LINUX Unplugged - 497: More Features? More Problems.

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

How Chris wasted three months tracking down a Wi-Fi problem, plus we debate if immutable distros need to be simplified.

We've been pretty interested in transcription recently, and Whisper is one of the tools of choice these days. This is pretty neat. Which one of you found this? I think you both actually found this. Whisper for Fosdum. Essentially, they've taken every talk that's been published so far, and they've run it through the Whisper transcription service. And now we have text versions of all of the Fosdum talks. And they have this one link here that's not very well formatted, but I like the idea of maybe throwing it into an e-reader. It's just all of the talks in one

big HTML file, which is not very usable. But in the future, a little more intelligence goes into how this gets sorted and, you know, cleaned up and you could just basically have a readable version of an event. You know, some folks were saying it's actually been great to find talks that you might be interested in. So you just like put in your favorite keywords of the day, you know, and then boom, you get a list of talks that you might be worth going to watch. It's nice to see this thing, you know, getting really easy to use just because I know we have, I have relied on some of the big proprietary platforms like YouTube for their sort of auto transcription because it's really nice to have.

But if you want to do a, you know, a free conference, you don't want to have it fall back on proprietary services. Well, just getting easier and easier to have transcriptions available for the folks that want or need it. It's getting pretty good. We've been playing around with it for our own shows, but also for Linux Action News, we'll throw a talk or a presentation through Whisper and they'll kick out a text file. And then we can review that and decide, is it worth us going to grab clips and trying to cover that? And we can look to see if there's anything kind of newsworthy in that in that event by the transcript. It makes it a lot more, I don't know, accessible doesn't feel like the right word, but it's like it's another tool to help us get through this data even faster and find the thing we're looking for. Because along with the transcription comes timestamps.

Invaluable. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well, hello, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show this week, I'll talk about how I spent nearly three months tracking down a crazy Wi-Fi problem with a really strange Linux angle. And then we'll round out the shows with some great boosts and picks and a lot more.

So before we get into my woes before we go any further let's say good morning to our friends over at tailscale good morning tailscale tailscale.com go get a mesh vpn protected guarded powered by wire guard it gets up and going in minutes and then you have a flat mesh vpn it's so awesome tailscale.com tell them linux unplug sent you you can get it up for 20 devices for free and of course timeate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris.

Hey, Bryson. Hello, Brent. Hello. Hello. Hello, you handsome group. Nice to see you in there. Thank you for joining us. I have, God, I just have one of these stories this week that makes you hate technology and

makes you wonder, should I have just never gotten into any of this? One of those weeks where we send Chris back to the woods. I just about was ready. I was about to give up on Wi-Fi, Wes. It was, oh, man, it was one of those things. Before we get into it, though, I want to mention for a limited time, the Coder Robe is back. This is a special item that we will do until it is sold out, and then I will never do this again.

Again. Ever. I think you said that last time, actually. Yeah, I know, but for episode 500, I got talked into it. But this time, the emotional up-and-down journey of doing a really custom piece of swag like this robe,

let me tell you what, guys, I'm never doing it again. Over there, too, because the international shipping can be rough on the robe, we have a Coder Tumblr and a Coder Radio sticker to celebrate Coder Radio 500. All over at jupitergarage.com. I mentioned it once on the show because I want to give the LEP folks a chance to go get that robe. It is a Coder Radio robe, but it's such a damn nice robe.

Can you describe what it feels like to wear the robe just a little bit? Like you're wearing a cadillac you know like you you've wrapped yourself in luxury and it is one of those robes that you can put on when you get out of the shower if you need to or if you're working from home and you don't need to get dressed that day you could wear it all day long have you tried podcasting in the robe yeah okay so it's like a performance robe yeah oh dude first of all you know the answer to that because you were here when i was doing a show with the robot and i lit it on fire and i kept doing the show and the robe continued on so you know that's the show the robe has survived fire

while live doing a podcast cadillac get yours today yeah it is a cadillac of robes and uh it's for a limited time over at jupitergarage.com along with the tumblr and the sticker and other stuff there's the journal and some love stickers you know i don't know i'm not you jupitergarage.com and then one other thing to mention sunday march 4th at the mount vernon tap room at 192 brewing we're going to do a little micro meetup yep that's right saturday march 4th did i say sunday because it's saturday, March 4th. It'll be the day before LUP 500. We're going to just do a little mini get together. It is kind of out of the way for most folks, but I wanted to do something up in my little

town that I like to patron from time to time. And I wanted to keep these folks going. They got a great location. It is the 192 Brewing Company. You can find their menu and stuff's online at 192brewing.com. And if you're in the Pacific Northwest area area and you can join us come say hi it'll be a little small private venue i'll be there wes will be there brent will be there jeff's gonna be there um whoever else we can talk into come hang out with us now chris considering the birthday uh are you accepting gifts what no

no no so you don't want like 500 raspberry pies or anything well i mean that'd be like we could trade that we could sell those i mean that now come on let's we'll talk oh okay um so i'm just looking forward to we're just gonna do a low-key thing uh we have some plans for 500 but again nothing that's gonna be like um like uh anything too crazy i think you guys are really hopefully going to love what we have in store and we wanted to have a little opportunity to get together before episode 500 and do a little hang we've done all kinds of stuff but we've never really done one super close to home that's within walking distance for me so just seemed like a great chance speaking

of walking distance from where i'm parked these days. We got to go back a few months in time, boys. You got a sound effect for this? I probably, I probably do. You know me. Let's go back. Let's say November. And I parked Jupes and it's like time to hunker down for the winter. And I think to myself, oh, this is going to be great because I'll just stay super focused on work for the winter. Not going to worry about going anywhere. Gas prices are high. This is going to be great because I'll just stay super focused on work for the winter. Not going to worry about going anywhere. Gas prices are high. This is going to be fantastic. And within a couple of days, I start noticing that we're having some Wi-Fi problems. And I think, I knew this could happen. I think to myself, of course, we park somewhere new. Somebody's got a weird device. It's messing up my Wi-fi and i'm having packet loss and

sometimes like pages will fail to load and like you know so you'll do a ping to google dns three of them might fail you know out of five or something okay yeah it was bad and this is just like on your home network yeah yeah and i'm like even with your fancy you know the first link and all your my first thought was yeah maybe. Even with your fancy, you know, peplink and all your. My first thought was, yeah, maybe something's wrong with Starlink. You know, maybe we're dropping to the Starlink level. And was this only one of your devices? Like, was it the local Wi-Fi going? Well, you're going to get into this, aren't you?

