LINUX Unplugged - 501: Fat Stacks for Flatpaks

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Robert McQueen shares the inside scoop on Flathub’s ambitious plans to create a universal app store for all distros—and we ask the hard questions. Special Guest: Robert McQueen.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, Robert McQueen joins us to share his insider scoop on how Flathub plans to build the universal Linux app store. And we'll talk about how this might succeed where all others seem to have failed before, kind of explain what they're doing different this time.

And can such a feat truly be possible? I think you're going to have a better sense of that question after today's episode. So it's going to be a great chat coming up here in just a few minutes. And then we'll round the show out with some great boosts, feedback, some picks, and more. So let's say good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. Build a flat network that gets through your firewalls and carry your great NAT in just minutes. We love it. It will change your networking game. And if you get a chance, tell them the unplugged program sent you. Tailscale.com.

Go say good morning. Try it out for free on 20 devices. Tailscale.com. And a big hearty time appropriate greeting to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, guys. Hey, Wes and hello, Brent. Hello. Hello. guys. Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello, Brent. Hello.

Hello. Hello. A strong showing today. A fantastic showing, indeed. We had a huge showing for last episode. In case you missed episode 500. Something special. We also announced that LinuxFest Northwest 2023 is coming.

It's back, and it'll be Friday, October 20th, through Sunday, October 22nd. If you can only make it a specific day or two, I think Saturday is the day to be there. Of course, we'll be there with bells on. We have some plans to do some cooking, inviting our friends. I'm really looking forward to it. And the nice thing is, since it's in October, you've got some time to plan. It looks like they've got a form now to let them know you're planning to come. Yeah.

So we're doing registration different this year. One of the things we're going to do is make the registration process smoother, quicker, easier. So you guys never really had to deal with this because you're big shots. So you just showed up and walked up and, you know, didn't have to worry about it. But all the regulars out there had to go through registration in the front and wait in line register and then they could enter the expo hall and go into the talks and we're getting rid of that just jams it up and the only downside is is then you can't really quantify how many people were there and if there was anything that required like specific invites due to like state liquor laws or anything like that you don't

get to participate because you can't be invited so this let them know you're coming is sort of like a way to kind of help them plan um you never know maybe there'll be some uh after parties that get planned and probably would get announced to that group i don't really think they're gonna probably get very many uh messages though but linuxfest northwest.org is the website this is i think the best fest in the country personal opinion been going for 20 years so i do have some data to state that on. And this is our chance as a community to come together and save one of the absolute best fest at one of the absolute best venues, the Bellingham Technical College, in one of the quintessential Pacific Northwest towns, Bellingham, Washington.

Very excited. October 20th through the 22nd, 2023, Bellingham Technical College. Details at linuxfestnorthwest.org. I'd love to see you there. Very excited about it. So we wanted to get a reminder. We won't blast you with that all the way to October, but because we just announced it last week, we do want to get the word out there. Yeah, start planning now. As I begin to learn more, like when we get the food stuff starting to get figured out, I've already had several listeners reach out and be like,

Hey, if you need a hand, I'm going to be in the area, which is so amazing. So I think it's amazing. As that gets closer, maybe in the summer or something like that, I'll,

I'll set up a Linux fest, Northwest matrix. Yeah. Ooh, write that down. Linux. That's Wes. You know, you are a natural titler. We should take advantage of that down. Linux. That's Wes.

You know, you are a natural titler. We should take advantage of that more. Strikeforce. Maybe we can extract it from my brain and train an AI.

That's right. We just need to model it. All right. So I'll have more details about that as it gets closer. Right now, we're

still very early in getting some of those details figured out, but it's pretty nice to have the fest actually on the schedule. So let's talk a little more FlatHub. This is a really big deal, and it's going to conceivably impact all Linux desktop users one day. Robert McQueen is joining us, and he is a longtime Linux user. He is an experienced leader across multiple projects, a developer himself,

and an advocate for free software and the Linux desktop for nearly 20 years. We had a good chat with Robert about some old historical things. And one of the things that I realized that I didn't know when we were chatting with Rob is that he founded Collabora in 2005. He now serves as the president of the Gnome Foundation, we knew that, and he's also deeply involved with the Endless OS Foundation. And if Rob's name is ringing a bell right now and you're not quite putting your finger on it, it's because he recently authored a post about Flathub in 2023 and their ambitious goals to turn Flathub into a universal Linux app store for all distributions, something that's been tried before but never been successful. So we wanted to figure

out how they were going to make this actually successful, what success looked like to them. We wanted to know some of the money questions, and I also wanted to get some context around Endless's involvement. So that's really where we started our chat with Rob, is just kind of getting that context around what he currently does at Endless. I'm the CEO of the NSOS Foundation. So there's actually a couple of different organizations kind of in the family. But Endless Network is kind of an umbrella that does various things like impact investments and philanthropy around a few different topics. Digital access is kind of an umbrella that does various things like impact investments and philanthropy around a few different topics and digital access is one of them learning to code through playing games and uh just general access to kind of your social benefit and health care and things so there's a

few topics kind of under that umbrella and the nsrs foundation is funded by that and this network and we're kind of the non-profit side of the house and we focus on digital access um so we we transitioned to a non-profit in 2020 i just want to step up to become the ceo i was trying to figure out sort of endless's connection with flat hub here i was kind of i guess you know for people who aren't really familiar what is uh what's in it for endless to kind of push this initiative forward and really sort of carry the torch here? Before becoming a nonprofit, Endless was a for-profit kind of investor-backed company that was trying to kind of a sustainable, profitable model around social impact and helping people get access to computers. And so Endless has been running for about 10 years in these various forms, kind of for-profit, nonprofit.

We took some really early bets on switching to OSTree. So we're actually the first in production with an OSTree-based operating system, so Immutable Core, actually originally based on Ubuntu, but we switched to Debian in kind of 2016 or something like that. So for the longest time, a Debian-based kind of OSTree system. And it made a lot of sense after that to then look for a system for app containment and a way to get applications and kind of open up an SDK and open up an ecosystem of applications on top of the OS. And we took a really early bet on Flatpak as well in 2017 or something. So pretty soon after the OS tree stuff went out. And that was roughly when I joined Endless. And so I've been there kind of since then, originally in engineering and now in leadership.

So we actually were kind of there in the early conversations around, okay, well, Flatback is cool. Endless has switched to it. Now we kind of need like a whole community because we were never trying to capture all of the apps and build our own app store and this kind of thing. We kind of always saw that Endless was overlaying on top of the strength of the apps and build our own app store and this kind of thing, we kind of always saw that Endos was overlaying on top of, you know, the strength of the open source community and all of the different, you know, creators and actors within that space.

So we kind of recognized that we needed this kind of, you know, rising tide to lift all boats kind of idea. So we kind of made an intentional decision that where we were packaging third-party software, and we kind of did a really rough cut, and we just put everything that we had in our kind of old packaging system, we put it into flat packs so that we had a migration path. But everything that was not sort of our software, kind of first-party endless apps and things that did offline content

and offline knowledge access, we wanted those to live somewhere outside of Endless, somewhere that was bigger, somewhere that would serve more people, somewhere that would be accessible to more people. So we kind of, together with Alex Larson, together with folks in Red Hat, the community, Cassidy was there as well at some point, and we were thinking, okay, great, we have to make a venue

and a destination for people to put their Flatpaks out there, people to get them. So we kind of helped to set up FlatHub, and it just made sense that we were making this big bet on Flatpak as a format and a technology. We also needed that to succeed with its own community, with its own legs, and with its own ecosystem.

