually think the firewall is a good idea. It just depends on the use case of the machine. We also got a feel-good? I've been a fan since before Jupiter at Night live streams. I probably wouldn't have a tech job right now if it wasn't for JB, and I keep a JB challenge coin on my work desk. It keeps me going a lot of the days. So thank you, JB, for everything. That's amazing. Wow. Thank you. I just got to say that since Jupiter at Night, when Jeremy was singing, belting out those intros, Jupiter at symbol night, N-I-T-E, like Nick at night. Go look at that on YouTube if you want to see some classic Jupiter broadcasting. Also, maybe don't. Thank you. challenge coin idea and i'd really like to make a great challenge coin because when we do meetups guys you guys know this happens every time we go to a meetup somebody somewhere has a challenge

coin at that meetup yeah definitely i think it's time to do it again it's been years it's been since linux action show was on the air you want to do it again because you lost yours and you keep losing the challenge is that liar i got actually i got one right here actually he opens the drawer i got a couple hidden ones in here that drawer only gets opened like twice a year i got one that's still in the packaging actually the original packaging look at that that's a pristine challenge coin right there and you want to hear it listen to this listen to that huh it's real not just an nft yeah we should do another one. If anybody out there knows about making coins and knows how we could do it in a way where we don't have to do the shipping directly and all that kind of stuff, I'd like to start thinking about it. Like a mint.

You're looking for a mint, basically. Yeah, but if you think about it, you've got to take orders. And you've got to take orders from a bunch of people with different shipping all over the world. And then, ideally, ship from the factory to them or you need somebody that's like an intermediary because what we don't want to do is have to receive all of these heavy coins here at the studio and then ship them out worldwide yeah it's just crazy been there not good but i'd love to do the challenge you know i mean i think you could probably what about you just put the coins in the cododer Robe pockets?

Yeah, man. Just saying, Coder 500's coming up. I'm just saying. And this episode's not too far away from 500, too. We should think about something. Something fun we want to do for 500. An event or something. I don't know what it is.

Could be anything. What did we do for 400? Well, we went and made some special 400 beers. Yeah, we did. And that was a lot of fun. And then 200? And gosh, I don't remember. I beers. Yeah, we did. And that was a lot of fun. And then 200? And gosh, I don't remember. I don't know if we did anything for 200.

Oh, I think we probably had a barbecue knowing us. That sounds right. That's like what we do. So when is 500? 500 is just a few weeks away because we're doing 489 and 490 today. So just 10 episodes away. Oh, man. I was kind of, if it landed like sometime in the spring then

we could then a barbecue type thing could work but if it's if it's too early then it's just then it's gonna have to be something virtual because nobody really wants to like do that in in cold wouldn't it be nice chris if it landed near your birthday i know it's uh around there no i want it to be summer i want us to get together and have a big old party. Summer would be nice. Pause the show. Yeah. The show just goes off the air just for long enough so that way 500 lands in the summer. What could go wrong with that?

What could go wrong? And now it is time for Le Boost. Oh, yes. And I want to just remind everybody that you can boost in with Albie from the Podcast Index website. Like we just got a live boost from Dan Johnson who sent it in and it's pretty great. It's pretty great. He used the Podcast Index. Oh, no, he didn't. Dan used Podverse. Podverse has also just gotten a recent update, I should mention. Podverse.fm now has Working Sleep Timer, which is nice.

Apple CarPlay support. Oh, fancy. timer which is nice apple carplay support oh fancy we got a boost from su or cd for 22 222 sats thank you kindly that's like a super duck just some ducks from the pod verse in infrastructure like i was just talking about you can just send it right there with albion pod verse right from the website if you'd like poppy 1984 bo Boosin with 1,000 sats. Pew, pew. Digital Animated Visual Entertainment. Dave.

Dave. The gif is dead. Long live Dave. Yeah, which stands for Digital Animated Visual Entertainment. That's perfect. Yeah. I'm sold. You know, it's funny how many memes are just Dave files.