Yeah, it's the local Wi-Fi devices. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, okay. So let's cover that. So, yeah, local Wi-Fi devices. I started noticing even stuff on the LAN was having a problem. So then I thought, oh, okay, it's not the peplink or the starlink. We're going to do this like we're sort of

the ISP technicians here, right? Have you tried to reboot it? Okay, Mr. Fisher. You tried? Yeah, you rebooted it, right? Oh, man, did I? I went through all that kind of stuff. I even busted out the old Wi-Fi analyzer,

you know, on the Android. Classic, yeah. And I did make some improvements there was a couple things did some channel happen and i and i decided to finally just commit to turning off the wi-fi in the starlink ap just have one less sort of yeah okay which is mixed but i decided to do it so i was going through and kind of refining i thought okay i'm eventually going to land on stable wi-fi right and i mean now we're like into mid-december and i'm like i'm still having horrendous wi-fi problems but i think i've noticed it's when like one of my neighbors comes home and so i'm thinking maybe

they have a device on them or something that is causing all kinds of problems and so i start trying to track that down best you can you know you can't go knocking on people's door and be like hey can i look at your devices i'm with the fcc and we've had a yeah right we've had a complaint here eventually though i do get in and i see there is a printer like one of these hp printers and this thing this thing is like blasting wi-fi they put one of the strongest aps in this dumb thing. I couldn't believe it. So you started printing to it? upgrade the old wifi system. You know, I've had this wifi system for a long time. Wifi six is out. I have a lot of data. I put on this network because I have wifi cameras. It's probably time. Right. Reasonable to invest. You want good wifi. It should last, right? So

yeah. Do some upgrades. And in the back of my mind is like, well, what if we went on a road trip and I needed to do a show from the RV? Yeah. People coming in new devices. You want robust internet absolutely absolutely i mean it wasn't so bad because i remember on our trips uh i would get wi-fi in the chase car when we were going to colorado and such so it seemed like you were doing pretty good it was working so great it was working so great i really up until brent spent some time on it yeah yeah yeah leave it to bre. New variable here. But I thought,

you know, I would have before it said, this is like the most reliable, closest to ethernet wifi experience I'd ever had. It'd been really solid. So I, I was, and I really had also realized at some point I may be dealing with multiple issues because I started,

I started realizing that perhaps the issues I was having on my phone with wifi were not the same issues I was having on my phone with Wi-Fi were not the same issues I was having on my laptop. And that was a big moment of realization. I started realizing I was getting different behavior on different machines. Does this sound like it's getting more complicated? Yeah. Well, in part, Giraffe and OS did an OS update that introduced a new set of issues at some point during this. Boys, it was rough.

It was rough. So I do the new Wi-Fi AP deployment. I get this all set up. I'm pretty proud. I'm spending, you know, like an entire legit Saturday ripping out the Wi-Fi. Tear down your whole old network, build it back up. Yeah, DHCP reservations you got to tidy up. There's just a lot, right?

And I have a lot of smart wi-fi devices smart and yeah some level of air quotes yeah a lot of them require to be rebooted and stuff like that even though I named the AP the same thing right it's just and sure enough the TP-Link smart devices just start dropping off the new wi-fi whole new set of issues I now have like so the phone doesn't isn't doing wi-fi properly the laptops aren't doing wi-fi properly and now the smart devices aren't doing wi-fi i've actually had a net downgrade in overall reliability of my sounds like you don't even have wi-fi at this point i basically don't and so at the end of a

long day of trying to get switched over i decide to abort and roll back to the old ap no unplug everything i've done undo all the work no way you maniac because i gotta have these devices these are like these smart devices help run heaters and stuff so like this is non-negotiable functionality have you thought about just getting like a three to four year old android phone that you just put on hotspot mode and be done with it. You know, it works for a lot of people. It might be a better experience. I know.

I know. When I see other RVers and I see how they solve it, sometimes I think, yeah, simpler. Just a little Wi-Fi puck. Sure, they have to reboot it all the time and the battery dies and they're made of junk processors, but there is a simplicity to it. There is. It turns out, though, it turns out that we start doing a little bit of distro hopping and i throw a couple of different distros on my thinkpad x1 and the problem goes away no and i think to myself well switching linux distros doesn't

solve my wi-fi so i continue to distro hop for the show and stuff like that. And the problem comes back. So I switch over to, so I start kind of paying attention. So I switch over to OpenSUSE and I have the problem. I think, okay. So I switch to Fedora and I have the problem. I switch to HelloSystem and I don't have the problem. But HelloSystem is based on FreeBSD. All of these other ones are linux i've heard good

things about the networking stick you actually tried hello yeah yeah for life you were giving me a hard time for trying you're the one that tried it yeah we did we talked about it on life i'll give it a go for life you wouldn't try it so we had to yeah that's right that's right that's right that is right we had to do the work somebody had to do the wi-fi worked fine and so the wi-fi worked fine on the same hardware so i decide let's put nix back on this thinkpad because that's the os i like right so i put what you want i put nix on there with the latest kernel i get it all installed with the genome 43 or whatever it is that they have get my extensions on there and things are working pretty good and i start i think i even mentioned to you like at some point just in passing i was like i've been really having wi-fi issues since linux six something or and uh i thought that's what it was sure because that was

the common denominator across fedora open susan nix new shiny kernels maybe there's some little regression that just needs to get worked out in the next and and that version hit all those current all those distros right around the time I started having the problem in November and it just started kind of doing this math. It might have been like Linux 5.19 back then or whatever. We've been through this kind of thing with audio devices or random little network things. It's rare, but it happens. It totally

happens. It's part of the rolling game really when you have a cutting edge kernel and Intel maybe changes some drivers, things can break. So I thought, that must be what happened. So let's see if it's been fixed. So I just go to the absolute latest stack that I can. And I'm thinking to myself,

I've solved the problem. This is great. No problem at all anymore. Until a little bit of a home emergency comes up and I need to get on a website as fast as possible and get information off this website. And the page't load the page the page I'm like no not again I thought I had solved this I bring up the terminal ping no reply no reply reply reply no reply no reply and like I started sweating profusely I started because it's like i need to get this information immediately

we weren't sure if there was an account compromise it was like panic mode panic mode and my wi-fi isn't working again and i thought it was solved i kind of forgotten about it but i pretty quickly at that moment i had in a moment of clarity realized what it was and how to solve it linode.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. And that's how you can support the show while you're checking out fast, reliable cloud hosting.

That's Linode with the best support in the business. They really are just humans that are there to answer your questions every day, all day. What a concept. Little things like that make all the difference, don't they? And Linode's how we run everything we've built since we went independent to what, three years ago or more now? I don't know. It feels like 12. And there's so much we've built over there that I kind of just

lost track of it. But when I sit here and kind of rattle through the inventory in my head, what I realize is that it has just been a rock. Performance has been great. The systems where we needed to turn up performance as they grew, it was really straightforward to just add more system as we needed it. The rigs are always a really great deal. If you need something for like a blog or you want something for the back end infrastructure of your business, they're 30 to 50 percent cheaper than the hyperscalers that have these crazy, unique, proprietary platforms. And on top of all that, Linode systems are faster. They've got 11 data centers online today. They're bringing Linode systems are faster. They've got 11 data centers online today. They're bringing on another dozen this year. They've got 40 gigabit connections coming

to the hypervisors, got the high end hardware. If that's what you want, they got the budget hardware. If you're just doing something for yourself, that's kind of small. If you're just maybe like deploying a dozen system to do some infrastructure management training, you could do that. I mean, you get the hundred bucks, go do that. Go, go spin up like five, six, seven, eight boxes, put them all together. See what you can build. I was actually thinking too, another thing you could try, especially if you've got users that are a little more familiar with traditional Office, only Office is now a one-click deployment on Linode. And that has a very nice UI and it's totally compatible with the Microsoft file formats, does collaborative real-time editing

up in the web, and you can get up and go in just seconds. Great way to take advantage of that $100. So go get that $100 and get started. Go to linode.com slash unplugged. I think you're going to love Linode. You'll see why we rave about it all the time and why so many of our listeners have become Linode customers. It's linode.com slash unplugged. It's linode.com slash unplugged. A couple of versions of GNOME ago, they introduced performance modes. Oh, I remember that showing up in the little menu. Yeah, you got power saver, balanced, and performance mode.