So yeah, we helped set up Flathub. It's been going pretty well, I think. It's been fantastic. I think you mentioned in your post that you you know you've been messing around with linux desktop apps installing them from different app centers and different places for 20 years and you still find stuff you've never seen in your entire life on flat hub and i feel the same way it's such a great resource it's so great every time i log in

there's something new right i was like oh well that's cool i didn't realize people did that on linux i'm like oh nice that's cool give that a't realize people did that on Linux. I'm like, oh, nice, that's cool. Give that a go. It's fantastic. It's such a low cost to grab a flat pack and install it. It's not going to trash up my system. So it's just kind of like, well, why not try it out? And if I don't like it,

it's extremely clean and simple to remove it. So, you know, these are the things that I've always loved about an app store. I mean, we've even seen this with the Ubuntu Software Center for a period of time. I'm curious, with kind of the perspective of history, what do you think the real big differentiator is this time? Why might it work this time?

I mean, you know, Linux is pretty good with compatibility. You know, you go, it can spit out a 100-megabyte binary. It'll execute. So it's always, to some extent, being possible to take a binary from one system and run it on another and obviously that's where flatpack starts that we rely on that right but it also solves these other issues of how do you make it safe to do that to just take a binary from somewhere so so the linux distribution has always kind of rested on this, this trust model of it's a very flat thing. I trust Fedora.

I trust Debian. I trust Ubuntu or whatever that is. And you kind of then just say it's an all or nothing thing. You just trust everything that comes from there. They figured it out. They reviewed every line of code, right? They patched all the security issues, right?

Every embedded copy of, you know, Zlib or whatever, right? And then it's all great you know all 15 000 pieces of software have been audited and everything's tickety-boo um but so it's actually you can run the software it works really reliably because it brings the platform with it so so um you know app Image is a product of its time. It's like, great, let's double down on the standard

base. Let's have these, let's just rely on LibSSL always having the same ABI or the distro is not building LibJPEG in three different ways and changing the ABI halfway through or whatever. And unfortunately, the cracks show through and you get to the situations where it's actually quite hard

to get something that the binary executes and then it works properly. So Flatpak gives you that kind of layer of isolation and gives you the runtime, the containerization. But then it also makes it safe to do that because, you know, security is a journey. It's not like a great sandbox, you know, 100% secure, everything's great. But it gives us tools to gradually build the right confinement and the right user interactions and that, you know, the whole portals API kind of framework, that's kind of the missing API for Linux desktop. You can really sandbox an app and you can now know that, you know,

apart from a couple of APIs that we need to sort out, you can access the desktop stuff in controlled and safe and understandable ways. And so it's this kind of combination of it. It runs not everywhere, but pretty much everywhere. And it has a really high chance of running. But equally, we now have tools and a pathway to make it secure. Do you think the velocity of updates matters too? Because that's something that feels like

the traditional repository model with a maintainer for the distribution worked really well when software came out once or twice a year, but then things sped up. Yeah, and I feel like they're just lessons to learn from the places where Linux has been really successful.

Linux dominates the server, the cloud space. Linux dominates enterprise computing. Linux dominates embedded computing. Linux dominates mobile phones. Linux does not dominate the desktop. And if you just look at the kind of success factors, people use containers, they do continuous delivery. You kind of hit commit and it deploys itself

automatically if the tests are green. All of these techniques exist and you can do A-B testing with rolling stuff out and you can upgrade your cluster on a rolling basis and understand if that software is working better or worse than the previous version. So all of these things are in a sense solved problems

by the industry. It's just a kind of historical accident of how we put the Linux workstation together that it's really hard to apply those techniques when you have this very kind of flat model and everything is delivered through the same pipeline with the same cadence. I think you have that. And then I think the other thing that you're solving in FlatHub in 2023 that I'd like to get to is, so, okay, we've talked about the distribution model. We've talked about packaging in a way that's safe

and redistributable amongst multiple distributions. But then there's the economics of it. Distributing and creating software for the Linux desktop is also just not a very profitable endeavor for a lot of independent developers that maybe want to make a great app and make a little bit of money for it. And it sounds like you guys do have some plans to address that as well, which is something

I think is also not being completely solved. Some app stores have done better, but Flathub seems like potentially a model that could scale across all the different distributions, which opens up the audience for these apps to just every potential desktop Linux user. So can we talk a little bit about the money for a bit and how that might work and how developers what they might expect and split models and things like that? It seems like it touches on something I noticed in your post that, you know, transitioning from a build service to an app store. And I've got to imagine that's a big part of it. Yeah. And I have to be upfront and say, I don't have all the answers here, but I think this is a direction that's worth us kind of trying to move in as a community. Because, as I said in my post, we have to get out more, right?

You know, we've built this amazing software and we feel proud of it. We feel there's an ideological benefit to it and it's a good thing for the world. technological benefit to it. And it's, it's a good thing for the world. And yet the way that it's delivered and the way that the economics work around it is almost like a historical accident that we haven't really changed in 20 or 30 years. And the distros, they're amazing, right? We would literally, there wouldn't be a computer in front of me if it wasn't for the distros that put everything together, made it installable, made it run, compiled it, tested it, you know, security advisories, all that good stuff. And yet the consequence of that, you know, single point that you go in and out of with all the software is that

they are the interface to the user. They have their economic models, which have evolved together with the technology that they produce. Those economic models don't incentivize them changing how they do the software. They don't incentivize them changing how people get rewarded for the software work that they do. And so in a sense, you know, we have the technical means to change this and to look at different models. And that opens up the discussion about, okay, economic models, what can we do to say, as a Linux developer, I can make some cool software, I can get it out quickly. That's great. Thanks. The build service works. But what does that mean in terms of economic models? And we have very flexible kind of implementation in the kind of web app because we're not entirely sure what the right answer is. So should it be a kind of, you pay to get the app, like VLC does this in the Apple store.

You pay a few bucks to get VLC um and it's free if you can build it and run it on your iPhone but you're paying for that distribution convenience so that's a model it works for them right to get into that space obviously on the Linux desktop you can probably get VLC for free so they probably can't use that that idea on Flathub or should it be like a subscription model where you know it's kind of a Patreon you want to support the creator that makes the next version of your application. And this kind of uncertainty and hesitancy that I have is a little bit why we're looking at focus groups and surveys and things, because we need to, this needs to work on both sides, it needs to be

something that developers feel good about, and that it kind of resonates with users, and they feel good about it too. So we have, you know, technically all of these possibilities and this flexibility. I kind of want to build subscriptions before we kind of, you know, further switch and turn it on, because I think that is a big part of kind of recognizing the difference between open source software, where it's about sort of supporting that community that makes it versus the proprietary software where the work is done

and you're just kind of paying rent, right? You just pay to get it. i think subscriptions are part of it but i'm not really sure where the chips will land i think people will do different experiments and you will see different models and you know probably some controversies some screw-ups some great ideas and we kind of just need to open the space so that we can start to kind of you know know, see where things net out. I think the takeaway there is we'll try to keep an open mind while that stuff gets sorted out. So my understanding while we're talking about money is that you have some grant money now.

You're hoping to get a bit more on board. Do you have a rough idea of how much runway you think that gives FlatHub here to kind of get this all sorted and organized? So one of the things that we're trying to get to over this coming year is, you know, with the kind of legal setup, you know, we have an advisory board and we have like a sponsorship model. So the grant funding, you know, is kind of front loaded. You do a bunch of writing and things and you get a check.

