LINUX Unplugged - 496: Tux in the Hen House

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

Chris attempts to get Fedora 37 on his M1 Max MacBook Pro, while Wes and Brent try the "every distro at once" desktop.

This is going to be one of those episodes where Drew's advanced AI-based adaptive sound removal is useful. You know, that's why he makes the big bucks. 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. We're coming up on the show today.

We're going to tell you about my adventures of getting Fedora running and actually usable on my M1 MacBook Max. Yes, it's an Apple Silicon device, and we'll tell you what it was like to run Fedora on there. Max, yes, it's an Apple Silicon device, and we'll tell you what it was like to run Fedora on there. Plus, Wes and Brent have been taking a look at BlendOS, which is really just kind of taking a concept to the absolute limit and claims to be a seamless blend of all Linux distros in one epic desktop. And then we'll round it out with some boosts and picks and a lot more. So let's say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Hey, Tailscale, Tailscale.com a mesh vpn protected by wire guard it's kind of like um you know how they once had horse and buggies and now we got automobiles it's kind of like the original vpns were a horse and buggy tailscale is an automobile you get my drift go say good morning tailscale.com

tell them we sent you somehow i don't. Tailscale.com. Tell them we sent you somehow. I don't know. Tailscale.com. And hello and time appropriate greetings to our very small mumble room. Hello, Virtual Lug. Thanks for joining us. Howdy. Hello, Chris. Howdy, guys. And hello, Brent.

Mini-Mechs tired. With virtual mumble rooms, it's really not the size that matters, Chris. Oh, oh. We do still have a few up and quiet listening too which is impressive um but it's a small handful and they're mini mix tired because it's a weird time we're recording it's 4 p.m on a tuesday pacific time we got together a little early this week because you know what um i think less is like on special assignment sunday or something i actually forgot the reason why we're doing this. I just know we're doing it. And that's good enough, right?

Yeah, I'm taking the weekend to celebrate a friend's birthday. So I'll be out and about and I won't be available to record at our normal time. We're all invited, I assume, right? Well, if you want to drive out. Actually, it's not too far from what you were at the Olympic Peninsula. Last weekend. What, last weekend, right? Yeah, it's not too far from there.

I should have stayed out. Dang that's what i get well brent and i'll just chill on sunday and brent has his hot tub come on down chris i might go out to the woods although there is the models are starting to show a possible winter storm coming but if the storm doesn't come i think i'm gonna go out to the woods. And maybe I'll play around with BlendOS, depending on how you guys liked it. I don't know. Disclaimer, my assignment was Fedora on the MacBook this week, so I have not looked at BlendOS. Wes and Brent are going to tell me a little bit about it. And Brent, I know you kind of did more of a deep dive into the research, and Wes kind of went with the hands-on. And so why don't we kind of start with an explanation of what it is and who's behind it? Yeah, I really wanted to dive in

to understand what BlendOS was trying to solve. And it turns out Blend is actually a really good name for it. It, as far as I understand, creates a bunch of containers on the backend to allow you to basically install applications from a variety of distributions and kind of makes that seamless for you as the user. And so it integrates a whole bunch of really neat technologies, which we'll talk about in a sec, but it also is one of those newfangled immutable arch distributions that we're all so excited about, similar to SteamOS, for example. Yeah, immutability,

not only is that super popular these days, but it really does seem like you're seeing a lot of different takes at specifically making Arch immutable. Like that seems to be really common. And the kind of special thing that this does is it lets you also run Ubuntu and Fedora and other distributions simultaneously along with it.

And I'm wondering, Wes, how that's actually accomplished. Well, there's a custom command called blend because, you know, why not? And blend kind of provides a wrapper around DistroBox and Podman under the hood to try and make things a little more seamless. So you use blend to set your system up. around DistroBox and Podman under the hood to try and make things a little more seamless. So you use Blend to set your system up. You can make new containers. So say you want to make yourself a new Fedora rawhide instance, Blend helps you do that. And then there's also some sort of integration thing. So if you want to just use DNF on the command line, say like you don't

want to fuss with the whole container business, or at least you want to be on the more seamless side, you can just use DNF. And that'll like figure out if you have a Fedora container running already. If not, it'll make one for you get that set up and then install the packet. Now, I guess you do have to do a sort of manual export to make that available outside of the container and seen sort of by the system as a whole. So there's, you know, there's some, some finer details around making it I think, as seamless as it wants to be, but it's pushing the boundary there. It kind of makes me think of, in a different way, but like some of the steps WSL2 has taken to make that VM experience be a little more seamless, you know, like, sure, it's all containers, you could do all of this on your own. I think maybe BlendOS is really trying to target like, through various, you know, environments and symlinks and

fancy setups. How seamless really can you make it? Now, as I dug into some of the technologies that were happening on the back end, because I'm kind of new to this, like seamless, blendy containerization stuff. And it turns out i'm getting quite interested but i learned that it uses distro box on the back end which in turn is using podman to get the fancy stuff done and i got really interested in distro box it looks like it's been around a little longer than blend has blend uh looks like in their g GitHub, they've got about two weeks of history from our recording. It's a very early days for Blend, but surprisingly mature. But as far as DistroBox goes, have you used it before?

I, you know, I've played with it. I think we toyed with it, right? But yeah, I don't think we've done anything serious with it, but I think both Wes and I have played around with it. Yeah, I don't have a need necessarily for it on a day-to-day basis in any of my workflows, but I'm impressed with how far it's come since the last time I really checked it out. It's always been a neat project, and it seems like development has really kept up. So you could get a lot of what Blend is doing with Distrobox. You could get most of the way there, but what you wouldn't get is this Blend tooling that they've created around it.

And then, of course, this immutable Arch base. That's very true. I just for fun, because, you know, I installed DistroBox here on my OpenSUSE install on my dev one and it worked perfectly. So that is an option if you want to kind of tinker with that. And it was very simple to get going. So if you just want to try that right away, that's attractive. But you're right, Chris, BlendOS is doing a lot more than just that. Now, when you were looking at the project, too, didn't you discover that it's kind of impressive?

