LINUX Unplugged - 507: Full Wobble

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Why Fedora 38 might Sway you to try it; and how it runs on the MacBook M1 Max.

Is it raining at your place, Brent? There's a train. All of a sudden, you know, a train decides to go by. It's training. It's training. I get it. It's training at my place pretty often. We're pretty close to it training.

Do you think it'd be possible to build a studio near that train? No. I think you'd have to build a room within a room that's like suspended somehow, right? Because it's just the kinetic shaking alone creates noise. Yeah, it might not be possible. I agree with Brent. Well, you could suspend it like they do for earthquakes. Or maybe like Jell-O, just to save money.

Sure. Plus then you got a snack, like a quick snack for when you're recording. You got to restock the Jell-O so you don't hurt the insulation over time. Definitely. Definitely. You just go down there and eat it. And when the strawberry flavor runsO so you don't, you know, hurt the insulation over time. But definitely, definitely. You just go down there and eat it. And like when the strawberry flavor runs out, you know, you pump in the orange flavor.

Just like that. Yeah. Maybe it wouldn't save money over the long haul, but it'd be a delicious attempt. 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 today's episode, we'll tell you why Fedora 38 might just sway you into trying it out.

And I'll give you my results with the latest and greatest Asahi patches on Fedora on my MacBook M1 Max. I daily drove it for the week and I'm reporting back how it went. And it's kind of interesting to check in on the project and see how things are and just how far along they've gotten.

So I'm just waiting to find out when I'll have to buy them. Yeah, right. Sure. Or maybe not. Or maybe not, Wes. But first we say good morning to our friends at Tailscale, tailscale. Sure. Or maybe not. Or maybe not, Wes. But first, we say good morning to our friends at Tailscale, tailscale.com. It's a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. Now up to 100 devices with a free account. Unbelievable. It'll absolutely change the way you develop

software, troubleshoot networks, and just communicate securely. I only sync my devices over my tail net now. We love it. It changes your networking game. Go say good morning, and if you get an opportunity, tell them the unplugged program sent you so we get the credit. TailScale.com. Now up to 100 devices. And before we go any further into the pod, we gotta say

good morning to our friends in the virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello, Chris. Good evening, guys. My use of the term pod is purchasable. Either way. Good to have you along, guys. I'm really looking forward to today's episode.

A Fedora release is always an exciting time, especially, I think, at this stage of where Fedora is at, where they're really kind of a leading-edge distro. A lot of the development and the forward development that's happening in the Linux desktop is happening in Fedora. So whenever we run Fedora

and whenever we run the latest and greatest, it's always an opportunity to check in on how all of that stack is coming together. Because that's one of the things Fedora does great at. So that's what we'll be getting to today in just a moment. But before we do, this is the last time we're going to mention it for a long time.

So if you're getting sick of it, don't worry. We're almost all done. It is our Linux Spring Meetup in Olympia, Washington, the capital of the beautiful Washington state in the Pacific Northwest. And the weather models are forecasting absolutely gorgeous weather, gorgeous weather, bring a t-shirt and shorts, potential kind of gorgeous. And we have a location, the Boston Habba Marina in Olympia, Washington. We have all the details at meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. It is a outdoor event, but it is a covered deck.

There is a snack shack just literally a quick around the corner. And there appears to be good, ample, obvious parking. So come chat Linux with us at the Boston Habba meetup.com slash Jupiter broadcasting this Saturday, April 29th at 1 PM Pacific. We're all going to be there. I'll be there. Brent, you'll be there, right? Heck yeah. Why would I miss a meetup? He's going to make the international journey to be here for it. Plus then it means we get to have a little Brantley in studio too, which is always... What a treat. What are we going to get into this time?