And that's kind of geared more towards, I think, you know, making changes or setting stuff up. I think for running costs, we need to look for, hopefully, you know, we'll take some percentage of the donations or payments that go through the system. Let's be honest, that's not going to pay that many salaries in, you know, in a very sort of short period of time. But I think looking for, you know, companies which are sympathetic or active in the space or may have benefits from, you know, Flathub being there and working and growing, I think that's probably a good way for us to just get a baseline sort of cover so that the, you know, we can keep the lights on, keep the team there and have that be a kind of recurring revenue. Right, okay. So I think the grant is kind of bootstrapped.

You mentioned team and salaries there. I'm curious, what kind of, you know, if all things go well, you get the funding you're hoping for, what size and shape might that look like in your dreams? I'm looking just at 2023 at the moment. I mean, there's one person with a salary who's kind of keeping everything running,

and that's Bart, who's just an absolute heroics. I mean, he's also the only full-time sysadmin at GNOME. And so he's running GNOME.org, GitLab, fighting, you know, spam bots in Indonesia at the same time as trying to roll out the payments and things. And, you know, that's the nature of kind of non-profit and open source kind of spaces. I think the kind of minimum team for us to really say,

okay, great, we're going to open the doors and money's going to start moving hands. And, you know, we really need to care about the verification and app names and icons and make sure that money isn't going to wrong places and users aren't being deceived, respond to reports and all those things. So there needs to be someone else who's kind of looking at those kind of, you know, kind of customer experience and kind of developer kind of relations stuff. So that there's certainly a second person that needs to be there in 2023 for us to feel good about, you know, kind of turning on payments and kind of bringing money into the mix. And then in a sense, I hope that the, you know, the problem scales with our resources to solve it. As in, if we get a lot more transactions and things, then we can show through our success

that it's worth funding, it's worth growing, and we can grow the team as necessary. But I'd love for us to have amazing developer documentation and developer relations and outreach to just help people understand the benefits of approaching Linux as a platform and using Flathub as their way to reach it. Mm-hmm. understand the benefits of approaching Linux as a platform and using Flathub as their way to reach it.

Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account, and it's a great way to show your support for the show while you're checking out the Linux Geeks Cloud. Linode's got 11 data centers worldwide today, and they're bringing up to 12 more this year, along with a bunch of other great plans, too. They're really investing in their infrastructure this year. And Linode remains the best place for running applications on Linux in the cloud. If you like to build it yourself or deploy one of the many awesome one-click stacks they have, Linode has excellent options for you. I think another way to say that is if you've been racking and stacking for 20 years, or if this is the first time you've ever deployed a server, Linode has options and support that work for you. And then there's the performance. It's incredible, guys. I mean,

it's awesome. I just get a thrill still. And I've been a Linode customer for three years, and I still get a thrill out of the speed. I have buddies who have been a Linode customer for a decade, and they tell me it's one of the reasons they stick around, because they just keep investing, making it better and better. I just wouldn't host all of the Jupyter Broadcasting public infrastructure on Linode unless it was super fast. That's just straight up the way it is. And they always have nice features, too, that make it even better,

like their S3-compatible object storage, the easy-to-use dashboard that brings it all together, and that clean, well-documented API with lots of tools and libraries ready to go. So for the best customer support, super fast rigs and networking, they are their own ISP after all, and a Linux culture that runs deep, there's a lot of reasons why I chose Linode, but I think you're going to find your own. So let's put it over the top. Go try it. Really get to kick the tires. Go grab that $100 in credit and support the show. You just got to go to linode.com slash unplugged. You get the hundred bucks and you get to try it out while you're supporting this here pod. Linode.com slash unplugged. Yes, I called it a pod. Linode.com slash unplugged.

linode.com slash unplugged. Love it. Oh, wow. That would be pretty great. Okay, so you mentioned in there a couple of times verification. I guess as an end user, what should I expect it to mean when an app has been verified? What does that mean from an end user perspective? And then it sounds like there's going to also be perhaps one day even more in-depth verification when it comes time to actually do payments. The main thing with it, we have to take steps to figure out. There's a couple of different reasons, but the first benefit of this verification thing is that people have different opinions about

distros, third parties, and this kind of thing. Some people have a great relationship with their distro, but they also want to get some apps that are on Flathub because the distro doesn't have it. And so straight out the door, we've had this kind of tension between is Flathub a place where there's this community and there is a really active community and there's tooling and all kinds of stuff to maintain a whole bunch of third party applications on Flathub. I mean, Endless put a lot of those in when we started. We want to take these apps out of just Endless and put them into FlatHub so we can help to bootstrap the whole thing. But equally, we're not trying to make a new distro. We're not trying to have a big community of people who sit there waiting for releases and updating them.

We're trying to make a tool that developers use to get their apps out. So just being able to separate those and say, this is uploaded and maintained, and this is configured exactly as the developer intended. They've tested this, this is what they built, this is what you're running on your computer. It's a direct through representation of whatever that developer is trying to build. Good or bad, but it's whatever

they built, right? And so that's what we're looking to verify. When you start to bring payments in, then you're also looking at, is know, is my money going to the right place? If I make a donation, is this going back to the people that created this? Or is this going to, you know, someone in the middle who's just, you know, fetched it from GitHub and done some packaging work? I mean, it is work, right? But it's not the original creator of the thing. The least controversial decision is to say, look, it's actually really hard for us to quantify, you know, how much does the original person get versus how much of the package you get.

And let's just keep this really simple and say, look, we're going to allow payments for those first party uploads. And you will just have to think about the other one. I'm open to ideas, but like what percentage of the donation? I mean, we don't accept donations where or payments or whatever where they don't get to the right person because we don't want to hold money on behalf of other people um you know tidelift has this this model where you kind of pay a subscription and they you know they assess your web app and they tell you you know how much percentage needs to go to the node you know true

module or whatever um but if the nodes maintainer didn't sign up then tidelift has this money that's kind of sitting on their books that you know hasn't gone to the right place and they have to solve that and kind of you know actively maintain that and the finances get more complicated they kind of you know community dynamics get more complicated so verification is also a neat way for us to not get into those problems technically what's verified at the moment is kind of ownership or control of the app ID. They're domain name based. So you might have com.twitter.client is the name of that app or whatever.

But why did I think of Twitter when we're talking about verification? It's not eight bucks. It actually verifies this ID that's not always shown to the user. So we're pretty careful in the application, you know, the web app to show what have we verified. So it says, okay, we verified that, you know, the developer has got control of twitter.com or they've demonstrated that to us, or the developer is, you know, in the group,

whatever, Twitter client on GitHub. So those kinds of things are actually really specific about what we verified. I think when payments come in, then we also have this kind of passing off problem. People might put in a misleading logo or a title and it's like, sure, this is Skype. And it's actually com.evil.notreallySkype or whatever,

which you can prove, right? If you're evil.com, but that's not Skype. And so one of the things we'll have to build before we sort of throw the switch is that we have a review queue if you change the name if you change the icon you know someone's going to have to look at that and say like is this legit like is this actually does the icon and does this belong to the application or maybe something that you could look to automate or do some ai stuff later or whatever. But at least at small scale, someone just needs to eyeball that. Like, oh, you've changed your license.

So you're a free software application now. No, you're not. You're not actually Skype. So we need to have a tool for that to make sure that as we bring payments and donations and things into it, we don't sort of have this problem of people being ripped off and misled because we really want to maintain that community trust in what we've built. It's really important that we don't go to this swamp and never being ripped off situation

because I think that will just kill. That will stop us dead in our tracks. Right, a problem a lot of app stores have run into, and I for one sure hope we can do better in the open source world. Hear, hear. I'm glad to hear you say that. Definitely. I think that's the important thing is FlatHub. People are like, oh, it's just going to turn into adware, spyware, this kind of thing.