The original creator of it, 13 years old, an official Ubuntu member already, and the project leader of Ubuntu Unity, which is an official Ubuntu flavor, Ubuntu Web, Ubuntu Ed, and Game Ubuntu as well. Yeah, this is Rudra Saraswat, who has a neat, simple website that describes everything they've been working on. And it is impressive, worth going to see that. And I think has some history. is impressive, worth going to see that. And I think it has some history. So it's not like, you know, BlendOS is created by some person and it's going to vanish in a month or two when someone gets bored. I think this is someone with a real track record of creating projects that have some sticking power. So I'm really curious. I know this is really early these days, but I'm curious even what Blend's going to do in

six months, maybe a year. One thing that's interesting here that you might not get sort of by default is I noticed in their little welcome screen, they mentioned installing different desktop environments, and that's sort of like a first class thing. So I went blend install-demate, and that's a command that they list there to install desktop environment. And it goes and tells me, quote, using Fedora Rawhide instead of Arch

as it's recommended for Mate. If you want to use Arch, you can specify dash dash distro Arch. And now it's going and creating a container for Fedora Rawhide. I think it's going to go install Mate inside that Fedora Rawhide container. And then it's going and creating a container for Fedora Rawhide. I think it's going to go install Mate inside that Fedora Rawhide container, and then it's going to do whatever magic it needs to so that that shows up as a separate Wayland session, and I could just log into it.

Okay. That is really slick. Can we just stop for a second and reflect on how impressive it is that you can combine all of these different technologies together, essentially by taking advantage of namespaces and just a little bit of clever scripting and a thoughtful developer thinking some of these things through, you can create this massive hybrid system on Linux. And I think the fun thing about it could be, if you could really get this to a point where it's fairly reliable and stable, and the nice thing about being immutable is you could probably roll it back.

So if it breaks, you could roll back. You could kind of have all your toys in one spot. And with the blend tooling built around it, it's just kind of integrated into the experience. It seems like, Wes, from watching you use it here today, it kind of feels like you're just moving in and out of containers like they're just,

like it's just natural to just kind of move between those and switch those environments. It seems very, very much like it's managing all of how to actually do the mechanics of like entering into a container and execing a shell and getting you there. And you're just doing like a simple blend command as a user. Is that right?

Yeah, exactly. Now you can like see under the hood, if you do a pod man PS, it'll, it'll show you that there's pod men containers running in the backend. But yeah, I think it's designed that you,

you know, really use blend as your interface. You can go and use manual package management stuff, but it offers and tells you right at the start, like, hey, if you want to install a package in your container, well, just here's how you do it with Blend. And then that makes sure that all the magic on the top layer sort of stays correct and things get exposed to the other containers and you can use the Htop you installed in one container over somewhere else. At least that's my early understanding. Brightly, I'm curious what other observations you picked up along the way as you were looking into the project. Several, I think.

One project you both may be familiar with that's kind of in the similar realm is Bedrock Linux. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. Um, this kind of plays a similar part, but it sounds like using containers to try to accomplish what bedrock was trying to do, which is kind of blending a bunch of distributions is feels like a little bit more of a clever way to do it. And maybe more robust as well. From what I understand from bedrock, it's a lot of manual ways of trying to keep things together with literal glue.

It feels to me like this is kind of in that territory, but quite exciting considering, well, how far it's gone already. I don't know what the future is for Bedrock, but it'd be interesting to see those differences. It does seem like Bedrock was kind of on to something, you know, but it was so early before all of the little other spaces in the Linux ecosystem had really embraced sort of, you know, containerization and all these techniques to have multiple systems running

on the same Linux box. It's just like a totally different landscape now. And I think maybe there's some evidence for that in the welcome screen for BlendOS. They really call out Flatpaks. And that's not new, right? The Flatpaks and immutable operating systems, there's sort of a natural pairing. But even with all the fancy blending under the hood flat packs are also a really blessed sort of first class way to get software on blend os that's the way you do it these days this is the process in free software it's a little messy but we keep seeing iterations on top of ideas i mean this really kind of started landing, I mean, back with CoreOS and some of the stuff that was really focused on container loads on servers.

And it's developed into things like Silver, Blue, and Ubuntu Core, and NixOS, and SteamOS, and now BlendOS. And what I really like about some of these more recent iterations is they're very desktop focused. And they're bringing new ideas and solving problems. This isn't for us right now. But say you were an Arch user, by the way, but you like to have an access to DNF and an app.

Maybe that's why you're on Arch is because it's software availability. This just takes it to the next level, really takes it to the limit of what you can expect from a distribution i think and it creates a meta distribution and then you combine that like you're saying wes with flat packs and like you're saying brent with the immutability it's a really new take on this i don't know if we're going to see this become a huge distribution but i think this is bringing new ideas to the space and i'm here for it well another new idea was the installer. Kind of the takeaway I got from BlendOS was they're doing a really good job of taking different pieces from different projects and putting it together in a novel way. And the Crystal Linux's in-house built Jade GUI installer is just a gorgeous thing. Wes, you spent, I think, more time with it,

installing several iterations. How was it for you? What did you like about it? Now, I got to say, I'm installing this onto a RAM disk right now. So I really haven't installed it in anger. I wasn't worried about it overriding any of my precious data. I had a dedicated virtual disk to play with. But the installer was really nice. I mean, it felt like there was a good amount of options. It had a dedicated virtual disk to play with. But the installer was really nice. I mean, it felt like there was a good amount of options.

It had like a keyboard test area. It auto-detected my time zone appropriately. But at the same time, you didn't have to futz with a lot. Like you could pretty much just, you know, type in your username and password, hit next, next, next, and start installing. And it can be tricky to get that right balance. And to boot, it was just sort of simple and clean from a UI perspective too. I was going to add that.