Well, on my ThinkPad, when it goes into balanced or power mode, power saver mode, it like clocks down the Wi-Fi. and it makes my Wi-Fi drop packets. And then here's the extra fun part. It has arbitrary rules about when you can go into performance mode, like if it detects it's in your lap or if the thermal conditions aren't right, or if the battery conditions aren't right, and it doesn't really tell you what those are. You cannot enable performance mode. So you cannot actually take it out of the mode through the gui to solve the issue and get a fully functional wi-fi like you can't just say send all the power to the wi-fi now there are command lines right but you know through the

exposed human interface you cannot and it makes the change automatically in the background so just as you're like plugging and unplugging and sometimes you can't even override it. So I realized as I was trying to get this website to load, I clicked the little power button and I looked at it. Yeah, right. Power modes. This always screws up Wi-Fi and Linux. This always has been a problem. And I really couldn't have told you like at that moment, maybe there was a way to override Gnome Shell and tell it to go to performance mode. I couldn't get it to do it.

Could not. And so ultimately, I decided to take Gnome off, and I just put Plasma on that machine. I just ripped off Gnome Shell over the weekend. Whoa. Yeah, it's a clean cut. That's amazing. You'd never know. Oh, gosh.

That's drastic, though, isn't it yeah and you know when i when i check now in in plasma when i use the command line to like check the performance modes um it says it's in performance high mode it just seems to be always being a performance high mode and that's fine i'd rather have worse battery life but have working wi-fi and i think there is a way to get both looking at some of the discussions. But I didn't really see many people describing my specific problem where when you're in power saver mode, you drop packets. I saw people that are looking to prevent their Wi-Fi from going to sleep mode, and I see people looking at different Wi-Fi power modes they can put it in. But I don't really see people connecting GNOME performance mode to networking issues.

But it is a straight line for me. It was bad. It took me longer than it should have because it just changes on its own in the background. I can put it in performance mode and it'll stick that way for a while. And then suddenly you notice, my Wi-Fi sucks now. Yeah, yeah. And Chris, is this the only hardware that this happens to? Like, have you tried other laptops? I'm wondering if it's worth, you know, maybe it's a Dev1 hardware combined with the performance indicators and change it.

Like, basically, I don't know if it'd be better. You want me to try it on my end and see if it's also an issue? I mean, I should try it. I have, I think I've probably used it a little less with GNOMEome on the dev one. Mostly I've used Plasma on the dev one because it isn't an issue on the same hardware and Plasma. That's the really, that's the funny thing about it. Right. machine to not have that work. And I get, I like the performance mode idea. I like the idea of being able to slap it into low power mode and extend that battery a little bit longer, maybe during a work day when you, when you got something going on. So I don't want to like just throw the feature out completely, but I just don't have time to nuance it either. Yeah. It does seem nice,

especially in the, just to compete with other operating systems, to have that little toggle up there, a quick way to say like, Oh, I'm like, I know I'm going to be going to be on the on the road for all day like i just want you to last a little bit longer it also kind of makes me like a little sus about these types of features when they land when you hear about something it's like that sounds like a good thing but how could it mess up my system and in this case it's like i don't know the performance mode or probably a net loss for me i think i'm probably just going to disable that for a while and i feel like this has always been a really classically hard thing in linux if you look like when i was just doing a little bit of search through of of troubleshooting there's a long long history of people having sleep and performance mode induced problems with networking on Linux. It just goes back years.

It's like we just haven't quite got that right. It's just a little too, like I guess there's too many edge cases, like perhaps it would work really well in the dev one, but on that ThinkPad X1, you know, you get Wi-Fi that drops off. Right, you've got different kernels, you've got different hardware settings,

you've got different chipsets, you've got different Wi-Fi chips. In some ways, it makes the problem feel too big to fix. You've got different hardware settings. You've got different chipsets. You've got different Wi-Fi chips. In some ways, it makes the problem feel too big to fix. Like there isn't a solution that's going to scale across all machines and that will always be just sort of fixing it up, finding the edge cases. Well, that's the wrong mood to take, Chris. Come on. Look at what the Linux kernel has accomplished.

Yeah? Well, what do you mean? Well, I don't know. It seems like the type of support for hardware of various flavors that we've had baked into the Linux kernel in the last 10, 20 years has been sort of monumental. If you thought that was going to be the case when it first came out, you'd think that we'd be crazy. You remember when we were just complaining that Wi-Fi would work at all you can see your wireless chipset yeah that's a that's a big big thing right there you know it just feels it feels still like it's two steps forward one step back two steps forward one step back sometimes but i do see what you guys are saying is if you

take the long long term it's these kinds of things get worked out. They're not so bad. And it's not like the physical hardware isn't supported. I do worry a little bit about the experience of trying to switch someone like from Windows or something. And then like you pop otherwise beautiful Fedora or something on there and you're like, this is really great. And maybe you're not, you know, they don't have the time or the expertise or the experience to dig into the level. Yeah. Yeah.

Especially if you're maybe supporting a family member or something so you don't have enough you know you don't see each of the failure states to walk backward the way that you did what are you gonna think like you're just like well it just doesn't work on this machine when it's a little setting that you could drop a com file somewhere and like not worry about at all well it's just funny how the problem starts as well there's something wrong with the wi-fi and then it turns out no it's actually not the wi-fi it's the laptop and the phone they just have two separate issues that make it look like the wi-fi is having problems like that whole that whole working that out process took way longer than it normally would

but you know it's christmas and thanksgiving is in all of this there's just a lot of family stuff going on and it's like you don't have time to sort this stuff i i think i i guess i just try to look back and think what could i have done differently and one thing i could have done differently is just not fooled around with performance modes in a desktop environment that has performance modes yeah but how can you predict that like new feature you're excited to try it and like surely someone's tested this right and and it probably works in 80 of the cases but surely someone's tested this right and and it probably works in 80 of the cases but so don't feel too bad i can't help but think of xfce you know what if i just went with xfce whoa just simple old xfce and it just would have updated for 418 and they just none of this

whatever i never would have spent any of this time buying new wi-fi swapping wi-fi hardware out you know like you see where my point is it's, if I just had gone a simpler path, I would have avoided a lot of this hassle. Yeah, but you'd be running 2004 XFCE and you wouldn't have anything to talk about

on the show. Yeah. Well, Chris, you did like Hello. You could run that and it'd be fine for you. I mean, it was nice. It was nice,

but I don't think I'd live there. Well, you just, you use that as your base system and you run Linux in a VM. There you go. Yeah, I'll just put Nix in VirtualBox. Yeah.

I was like, wow, this is working a lot better. Sure is nice to have Wi-Fi that works. Does that mean that you have a pretty much brand new out-of-the-box wireless access point that you're looking to get rid of because you're still using your old Wi-Fi system look at you you savage keep your track here yeah i'm not sure what i'm gonna do with it i just calling dibs right on air look at that bowl i went to ship it back and i got a real hard time from some some self-hosted listeners and i thought

no i'll hang on to it try to make it work here at the studio but like when am i gonna do that but that was my idea was to just set it up here at the studio and use it. We have a couple of those TP link smart devices, but only a couple wouldn't really be a big deal. And I'd still like to figure out why they didn't work as a whole other thing. You know? Yeah.