Oh, I already got a list of projects. You know I do. You haven't even told me that yet. Oh, gosh. Well, I haven't told you because I've been busy trying out Fedora 38, which shipped just a few days ago as we record. And I think this one's probably got... I mean, I guess the headline feature, I guess, comes with Genome 44,

which is a very refined version of Genome that has almost entirely completed the port to GTK4. I mean, just really, I think, close to maybe the perfect version of Genome. I have a couple of quibbles, but we can get into that later. It also ships with Linux 6.2, so you're getting a really nice stack of current drivers. That's a nice kernel. You're going to have other niceties in there like GCC 13, Ruby 3.2. And if you're an XFCE user, it's got that new XFCE 4.18 that all the XFCE users are raving about. And of course, it comes with a Plasma spin.

And new in this version is a couple of other spins as well. Right, Wes Penning? Indeed, there's a Budgie spin with that Budgie desktop environment, which I haven't used for a while, but it's pretty darn slick. There's also a Fosh shell aimed at mobile devices. I haven't tried that either, but curious. Yeah, I've definitely had opportunities to try it

on top of Debian, but yeah, I'd love to try it on top of Fedora. And there's a new variant that showcases Sway. That's right, there's a Sway spin now. Yeah, this got both our attention. You're using it right now, actually. And I spent the

morning, I didn't do my daily driving on this, but I spent the morning trying out the Sway Spin. What'd you think? So I'm not a general Sway user, and Sway is a Wayland tiling window manager that's clean and lean and- Definitely minimal, yeah. Yeah, definitely minimal. And they've done kind of a basic implementation with a pretty usable little bar along the top that gives you access to things like network manager and the time and some of those things. And I like that. I guess for what I would want out of the Sway desktop, it's kind of great. In fact, I wonder if you'll agree with me, but it sort of feels like Sway itself fits really well with the Fedora ethos. Yeah, I was kind of really appreciating the work that Fedora does

to sort of just, you know, build on all the great things that are out there, package together in a thoughtful way, make it feel more like a cohesive system because there's a lot of little utilities. I haven't, you know, checking on Sway from time to time,

which is why this was a nice excuse to do so, but I'm not daily driving it. So I haven't explored as this corner of the Wayland ecosystem has really been built out over the past few years, but the folks over at Fedora and Fedora Sway have. So they've got a nice, lightweight, minimalistic Wayland terminal editor. They've got stuff to set up like screen backlight brightness handled for you.

They've got a command line image viewer pre-installed. So there's lots of neat little things that maybe you wouldn't find or would have to take a little while to find yourself that just come out of the box for you in a different way than you might be used to from, you know, Genome or Plasma. And it's a more, it's a simpler stack in a lot of ways. So I feel like it could be potentially a little more reliable and solid, especially if you're stacking that on top of free software drivers like the Intel or AMD drivers for the video card and other components it seems like a pretty solid setup and a really good way to experience wayland in a wayland first environment exactly yeah you get wayland it feels nice and modern it's a little bit different but

you have sort of the comfort of fedora all the things that fedora has access to right you still got access to all the all the flat packs that you might want, especially with this, this release, you've got access to DNF. So yeah, it's a lot of fun and it's pretty easy to get started with. Now, Brent, I know you're not a daily Fedora user. I'm wondering if you had any first impressions looking at 38. Yeah, it seems, I don't know, quite refined to me. I didn't get to spend that much time on it, but it feels like the KDE version is just standard greatness. I didn't have as much trouble as I did in some previous versions, so that's always a good thing. But so far, so good.

I have it on a secondary laptop, so I think I'm just going to keep it there. Keep running it, see what I can get out of it. Yep. Now that is 5.27, right? Yeah, it is. It's 5.27 with a point release. So I also went with the Plasma spin for most of my daily driving. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. But it's a nice, clean, solid implementation of Plasma. And it's a more modern version. And again, you're putting that on top of 6.2. And DNF5 is in here as well. It's not default, but DNF5 is in here, which kind of pushes things forward. You got a brand new pipe wire.