They just didn't know it, you know? Deleted Boosin with 20,000 cents. Moved to Fountain just for the boosting support. I consider myself tolerant of people who pronounce words wrong, but I think hearing genome broke my brain. Is genome wrong or is it just so, so right? I think that's the question, right? It's right.

The one that really got me was Linux Unplugged. Oh, no. Oh, now I'm offended. No. A Soltris boosted in with a row of ducks. Thank you, Soltris. A Soltris boosted in with a row of ducks. Thank you, Soltris.

Even after years of using ButterFS, I'm still figuring out cool stuff that I should have probably already known. Amen. I had no idea you could shrink a partition while it was in use. And do whatever you want with it. Another reason to use it on everything. That flexible, buttery file system. I'm not saying you should do this, but I'm saying it's pretty nice when you do do it it is nice okay i have a question though uh so neil what's your favorite butterfs feature then send and receive sure yeah yeah send and receive because i don't

know if i've mentioned this before but all of my computers are kind of crap and that includes the hard drives and so being able to move data very quickly and archive it from one system to the other, or in the event that my computer is about to fail, and I can very quickly offload the data somewhere else and then discard the machine is great. I actually just had to do a migration like that yesterday for one of my computers because the webcam failed out the battery glitched and now it died it like shuts off every 30 minutes time to go time to go yeah and it's like always getting hot it's like okay this is this is like dead uh and so i did ascend to the to another computer

stored it as a backup sub volume you know like named with a different label and then installed Fedora on the new machine and then created the user, blew away the home sub volume it created and then renamed the one that I already had and then just had it mount up and all of my stuff was there. Nice. Yeah, that is a super nice feature.

You didn't ask Brent, but I'm going to tell you mine. No, I was going to ask, so please. One of my favorite things about ButterFS and don't do what Chris does, but, I was going to ask. So please. One of my favorite things about ButterFS and don't do what Chris does, but when I was rocking and rolling a Raspberry Pi server for like two years before the SD card died on me, what I did is I had my data drives were two one terabyte Samsung SSDs and they have these MVMEs that are basically in a USB 3 enclosure. So they're really fast,

really sturdy, really reliable. I needed something to go down the road. And I attached two of those to the USB 3 ports on the Raspberry Pi 4. And then in ButterFS, and again, don't do this, but in ButterFS, it's one fricking command to just join both those drives into one two terabyte volume and so i had two terabytes of addressable usable space mounted as my media uh drive when it was really two individual one terabyte mvmes and i i took this risk because i had backups of this data it wasn't the originals and two like you need two terabytes of storage space and this was like the way you did it back then and it worked really well it it it still flawless those drives are still fine the other thing that's really nice compression compression reduces the amount of read and writes

to your ssd or if you're on a pi your sd card and that extends the life of your device. So I use compression on all of those types of devices. Because why not? And with modern CPUs, you can decompress that stuff so damn fast that it actually improves the read time. So that's just magic as far as I'm concerned. It's one of the wonderful things about ButterFS. Of course, you can do it with other file systems as well.

And so, Wes, what about you? Do you have a favorite ButterFS feature? I think it's just got to be that it's everywhere, well, almost everywhere that you've got a Linux kernel. Mm-hmm. You know? Because you can just rely on it

at this point. Yep. And to Neil's point, right, you've got places to send your backups, you've got all of these fancy features, even if you're not using them,

you can have a new ButterFS file system whenever you darn want. Right. And we've been covering in Linux Action News there's some really nice stuff landing for ButterFS in the next couple of kernel releases. It does just keep getting better.

Lucas of Burlingham boosted with 5,000 stats. I've been listening since around episode 356, though I've since gone back and listened to some of the earlier episodes. I just want to say thanks for the great content y'all push out every week. Then he also sent 5,000 stats along to point us to an old Indiegogo of an e-ink phone,

which we had been talking about last week, which looks pretty rad. I would love like, you know, we talk about all these foldable displays. I'd still love the idea of something that folds open on the outside. E-ink just saying sell it to me. I'll buy it.