Yeah. I mean, it looks like a native, modern, Genome desktop application, but it's the installer. And it's more modern and cleaner looking than Anaconda. And it's more modern and more Genome looking than the web installer where anaconda is going which not to disparage it because i think it's the new web installer is looking really awesome i'm excited about it but this clear installer or whatever it's called or crystal i don't know i can't remember it's really nice jade gooey yeah okay jade gooey all right you know the crystals okay it feels like this is a steven universe project but whatever um Jade gooey. Yeah, okay. Jade gooey. All right. You know. The crystals. Jade gooey. Okay.

Feels like this is a Steven Universe project, but whatever. I really liked it. I thought it looked very native. I was impressed by that. And I think other distros should consider maybe nabbing that and using it. Well, cool. This sounds like a good weekend toy. You know, like something to keep checking in on every often, every now and then, too, and see how far they take this.

Yeah, I'm still waiting for DNF to finish installing my Monte over here, but it is like over a thousand packages. So, OK, OK, that's fine. But, yeah, I hope maybe after the show I'll be able to reboot and have a whole new desktop environment. Linode.com slash unplugged that's where you go to get that 100 for 60 days and it's a great way to support the show while you're checking out the linux gigs cloud they got 11 data centers right now they're spinning up another dozen this year they've been hard at work with us for nearly 19 years and now they're part of the akamai team so they bring in all of that infrastructure as well if you want to build it yourself like i've done the nuke and pave and put nicks on there and built it all the way up from the ground or use one of their many one click stacks, they have

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Well, after the show, which was only just a few days ago as we record, we came across a little tool to get Fedora 37 running on Apple Silicon. And I have, for a for long long time been hoping to run linux on my macbook 16 inch max m1 edition and this thing's it's i you know because the way they build these you can't ever upgrade them so it's like if you're going to buy one you got to buy it with like a decent cpu because that also means you get a gpu and you got to buy with enough ram so i went all in and i got a got one thinking it's a it's a nice piece of hardware. I mean, I was just sort of playing with it a little bit and had me thinking about buying one. Sure, there's just one thing wrong with it.

macOS. And I say that having no illusions about operating systems anymore. My friends, they're all crap. And it's just what kind of crap you want to put up with and mac os is a bag full of it and it has been immensely frustrating to use on that machine to the point where i got so frustrated i begun rebuilding a machine from like 2016 that could just run genome because i couldn't stand mac os so when the opportunity came around and for those of you who like mac os that's great for me i'm having all kinds of issues

i think it's just half-baked at this point this script comes around i'll have it linked in the show notes and it lets you do the really really advised step of just curling a shell script and running it, you know, which of course we recommend with a big underscore here on the show. We, and if you can run it as root too, what you want to do is just find any shell script on the internet randomly and just run it as root. That's what we recommend, right? It's even a script that is sort of, you know, telling you it's going to do some disk partitioning. It's going to move things around. It's going to switch what operating system you're using.

Yeah, yeah. Wes was still here, and he's like, you want to just pull that down and, like, open it up real quick and take a look at what it's doing? I tried, audience. I tried. And I was so mad at macOS. I'm like, I hope it wipes the machine. I hope. You know what?

Do not care. would like to burn this install with a fire so i uh i went ahead and did the right thing and just curled that thing and then ran it right into the shell and it was fine you know we don't actually recommend you do that and i didn't do it as rude but what it does is it kind of assesses your machine it asks you a few questions and then it starts repartitioning using macOS tooling. It starts resizing your partition and making space for Linux, and then it starts working on the boot stuff. And then a few reboots later, and you know, you hold down the power button and you get the boot, you get the bootloader, you do all these things, it gives you all the instructions

in the terminal, you do everything it says. And I mean, within about 20 minutes, you're at a Linux desktop. There's just really only a few like things you have to go through. Like at one point it goes into recovery environment for a couple of minutes and you may have to click OK on a couple of things. You know, you have to make sure that at one point you shut it down and you actually leave it powered off for 15 seconds. And if you do anything less than that, you could wreck the bootloader. There's those types of moments, but it's all really clear.

And to the point where it was sophisticated enough where we went and blew away an Arch install I had on that M1. And just were able to override it using the script with the Fedora 37 install, which is pretty fancy. Really quite slick. I mean, to the point almost that it felt at times. Now, admittedly, it's, you know, there's still more polish that could happen for sure. But it made me wonder if some of it weren't a smoother process than what might happen if you were trying to install Linux like on top of

replace Windows with Linux on a x86 PC right with secure boot that yeah yeah especially these Windows 11 editions yeah or even as it may have even been easier than when we put Arch on that 2012 MacBook yeah I think so I mean at least you know, the Wi-Fi and the brightness controls, it either sort of like worked or it didn't work. There wasn't as much sort of futzing in the middle, which was kind of nice. Yeah, yeah. It's either totally unavailable or it works. That's a great way to put it. And right now they intentionally have speakers disabled. They say the headphone jack works, Wes, but I did plug stuff into the headphone jack and it never showed up. But Bluetooth was working. Yeah, Bluetooth works. So you can do Bluetooth speakers and you could just do a USB audio device. I got plenty of those.

So it was not an issue for me. Thunderbolt wasn't working for me, but USB over Thunderbolt and power over Thunderbolt is working. So I just hooked up a USB hub. Good to go. And all the ports I needed. And so I could just, I just, here I am with this Mac hanging everything off USB, but it was fine. The trackpad works great.

Gestures and GNOME work. Wi-Fi works, like Wes said. It detects the full resolution. It does one-to-one doubling. So it'll do, you you know you can do a 200 magnification so it's basically high dpi on the screen it's using hardware accelerated rendering ish like stuff works but it's not it's clearly not like a complete driver so gnome's usable and in fact i'd even say you wouldn't even realize

it's being partially software rendered until like a couple of extra things are going on on your system and things are just kind of really demanding the different subsystems and then things start getting a little sluggish. But I have to say, you guys, it never got to a point where i was like this is unusable

it never got to that point it the performance was pretty surprisingly good now it's based on fedora 37 it's using linux 6.2 which as we record hasn't even been released yet it'll be released very soon but it's an rc it's not even out yet. This is going to be, it's going to be a banging kernel though. Yeah, it is going to be a, yeah, Wes and I are both very hyped about six two and we'll be talking about it and land covering what's really great about it.