What's going on, bro? Well, that's you're, you're hitting me right in the feels here, Chris now, because it feels like, you know,

we, we tinker because we want to bring new things to the show and we can't help ourselves. But man, do we ever run into all these like little tiny issues more commonly than we should? You know, it's like, well, I have like the title of being the QA guy here because I always seem to run into these weird obscure issues and is that just going to be the way it is for us on the Linux desktop or is it has it been getting better over the last decade like is this see now see you see where I'm at you see where I'm at now yeah I hear you yeah yeah it's sort of it can be a little frustrating because this what I thought was a networking issue turned out to be a software feature on my desktop that was messing with me sort of like a little troll like a built-in malware almost it's just the

craziest thing so i i don't know brian i want to say no i want to say the answer is no i want what i want to say is for like every gem that we discover we gotta find we gotta file we gotta go through a few piles of just junk right and then you find a gem and i feel like that's open source in a in general like that's open source in general. It's incremental progress, yeah. A lot of work to get to the good stuff, but the good stuff is so great. And here, you know, in some sense, we're trying to, you know, bite these bullets first. So that, like, right?

Like, it's not like Plasma's perfect. You can just go to Plasma. Plasma has its own issues. There's reasons you like being on GNOME. And we're kind of here just calling these out so that, you know, the listener can decide which barrel of apples sounds good to them. I am very excited about Plasma 527. That was the other reason I was like, I'll just go over to Plasma. They've got some good releases coming.

Plasma 527 LTS is going to be. So I thought, all right, I'll hang over there for a while. Get that goodie. Enjoy that. Not worry about this. Come back and test it some other time, I suppose. So what was going on with giraffe that's a whole other little thread in this adventure yeah i actually haven't

solved that will not connect to my home wi-fi anymore like at all no still not have you tried to connect to the printer i can't connect to the neighbor's wi-fi and i can connect to the wi-fi here at the studio just fine but i wonder if mine would yeah interesting to compare now i haven't had time to like reboot my ap and do all that just basics right but it is a strange problem and it's been going on for weeks it's it was like one of the updates right after my last rafi no s update like almost immediately after that last rafi no s update we did on the show. I got an over-the-air update. I've had several since, too.

They're very good about that. And the over-the-air update lands, installs, reboots, no Wi-Fi. Cannot connect to my Wi-Fi access point anymore. I've turned off like the randomized option. In DraftVNOS, you have the option to randomly generate a Mac every time you connect or you can not do that or you can do it like there's like a third option and I just turn all that stuff off so it's just using its regular Mac address it's not randomizing it when it connects still no no dice I think I now understand Chris the root of

your motivation to have offline Saturdays you just can't get online it seems yeah yeah there was some of that it's like this crap sick of it yeah ready to stop stop stop just didn't get online, it seems. Yeah, there was some of that. It's like, this crap, sick of it. Yeah, ready to stop. Just didn't want to fight technology anymore. I think that was sort of my, I was just surprised that I spent so much time thinking it was a Wi-Fi issue. Maybe because I'm an old man, I don't know. I just don't trust Wi-Fi. But I just spent, I waste a lot of my time thinking it was something wrong with the Wi-Fi.

But I just spent, I waste a lot of my time thinking it was something wrong with the Wi-Fi. And in part because there's not a lot of good information you get out of your, a lot of like the existing common Wi-Fi tooling. So you're kind of just left as a guess of what it's doing. So what else are you going to do except for assume that's where the problem is? Yeah, right. Either the sort of magic radio waves work or they don't. And anyways, I learned my lesson on that one. Got to go back to the basics and test uh you know layer one however you can do it i suppose even if in my case it means swapping out devices sometimes but yeah there you go if you have weird wi-fi dropouts

perhaps it is performance modes i'll have a link in the show notes of how i went in and uh figured out what uh power profile it is in from the command line. You can basically just cat a file like you can just about everything else in Linux. And it'll come back with your performance mode, either balanced power or balanced performance. And if you're in balanced power, you may experience what I was experiencing and drop packets, especially if you're on a ThinkPad X1, because that's what I was using. Still good, boys. It's no good.

Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go try it out right now. Go get a free trial and see what we've been talking about. Bitwarden is the easiest way for yourself or your friends and family or business to store, share, and sync sensitive data. And Bitwarden vaults are end-to-end encrypted

with zero knowledge encryption. That matters a lot these days. And Bitwarden's open source is trusted by millions of individuals out there, teams, organizations, open source projects. Wes and I, it's what we use for a while now. And if you're using a different password manager and you're looking for a fresh start, something you can trust, go to bitwarden.com slash migrate. They make the process of getting set up really straightforward.

Bitwarden also has account switching support. So if you want to have a work account and a personal account or open source project and personal account separated, it's easy to do that. It's integrated right into the workflow, even when you're on mobile. I mean, it's just top notch stuff. And one of the things that I think really impresses me about Bitwarden is now that I've been a user for a while, I've noticed this cadence of updates. And I saw on their blog, the February update, they're putting a lot of love into some of the admin console stuff. So business users and

enterprising groups, there's going to be a lot of nice dashboard features coming to you. We all get good stuff, but I noticed this next one, it looks like there's a lot of good business stuff in there. So if that's an area or a realm you're considering, Bitwarden just keeps getting better. So go get started and try it at bitwarden.com slash Linux. Using a unique username, password, and email address, which Bitwarden makes very doable, it's one of the easiest and most simple and straightforward things you can do to improve your security online. You might already know that, but maybe you know somebody who needs to hear that. So send them to bitwarden.com slash Linux and have them start improving their security or do it yourself today and migrate. Don't forget about that bitwarden.com

slash migrate. So try it out. Give it a go. See why we love it. bitwarden.com slash Linux. Well, we always love receiving your feedback and you can send us some linuxunplugged.com slash contact and make sure to read it. Josh sent something in for us. Says, I want to add my two cents to the conversation about BlendOS. In my opinion, Arch is the distro you go for, for software availability. Why do you need DNF and Apt if you have the AUR? Even though it's immutable, having an Arch base is still bleeding edge. Vanilla OS accomplishes pretty much something similar, but it uses Ubuntu 22.04 as the base. It's also immutable, and you get the software from the AUR and DNF while keeping a solid Ubuntu base

might be a nice alternative to consider in this case. Any thoughts? Vanilla OS gets another mention. I think I see the logic. I agree. In this particular scenario, there is perhaps some value to an Ubuntu base. You get a certain layer of software compatibility there. I am not as excited

about this latest generation of immutables that we, it does seem like a necessary step in like the creating the immutable Linux distros out there. And vanilla OS feels like one of the more interesting ones that's happening, but we've kind of reached my point of saturation on interest in that. I guess it's, it's there for me now, you know, like my moment of the immutable desktop arrived. And so now I'm not as interested in the solutions that are maybe several layers more complex,

but obviously have good reasons. Does that make sense? You follow me? Yeah. I mean, well, you're, you're drinking the Nick sauce.

So what other distros are going to even, it is interesting to watch, but you're right. I'm not... For some reason, I'm not as drawn to, like, try every iteration. I'm curious to see them. And obviously, we did try BlendOS, and it was fun to try. But it does feel like it needs to add a little something new.

And there's so many... I think it's a little tricky, too. And Brent touched on this with DistroBox when we were talking about BlendOS. There's so many different ways now with containerization methods and other software availability between just install Nix on your distro, between, you know, things like Docker and Podman, snaps, flat packs, app images. So there's a little less. You got to really like, in the immutable case, I think you really got to like how the base system is put together. And that's maybe the layer that's going to stand out, right?