Doug boosted him with 40,000 sats. Keep the change. You filthy animal. Been a long time listener to the network. Just saying. Sell it to me. I'll buy it. Doug boosted in with 40,000 sats. Keep the change, you filthy animal. Been a longtime listener to the network. Great to have a way to contribute, even just a tiny bit back. Now, because of Chris, I use Arch, by the way. Nicely done. That's good.

I mean, we're not hyping it like maybe we should be, but you can have just such a nice Arch setup. It's still wonderful. It still is. Just one of the greats out there. Yep, absolutely. Bandblock boosts in with 4,000 sats. Hey guys, I've been listening for about a year and a half and really enjoyed the show.

Today, however, I was very disappointed in the snide comment calling Linus Tech Tips a clown show. I don't think tearing down other creators is a good look, and I'm disappointed to hear that kind of thing on a show that I've enjoyed so much. I think your coverage of Linus' Linux challenge was well-balanced and understanding at the time, so hearing their show called a clown show now is a bit jarring. Bad Block continues with another 3,000 sets. Please keep up the good work with your Linux coverage,

but refrain from tearing down other creators. It makes normies like me, an electronics designer who has an EE degree and went back to school for a CS degree, feel bad about making mistakes. Best of luck, Badblock. So this is an interesting bit of feedback. I thought about this because this came in about five days ago so i marinated it on it for a bit uh when i was thinking about the reference of clown show i'm really referring to well there is a bit of clowning that goes on on that channel

because that's what plays to youtube so there is actual some kind of literal clowning that they do you know with the face stills and and the goofiness that I don't like, but it is the game and it obviously works for them. But I, what I was actually really thinking about is, and the problem is, is we all called it. All of us,

like on a pre-show said it before the thing even really kicked off. They're going to make this, these fatal mistakes and it's just going to go badly. And the fatal mistake is, and I know it because I suffer the same exact limitation. So I recognized it before they even started. Linus has too much going on. He's got three kids, he's running a small business, and he's trying to film four or five videos a week. And to try to take that when you are running at a hundred percent and to try to slide in a complete paradigm change on your operating system, which is kind of essential to how you get your job done, there's just no way for that to go well.

perspective shift that's like, you have to make this shift from, this has got to work right now, I've got to get this fixed, this has got to be done to, huh, I wonder what this means. I'll go look this up because clearly I've got to fix this before I can proceed. I mean, it's a whole new project, right? You've got to have budget in your life for, yeah,

having downtime, having things to figure out, having workflows to adapt. You might still be able to get the same thing done, but you have to do it with new tools. And I don't think Nix would have been as doable for me if i didn't come at it with that exact perspective and i'm taking i even today like i take like after the show we were working on an issue that i just have to take like this long-term perspective that sometimes is going to take me a while to work through the issues and the other issue that really compounded it that really kind of made it a clown show, is they have deadlines. So they had to get this stuff done in a pressure cooker situation.

So it was never going to serve the audience fully. It was always designed to create this packageable series that they could talk about and hype up and present. And as a content creator, I recognized that flaw before they even released the first video. And I guess I could let that slide, but they're also supposed to be at the top of their game. They're supposed to be one of the most respected content creators in the technology category on YouTube. And they clearly make millions of more dollars than I do. And they have a staff of like 80, right? So it's like, when do I let them off the hook for clearly not doing a very good job of creating content that actually was representative of what the audience deserved to see? That's just my personal opinion on it. And I think they missed the mark on that one. I think some of their videos, you know, they fit really well within the availability of Linus and their expertise area and what they have allotted time-wise. And I think they do a great job.

And then I think other videos are shortchanged and rushed, but the professional presentation and the polish of the editing and all of that that they do, or if you can call it polish, I think kind of maybe hides the fact that the product isn't actually as well thought out and refined as it should be. And I'd like to see them do better in those areas, to be honest, because we can have any channel on YouTube do the quantity thing. But I think the Linus Tech Tip folks, with the budget they have, with the gear that they have, with the staffing that they have, well, they'd have to probably have less staffing. But I think they could actually do the quality thing. I think they have the means, the will, the staffing, the gear to do quality over quantity. But because of that fricking algorithm and because that entire ecosystem is based on the attention economy, they have to placate the algorithm. They have to rush