It's not quite daily driver yet. You know, if you disconnect from all your USB devices, you don't have speakers. Webcam doesn't work. Thunderbolt doesn't work. And it doesn't support the deep sleep yet it does support like the s2 level sleep so like the screen will turn off and some of the systems

will power down to a lower state and with the battery and that thing that may be enough but it won't do like the deep sleep like mac os does where you could put it in your bag for days and days and days i don't know that's not really a deal breaker for me, but that's something people should be aware of. But as far as getting a full working desktop that is totally usable with Firefox, you can play videos. I mean, if you do like a full res 4K video,

it may drop a few frames, but it'll actually play it. I worked on it. I've been working on it since Sunday as my main workstation doesn't support any external monitors the hdmi port on my machine isn't currently working although i believe it does work on some of them oh geez but uh if you're okay with just using a single screen or if you have maybe like the mini i think the mini works with hdmi it'll work And it's fast. In fact, fast enough that I kept forgetting about ARM compatibility and that some things don't have ARM versions because I kept forgetting I was on an ARM box.

Whenever I've used Linux and ARM before, it's either been headless, so I'm not really working with GUI apps, or it's been on a Raspberry Pi 400 or a Raspberry Pi 4, where it's like, okay, yeah, okay. Or, you know, like the Pinebook. It's like, all right, yeah, I'm using this. Look, hey, look at me. I'm checking email on an ARM system. This is great. All right, well, it's too slow. But with the MacBook, it was so fast, I just kept thinking it was an x86 box.

And so I'd, like, download element and go to install it. And it'd be like wrong architecture. I'm like, wrong architecture. What the hell are you? Oh, right. This is an arm box.

I'm on, it's a real computer. And I just kept forgetting it, but it's, I'm pretty excited because the Asahi project's gone kind of quiet since december really december 8 ish i really don't see much from them since about the 8th after all you know a really busy year so i was a little worried like maybe maybe they were getting a little discouraged um maybe they were burning out especially because we saw apple just announced

new m2 hardware right we haven't really seen them say much, whereas in the past they kind of jumped all over it. This time we haven't really seen much. But, you know, having given this a go and seeing the packages get patched and new stuff coming in as I've used it, it's reassuring that they're making real, actual, measurable progress with this. To have that machine upstairs right now running with gnome and firefox and all my stuff and i've been in the fact that i've been able to use it for the last two and a half days on an apple hardware it's just i mean they had to they had to get the gpu working they had to get the cpu it's just amazing wes it's just really something so you know i

wouldn't say it's daily driver but but I mean, you saw it. It's pretty damn close, right? I mean, yeah, it sure seemed like it. It was surprisingly snappy. Not perfectly accelerated, maybe, but definitely, you know, definitely not painful to use. I think, what, macOS sets a pretty high bar, I mean, on their own hardware when it's all sort of designed together to take advantage of the beautiful screen high bar, I mean, on their own hardware, when it's all sort of designed together to take advantage of the beautiful screen and the, you know, optimized responsiveness and

all that, but that were this far along to the point that, you know, if this wasn't a machine you were super focused on really appreciating every ounce of, you know, but it was like a machine that you really wanted to be able to use Linuxux on especially as you know more of the secondary display things where you could just have it as a workstation to plop it in i think there's a great future here i like the combo too of having linux and mac as a dual boot you know you every now and then maybe you do something where you need to reboot into mac os maybe it's's a former update. Maybe it's something. I don't know. Just you have that final cut.

I don't know. You get that compatibility layer when you need it, but you can run Linux as your daily OS. They're there now, really. Like that scale is just macOS is the primary OS and now Linux is there for experimenting. But you just keep doing a few DNF updates and upgrades. And in a few months, that scale could be completely flipped. And then you've got Linux as the primary OS on there. And when you need that extra little Mac OS compatibility, you have it. And it sort of reminds me of the day when people would get Windows machines specifically because they wanted to dual

boot them and have that Windows license when they needed it. And it's just kind of like the modern version of that, perhaps. I'm not sure if it's going to get completely there because it seems like Apple's always moving it. They're always going to be adding features. But I do think this M1 generation, these machines, I think, have a pretty good shot of getting 90% of the way there. We'll see. We'll see. But I dream of a day when you could go out and just buy one of these machines and know that you can just put Linux on it and it's going to work problem free. I remember last time I was at the studio, you and I tested that M1 or the audibility of the fans, if they even came on at any point. No, still not.

Still, I thought maybe when we were doing a few things, this is going to do it. This will be it. Because we were really trying to push to see what kind of frame rate we can get out of the current state of their GPU, which I think is still pretty, pretty new. But even when we were pushing the GPU as hard as we could, I don't think the fans ever kicked on. The only time I've ever now gotten the fans to kick on is when I'm doing like stable diffusion and then like running a bunch of other stuff when you really load it up. But I don't think it's been an issue on Linux.

I think they've actually impressively got power management in a better spot than I realized. I think the CPU idles down. I just don't think it sleeps. So I think like the core, like the speed of the cores idles down and that uses less power because when it's sitting there and I'm not using it much, it's cool to the touch. The machine's cool to the touch. Nice. Yeah. It's really, it's really something because the M1 mini mini machine thing, I think, would make a fantastic home server. Really do. I think the low power drawing. I was just thinking that. Yeah.