There's some kind of comments in the blogs and things this week. And I mean, yes, that could happen. I mean, if there is terrible software on FlatHub, then please review it poorly and don't use it. But equally, we do have these properties in FlatHub that commercial app stores don't have. I mean, firstly, it's going to be community led, community controlled with transparency. And you know that it's being run by nonprofits like Gnome and KDE, who have, you know, 20, 25, 30 years been out there caring about exactly this experience and the values that we hold as a community. And the other thing is the most of the software on Flathub is open source.

I don't expect that to change overnight, right? I don't want it to change overnight. The whole point of this is that we're boosting open source creators and users. We're going to keep that transparency. You're not going to be able to put spyware in it because there'll be a click. You can see the build log or which CI system it came from, which patches have gone in. That's important as well, that we kind of maintain that transparency. I don't expect a huge amount of proprietary software on FlatHub beyond the stuff that's already there. You know, the obvious, like Skype or Steam or whatever, that's already there, right?

That's a convenience rather than someone making big bucks. What I want to do is enable the open source apps. While we're talking about transparency, the governance stuff I know is still coming together. That sounds like an area, though, that you'll probably have some of the most insights on. Do you have any thoughts on how you're going to keep that process transparent? So that way it's trusted by the community? Because I know that's one of your goals, but it's not clear to me on how you organize governance and keep that process transparent.

But you're probably the man with the experience. I'm curious what your thoughts are. The important thing is knowing who's making decisions and when were decisions made and why were they made. So you can approach this in different ways. You know, you can have public meetings. You know, there are kind of working groups and technical committees that, you know, they meet on ISE or they meet on a call. But they do that, you know, monthly and there's minutes that are published. But also you can join and observe and take part in those meetings.

So that's one possibility. The Globe Foundation board, which I sit on, you know, the meetings are private because you might be considering, you know, whatever comes in, whatever issue is going on. But then there's a commitment by that board to publish minutes within a certain period of time. And, you know, they get reviewed and published out normally, you know, by the next meeting or during the next meeting. And so as long as you know who's there, why they're there, what have they thought about and kind of what decisions and I think you have these kind of hygiene factors of people actually being able to see, okay, great, these are the people I should talk to. And this is what, in a sense of what I

can expect to happen. So it's just about our people's expectations, you know, is it predictable? If I go in and spend time building my app and uploading it do i know if it's going to get accepted or not do i know what are the conditions under which you know it's going to get you know withdrawn or unverified or whatever so as long as it's predictable then people know how to contribute how to engage and they can see you know how the decision is made and why they made and it's that predictability that builds trust that you know it's not like i go in one day and like I get screamed at. I go in the next day and I get, you know, a hug and a cake. And then you don't like, is this good or not?

I don't know. Yeah, that does make sense. There's so many questions, Rob. I mean, so many. Maybe we could chat again in six months or so because I could go on and on. But I think what I'd like to capture at this point is just really a high-level version. Maybe we're five years out, maybe it's three years out, whatever you want it to be. What would success look like? Where's Flathub at and what

is its role and what does success look like to you? I want to see a lot of money going through Flathub because we've grown the user base of Linux and because we've gotten the developer base. I don't see that, you know, we're going to suddenly make huge amounts of money for a load of people just by, you know, flipping a switch and saying, okay, FlatHub does payments now. That's not what this is about. What this is about is changing the dynamic of how people, you know,

create and receive value on their open source desktop system so we kind of have to make this change and then we still have to work and solve all the other things but with this kind of in in hand we could make a much better story to hardware manufacturers and and distros and people who make applications and things and say look this is now an additive you know growing thing that you can take part in and it will help. You'll get benefit and other people will get benefit. You'll reach your users. You'll make your hardware more valuable. So it's a missing piece of the puzzle. And I think the success will just be the volume. And that's the volume of applications that we have to offer, the volume of payments that we're processing, because then we're actually giving, you know, economic success and independence to people. So I hope it's big, not because, you know, I want FlatHub LLC to be,

you know, hugely wealthy. Actually, if it makes too much profit, it's going to cause a problem for the Grown Foundation. We're not profit. This activity is commercial-ish. And so, you you know we're talking to lawyers about making sure that we structure it correctly you know i think that the proprietary applications will have to pay higher fees than free and open source applications as it should be because we are a non-profit that's trying to support and promote free and open source software right you know we're having to kind of nuance this really correctly because you know if you just look at it quickly it looks like an app store. Sure, it's super commercial.

Why is this non-profit? Okay, this is about open source. This is about the mission of the foundation of KDEV. But I want it to be big because I want that to be an indicator of our success as a community, onboarding developers and onboarding users, and actually delivering more impacts in the world. Well, Rob, thank you so much for joining us and taking a bit of time in your evening. This has been really illuminating. These are some of the questions that have been kicking around in my head, and I am just like, I don't think excited even gives it the appropriate amount of how enthused I am that this is happening.

I felt, it just fell into my bones that FlatHub felt like this was probably the chance for it to happen, right? I mean, I, like you, have been watching these different app stores and different methods for a very long time, and it felt like FlatHub might be uniquely positioned with the backing of the Flatpak technology to actually pull this off. And I'm really glad, you know, somebody's doing the hard work to actually push it forward. So thanks for coming on and chatting with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm glad to come back and chat in three months' time, six months' time and see how we're getting on. But yeah, wish me luck.

Yes, yes, we do. We do wish you luck. Is there any way our community can help? Is there something we can ask from our audience? Is there just kind of wait and see and just support? Is there a particular ask right now? Oh, that's a really good question. I mean, I think, you know, use use flat herb respectfully promote the benefits of flat pack to applications that you care about

and i say that there are different communities that have different approaches here but um if if you know flat pack works well for you and there's an app you want to see you don't come to flat herb go to go to the communities that make the applications and talk to them about how how great it is for you and how great it could be for them. Put a few bucks in. If the opportunity arises to support your favorite application on Flathub, then show us that the system can work

and that it's a model that can actually provide support for developers to come in and join and stay in our ecosystem. Install Linux for your friends and tell them how great FlatHub is. Agreed. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. That's where you go to get started with a free trial, a team or an individual. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. You could use Bitwarden for free as an individual user, and it's pretty functional, but they

also have a premium plan, which not only invests in the ongoing development and is extremely reasonably well-priced, but gives you a whole bunch of great features as well. And if you're a group or a business, it's really great the way it can snap in with your existing management tools. Simply put, Bitwarden is the easiest way to share, store, and sync sensitive data. Your vaults are end-to-end encrypted with zero knowledge encryption that Bitwarden is the easiest way to share, store, and sync sensitive data. Your vaults are end-to-end encrypted with zero knowledge encryption. The Bitwarden is always keeping an eye on and always improving. And you can check on that yourself because Bitwarden is open source. It's trusted by millions in the community.

Our audience, it's what Wes and I use for all of our secret management. We put things like recovery keys in there and passphrases as well. And I'm so thankful that Bitwarden makes it super simple and straightforward our secret management. We put things like recovery keys in there and passphrases as well. And I'm so thankful that Bitwarden makes it super simple and straightforward to switch between users. So I can have a home account and a work account. I can keep those two things separate and isolated. You can do that too if you're working with an open source project. It's nice, right? Because those are two separate worlds and you know from a security standpoint, they should be separated. And Bitwarden makes it actually accessible to anyone to have improved security. It's like one of the most straightforward things we could do.