through things. They have to release X amount of videos and X amount of those videos have to have Linus's face on them or else they won't perform to the levels they need to meet their budgets and to pay for their run cost. And it's just a spiral of a situation. And I got to say, man, I don't look pleasantly at it. I think it's a bad situation and I think it's kind of on Linus to fix it. And I don't know how he can if he wants to have a staff of somewhere between 30 to 80 people. if he wants to have a staff of, you know, somewhere between 30 to 80 people. But that's just my personal slash professional opinion. But I do agree we don't need to cut people down. And I will try to be better with how I choose my criticism when I do choose to vocalize it. On to a less controversial topic.

John A. boosts in with 20,000 sats. Keep the change, you filthy animal. Plus 20,000 sats for Brent on Debian. I know. Rock solid. I agree. John's nailed it. John and I both wanted Brent to live the Debian lifestyle.

I don't know. I just like the idea of Brent being a Debian user, but. Why are you saying Debian? You got to. Hey, man, don't blame me for not listening to the back catalog yeah you're out of loop i i i see i can genuinely tell you are happier with susa so john a unfortunately those 20 000 sats were a little late he is picking the lizards but i hope you like me can get behind our brother and support him in his in his journey with the

lizard after he goes another year without updating, he has problems. He'll finally see the DB. Have you updated? Have you updated since last week? I thought of you, Chris, because this morning when I was bringing up all our docs and getting ready to prep for the show, I saw a little notification when I booted my laptop and it said, Hey, you've got like 300 updates available. And I was like, well, I really want to go see if that's going to work, but I really shouldn't do that on a show morning. So I didn't do the Chris and I was going to do that right

after the show report back. I'm happy to report. I made up for both of us. I did a massive update on my neon system that I hadn't been i hadn't done for weeks tons of packages like literally all of them went flawlessly absolutely flawlessly i will say i think debian for me is like the next thing i'll dive into um i've been sufficiently convinced that it's not kind of the old relic that I thought it was, that it actually is really great. Tons of audience members love it. And so we'll just see what next year brings. Let's put it there. Violet Koala boosted in with a thousand sats. Never have I ever customized Grub, installed Arch, or used Wayland. That's from last episode when we were sharing never have I evers about Linux.

And Wes, I wonder if you have another one to share with the class. I'm working on my predictions, Brent. Yeah, me too. I can't be thinking about stuff I haven't done. I know, right? No, it's a good question. Have you been pondering your never have I evers? And I still haven't,

I haven't come up with one. I was kind of hoping one would come in via the boost that it was like, Oh yeah, me too. But I haven't gotten one yet. I do think violet Koala has like a nice life. Like if you don't want to tinker, you're not interested in any of the new fluff,

not customizing grub, not installing arch, not bothering with Wayland. Violet Koala probably has a pretty rock solid, consistent, maybe even a DBbian workstation going over there. I don't know. Yeah, I think this machine right here comes as close as I can to a machine I haven't tinkered with, like never, ever have I just not tinkered with the system, except for I swapped out

the, you know, kernel and I have like an upstream 6.1 kernel in there, you know, so I really have tinkered with it. I guess the OBS machine You know, so I really have tinkered with it. I guess the OBS machine and the Reaper machine I haven't tinkered with. Maybe that's why they're broken. From our matrix room. Have you ever built Linux from scratch? I have not.

That works for me. Actually, never have I ever done LFS. I have done like stage one, gen two, but that's not LFS. That's a different thing. Yeah. I will say these days it feels like you could be on wayland without even really noticing that you're on wayland yes so i wonder

you know maybe you got to verify these maybe you're using it it's right under your nose if you don't send us a you know process list output with your boost or a link to where we can get it it just it just doesn't qualify yeah i don't know how we're supposed to verify these things otherwise. Rusticastiversa boosted in with 1000 sats. Never have I ever stayed longer than 6 months on a non-Ubuntu-based system. I wonder if that's going to be my...

Oh no, I did arch for a little while, so okay, I can't fit into that one. Mars X-Ray boosted in with 1,024 sats. Since Brent will undertake the OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Challenge, is that what we're calling it? I feel compelled to partner along. That's exciting. I'll be trying it myself.