Wow. Sits in the corner, sips power. You can get a whole real Linux environment on there. I mean, come on. Because the cool thing about what Asahi's building here is that it's all upstream. So you can use the mini bootloader if you're on arch if you're on fedora like nix has like just depends on the distro and how they pull in the upstream patches so the first go we did of this was with arch but the second go was with fedora

and i think pretty soon the fedora project's going to have an official asahi spin because they can bake the stuff in because it's all going upstream. That's pretty neat, right? Yes, there will probably be like an Asahi distro, which is essentially just this installer on top of Arch. But you don't need Asahi Linux, the distro, because everything can be integrated into these everyday distros that we use. everyday distros that we use. And we could be at a point in a couple of years down the road where Ubuntu and SUSE and Fedora and everything just has M1, M2, whatever it is, support just baked in.

Because it comes in the kernel and the bootloader is there if it needs to be installed and it just sits, packages it up, it's in the repo. It's also great once you get mini installed and you've got your first instance of a Linux distro script run from the Asahi team. It's then set up to be able to just boot from a Linux ISO. Like if you get one, you know, targeted at running on these M1 Macs, but then you can just have like a, you know, regular old ISO that you plug into your Mac and boot into that.

So you can start doing the fun distro hopping. You don't have to be confined to whatever, you know, feel like you have some precious telekit install running on there. Once you're done, you get a proper bootloader on the Mac. So you can boot, you could choose to boot from external hard drives that might have Linux on it. You could boot Mac from an external Mac OS install. You could boot the internal Mac OS install, the internal Linux install. You get more power and flexibility.

It makes the Mac better for a nerd and a geek once you have this installed because you also get that flexibility at boot time and stuff. It's a great point, Wes. It's an upgrade. You can even have it virtualized. I mean, come on. So, Chris, I think maybe final question here. You've watched this progression of the Asahi project. I mean, since its inception, really.

It's inception, really. And so given that, and I know this is not a predictions episode, but in the spirit, when do you think from what you've seen that we might see like a reliable version of momentum, I would have said before I did this little run, I would have said the end of the year, if we were lucky. And now I'm thinking springtime. Wow. Like I'm thinking springtime summer. Yeah. Because it's, if you're like, if you're comfortable living with rough edges and being a really early adopter, you could use it now. comfortable living with rough edges and being a really early adopter, you could use it now. You know, as long as you're not, like Wes said, demanding a lot of performance from the system, expecting, you know, 130 frames on your desktop and want external monitors and speakers and a webcam, but solvable, solvable. But like if, if like hooking up a USB sound card and, you know, doing a few workarounds here and there for stuff doesn't seem like a big deal to you, then you're probably the right type of user to maybe consider using it right now and start giving the project maybe some bug reports and stuff like that. But if you're the type of user where that sounds fiddly and annoying, I think you probably have until about early summer late spring and then you're going to have a better time it's i mean a lot of it's going to improve when six two ships we're going

to see a big batch of hardware improvements with six two then the guys and gals over there just kind of have to work out the the little niggly things with completing the video driver completing issues with the speakers and the way i can like, all of these kind of 10% gaps that now need to be closed. And that can often be, you know, 90% of the work as they say, but that's where they're at. They seem to have a pretty good handle on what that work is. And now I think it just is a matter of executing. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. That's where you go to get started with a free trial of Teams or Enterprise plan. Or you're an individual you can try it for free at bitwarden.com slash linux it's just the easiest way for a business or an individual to store share and sync your sensitive

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to really make sure that your company or just your family is safe. They've also set up bitwarden.com slash migrate, which makes it really straightforward to migrate from an existing password manager. I did this a few years ago when I migrated from LastPass, when things started to smell a little sus over there. It was so smooth and so easy. I was a little embarrassed I hadn't tried it earlier, you know, cause like you try it and you're like, that's it. Wow. Like they've clearly tested that and made sure it works smooth. And then that extends to the whole product line. I'm a, I'm pretty much, I think a lifetime customer at this point. I think you're going to love it too. It's also just really straightforward for anybody to greatly improve their online security. I think the execs and like the V at

the VP level, you know, the VIPs in your business, I don't think they realize that they can particularly be a target and they're the type of user that could maybe benefit the most from password management. I've worked in it. I've been there where I've looked under the keyboard and I've seen the passwords written down. It still happens today. That's got to stop. And Bitwarden, Bitwarden makes it not only easy, but makes it a better solution that works across all your devices and securely syncs. Go try it out. Support the show and improve your security by going to bitwarden.com slash Linux.

One more time, go try it out for free at bitwarden.com slash Linux. A huge thank you to everyone who sent in feedback this week. You can send some in if you've got some. LinuxUnplugged.com slash feedback. This week, ScaredFox sent in a little story. I was listening to episode 495 while cooking. Then suddenly, my dinner caught on fire. My sous vide tri-tip was covered in butter sitting under the broiler when big flames appeared.

Whoa. Is this you, Wes? This sounds like you. I was going to say it sounds like you. Play nice, guys. I was freaking out. I turned off the oven. Then I was going to pour water on the fire, but I realized that was probably a bad idea.

So I ran to the garage to grab the fire extinguisher. I gotta say, it was hard to think clearly in that moment. I really thought my house was going to burn down in that time, and I couldn't help but think about what would happen to all of my data. When I got back to the oven, thankfully, the flames had started to die down on their own, so I didn't need to spray my oven with a fire extinguisher. I'm thankful I didn't have a bigger problem, though. I guess my message is, be careful with your data. You never know, and anything can happen at any time. Being responsible for your data is a burden, and I'm not entirely sure I can keep it safe.

And I hate to say, but the tri-tip was perfect. Medium rare with excellent reaction on the outside. Stay safe. Oh man, it really sounds like a win-win. Fire put itself out. You didn't lose any data. That's fantastic. What a crust.

I really was dealing with this when it came time to back up the photos. I'm like, crap, I'm really taking on a serious responsibility. I would have crushing guilt for the rest of my life, right? If I lost all of the photos of my kids. So I do take it pretty seriously myself, but I, I kind of think data in the clouds, a bit like employment, it's all a lie, right? You think you have security until one day you've lost your job, right? You think you have security until one day you've lost your job, right? You think you have your data in the cloud until one day you don't. And it may happen.