I forgot about that. I meant to turn that on. Yeah, yeah. I might still play with that. But as we've been saying here, we talked about some of the nuts and bolts in Linux Action News 2 for Fedora 38. It's not a barn burner release, and that's okay. In fact, this is one of those releases where we really could talk

a lot more about what's in Genome 44 and or in Plasma 527 or Sway. And, you know, maybe we might mention something like, well, it's got shorter system

de-shutdown timers now so that way instead of waiting a minute 30, now you're going to wait 45 seconds when shutting down. Which is handy. It is great. It worked out great for me recently.

It's in maybe the like integration and polish section, which is a very important section that we talk about a lot, but I guess it's great it worked out great for me recently maybe the like integration and polish section which is a very important section that we talk about a lot but i guess it's maybe part of what you mean it's not a barn burr there's not a major new right feature that we're super excited about it's just like lots of little stuff that all works together and i think that could be in the pro column for a certain fedora user um you know if you're one of the long timers you know the drill you know what to do wait around a few weeks you know maybe a month i don't know i'm not i'm not your dad but you wait around a little

bit you run your current install wait for a couple things like there was a patch just went out that seemed like some plasma users were reporting slow launch times for native applications that got fixed post release that kind of stuff like little things like that accumulate up and so it's not necessarily a bad idea to give it a few weeks but i want you to keep this in mind fedora 36 goes end of life on may 16th 2023 fedora 37 on november 15th so i think 38 is a solid upgrade because if you've been sitting on the sidelines waiting on like to see how Pipewire plays out, to wait for a little more Wayland compatibility,

maybe you want to see Genome Shell get a few things figured out and get that transition to GGK4 done, or maybe you're even just waiting for a really, really great implementation of ButterFS because Linux 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2 and 6.3 will include numerous ButterFS improvements for performance and polish and RAID 5.6 improvements, like some good stuff for ButterFS users in this kernel. This entire stack, Pipewire, Wayland, Genome, ButterFS, all of it is very rock solid in 38 because they've been shipping some of this stuff since 33 and back. And they've had release after release now to iterate.

So if you're sitting on somewhere between 35, 36 and 37, I think you ought to be looking in the next month or so about early May. I think it's time. So it's less than a month away, but a few weeks. I think it's time to upgrade. I think this is a really great, solid release. And in a couple of weeks, it's going to be in that super sweet spot that Fedora finds itself. And if you combine that with a free software driver stack like AMD or Intel drivers, like I've mentioned, it's an exceptionally solid experience. And you get to ride on the leading edge of development. The stuff that's getting created today upstream is shipping here.

And it's shipping in a way that's been thought about and packaged and consideration and intention has gone into to make it work together. And that's what makes Fedora special, right? I can go build my Rando N Nixbox, and Hadoop, or my Arch systems, you know I have, but there isn't that entire collaboration of experts that are curating all of this leading-edge Linux stuff and putting it together. Yeah, I was thinking about it,

and it kind of makes Fedora, like it's not always my daily driver because, you know, whatever. We're oddball users. We like to test stuff. We like setting up all these kind of custom bespoke systems. But I'm almost enabled to do that knowing that I have a fallback that like, especially, I mean, maybe with Sway now, honestly, I might try that more.

But with the Genome implementation, I know that I can get a modern Linux workstation up and going really darn quick. So I've got a fallback if, you know, whatever I'm playing with doesn't quite work out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's totally true. And you'd be happy with it. You could totally make it work. You'd stay current.

It would work for you for the long haul. It would be great, yeah. I had a lot of experience this turn around with the minimal install, which is nice to see again, and the server installs. And then I built up to Sway or I built up to Genome or i built up to genome or i built up to plasma and i was doing all of that on the asahi patched version of fedora running on my macbook pro max with like a whole bunch of cores and a whole bunch of ram and i wanted to kind of get the cutting edge linux experience to see what that was like. And Fedora, again, was the place to try this because it's got a current kernel.