Laughter or pain should never be felt alone and should always have an audience. Here's a few sats to help Brent pay for gas to drive to a local cafe to get coffee if he encounters any tech issues. Remember, decaf is to relax. Keep up the great work on the show, guys. You could tell who like reads the boost splits because I left it as Brent's gas fund because that's just Brent's lightning note, right? But it was Brent's gas fund because we were doing that for the road trip, which worked out fantastic. It really did. We still have one Chevron card left that we haven't spent that was spent with the stats. What should we do with it? That's the real question.

I'm waiting until you come back down. I think my question is, where should we go? Right. Definitely on a cool drive. And then when I cleaned it all up just recently and I redid the splits, I just took the gas fund part out. It's still for Brent, but the gas fund part. Now it's just Brent can use it for whatever he wants. The restrictions are off.

But X-Ray boosted in twice, I believe. Yeah, a second boost with another 1,024 sats. Now that Brent will undertake trying, or I guess returning to, OpenSUSE, I thought it a good idea to help squash any debates on how to correctly pronounce this distro. Here's a link to a video published by Sousa on exactly how to do so. Hint, Neil was 100% correct. I'm continuing giving Brent sats here for his decaf coffee fund as he wrestles, plays, and QA tests his latest distro. Keep up the great work again.

I like being right, but I don't know what I was right about. I don't know if you guys have heard this. I'll just play a little bit of the link that was included by X right here for how to pronounce Susie. Yeah, it's a well put together song. Now, Sousa is a company, a worldwide one to boot with solutions for your software needs. Now, isn't that a hoot? We realize that it's tricky, but ask you don't misuse. Most people mispronounce it. They try to call it Seuss, but it's Seuss-a. Yes, Seuss-a.

Now say... There you go. So that's how you say it. That is a good educational link. Thank you. At least until someone boosts and changes it. Oh, God, Wes. You were a little evil, you know that?

You got some evil in you. Oh, my goodness. Gene Bean boosted in with a row of ducks. Y'all have inspired me to try OpenSUSE again and a spare laptop. One question, though. Does anyone know how to get the TTY theming that opens who's ahead in about 2005 2006 era i hope i don't but i hope someone does it was on point back then i will say i agree it was on point and if anyone deserves it i mean come on gene bean yeah reliable booster gene deserves it yeah

well if anybody tells us how i agree agree. It was super polished looking. Gene Bean also mentioned that Gene Bean was one that told me the Linux Out Loud podcast does a lot of love for SUSE over there. The Golden Dragon came in with a row of the ducks. It's been a while since I've tried OpenSUSE, but glad that Brantley is getting along well again. I like it that dragons. You have other people naming and saying Brantley is getting along well again. I like it that Dragon's coming. You have other people saying Brentley. Look what you started. Well, mascot has special privileges.

That's true. It's an endearing term. I'm going to try out Nix on the server for my next cloud instance and maybe, just maybe, give Jellyfin another go. Great show. I'll try to set up my audio for the sweet double show. Oh, Dragon, did you get in there? Dragon.

Yeah, that'd be awesome. You know, I was recently informed by a listener that they have taken Jellyfin, and the Jellyfin live TV support has RTMP feed-like options. Oh. And you can just give it an RTMP feed, or maybe it's RTMP. So just, like, give it the JB one, you're saying. And you could just pull it right up there in Jellyfin. Martin DeBer better boosted in with

5001 sats hello chris swess and brent great episode here's some tips for open seuss tumbleweed you can enable that kde connect with the yast firewall there's an option in there um you also are going to need that for wireless printing by the way good to know assumes we do wireless martin continues with 5002 sats now about partitioning guys i have a separate home partition and i use xfs because of the speed i agree xfs is brilliant butterfs is stable but xfs is way more stable however you cannot shrink xfs after the fact with extended four you can shrink the partition which which can be helpful. A Butterfest subvolume is also a workable idea. However, then you can never reformat and reinstall the full partition because the slash root doesn't need to be some big old 64 gig drive.