Like Nix, something like Nix versus Silverblue. You've got different ways of how that works. How does the sort of updates get applied. Are we getting too complicated, too, for people to track this? Is this getting too many layers of complexity? Well, maybe that's an area where they will do a little more innovation, is sort of making it, taking immutability to the masses. Obviously, we're happy. We like NixOS.

We like being able to go in and have this one declarative file that we work with. We like being able to go in and have this one declarative file that we work with. But that's not how everyone wants to approach using and configuring a computer, especially if you're just a normal sort of desktop user. But, and obviously I think the folks behind Silverblue think this, right? Eventually, it'd be nice for those folks to also get some of the reliability and other benefits of having an immutable operating system. Boost to Graham. We got some great boosts.

We have an interesting batch because we were off for a little extended period of time, but we also had a node inbound liquidity issue or a Tor issue, so we missed a few boosts too. So it's a good bag,

but if we missed your boost, let me know and send it to me in, I don't know, a matrix message or something. I'll try to get it in here. But VLINX came in with 100,000 sats this week.

You are our baller, sir. Thank you very much. That is fantastic. Hey, Rich Lobster! And they write, I finally figured out this boosting thing with all the new immutable distros popping up. I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring.

Since adding the Calamari's installer to an XOS, thank you, by the way. Yeah, wow. Great work there. Nice. I've been working on other GUI tools for NixOS and a beginner-friendly NixOS-based distro called SnowflakeOS. Hmm.

Given your combined years of distro hopping experience under your belts, what are the most important factors that you consider in a distro before suggesting it to non-technical persons? Any must-haves? This sounds like a Brent answer to me. Hmm, okay. You got any ideas on a must-have? What a great question.

Wow. Well, I feel like we could do a whole episode on this topic. Most important factors that you consider in a distro before suggesting it to a non-technical person. Well, I'd say number one is have a technical person by your side so that if you do run into something. Yeah, maybe one way to phrase this is, hey, there's this cool new NixOS-based distribution, but it's aimed at your average user. What's it going to take to put it on your mom's laptop? Well, I think the average user wants discoverability. up well i think the average user wants discoverability you know if you want to have a youtube music player well how do you go and find something like that so i know we all have like

you know eight different tricks of places to go look to try to discover a piece of software that might work that way but really what I've seen for non-technical people is like, they just want to be able to hit the menu button and write like software or do a search right there for an application they might want. You know, they have a zoom call all of a sudden, well, how did, how did they get that working and how does it work in a way that's streamlined, straightforward, and easy to understand. And I think that's been probably the most challenging thing for Linux, is making otherwise really complex things on the underpinnings seem really simple to the end user. That's really the key, is reducing all that friction.

You're probably going to go say, like, oh, I need to do Zoom as a great example, or whatever the weird proprietary app that you just got to run this moment to get your stuff done and then how do i get this on linux maybe you're kind of aware that you're running linux and then you get instructions for a dev package or whatever and how do you deal with that can you have like upfront documentation or guides that say like either just provide that software getting pathway and has enough software which nix does have a lot of software, to meet that need, or do you need to have some way of saying like, well, yeah, you're going to, here's what you do

in the middle ground that doesn't quite work, or here's how you get help with... Because a lot of users are just going to go to zoom.us and try to download a file to get it going, and that's going to be tricky. You know, I think too, if you think of the audience for a distribution like this, Snowflake OS, it's probably technical people that are deploying it for non-technical users.

And I really wish there was something a little more straightforward for supporting these installations after they're deployed. I will talk a little bit here in a moment about some remote desktop options, but something that maybe took advantage of modern technologies, took advantage of maybe the RDP server built into GNOME and the fact that that's Wayland compatible. Something that made it more straightforward to support folks. These guys are both right though, too.

The software discovery thing is a big issue because most end users, they just go Google search, Zoom install and download and try to install it. I really like snowflakeos.org. It's a great looking website. It's a great idea. idea audience if you have ideas out there you let us know what are things you must have for a beginner friendly distro boost us in and let us know you're like newbie distro must haves am i right in thinking that snowflake os

might might be kind of a nod to using flakes in nix? Do you see that anywhere under the hood there? I'm liking that idea. I was wondering that same thing. I like that idea. I can see it. Well, thank you for the work on the NixOS GUI installer too, VL. That's awesome. Kind of transformative. It's impressive. Yeah.

TechGeek boosting with 25,000 sats. Hey, gang. TechGeek here. I've heard you guys talk about Rust Desk so much, I decided to finally check it out. How about this? Rust Desk on Tailscale. I deployed the server via Docker on my Raspberry Pi on my Tailscale network, and I can access all my Rust Desk clients on my Tailscale network. I love it.

So keep up the great work. Also, may I please have a money soundbite from the Swingers movie? Oh, okay. I didn't see that. I didn't see that. Is that what's that? What is that? I don't, I don't know if I've seen the Swingers movie now.

Well, add it to your list, I guess. I guess I will. I'll have to grab the button. Sorry, geek. I, uh, I'm slacking. I, I take the excuse that I've been sick this week. Uh, the self-hosted Rust test sounds great, though. Yeah, that is a really nice setup.

Ticario boosts in with 22,222 sets. Some sort of super duck, I don't even know. This old duck still got it! I was listening to episode 495, Moment of Truth, and had some input on the best keyboard on drafting os i had a lot of friction switching away from gboard but thanks to drafting os's security rules you can disable networking entirely for apps no telemetry concerns some drawbacks like gift searching obviously doesn't work but i have all the swiping locales and sizing comforts i'm used

to hmm so he's i think what he's saying is use the google board just turn off network access see these are just kind of options nice options that you forget that you even have on mobile sometimes yeah that's great that is a great idea because it is a pretty good keyboard it is and i'm definitely used to it yeah i'm still soliciting ideas but that might be the winner right there. So practical. Mm-hmm. Elefante Orquidea boosts in with 10,000 sats. Great episode. Thanks for your work. Out of curiosity, have you ever heard of CRUNVM? K-R-U-N-V-M.

So a command line based utility for creating micro VMs from OCI images. Minimal footprint, super-fast boot time, zero disk image maintenance, zero network configuration. You can map host volumes into the guest, and you can expose guest ports to the host OS. Okay, well, this looks pretty darn handy. It does. Look, they've got support for macOS on ARM?

What? What? Now we have to try it. Yeah, okay, sure. It looks like they've got a Copper repository available for Fedora folk. And, hmm, you see that there, Wes? You see that? Looks like it's using a little rust. It sure is.

Well, Elephante, thank you. This is something I'll definitely give a shot. Zack Attack boosted in with 7,000 sets. Don't feel bad for putting Apple Music on your Giraffian OS. I also downloaded Gboard and turned off its network access just to get speech-to-text and multi-language support. All right, fair enough. I have been leaning on the Apple Music a little bit,

but Brent, our next boost came in midweek. And when I saw this one, I grabbed their app recommendation right away. Hydrejerum wrote in with 4,950 sets. For music streaming and collection on Giraffine OS, I personally use VI Music from FDroid. Works great for online streaming and offline listening using automatic caching. This is a very much appreciated tip. I've been waiting to figure out how the hell YouTube music could ever be relevant at all in my life.

And this app basically makes it relevant as an abstraction detail. But it is a really great app for playing and caching music on your Android device. Nice UI. It just sort of elegantly downloads the files in the background and then plays them and it'll play them offline you don't have to have cell signal which i really appreciate it's got a great ui i was so impressed by it i had to message wes ahead of time too i was like

wes you gotta check this out this is a great little app which i appreciate i uh have just been trying it myself and yeah wow, wow. What a find. What? You didn't tip me off on this? Well, I didn't. I didn't. You were sick. Oh, I get it.