And I think Bitwarden is the way to go. There's other options out there. But Bitwarden is the best and just keeps getting better. In February, they added login with device to more clients. So now you can quickly log into Bitwarden without your master password in the browser, the web vault, the mobile apps, the desktop app. You can use an already logged in app to get access. I love that.

You just also have to appreciate that they keep iterating on the security. They keep making it tighter and better for enterprise as well. They roll out new releases constantly. Making Bitwarden the best. If you haven't switched yet, check out bitwarden.com

slash migrate i think now's the time and if you know anybody who hasn't started using a password manager yet or you haven't well this is a great opportunity you can support the show and check out the one i think is the best try today bitwarden.com slash linux that's bitwarden.com slash linux dot com slash Linux. Well, thank you, everyone, for all the lovely feedback around episode 500. And since then, we got some great feedback. And I noticed there was a bit of a trend in the feedback this week. And I think some of us might just enjoy that. Chris, I'm looking at you.

Decent in a piece of mail that says hey please don't miss the opportunity use a ferengi rule of acquisition for your deep space nine boost clip good customers are as rare as latin treasure them from what i've been learning during my research chris there's something like 200 some of these so i feel like we can impart much wisdom to our listeners throughout. Yeah, we're going to need some more boosts at this rate. I saw we did have a little bit of uptake on the GitHub. Was that all just you finding that Deep Space Nine boosts or were other folks sending them in as well? No, it's just me. I got into a bit of a rabbit hole. But if you do check out that issue we have on GitHub that just suggests a bunch of little boost noises. I might have

thrown my favorite ones up there, and we're open to suggestions all the time. Doesn't have to be necessarily all Star Trek. Yeah, I think shorter and pleasant is preferred, you know? Yeah, clean audio too. We've cut down, so now the bar is up a little bit.

That's not to intimidate you, because we could always get inspired by what you've posted. Like that one, I argue it might be a little too long, although it's just on the cusp. I like it. You see, that I think was also too long for a boost clip, but this was the only opportunity to throw it in there in a show. So I thought we may as well use it. I did include another one that, anyways, the breadth of it goes anywhere from really sweet rules of acquisition that are like, oh, our listeners are the best, all the way to frangie mothers not being insulted and such and everything in between. So I feel like, you know, there's some variety here to choose from.

Brent is just getting primed to watch Deep Space Nine. I was saying we found a way to get him watching Star Trek even more. I love it. It's your fault. But Nick wrote in as well and says hey, thanks for the history on the bell sound in episode 499. I have yet to look into the boosts and sad stuff because I'm still working

away on all the amazing things I hear you talk about in the self-hosted show. I totally agree that it's been a long road. It's a terrible Star Trek song. And if it got a boost code number, I would be motivated to try and set it up. Nick, in Kingston, in Ontario, for those of you who don't know it, I lived in Kingston for something like a year on a winery near Kingston and then downtown Kingston.

So that's close to my heart. So thanks, Nick, for writing in. Yes, thank you, Nick. I love it. If you want to, I'll do it. If you send a boost in. Did we figure out what the amount is for the Enterprise? It should be like the registry number, but the NXL1 isn't very...

Yeah, how do we make that work? It's a long road. In the meantime, Nick, thanks for using the contact form. Appreciate it. Beau also wrote in. Chris, I think you love these ones specifically. Beau writes, since you've been asking where listeners are

and what they do, here's me. Writing with love from Hendersonville, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville, with much better real estate prices and public schools. Zip code for you, Wes, is 37075. That cuts deep. You know, I hear a lot of RVers that love Tennessee because they can get a nice lot. It's not too expensive. Oh, yeah, man, you just like just a quick drive outside of Nashville. Hendersonville. Offensive. Oh, yeah, man.

You're just like just a quick drive outside of Nashville. Hendersonville. You know any good RV park in that area? If we ever wanted to visit Nashville anywhere, I could park Lady Jube's. Because, you know, it's not a deal breaker. If we did an event in Nashville, it's a little bit outside. You'd have to do probably a little bit of traffic on the 65 there or something. But, man, that's doable.

And then right there is the International Airport. So you boys could fly in. We'd come pick you up. I feel like we should do a Nashville event. That sounds great. I've always wanted to go. Me too! Beau also shared a little bit more for you here, Chris. Uh-oh.

Oh, jeez. They're right. I'm a doctor in cancer medicine, not a surgeon, with academic activity in data sciences, using Linux on the desktop for everything except for clinical care, where a Mac laptop connected to a Windows VM at the hospital is the most reliable setup. I also got a kick out of self-hosting as much as possible. Thank you, good sirs, for hipping me to tailscale. It's an absolute game changer.

I listen mostly on my commute, but also when doing household chores and working in the backyard. Oh, well, thank you both. Stay tuned to the picks. We got something that I think you're going to like in the pick segment coming up. That's a nice, you know, we did get a bunch of nice emails this week. Everybody sent it in for like a belated 500 congrats. Thank you, everybody who sends those in. This has been a fun read.

Linuxunplugged.com slash contact if you'd like to email it in. And of course, we got some great boosts this week too. Boost to Graham. In fact, Linux Unplugged not only once,

but twice made it to the top shows on the Fountain FM charts, which has always been great for discovery. Really just, how cool is that really? Just to take a moment.

I mean, a Linux podcast is never going to be at the top of spotify or itunes never going to happen but when it's based on the value for value model and the contributions from the community linux unplugged was number one and number six 499 was number one because everybody was boosting it for 500 and episode 500 everybody giving us belated congrats was number six so linux unplugged 499 and 500 were in the top seven with 499 developers choose snap at number one thank you everybody and welcome everybody who discovered the show as a result. This is your weekly

Linux talk show where we hang out and talk Linux stuff like you may have just observed. We also got some live boosts during the show while we're streaming, so I'll just read a couple

of those real quick. GTK Frank sent in 15,000 sats. First time booster watching live. Boosting via the podcast index webpage. Thank you for asking, Rob, the questions on my mind. I feel like they have a realistic approach that could actually work.

Exciting time to be a Linux user. I agree. Yeah, amen. This system I have over here with Plasma 527, the Arc Intel GPU, running Wayland, and then flat packs for my user land applications chef's kiss and then the same kind of build on NixOS minus the Arc GPU has been really solid

L Dewey came in live with 500 sats and a 400 sat boost he says hey this is my first time boosting in but I've been a listener since 2008 and a Linux lover since 2004 my first was Warty Warthog thanks for everything you do for the community boosting in, but I've been a listener since 2008 and a Linux lover since 2004. My first was WordyWorthog. Thanks for everything you do

for the community and giving it your all even when times get rough. Well, thanks. It's been amazing to see JB blossom into what it is today. Also, congrats on 500 and 501. Missing out on watching Lep Live on Tuesdays, but understand why your journey brought you back to Sundays. Yeah, that's a nice way to put it.

It's been a long road. The Lyreman boosted in with 77,777 cents. Well, how about that? That's not too bad at all. Thanks, Rich Lobster. We appreciate it. Hey, Rich Lobster! Hey, JBs.

Greetings from Austria. Thanks for all the great content over the last few years. If you ever plan to be around Austria or Germany, happy to help organize a meetup. Oh, we'd love that. Yes, we would. Let's put that in the back of the old noodle. One of us may make it over there eventually.

Stay tuned, I suppose. But all of us, that'd really be a treat. Anonymous boosts in with 25,000 sats. What's this about Dick small enough? I wasn't worried about it until Chris mentioned it. I hoard that with your kind of covet. We don't want to talk about that. I mean, you got to be careful about that kind of thing, though.