He goes on to say with other 5003 sats, OpenSUSE has great Flatpak support. But to have the complete experience, you need some additional repositories. And he'll link us. We can put those in the show notes, right guys? We sure can. And you can also enable Pac-Man. Maniac. Maniac. And then Martin finishes up with, well actually not. Martin continues with 5,000 Foursats. By the way, with OpenSUSE VirtualBox, you need to go into YAST User Group Management and turn on those groups for VirtualBox as well. So if you go that way, Brent, and you switch from GN gnome boxes you're going to have to do some of the same grouping which will also likely help he says with boxes well he's right about that another 5005

sats i love the mispronunciations of chris my name is dutch so especially hard to pronounce. O-E has the same sound as the first U in the word guru. So try Martin de Beer. But if that doesn't work, Martin de Boer works as well. And 5,000 in six sets.

Also worth mentioning on the show, the FOSDEM 2023 conference will be in Brussels between the 4th and 5th of February 2023. Maybe a bit far to travel, but it's a great conference. You should go. And, you know, I'm sure he's talking to kind of us here, but also let's just repeat that to the audience. Probably everyone should go. Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you, Martin. That's a great point. FOSDEM 2023 between the 4th and the 5th of February. And that's a great thing to boost into the show is those kinds of events, because we always do try to give them a mention so people know they're coming up. The Helpful Idiot came in with 5,000 sets. He says, Chris, I use OwnTrax with Tailscale. I set up MQTT on OwnCloud, and I have Home Assist on OwnCloud as a front end to detect it. That, heard is a really solid setup. So what he's saying is OwnTrax is the app to track his current location. That reports over tail scale using MQTT to NextCloud. And then he has that interface with Home Assistant. So Home

Assistant is also getting his live location. Now, why is that useful? Well, one of the ways I use that is right now I'm not home and neither is my wife, Adia. And so the heating automatically turns down to a low power mode. The lighting automatically turns off and other sequences that might kick off first check to see if we're home or not before they do kick off. increases are one of those things. But you could imagine tying that to all kinds of things. My door locks included are included in there for the RV. Like there's all kinds of stuff. If you start thinking about water pump heater, et cetera. And so getting really precise location information is essential for enabling reliable automations. And so that's why using something like own tracks, which is actually really good at staying reliable and precise is nice because home assistant itself can do it via the companion app on your mobile device. But if it gets closed for some reason, like it happens on iOS, even when you set it to run all the time, it'll stop updating the locations and the automations break, which stinks.

Helpful Idiot came in with a double 5000 boost. I use NextCloud Talk to message my small children. They can send cute messages to me and I know there are no creeps. Yeah, I agree. NextCloud Talk all over tail scale or just even on your own instance does seem super appealing.

I've been thinking about NextCloud Talk if I could just get them off that damn iMessage. They're hooked to those blue bubbles. And then a rare triple boost. You guys do a great job when i grow up i want to be brent don't we all amen don't we all come on that's very we all strive we all strive that's true thank you helpful idiot uh joe f of the jungle boosted with 7 000 sats listening

since episode 309 well we're almost to 500. So that's impressive. And sharing some love with the free sats from listening on Fountain FM. Keep up the great content. Well, thank you very much. I love the newbies coming in. The newbie boosters that are longtime listeners. We need an oldie newbie or something. We need a term for these guys that are like long timers that are first time boosters. We need a term for that, like an oldie newbie or something. But I love it. It's great. and don't forget that albie plus the podcast index listing of lup where you can boost in through the website or you can boost in with the with the podverse app too that's embedded on our website so many

options nomadic coder came in with uh 1555 sats just to mention uh he's continuing the fight against guy swan every time i checked the charts this week, they were down, so I just had to let it go. But thank you. Thank you, Nomadic Coder. And then TheBosh wanted to boost in 200 stats just to welcome all of our new listeners. We've had a whole bunch of new onboards, so he wanted to say hello. Thank you, TheBosh. We appreciate that. If you want to try