I didn't spend enough time complaining about YouTube music to Chris. No, it's because Wes was going on a road trip. So I told Wes about it because he was going on a road trip. I'm okay with that. But now you know, VI Music. And it has nothing to do with the text editor that Wes loves so much. But it's still a great name. Yeah. I mean, no one's naming stuff Nano Music. And it has nothing to do with the text editor that Wes loves so much. But it's still a great name.

Yeah, I mean, no one's naming stuff Nano Music. No. E-Rock boosted in with 2,000 sets. Regarding Spinrite, Steve has done quite a bit of optimized operations for both spinning and solid-state storage. It might be worth a go. Good old Spinrite getting the plug. Getting the plug. Yeah, so this was brought up in Matrix, too.

It's been a minute since I've tried old Spinrite. You ever try Spinrite there, Wes? I'm aware of it. I don't think I've actually run it myself. Yeah, I know. He's working on the version that's updated for SSD drives. So he'll have that out soon. Can either of you remind me about Spinrite? I don't think i've ever run into this what's it used for and uh what problem is it supposing to solve spin right is a

tool that really would came into its own for spinning discs hence the name spin right hence yeah uh and you could go through and if you had a disc that maybe was in the process of dying or had some bad sectors on there maybe even had some bad some uh bad file system get messed up or something like that you could throw spin right at it and it would sit there and it would scan and scan and chunk and chunk and just grind its way through like there's there's stories on here about after 22 hours spin right completed its work and produced a fully recovered file. You know, it's like, it's like where people go when they're desperate to get that screenshot that they took that they were working on for the article and then their computer crashed, like that kind of thing. And, you know, people love it because when it has worked for people, you know, they've really

built a loyalty to it. I don't know how great it is with, uh, SSDs, but I'm sure, I'm sure Steve's, you know, tried to keep it up to date as best he can. I don't really know what we need for the... So the background is we have a machine here in the studio where its drive is dying. So the idea is perhaps we could throw a spinrite at it, mark those sectors bad, and then keep on trucking for a while. Now, does spinrite... We have to use Wine? Is it a Windows... It looks like a Windows app.

It's a DOS app. Oh, it's a DOS app. Can we just boot into it then yeah you boot into like an old boot dos environment or something like that and run it now does that support skiboot i know i just want ram i want ram doubling so that's that's what i care about and of course you gotta have smart disk caching right smash comes in with 2006 sats smash here 2006 from fountain i'm moving my email away from Gmail and using Google Takeout. I need software that can access the search that will be an inbox file from an HTTPS interface.

It doesn't need to be a full email server, just remote HTTP access to my archived email. Huh. Never ever have I got an NGINX reverse proxy working until last week. It's glorious, though. Tell Wes thanks for the tip. Aw, that's so wonderful. Thanks for letting us know that it worked out. There has to be a solution out there that takes an email

archive and puts it over HTTP, right? There's gotta be a thing that'll do that. I'm wondering if SquirrelMail supports Mbox format. Or if you could expose Mbox as IMAP using a service and then just throw an email

client at that this is a problem that i would have had to have solved a long time ago but have not had to solve for a long time that's how i'm feeling yeah like there's probably a nice pathway here i don't know anymore i had you know i had a law firm that was so serious about archiving emails and retrieving them. It was like a constant thing we were always trying to solve until document management systems became a thing. Jacobo comes in with 10,000 sats. First time boosting party member here from the Denmarks. I hate Chris and the gang. I recently received my Steam Deck.

And one of the things that it makes possible for me is to use it as, for my daily driver, is to install DistroBox in the home directory. This way, I can have all the packages I need safely tucked away in containers located in my home directory. It's far, far away from the A-B partition nightmare, so I think

it means it's persistent. I haven't found you mention this neat little trick, so I thought I would share. You know what? You're're right i was thinking this morning there's several steam deck related topics that we could share on this show if people are interested i just don't know if people are if you don't have a steam deck is it is it still interesting to hear um maybe well i was interested in this one particularly because you know we've been exploring like DistroBox last episode and we touched on it a little bit here with the immutable stuff. And I was always thinking, this is really cool that people are building this, but what is it actually solving?

Like we had fun playing with it, but I'm not sure what real world case this was actually solving other than maybe some development or something like that. But here's one that's exactly a perfect example of something just an end user would really love to have. So I think I'm convinced. Yeah, and it's nice to trash up a virtual environment and leave your host system clean. You know, you're building a little project,

doing a whole bunch of dependencies for a day. That's a real quick way to trash up your Linux box. And if you can keep it in these environments and that are just disposable. Or someone else's linux box that guy knows what's up jacobo thanks for being a party member as well cb boost in with 10 698 cents not to beat a dead horse but you guys have been mispronouncing wire guard uh-oh it should be Bad horse, but you guys have been mispronouncing Wireguard. Uh-oh.

It should be Wirejard. Mmm. Mmm. By the way, the boost amount is a decimal encoded string. 10698. A little puzzle for later. CB Boost in with another 5,000 sats. I've been neglecting my duty and haven't boosted in a while.

Please send more episodes. I like that idea. Working on it, CB. And thank you. We got to do it for CB. That's right. If for no other reason, it's for CB. Menon RB boosts in with 4,096 sets.

Thanks for doing the shows every week, using Fountain and boosting all the sets I've collected. We'll be trying Copia as a backup strategy as well. Hey, another Copia member over here. Great. That's nice to hear. Thanks for bringing it up. All the best from Bangalore, India.

Hey, Booster from India. Wow. Thanks for boosting in. That's wonderful. Wes and I were just chatting, I don't know, a couple of days ago. It'd be really nice to know where y'all are at in general. So if you've been thinking about boosting in or you're your regular booster, boost it and let us know your location. Well, location boost ping.

Yeah, we'd like to do a round of location shout outs next episode. And I don't know, there's something pretty fun about hearing all the crazy places that people listen to this show. You know, here we are just sitting here in this room in a little studio doing a pod. And then you hear somebody's listening to India. That's fantastic. So let us know where you're at booster. Well, here's one for you, Chris. The last kiss with 10,000 sets says Brendan from Cape town here.

Let's meet up. I also live in Cape town. My name is Bellaz. We would love to have the entire JB crew in Cape town. You will absolutely love it. Thank you for Fedora M1 testing, guys. I'm itching to pull the trigger. How do we make this happen? How does this become a thing?

You know, because there's aspirational ideas and then there's ideas we should really follow through on. And a Linux unplugged from Cape Town feels like it should be something we do. I just don't know how we go from dream to execution. You know, that's the part we got to figure out. Does it start with boosts? Yeah, probably.

Splurk boosted in with 3,591 sats. Dumping all my sats from fountain, cool idea, but it just isn't stable enough. The UI is a bit laggy and sometimes it forgets my place, or if I've listened to an episode. Maybe I'll spend a few years setting up Boost CLI. Also getting a bit jealous of the Cape Town guys. Anyone else besides me in Johannesburg area? P.S. How many sats do we need to get Brent and Wes to South Africa? What about Chris?

What about Chris? Well, you know, that's a new thing. I see. I see. I see. You know, I feel you on the Fountain FM. Because I was like, never had any problems, ever. And then I switched over to Android, and I had some of that, you know, like maybe it lost my place.