You know what I mean? You know what I mean. Mr. MGB boosted in with 1,000 sats. Hey, guys from Quebec, Canada. I have been listening for many years. You got me into the open source and Linux rabbit holes, trying to use Linux as much for school and work, but it's hard to make it work when you don't have a choice. So it's only a hobby, even if I hate Windows and I have to use it every day. But I'm trying to change that and keep up the amazing work. Cheers.

Well, I hear there's great fishing up there in Quebec. You know, the thing is, is you can always SSH into a Linux box from your Windows system. Of course, WSL makes things a little easier these days. Don't stress about it too much there are more people that are running mac os or windows ssh into a linux box than there are people running the linux desktop now those of us who do on the linux desktop love it and i think you know people that consider themselves probably power users or above begin to appreciate the features of Linux, the desktop, being able to run things inside the powerful Linux environment, stuff like that. Powerful. Anytime you get sick of Docker desktop on the Mac.

It's too often for me. Yeah, it's rough. Keld09 boosted in with 5,500 sats, saying, Hello, JB Crew, coming at you from London, Ontario in Canada. Congrats on 500 episodes and plus one for Cast-O-Matic. I hope to make it to more live shows in the future. Albie is all set up. Nice.

Earhawk boosts in with a row of ducks. That AI generated Windows unplugged is so blursed. I loved it. AI-generated? What are you talking about? What are you talking about? That was us. We just failed.

That was so fun. I think, looking back at it, my favorite part was that my voice was slightly off. Because it was from the original samples he did, but made it funnier. It did, yeah. When you listen back to it, it makes it... This is a clip we played in episode 500, for those that don't know what we're talking about we were roaring when we played it here just roll it on the floor yeah it was it was really great and uh probably as good as we could have done if we actually tried to do the bit if not better yeah i agree i i appreciate

how it was from a listener's perspective who clearly had really been paying attention because there were so many inside jokes and stuff in there from years of crazy content that we seemed to produce. So it was just amazing. It was pretty insightful. It was pretty great. It was a nice treat. I'm hoping by a thousand,

we could just do the whole episode AI generated and the joke will be on the listener. They won't even know. Secretly, I don't want that. We don't want that won't even know secretly i don't want that we don't want that secretly we really don't want that jor-el 69 boosts in with 3505 sats so we're doing zip codes now here's mine i don't live there anymore but that's where i grew up hint it's in the republic of moldovaova. Happy 500, everybody. Hmm. According to Google Maps, it's Dodge City, Alabama, so...

Yeah, it looks like you gotta put an MD in front. Okay. If it's MD-3505, or he, or hey, that's my best guess. Okay. Well, that was fun. And thank you for the boost.

Our dear listener Jeff boosted in with 16,260 sats. The first four digits is my trip odometer getting home. Wow. Time for another oil change, Jeff. I'm just saying. I think it's time for another oil change. One oil change per road trip. Good idea. Forward Humor comes in with 5,555 sets. Chris and team, I just wanted to say you're all doing a great job already.

Okay, you guys stop it. Greg McCohen in his book Essentialism would challenge you though. How can you do less but better? Say no to more things and more shows and have the capacity for great things that you've been dreaming of keep yourself young and energetic and able to hit episode 1000 by not trying to do it all rather more and subpar always aim for less but better keep up the great work some wise words there forward humor totally agreed thanks for the advice i think when you're a young lad you're inclined or lady you're inclined to take a lot on

you gotta push you gotta prove yourself and you get to be an older fart and you realize if i was just a little more focused i could do that even better and then that begins the process that explains jb going from all these different types of shows kind of whittling it down over the years and now we've just whittled it down to my babies that I can't bring myself to kill. So that's what's that's what's left. The Golden Dragon boosted in with a row of ducks.

I'm trying to convince my wife to take our business up there for LinuxFest Northwest. It would be amazing to meet everybody and be the best mascot I can be. Glad I was able to make it to episode 500. Dragon, you got to be there. Maybe we got to discuss, like, get Dragon here fun or something. But you got to have the mascot here.

And, of course, you got to be wearing your mascot uniform, whatever that might be. But we'd love to see you here. Marcel comes in with a big old boost, 74,656 sats. Hey there, baller. I hoard that which your kind covet. Congrats on 500 episodes. I love all your shows. Thank you, everyone, for your hard work.

How about some 7 of 9 soundbites? And he suggests the fun will now commence. So in your honor, Marcel, we now have... Fun will now commence. The 7 of 9 of Unimatrix Zero, right? I think we might have found will now commence the seven of nine of unimatrix zero right i think we might have found our pump-up song we just need that remixed into you know some sort of upbeat tempo this is probably an example of a great boost sound clip right it's short it's tight it's kind of funny and if you like uh seven of nine it's a great clip fun will now commence

so there you go marcel the fun will now commence. We do have There's Coffee in That Nebula as well. There's coffee in that nebula. Which is, when you come in with the Voyager boost, that's what you get. 74,205 sats. You guys really got me with the AI show thing. I was hyped since you, quote, accidentally dropped it in the pre-show. That was evil. Yeah, that was actually kind of sneaky. I'm sorry about that.

This is for fun. Oppie1984 boosted in with 5000 sats. 5000 sats to apologize for the enterprise boost on 500. Thanks for putting up with my shenanigans. Oh, you don't have to ever apologize for sending a boost in. And we had fun

with that, didn't we? You know, it was a long road, but we had fun with it. didn't we? You know, it was a long road, but we had fun with it. We sure did. Moonanite boosted in with quite a number of sats, 69,420. Hello, I'm a fairly new listener within the past couple of months. I was digging through the Breeze wallet looking for some good non-Bitcoin podcasts to listen to. I'm quite deep into the lightning ecosystem and have a lot of related podcasts I already listen to, so finding something outside of that realm was my goal. I'm really glad I stumbled upon your podcast. You guys finally

convinced me to switch off iOS to Giraffine OS. Switching from iOS to Android is quite a usability downgrade for me, but the Genome and KDE integrations with Android are making me feel a lot better about it. Out of curiosity, do you guys run your own node to receive boosts? I'm boosting from my own node via Albi. It's free, open source, and peer-to-peer money for the win, baby. Hey-o! We kind of take a mixed approach. We do a little bit of Albi. We do a little bit of self-hosted notary.

I like them both. The Albi solution is really simple because they just manage liquidity, and you don't have to really think about inbound and outbound channels. It's been a nice backup, actually, sometimes if our node is doing maintenance or something. Yeah, or maybe Jeff and Brent disconnect the power real quick. That was my point. Mostly Jeff. Mostly Jeff. I just take the internet down. It's fine.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Jeff takes the power down. Brent took the internet down for like 16 hours or whatever it was. Eight hours. Six. So there's the advantage that the Albi wallet is hosted. Of course, there's always the caveat of not your keys, not your coins. So generally what I recommend is if you manage to stack a few hundred bucks, move it out of there eventually.

Good advice. You know, just basically when it gets to a point where you'd be sad to have that missing. Not that I actually think anything wrong about Albi. I actually think it's a fantastic project. I think the co-founders behind it are straight shooters. I've had conversations with them and I really like where their heads are at. They're actively participating in the podcasting 2.0 community, trying to make things even better. They're at events right now, spreading the word about value for value and getting feedback and making Albie even better. So it's, I think it's one of the more amazing projects that's launched

since we started doing Boost on the show. It didn't exist a year ago when Boost started, and since then I think it's become a quintessential application. There are rumors that Podcast Addict and AntennaPod and Pocket Cast may all eventually get value-for-value boost support. And if they do, I would bet they use Albi. I mean, they just made it so easy to sort of bootstrap up in there. And then you can move those funds between apps without having to have a wallet per app.