out one of these newfangled podcast apps and help keep the podcast industry decentralized and independent, go to newpodcastapps.com. Go grab Albie and boost keep the podcast industry decentralized and independent go to new podcast apps.com go grab albie and boost via the web and we love it thank you very thank you everybody who supports the show that way it's a great way for us to have some fun interact with you guys and uh get a little value for the production which is much appreciated all right we got smart tube as a pick i like this next oh it's next oh so not the

original come on this is smart tube next my bad also known by those who love it as stn so what is it well gomer kyle suggested this one by writing in and they suggest smart tube next is specifically for android on set-top boxes and i can't go back to native YouTube on my Shield TV once using it. There's playback cue, check. Key shortcuts, got them, and user configurable. Sponsor block, bake right into the cake, better believe it. Hell, even video descriptions are displayed if you want them. The Shield launcher allows the content to be used on the home screen

for play next as well. Just the same as native YouTube app. I sometimes find that the native YouTube app would sometimes show empty categories on my home screen. And that just isn't the case anymore. It has worked nearly as a total drop in replacement without any modifications to YouTube, just prioritizing the new app and hiding OG YouTube from the home channels. Uh-huh. I don't work on the project or have any affiliations. I'm just a huge ecstatic user. Give it a try, fellas.

And of course, a mention for everyone listening. I've not seen it on any app stores before, but they do have self-updates built in. I think the SmartTube Next and these kinds of apps are going to be a real challenge for YouTube to build in sponsor block. I was watching one of our videos the other day, and I noticed that people had sponsor blocked it. I was like, wow, look at, we are even getting sponsor blocked. And we get like a few hundred views on our YouTube videos. Like, can you imagine how many creators are going to get sponsor blocked? Again, you know, this is what you get

for creating such a toxic incentivized system with that algorithm in YouTube. So I'd have it built in. It's nice. And it keeps those Android set top boxes kind of appealing to me to have this kind of functionality because you can sideload. Yeah. Now I want one because unfortunately I was going to try it, but it doesn't work with anything I've got because I've got the non-Android Chromecast. The NVIDIA Shield was on sale yesterday too. If you ask nicely, Wes, I think Chris might have an extra one laying around. He offered me one earlier. I think I do actually, yeah. I just want to say, Chris, you were asking about demographic of our listeners and Gomer Kyle

included the following. I sell air conditioners and air conditioning accessories and use Arch, by the way. I used to fix and service them, but crawling in attics in the summer is getting pretty old. Just share that to give you a little bit of demo data. And he says, Merry Christmas, you Fosse animals. Fosse animals, that's great. I love knowing that stuff. I do.

So thank you, Gomer. Appreciate it very much. Based on everyone who writes in, I'm going to say at least 10% of our listeners are involved in air conditioning or air conditioning accessories. Air conditioning, air conditioning accessory. It's for the server.

You know what? A lot of server, yeah, that's true. You got to have a little air conditioning. All right, well, that's it. That's the end of the feedback frenzy there. But thank you, everybody who writes in. Linuxonplug.com slash contact is how people got those emails in.

Or of course, they boosted in with a new podcast app or at the podcast index page. Now, we won't be live next week because it's the holidays, but we will have something in the feed, and it's going to be the tuxes. Do not miss the tuxes. They're going to be out, you know, around our regular time. We, you know, we give some flexibility there because we want the crew to have the holidays off, but it'll be released around our regular release time. And it'll be a very special edition where our community votes on the very best open source desktops, text editors, and projects.

So check your feeds for our regular episode next week. Yeah, the best thing to do is just keep your podcast client up all the time and constantly refresh it. And of course, Linux Action News is also going out. If you want more Linux content, there's a lot going on that goes into Linux Action News that dents the world of Linux and open source every single week. That's where we're hyping all the cool new ButterFS features that you probably want to hear about and take advantage of. It's probably true. Links to what we talked about in this here show are at linuxunplugged.com. Of course, our RSS feeds are over there.

The contact form is over there. You get the idea. It's a website with links that are relevant, like the Matrix chat room and the Mumble chat room. It's incredible. I don't think we have Jupyter.tube links, though. You should think about that. Anyways, thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program,

and we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you. you