And when you're really in the middle of a show that you're enjoying and you lose your place, that is very frustrating. Especially if you're like driving or otherwise distracted and can't get to your phone, you'll just sort of find it again. Yeah. I do stick with it because, you know, ultimately I want to help these guys get across the finish line. And I, so I've joined their beta group,

but, um, you know, you can also stick with your favorite podcast app and just go grab Albie and boost from the podcast index and don't change podcast apps. And then most podcasts, I think the next wave of podcast apps like, uh,

antenna pod and others, they're going to use Albi integration anyway, so you'll just sort of already be where they're going. That's my thoughts on it. Vectron boosts in with a row of ducks. I think someone suggested Steam game streaming for your Rust issues, a.k.a. getting a reliable remote desktop on Wayland systems. I'd suggest looking at Moonlight Game Streaming for that. It used to be NVIDIA GPU and Windows host only,

but now they have Sunshine, which is a host application that works on Linux and without an NVIDIA GPU. I use that to stream to the Steam Deck and it worked pretty well. Maybe check it out. That is a really, really good high quality boost. I tell you what, because that's actionable right there.

You could absolutely do that setup to get remote desktop going on the Steam Deck and it would be totally modern Linux compatible. That's just totally chef's kiss on that one. That's a great setup. I want to try that. Gene Bean boosts in with 4,096 sets. What do you all think about Docker rollout?

It was in this morning's TLDR newsletter. Rollout. Yeah, I know. I saw you also tagged this for LAN. Zero downtime deployment for Docker Compose. I know you already saw this. It's on your radar. And the idea is, right, that you could make some modifications to a running Docker

Compose container and not have to shut it down and start it back up again. So it just continues to run. I imagine that must have limits. Yeah. Currently, only services with scale one are supported. Your service cannot have container name and ports defined in Docker Compose.yaml. A proxy like traffic or NGINX proxy is

required to route traffic. So you've got to have the project and the infrastructure set up just right. But if you need zero downtime deployments or are interested in that, you're probably configuring some. I mean, who doesn't? Yeah. Everybody wants zero downtime. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but I like getting more.

You know, so many systems now have just been set up with Docker Compose because it's so easy to have like a simple little declarative setup for your containers. Really easy. Everyone knows YAML these days, right? I mean, you do it all over the place. But sometimes you need to get stuff that's like a little more complicated. Now suddenly some things are depending on this compose thing that you've set up, right?

And like your needs and reliability and that kind of stuff, that's just changed. So it's cool to have more tooling built around the stack that we're all using. Maybe if you're not doing like a Kubernetes thing. It's called Docker Rollout. And I could see it being pretty useful in the case of our matrix server because when we take the matrix server down you get punished for the length of downtime essentially because the longer you're down the more syncing with the rest of the federation must take place and it just has to work through that backlog and so if you're down for a long period of time for maintenance,

that means that when the server comes back up, it's really busy because users are slamming it because now it's finally back online and it's syncing with the rest of the federation. And so if you could minimize downtime, it just makes everything a lot easier. It's doable, but it's a lot nicer. Gene Bean moves in with another 4,096 sats. I'd love to hear Brent's experience doing a stage two Gen 2 build without using Gen Kernel. Do the full custom kernel and select use flags that make sense for the hardware and intended software stack.

Gene Bean, you are such a solid booster. You know, isn't Gene Bean great? Good, reliable Gene Bean. We wouldn't want to disappoint solid, reliable, boosty Gene Bean. Friend of the show, Gene Bean. Friend of the show, Gene Bean. So Brent, I mean, what do you think of this great, solid idea from friend of the show gene bean friend of the show gene bean so brent i mean what do you think of this great solid idea from friend of the show gene bean

to do a stage two gen two build yeah uh i think at this point i understood maybe 50 percent of what gene bean was saying so i think i have a thing or two to learn so this is what i'm thinking is you come when you come down a little early for lup, one of the things we do is we set up with the mics, and we just set up, and we do it. We just rip through it. All right. Maybe we stream the whole thing, and we cut it down. I don't know what. But we do a Gen 2 party.

And if it takes us all night, it takes us all night. I think Wes would prefer it that way. I think Wes doesn't even invest until it goes to at least 11 p.m. That's right. That's when I wake up. Yeah. That's when he gets his second wind. But, you know, we'll get some food that we can all eat.

Maybe we'll do some grilling. We'll have some microphones going. We'll get a Gen 2 install going. And you'll be in the driver's seat. But, you know, I'll be there to help. Wes will be there to help. I'll have a devil and an angel, one on each shoulder. Yeah.

Yeah, what do you think? For Gene Bean. Sounds good Yeah. What do you think? For GeneBean? Sounds good. Okay. There you go. GeneBean also came in with a hot tip. We were talking about Fountain.

If you're on iOS, GeneBean says that Castomatic is hard to beat in the 2.0 space, and I agree. That is a really well-polished app. It is iOS only, so I don't mention it as much. But Castomatic has, well, it's kind of got a head start because they only focused on iOS. So they, you know, sometimes has its advantages. Oh, Nev is reminding us in the Matrix room that I'd sent some boot media our way at one point because I think Nev's

been mentioning it to us for some time too. Yeah, it's actually in here. His USB stick's actually in here somewhere. Check the top drawer. I think most lost. Well, Brent, you might have just gotten a little help from Nev. Yeah.

But at this point, wouldn't we want to go get new media anyways? We could try it. That could be fun. Where's the fun if you don't stick the strange USB drive in your computer? Well, we'll put it in Brent's dev1. I've stuck it in my computer. I mean, come on. I did that right away, of course. That's how I know it's a Gen 2 install.

I think probably the moral of the story here is we have the best listeners. Yeah, we do. We do. All right. Gort Brown comes in with some baby ducks. Long-time listener, first-time booster. Love listening to you guys when delivering papers on a Friday morning and in between classes. Oh, that's some dedication. You come back. I've been using BlendOS for about a week. And as a distro hopper, I absolutely love it. It's super seamless.

My only issue has been Bluetooth is not working on my framework laptop. Keep up the good work. Y'all rock. Well, better than Wi-Fi not working. Too soon? Too damn soon. Orbital Dev comes in with 2,000 sats. Hey, I love listening to the show.

I've been using podcasting 2.0, but this is my first time with Podverse and Albi. My first time boosting into the show. Enjoy the sats. Not sure if this is a lot, but here's another boost for the dashboard. Thank you, Orbital Dev. The Albi-od verse combo is my my combo of choice right now super super solid this is great i you know sometimes i when i see these usernames i don't read them fully like it doesn't click andy juan kenobi that's great man

that's a great username coming in with some leet sats, first boost. It occurred to me that boosts are a lot like boosts on Twitch. Bits. If you don't think of the fact that, or bits? Yeah, they're called bits. I just learned this yesterday. That's why. Okay.

All right. Thank you. Okay. I just thought I was such an old man. With some leet sats, Andy writes, first boost. It occurred to me that boosts are a lot like bits on Twitch. If you don't think about the fact that you could convert them back to fiat it's just like a podcasting currency for sending to your favorite creator yeah i agree uh the blueberry folks the bull bar just did a great write-up on podcasting 2.0 and introduced the whole value for value concept

and then their basic my takeaway from their write-up and i think they nailed it's like don't don't get caught up on the stats thing. It's just a medium of exchange. Like that's not the important, the important part is boosting in and supporting the creators and creating a model around value for value that is audience driven.