And that just seems ultimately like the way this is going to go. I do like, though, that you can tie Albi to your own node, so you could self-host the back-end and where the keys are at, but use Albi for the front-end and the sending. Yeah, isn't that nice? It makes this whole setup so flexible, and you can kind of start one way, change later, intermix them all. You can do full, crazy self-hosting, you know,

Tor only to just, like, a mix and a blend, and, I mean, I think Moon Knight has a nice little mix there. Gene Bean boosted with 11,111 stats. All these I started listening boosts made me finally look. It seems I started listening

to LUP around episode 410 here and there and then got hooked. I haven't missed one since playing LUP 416, LAN 197, self-hosted 52 and office hours one i think it's the brent factor you know what i think that's the that's got to be the common theme there right oh except for lan i could be a guest if west needs to travel the world again

you know who knows i don't see another common theme across those shows so i think it's it's gotta be it's gotta be it's gotta be the It's got to be. It's got to be the brand thing. Thank you, Gene Bean. That was... We need to call that like a bushel of sticks. 11,100. A bushel? Yeah.

Well, now we've also got 4,096. That's further boosting from Gene Bean. I think the most interesting hardware I've run Linux on is when I had Yellow Dog Linux on an Apple iBook circa 2004. Yeah, man, that's great. I loved Yellow Dog. Those iBooks that kind of looked a little bit like Turlets, you know, but still, do you remember the plastic iBooks? I just thought those were great machines. And if you wanted a PowerPC workstation, they were a great candidate. And Yellow Dog Linux, you know, well, it lives on in

DNF today. Second most interesting was likely when I had Debian on an old SunSpark box and used it to recover data from ZFS pools. The server was floor standing at about 12 or 15 U tall and load balanced power across three massive power supplies. Its large number of drive bays made it great for the job. I've sent a picture of it to you in Matrix for reference. He did indeed. And it is a beast. It's a retro-looking machine, too. And of course, at the top of the stack, it's got a CD-ROM.

Classic. Also, maybe a tape drive slot I see there. And then, what some of these server systems had back in the day and this one has it is the power button has a physical key lock so you can lock to disable the the power button and lock to uh leave it enabled and like so many of us just inevitably did after the server was a few years old is you just leave the key in the lock because if you ever lose that key you're not going to be able to power up or power down the system.

Oh, and it's a DVD drive. I see in there. And the machine's name is Brian. You see that? It's got a tag on there. The machine's, isn't that B-R-I-A-N right there? Isn't that say Brian? Hi, Brian.

It's Brian, the machine. The Sunfire Sun System named Brian.rian well what would you name it i guess yeah i mean i don't know maybe brian with a y uh it's up to him thank you gene bean always appreciate that oh he also sent in a row of ducks saying that he thought levi was also a human child for the longest time i think several people no way that's why i'm glad we made that clarification levi is in fact a dog a great dog perhaps peak dog but just just a dog you know if you ever have that fourth child uh maybe consider levi jr yeah could you imagine i i bet this happens so i don't want to make fun but could you imagine naming your child in memory

of your dog like i almost would do it dude would you tell you tell the child? You know, he'd find out. I guess so. They'd put it together, yeah. We've got so many pictures of that dog. You know he would. User 6255 boosted in with 2,200 sats. Congratulations from Portland, Oregon on episode 500. Love the show, and I'm looking forward to the next 500. Here's all the sats I've earned from Fountain.

Sincerely, Clever Compiler. Hello down there, Portland here. Yeah. You know, we are ruminating on an Olympia meetup at the end of April, just to say hello to folks down there. So keep that in mind, Clever Compiler. And if you're moving off of Fountain, don't forget you can still use Albie. You don't have to switch your podcast app.

Deleted comes in with 50,000 sats. Hello, sir. I missed the live stream, but I still wanted to boost and say thanks for episode 500. I'm looking forward to the next 500. Thank you, Deleted. How was right sends in 5,000 sats. Congratulations on 500. And Seabirt or Seabit comes in with 35,000 sats.

Woo. Happy 500. Keep them up. Well, thank you, everybody. We really appreciate it. Yeah. I hope we don't have a glut of boosts now, now that we've got all the 500 congrats out of the way.

So tell us. Remember, we still want to know your locations, your weirdest Linux box, and your never ever on Linuxes as well. If you need a reason to boost in, those can be a reason, but we just love hearing from you and appreciate the support.

If you got value from something we covered or talked about today, a boost is always appreciated. Of course, we also are eternally grateful to our members who invest in the ongoing production. They are our Unplugged core. You can become a core contributor and support the show. We have links at linuxunplugged.com. Boys, we got some picks to get into before we get out of here. And we got two really great ones and why don't we uh kick it off with one that mini mech wanted to throw into the pile today it is a better cd encoder and mini mech you've been putting it to the test haven't you i have indeed i started some

work this weekend so as you said this is a epic for people like me that have hundreds of audio cds lying around and the app is called abcde which is an acronym for a better cd encoder and it's a terminal application hey yo hey yo i used it some years ago and i did it all wrong at the time because i ripped all my audio cds into one flag file and once you wanted to split it up into the actual tracks if the cd information was wrong then the splitting points were wrong too that's bad so now i wanted to do it better you can configure your own configuration file and if you go a little bit further you end up like me with one command and you can rip an audio cd into flac and ac aac files with one command it looks up for the cd information on either music brains or new cd db it adds also the album arts it does everything you want and just with one command

it's it's great i love it and i save a lot of time with that new workflow it's really really really great i can recommend it yeah the being able to to write it out to two separate files so you have the flack which is like your pristine as good as it gets version and then you got your compatible with your entertainment system version that's brilliant indeed yeah Indeed, indeed. Yeah, that's good. And you do it really in one flight. And you can predefine the folder structure. So what I did, it saves it to a folder structure that is in fact compatible with the one used in Jellyfin.

So I can push it to the Jellyfin music server and then it's all done. No. That's even better. It's really good because you have, the Jellyfin uses a folder structure like you have one folder for the artist and then you have every album just beyond,

also in that folder. And that is really great. There is one last bit. When I do the CD ripping, I switch to dev.shm directory, which is a tempfs because it avoids a lot of writing cycles, because before you transcode to these favorite formats,

it will rip the whole CD down to WAV files. And if you want to really avoid some writing cycles on your hard drive, I guess it's better that you switch to dev.shm. It's available on every Linux installation installation as tempfs and then you avoid the way file writing seconds great tip i love dev shm yeah yeah that's a great tip and i'm kind of rebuilding my local audio library so appreciate it i don't have a lot of cds but i was just thinking you know my pop sure does and i was he's been complaining about not being able to really make playlists so yeah might have to give it a try.

And then we've got another pick that if you're a Tailscale user, I think you're going to like a lot. And, of course, we'll put the Flathub link in here, but there's also a GitHub link in the show notes. And this is Trayscale. It's an unofficial GUI wrapper around the Tailscale command line tool, which is pretty straightforward. Like, Tailscale status tells you the IP of all your different tailscale nodes and whatnot. But as you can probably picture in the theater of your mind, this is a GTK GUI that comes up and exposes the information you might need for each individual node, makes it super easy to copy their IP address, to turn on exit node information, grab that kind of stuff.