It may not happen, but it does happen where your account gets suspended. Something gets deleted. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft lost all of the data of the sidekick users. I don't know if you guys recall that. And then I think it happened twice. Oh, that's embarrassing remember how this happened the last time and you still decided to trust us with your data yeah um so it's a it's a tricky thing and it's kind of also like when you work on your own vehicle the only way to really know that they checked over everything is if you're the one that did it, right?

And you could take it to the dealership or you could take it to a mechanic and you can hope and believe that they're checking your seals and they're looking at all the joints and they're looking at the fluid levels. They're looking for other obvious signs of wear when they're changing your oil, but they're probably not. They're probably rushing through the job and kind of doing the bare minimum that's on their procedure and process list. And I kind of look at cloud storage vendors in the same way when it comes to data. They just have a problem at scale. That's really challenging. It's just a hard problem to solve. And so I don't know if I'd really feel a lot more comfortable with my only backup being say in iCloud or Google photos. One is none, two is one, and three is a backup, as they say. Kyle sent in a question for you, Chris. I've been very interested in the

conversations in Linux Unplugged recently around backing up Linux boxes. I know Chris has been switching things to ButterFS over the years more and more. Instead of a new backup system, Chris, why not back up the snapshots that you're taking to an external location using butterfs send and receive you know i just had a conversation in matrix that day is like we should talk more about butterfs send and receive because that is a super powerful tool and i've never thought a lot about it in the context of backups i do with cfs file systems it's very funny. I'm wondering what that would look like. It is a super neat capability though. Would it be, we put systems at each other's

houses and we do a compressed butterFS send to each other? Is there like rsync.net type services that accept butterFS sends? That probably is the thing, I think, now that I say that. There's probably a lot there we could play with. There is a tool I've been looking at recently that I haven't used very much, but I think might be a start in this category. It's called Butterback, B-T-R-B-K. And it pretty much tries to help you automate some of this snapshotting and remote backing up of ButterFS volumes. Everywhere I've looked, this has been the recommended piece of software to get this accomplished. So I think if we're going to start on this, this is a good place to dive in. All right. Well, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Butterback B-T-R-B-K could be

definitely worth looking at. I mean, it's fun to say. Thank you, everybody who sent in the emails over at linux unplugged.com slash contact boost to grant now uh we have a little bit of boost news we have updated once again our splits and now the boost also will include our editor and lovely human being drew oh so deserved it's yeah it is uh he got albie set up and he has a lightning wallet now and he'll be in the splits. So when you boost into the show, 5% will go to drew you.

If you're using a couple of places like on the podcast index, when you boost in, you'll actually get a prompt. You'll see each one of those prompts come up. And then like most of the apps, you'll just see it. Like if you look at the splits, the nice thing is all the accounting is transparent. So you'll just see it like if you look at the splits the nice thing is all the accounting is transparent so you can just see it in there and that's nice because now

we get to support drew too and uh he deserves it no kidding we also just got done recording office hours 22 where we did do a deep dive into how drew accomplished that but we also did a ton of experimentation on some newfangled RSS 2.0 stuff around our... Chris, you launched a new feed for that show. Test feed. That's true. Tried out the new lit tag and everything. Jupiter test signal. You can go look on the podcast index for a test feed that we're screwing around and trying out new features. Yeah. At this point, I think as a little debrief,

it's very manual on Chris's part, but very, very fun at the same time. Which means temporary, but worth it because we're learning a lot. It's pretty great. All right, well, we got 49,600 sats from deleted. Hey, rich lifestyle! In a few episodes, everyone will be celebrating episode 500.

I wanted to beat everyone to it and say happy episode 496. Somehow that's even more special. That's pretty great. Gene Bean came in with a row of ducks. Says, wow, Copia, K-O-p-i-a looks quite interesting yes that came that came up just briefly last week this is i should say a reduced set of boosts because we are recording so stinking early this is like essentially probably 24 hours or so after

the episode came out that we're recording so if you don't hear your boost in this week's episode uh we'll pick it up in the next episode. We met no offense. It's just that we were recording early. And then we have another baller boost from Brendan the Penguin for how much, Wes Payne? 140,140 satoshis.

I hoard that which your kind covet. That is fantastic. Thank you, Brendan. Hey, rich lobster. That is fantastic. Thank you, Brandon. That's awesome. I forgot that you also have the boost over there. Brandon writes, a party member here, and I just sorted out sats. I've been listening to all the JB shows for years, even since the Noah days.

Keep up the great show, guys. You guys rock. I love having a place to go to get my Linux nerd on as I don't have anyone else around me so passionate about Linux. Hear you on that one, brother. Side note, where can I find out if anyone is keen to meet up in Cape Town, South Africa? Wow. Not really sure how many South Africans are lurking. Let me know. Well, Wes and I have these really, really, really extremely vague plans to end up in South Africa at some point this year.

Oh, man. I like these plans. Very vague. Very vague. No guarantees. Perhaps come chat on Matrix. That might not be a bad place to start, at least. Yeah, maybe you can find some folks on Matrix. I mean, if we saw a few people popping up, I'd be happy to create like a South Africa

or just a Cape down specific room, whatever people wanted. We totally will do region specific rooms when there's a demand for it. Cause anything that helps the community connect, I think is totally worth it. Sir. Alex Gates comes in with 10,000 sats and he says, I use floor sport.

It has gesture typing and is open source on F droid talking about different keyboards. All right, I'll give floor sport a go. That's really good to know yeah same here you know i you know i use florisboard and i have for what most of this last year and uh i will say it has a few rough edges oh is that why you haven't mentioned it to us both west and are like what where were you last week? Well, I did hesitate last week. Yeah. Well, I don't like. Yeah, it's an experiment. I mean, it has some amazing features, which is why I've stuck with it for so long.