And hopefully one day we'll also work for software, but that's just me dreaming. Yeah, I think it's not necessarily a podcast only thing, which is, I don't know, part of where the excitement is. It could be for all of free software. It could be for your coffee at some point. Who knows? Yeah, for farmers.

You know, markets. There is interesting tests out there. Little micro tests going on a Saturday or Sunday. I've seen that tons in different cities. And so they were just like ahead on the game here. Yeah. cheap enough to do very, very small transactions. And you could integrate that into something like GNOME software or Flathub so seamlessly,

so smoothly. And then it wouldn't matter where you were at in the world, there wouldn't be the currency conversion. And it could be done as easily as when you run the app. It could be done at the download link. There's so many ways to do it where it's a good, smooth, seamless experience where maybe you just have a budget set up in something like an Albi wallet and you don't really have to interact with it a whole bunch until it exceeds what you set as a budget or something like that. Who knows? It'll probably be something our kids figure

out, not us. Scranton boosts in with 2,000 sats in a sea of how-to install apps in Ubuntu. This show is the island of Oasis of interesting and useful news on Linux. Keep up the good work. Thank you, Scranton. I was just going to pitch a how to install apps on Ubuntu show. Maybe next time. Scranton, just cut you down. Just cut you

down. If you'd like to send a boost into the show, you can get a new podcast app, newpodcastapps.com or just go grab Albie, getalbie.com, top it up, which you can do directly in Albie these days, and then go to the podcast index and boost from the web. And then you don't have to switch podcast apps. However, I recommend you do because our first pick this week is Podverse 4.12.0. And the reason why I am making it yet another damn pick again is because Mitch and the team over there have been in some kind of fugue state making this thing better and better constantly. It's un-freaking-believable.

It's so nice to see. Major audio and video playback. App is faster, cleaner, smoother. The boosting stuff's even better. They integrated in hls support for video streams from peer tube so we'll be able to soon video stream into the podverse app live yes and of course gpl cross-platform available on the ios app store android play and f-droid and the fact that it's a just getting better and better it's

like i used to say well we should we should all give it a go because it's gpl and it's the one i think long term it's probably not going to rug us and you know just i like that it's free software and cross cross platform and now it's just a great freaking podcast app they've really crushed it we've been experimenting with transcripts and cloud chapters and all this kind of stuff behind the scenes. And it's so nice to have a web version of Podverse to do some of the testing. It just, Podverse has been great. It's been great from the open source community standpoint.

When we did the website project, they've been great on solid releases and they have been absolutely great to work with whenever we have something come up so i love that web player for sharing with like friends and family who maybe aren't big into podcasts like i don't they don't have like a preferred client i don't want to just link them to like what the apple music where you know uh but podverse has the player built right in so why not yeah it's great for lincoln so slick so i have to give them a shout out because they just keep blowing my socks off. But we also have Boxee that we wanted to let people know about this week. B-O-X-X-Y. And this, this is a tool for putting a misbehaving app in a box. Hey, you ever have those apps that sort of just want to put their files wherever they're going to put them in your home directory,

regardless of how you've set things up, how you're already trying to save or configure your.files, it's just going to spew. Well, Boxee helps with that. So they give an example of Tmux. It wants to put its config in just.tmux.conf. You can set up a little YAML file here with Boxee. It's a Rust app, no less. And you can say,

I want to redirect writes to tmux.conf to.config slash tmux slash tmux.conf. Go put it in this place that you keep all the rest of your config files. And then without using symlinks, which is a common technique here, right? You just sort of like set up all these symlinks. You got to like know which files, set the symlink up right. Boxee uses namespaces instead. Oh, cool. As it should. This is 2023 after all, Wes. Yeah. I mean, come on. Be a Linux hipster with your Rust app using namespaces instead. Oh, cool. As it should. This is 2023 after all, Wes. Yeah. I mean, come on. Be a Linux hipster with your Rust app using namespaces.

Yeah. What do you do? Isn't SimLinks? It's not 1980 anymore. Gross. Says the guy who's got SimLinks. This is a really cool tool. Boxee.

And like you heard Wes say there, it's written in Rust 99.1% Rust 0.9% shell. Breakdown. That's pretty great. B-O-X-X-Y. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Go put your bad Linux application in a box. I actually feel like this would be really great for, honestly, even though we don't really have a problem with it, Reaper. Just to kind of put it all together in one spot.

Because we generally just download the Reaper tar tar file extract it and run it and i like the tidiness of this uh some great news uh a file for boxy was merged into nix packages three hours ago as we record what are the chances this is getting weird this is like the second time that's happened that's so great well there you have it it's like it's meant to be well i feel like for me the win this week is my wi-fi is working really solid and plasma is so dang great 527 is coming boys it's coming i'm trying to get the hype going because this project has been working really, really, really hard on this release, and you can tell they're trying to make it a banger. And so I'm just trying to lean into that a little bit. Go get some of your Adventures in Linux and KDE blog reading. Yeah, go check out Nate's weekly updates.

And I got Neon installed here in the studio, and I got Plasma now on the Nix ThinkPad. And I'm going to be, as soon as 5. 527 is out i'm going to be jumping on it chris can i ask you uh why are you so excited like what what are the top two or three things that really are getting you on this one you ready for this no i am this is the end of the five series my friend this is the end of the road so it's huge for that right there let's just full stop it is also going to be an lts so this is the end of the road so it's huge for that right there let's just full stop it is also going to be an lts so this is going to be one of those where i feel like would be perfect for deploying and production in the studio uh maybe not immediately but within a month or three um but if you go through the post that nate rounds up or if you go to the kde planet

there is a all of project effort to make this a really good release. Like everybody's on board with really trying to make 5.27 a banger. And I don't know, there's something about that that happens from time to time. Every now and then things align and the project gets like focused and it's usually really good. So also K runner looks a lot better. There's that.

That's okay. That that's exciting right there. All right, well, that wraps it up for this week's episode of the Unplugged program. Remember, we get together every single Sunday, and we'd love to have you hang out with us. We do it at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, over at jupiter.tube. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And if you want to see the factory and watch the sausage get made, you can

go watch the replay at jupiter.tube. And of course, we package that up for our members, put it in a nice feed, give them some chapters, give it a little bit of love and some processing. And that's a thank you for being one of our members. You can sign up at jupiter.party or sign up for this show specifically at Unplugged Core.

We appreciate you very much, members, especially these weeks you know especially especially these weeks and if you're thinking gosh guys i wish there was more show i'm not really ready to be done yet linuxactionnews.com that's where we send you linuxactionnews.com go get more news why not i don't know thanks for joining us that's all the show for this time see you next time. That's it. Show's done.

Good night. You're done. you know what we need if anyone's listening who has some ideas what we need is to be able to integrate the matrix chat into a into a website that way we can go to jb titles and it just shows up you know maybe the yeah the whole thing shows up there and you can vote to scrape the chat room put it into an html page just scrape the chat room, put it into an HTML page, just scrape the titles? Well, maybe, but I was also trying to kill another – well, don't kill birds. But I was – we also, for the website, need a way to replace our embedded IRC, which I don't think we're using anymore. So if anyone has any ideas on how to do that with, like, an embedded matrix client, that would be pretty sweet. with like an embedded matrix client.

That would be pretty sweet. Brent, the, uh, the term we use at work for the, the birds and stone metaphor you were about to use is feed two birds with one scone. That's delightful. I'm taking that one.