IP address to turn on exit node information, grab that kind of stuff. Now, unfortunately, Trayscale does not actually go to your system tray as support for that has been removed from GTK4. And you're bad and you shouldn't want it to go there anyway. Yeah, you shouldn't have been asking for that. So if it ever comes back, you'll get it. But honestly, it's really's sort of inconsequential you really are you're looking for a gui on top of the command line client and trace scale is it and it's really nice clean and simple just gets you the information you need it just makes being a

a tail scale user even smoother on linux and uh using it today because after the show we're going to try to save my next cloud server. And guess what? That's over. Tailscale. So, Trayscale. We'll have a link in the show notes, and the links will all be at linuxunplugged.com slash 501. All right, well, I think we're just about done here, boys. Tidy show today.

Yeah, it was really nice talking to Rob. I feel pretty solid about where they're going with Flathub. And I think one of the quintessential missing ingredients to all the different app stores is they've often relied on the distribution packaging mechanism. which I think for a period of time was the most successful. And then of course it was click and run as well. They all were based on devs and working with a particular commercial entity to publish. And all of them were really built. Even the app center on elementary OS is built, even though it uses flat pack, it's still really built with a particular distribution in mind. And it's technically compatible with other distributions, right? Where Flathub is being built distribution agnostic from the beginning, and underlying all of that is the Flatpak technology,

which itself is also distribution agnostic, and the repository system, the way that works, which is distribution agnostic. So it really feels like they have the pieces in place if the governance comes together in a way where people trust it and i think it likely will be with with rob's leadership i think they finally have all the ingredients to pull this off yeah and it might sort of cement maybe for folks who've been on the edge or not sure where to pick or what

technologies to use i'm not saying don't use snapsaps or App Imagers. I've used both. But it feels like it might become, really, like you're saying, like a natural sort of default. I'm already using it on multiple distributions, right? It'd be an easy win to suggest parents or friends or anyone else that you're, you know, helping with Linux to also go that route. And then it's the same

experience if they do try different distros or if we're starting, you know, maybe you've bought some proprietary apps or one place to really easily support free software. Yeah. Anyone who's switched a friend or family member or someone to Linux who's been a Windows user or a Mac user and you've watched them, okay, I need to go get this app. And they go to Google and they search and they try to download the app and then they try to install the app they've downloaded. Sometimes they get lucky, sometimes they don't. If we had a universal place to just send people, well, just go to Flathub and we could just make that a standard workflow. I think that would solve one of the biggest usability problems new users have

when they come to Linux. Especially when that place has the wider range of apps, right? If it doesn't vary from distro to distro, you don't have to worry about, oh, yeah, but if you need Zoom, well, you also got to go over here for Slack or, you know, whatever the exceptions that they need to get their stuff done. And I feel like it's more likely that more distributions will ship with the Flathub repository turned on by default if they do pick up some momentum and success here and so then it's just sort of like a snowball effect where well now like almost every distribution out there except for maybe the ubuntu distros ships with flat hub turned on now even

even fedora has flat hub without the filtering like it's full flat hub you know pop os uh the mangeros out there the arches out there whatever, they all ship with Flathub turned on, and all of a sudden we really truly have this cross distro system where I as an end user know that if I buy something on Flathub and I'm using NixOS today, when I want to deploy it on my Neon workstation, I could hopefully take that same purchase and now deploy it on my Neon system. I could hopefully take that same purchase and now deploy it on my neon system, right? It's not a brand new transaction, but maybe I'd be willing to have a flat hub ID or something, or if I could log in with some other system to track that, because that's one thing that I think Mac users enjoy about the crappy Mac app store is that you can sit down on a blank map Mac and you can blast it with

apps from the Mac app store. There's way better ways to do it. I mean, even just package managers are better, or Ansible or whatever, but it works for a lot of Mac users. You get a fresh Mac, you open up the App Store, you go to the page of all the apps you own,

click, click, click, click, click, and it's all installed. Same on the phones, right? You expect the same even if you're an Android user and you're using the Play Store. I want that when I switch distros or when I switch between systems. And if I can,

I'm way more likely to buy the app because then if it comes with me between different machines and distributions, I'm way more likely to do a membership or buy an app. So I hope they can build it that direction. I'd love to know what the audience would like to see from Flathub

and what it would take for them to start using it and recommending it. That's a great piece of contact or a boost. We'd love to read that on next week's show. If you want more show, we got Linux Action News at linuxactionnews.com. Wes and I are breaking down all the stuff that really matters in the world of Linux

and open source every single week. And there's a lot going on. We sit down every week and we really try to focus on the stuff that we think you need to know about, especially if you're in the industry. LinuxActionNews.com for that. But as for us, we'll be live next Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at Jupiter.Tube.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And of course, published just a matter of hours later. Drew is so dang fast now. No kidding. You know, I used to say Monday mornings, but it's basically the published version comes out Sunday evenings now. Members get it real hot and fresh. As soon as we wrap up, we publish the member feed, and then Drew cleans up all our mistakes,

make us sound like professionals, and we publish that out with all the links and all that stuff at linuxunplugged.com. Stay up late, listen to Unplugged. Yeah, right? I guess you could. Or listen, I like to think of people getting all charged up for Linux on a Monday morning. Either way.

Easier, you know, yeah. Easier entry into the week. Might be. There's other things that could probably get you more riled up. Either way you do it, though. We'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you. I wonder if anybody in the Mumble room has any first reactions to our chat with Rob and Flathub's plans for turning into a universal Linux app store. Anybody in there have thoughts before we wrap up? My first question was, who maintains all these flat programs? In fact, because often what I see also with snaps, there is a lot of enthusiasm at the beginning and there's the first version out. But then the new versions like that, sometimes you have to wait for some time. Yeah.

I kind of wonder what happens if Rob gets swapped out or gets burned out or leadership changes. Yeah, they do plan to have like a board and a group of people that are responsible for the decisions. So that I think initially, there's a bus factor there. But as time goes on, it seems like there's a governance structure that will be set up. We'll see. That's one of the areas I think is going to still be the most to be determined. But I do have some faith that Rob's going to get that right there. I wonder why the payments and storefront thing has to be coupled to the delivery mechanism. Because if you're tying it by a login credential and an AppStream ID, is there no reason that like, say, even a Fedora shipped version couldn't present, you know, payment or subscription or contact information, stuff like that. Like if it's all bound via like an identity service or an account service of some kind, why not do it that way?

And because like if we talk about like, for example, you just mentioned that Ubuntu is like really pushing the Snap thing. Well, those AppStream IDs are supposed to be format agnostic. So if the AppStream IDs are supposed to be format agnostic. So if the AppStream metadata is correct and the integration for Flathub into Discover and software are set up in such a way that they're not actually connected to the Flatpak plugin, then it doesn't actually matter which format

and the developer can still benefit from it. This is incredibly important for open source applications, in particular ones that have to be preloaded by the distribution for XYZ reason. We still want to give them a way to like, receive money, right subscriptions or, or donations or whatever, because like having flat hub as a central payment processor processor and an intermediary to help like make it possible for developers to get money on both free software as well as proprietary stuff that's a like there's a big big winnable opportunity there by creating an avenue for that regardless of which distribution mechanism the application actually is delivered under as long

as there's an app stream id and and Flathub knows what it is, you could accept money for it. You know, Wes, I have a sense that you and I are going to be following these developments for Linux Action News and this show, and we're going to start seeing Neil's name on some of the mailing lists here pretty soon. Nobody wants to hear what I think. You know, it's funny, Neil. Often, we'll be generally like with Fedora or something,

but we'll be looking at something and there's Neil. Oh, Neil's involved in this discussion too. It's like, where's that guy ever rest? And we appreciate all your work.