But occasionally you run into like, oh, hey, you hit this button. That's supposed to be this overflow menu. But we haven't implemented that yet. So you just have to stick around and wait. So there are some rough edges. But if you're OK with that, which I know you, too, sometimes occasionally you're okay with that, totally check it out. It's great. It has some amazing features.

I don't know if I mentioned last week, but I am still loving the crap out of Magic Earth. I actually like it better than Google Maps and Apple Maps because it shows me the names of nearby stuff. Like when you're coming up on a farm, it puts the name of the farm. of nearby stuff. Like when you're coming up on a farm, it puts the name of the farm. Like if the family farm is registered on there, or if you're next to a body of water,

it puts the name of the body of water on the map, which Google Maps does sometimes, but not all the time. So when you're going on a little day trip, and it's an area you've never been before, Magic Earth frickin' rocks. Plus, I fought Google Maps like the dickens to get it to route the direction I wanted to go. And when I put the route into Magic Earth, it gave me three route options and one of them was the one I just wanted to go.

Lovely. So it routes like you, huh? Yep, yep. And, you know, I feel better using OpenStreetMaps too. So, it just feels better. It's cool that it's an alternate and what feels like a fresh take that doesn't have like a whole bunch left to implement you know like it it's quite usable day to day yeah i think the biggest thing missing is the network effect because it has traffic stop reporting and camera reporting and accident reporting but people have to actually use it and it just needs more people using it. So magic earth,

go use it. Gene Bean comes in with a row of ducks. I'm so glad now that all the boosts, regardless of the source app will help you in the fountain charts. Thank you, Gene Bean. Yes, we set that up starting last week. So going forward,

regardless of what, uh, I guess source, the boost came from, uh, they'll help us rank in those fountain charts. And we think that was a big reason why we grew so much in the last year so the uh baller boosters that read that got

us up on the charts are probably largely largely responsible for the numbers the show is reaching that are life goals for me i i didn't expect that as a show at the age it is reaching 500 episodes could see growth that is larger than the total of some of our other shows get just in growth right it's just remarkable so i'm really grateful that fountain fm engineered it so that way the boost could come from anywhere on the lightning network and show up in the charts instead of keeping it just closed and just keeping it in their little you know ecosystem they open that up which is the advantage of an open network so thank you thousand sats from runway for recovering data from failing hard drives there's no better tool than spin right it recovers data at physical level and marks bad sectors is

unavailable to tell the drive to work around them it It's $80, $89 for a license, but worth it for every penny. A huge new release, 6.1, is coming out soon, which brings much faster speeds. The owners of 6.0 will get 6.1 for free, GRC.com. Yes, good old Gibson Spinrite. I've heard it disputed if it's very useful on SSDs, but maybe it is. I don't know. Would it be worth trying Spinrite on this studio machine that has an SSD going out?

There's only one way to find out. It kind of feels like when you got an SSD that's on the edge of totally collapsing. You should get rid of it immediately. Well, yeah, obviously. But maybe the last thing you want to do is just throw a ton of read and write at it in like an intensive way. Maybe that's not the best thing.

I don't know. Maybe it is. Maybe they'll just provoke failure early so we don't get surprised by it. I mean, we'll be surprised that day, but not the next day. Right. Yeah. When I forget about it. You seem strangely calm about this failing solid state.

This is the first I hear of this. And why aren't we doing forget about it. You seem strangely calm about this failing solid state. This is the first I hear of this. And why aren't we doing something about it? Well, you know, I kind of work on sort of taking care of emergencies. I kind of move from one emergency to the next. And it's just not in the emergency category at this point. So there's that element. The second element is, I guess I'm a little curious how long it'll last. And then there's like the whole like third aspect of like, well, who's got the time to do anything about it anyways? Like it's really, I don't have, this is the only default option I have.

I don't, right? Like, would I have done it today? I worked for 15 hours yesterday. We did LUP on Sunday, the day before that, which was like a 13-hour day. And then we're doing two shows today. And then I got a show tomorrow. And I got a show after. I don't know when I would do it.

So you could stress about it. Or you could just go with the flow, whichever way the bits go. Maybe I'll just throw Spinrite at it and see what happens. I'm hoping it's an excuse to start pixie booting NixOS on there. I like the way you think, Wes, because you know what? Because then we could keep the same hardware, screw the frickin' drive, don't even need it. And what, like, you're mostly, it's your presentation machine, right?

So, like, it's not running a service that needs to be operational. You just got to be able to get to your desktop. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. Well, I don't know why we're not Nix network boot to your desktop. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. Well, we should, I don't know why we're not Nick's network booting it already. Stupid local disc.

Yarg 32 came in with 4096 sats. I hear a rare mention of gen two Linux from time to time. I've been using it as my daily driver since 2005 or so. I just love getting down in the weeds in my OS stack. And that's why I enjoy this show. Keep it up. Cheers. Love it.

We got a serious Gen 2 contingent out there. Have you guys noticed this? Respect. Don't presently use Gen 2. Don't plan to use Gen 2. But I do enjoy entertaining these two gentlemen with my tales of using Gen 2 in production back in the day at a bank, which is totally inappropriate place to do it. production back in the day at a bank, which is totally inappropriate place to do it. And how I commandeered the hardware in that bank to do distributed building so that way I could update the systems in a reasonable amount of time.

It was a lot of fun. It was some of the best fun. I still think Brent would have a lot of fun playing with it personally. You know, okay. Hello system. Clearly not. Brent was not interested in that and that's okay. I know, right?

No take. But Gen 2 like it it's its whole own world it has a lot of i mean the customizability that the little deep dive rabbit holes you'll be able to go on imagine that oh that's what we do we all come up we get him we're all here at the studio one night right we get him his his food that he eats and so we because you know he's got to he's got to stay he's got to keep his energy up and then we get him a laptop and we set up the microphones and we just take an evening getting gen 2 going oh that sounds fun is it only going to take an evening huh i mean you could see the thing about gen 2 is there's three different stages

you can choose to start at and depending on what stage you start at, it's really quick or long. So we just pick which one we are in the mood for at the time. You know? So we'll see. Or, okay, you hold him down, and then we just get, like, the first stage sort of set up on his dev one after wiping it. And then we leave him to, you know, get the rest of it so that he has a desktop for later recording. We could also incentivize performance by withholding oatmeal until the Gen 2 is working.

He might not come back to the studio again with this kind of talk, I'm not realizing. Yeah, okay. Remind me to do a really good backup before the next time I'm at the studio. Yeah. With Butterbeck. The Golden Dragon comes in with some baby ducks. here's one for the pronunciation of wire guard so it's an alternative

to the to the submission last week chris always needs to use his southern gentleman cowboy accent when using it would that be wire guard is that that WireGuard? Yeah, it's that one. It's WireGuard. You got to spend a little time in the WireGuard, you know? Unfortunately, nobody else can say it just like you can. So it's like a one-person pronunciation. Is your network protected by WireGuard? Brent, I think that just means you and I, like anytime we need to say the word in question, like Chris has to step in and sort of say it for us. I need a yak back or something.

Ironically, we have Westbot on the soundboard saying WireGuard. All right. So then WireGuard. WireGuard. WireGuard. So there's a couple options, too. I just have those saved there. I really like that first one.

WireGuard. That was really good. I just have the save there. She said, I really like that first one. Wire guard. That was really good. I was feeling the wire guard, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I'm feeling it too. I'm feeling it too. All right.

I think that's all the boosts because, oh yeah, right. No, we have one special one. That's right. Of course, Dan had to sign off for the night because it's getting so late. But Dan Johansson did boost us while we were live. Yes, two days ago and said, don't worry, guys, technical issues can happen. Hope the Thaleo is doing a good job otherwise. Yeah, the Thaleo has been we've had we've had two lockups, but I don't actually think that's directly the Thaleo's fault. I think it's video acceleration issues that's what we're hoping but it's been very pleasant to use to install things on to get set up i mean it's it's snappy it's performant it's a cute little case it's just it's a handsome machine it's nice to use yeah it also hasn't squeaked or knocked at all since we've been using it that's been nice yeah no face full of ozone yeah yeah that's been really nice. Remember

how the old OBS machine would just kind of randomly spaz out sometimes and like the display manager would just crash? Sure do. Haven't had any of that either, so that's been really nice. Actually, a decent showing of boosts. I hadn't gone through that whole batch yet. Just kind of did that live. Didn't read all of them, but read most of them.

Thank you everybody who boosted into the show. We really appreciate it. We're working on some cool stuff. If you'd like to boost in and not change your podcast app, I recommend that you go to getalbie.com. That's an open source browser extension that'll talk lightning. And then you go to the podcast index once you top that off, and you can boost right from our entry on the podcast index. Or you can try out one of these new podcast apps,

which we are building all kinds of cool features for, like live support chapter support that's even more fancy transcripts additional casting and host information in there it's just so cool it's what i've been playing with all day to say i'm excited is an understatement and you can experience all those cool new features with a new podcast app pick one at newpodcastapps.com. Shout out to Podverse, who is in our splits, as well as Fountain. Those are a couple of the best ones out there, and we want to send some love their way. Thank you, everybody, who sent it in.

I want to second your suggestion for Albie there. If you're curious about any of this stuff, I wish I had set up Albie earlier. Sort of a little gateway. Maybe you want to do things in a different way. You want to self-host more of it later down the road, but just get Albie set up, start playing with it, and you can dabble your toes in the ecosystem with basically zero cost. We have a really

special pick this week. Brand new, fresh release of Elementary OS version 7 is out today as we record. Looks like lots of stuff in here. Big, big improvements. Still a beautiful, beautiful desktop, too. I saw somebody in the Matrix today said,

Brent, how come you're not using this? It seems like this would really be appealing to your aesthetics. It's true, and I don't have any real good reason why I'm not using it. So I think we're going to have to add it to the ever-growing list of things for Brent to try. Yeah. I mean, a guy can only run so many distros. That's why he's using BlendOS. Way to bring it all back together, Wes.

Very, very nice. Nicely done. That is true. I guess when you can't pick one, you have BlendOS. But we did want to give a nice recommendation elementary os 7 it's nice to see the release cadence seemingly picking up a little bit some features in there and of course as always a really great blog post that just goes through everything you might want to know we'll have that linked at linux unplugged.com slash 496 and you're gonna believe it

crazy 500 oh it's four weeks four weeks we gotta start planning like serious and we gotta get you down here we got so many projects to do there's so much going on it's great though maybe we start doing half episodes you know give ourselves a little more this is 496.0 the one is 496.5 next seriously could we you know like we just do like point releases we'll have minor releases and major releases of the episodes and i think that's why we want to get all the polishing we can before the radical change and uh you know 500 right yeah where it's all new uh version of the show that now supports rust so that'll be yeah that'll be look forward to that and we're starting season two at episode 500, right?

Yeah, right, yeah. Yeah, every season is 500 episodes long. So we'll be resetting the number, of course, at that point, right? Something about that seems a little off, but I'll tell you what's right. We'll be back to our regular Sunday Lifetime over at Jupiter.2 at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And of course, don't forget,

there's a lot more show over at Linux Action News. Wes and I are breaking down the most important things in the world of Linux and open source every single week at linuxactionnews.com. Don't miss it. There's stuff in there you need to know about. We get together, so that way you can hang out with us. That's the only reason we do it. No other reason. So come

on over. Jupiter.tube and the mumble rooms over at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash the mumbles. The matrix at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash matrix. The only reason we do it. Sounds about right. Alright, that's it. We did it. We did it on a Tuesday, boys. Feels like old times.

Thanks for joining us. See you back here next Sunday. Thank you.