It's got a current Mesa. It's got these pipewire components I need. Like it's got the stuff I need to use this super current hardware. Yeah, I mean, if it's not going to be something like Arch, it probably needs to be Fedora. Linode.com slash unplugged. Head on over there right now to get a hundred dollars and 60 day

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It is a really compelling setup. So I think the best part is you can get that $100, and then you can support the show while you try something, while you build something. Maybe go do that deployment of NextCloud. They've got that all-in-one NextCloud deployment that you can go in a couple of minutes. You know, I think that's worth trying.

So go build it, go try it, and support the show. Just start by going to linode.com slash unplugged. Get that $100 in 60-day credit, kick the tires for yourself, support the show. linode.com slash unplugged. Get that $100 in 60-day credit, kick the tires for yourself, support the show. Linode.com slash unplugged. Asahi Fedora. Sounds exciting, but it's not necessarily easy to try out. You can't just download any old ISO and get started on one of these Apple M systems. So Chris, am I right in thinking you used the Asahi Fedora Builder? This is such a great little tool. There may be other ones out there.

And of course, you really, I suppose, if you were motivated, could do it yourself on any distro. But the Asahi Fedora Builder script is one of those ludicrous opportunities to just curl right into a file from the web and launch it and begin just wrecking havoc on your hard drive like an absolute lunatic? So, of course, all of these standard disclaimers apply. Make sure you got your data backed up. Be OK with your Mac maybe needing a little bit of work if anything goes wrong. But I have to say, having now installed Arch on this thing and having installed Fedora twice, I have yet to have anything go wrong.

But when you're doing this kind of stuff, it's always possible. But this little shell script is brilliant. It downloads, it figures out your Mac disk layout, figures out all the components you might need. It walks you through the reboot sequence you need to go into the recovery mode and change a couple of things. And then when you're done, you now have Linuxux as your default but you can hold down the power button on the m1 macbooks and when you hold down the power button you can choose whatever os you want and this sets up a dual boot system i think for right now you have to do that and so by default it'll boot into linux which is my preferred and if i want to override that i just hold down the

power button it's a little surprising how sort of first class it feels in that way, you know? Yeah. For how sort of all the effort that's had to go in to get it this far, you might not suspect that right away. You know, it's especially impressive with Plasma because it's doing the high DPI scaling.

So it's doing the double scaling. The high DPI display looks, well, chef's kiss good. I've never seen Plasma look better. And it just did all that automatically. Really was nice to see that. You're going to have to let me take a look at this later. Oh yeah, totally. Oh yeah, for sure. I should have brought it down. Now the way this works, right, is this is now a version of Fedora with some of these Asahi patches, the mini bootloader, this kind of stuff. And so you want to keep it up to date pretty frequently because they're working on stuff. And so you will be getting a lot of updates as you use this,

but it gets you to a minimal install environment is what the script does. And I like this because you can use DNF groups. Like if you just run the command DNF group list, it will show you all of the group packages, which are basically meta packages that you can install. And I chose the KDE Plasma workspaces, right? But there's a Sway one, there's a Genome one, there's an X, there's all of them. There's headless, all of that. And so I told it, you know, DNF group install KDE Plasma workspaces. You hit enter,

pulls down the packages. Of course, these systems are ludicrous fast so moments later i now have a kde plasma spin of fedora and i reboot boom there i am right there at ssddm or whatever it is log in and it's gorgeous man it works so so good the the things that the effects are on the compositors hard work accelerated it wow it is nearly without problem nearly it is not without problem and i don't want to give anybody false hope here uh really minor stuff like in my console window maybe because that's a little bit of transparency i'm not sure i often get this weird mouse trails issue where there's just sort of like my mouse carves out a little bit of the

background which is weird though it's behind the text of console look at that yeah i'm showing a picture to wes and brent right seems like a fun game and then if you like if i move the window or whatever it'll clear out and you can still use the mouse it still clicks on things and okay it doesn't affect this so totally just a graphical artifact. Yes. Also again I have transparency turned on. Sometimes when I move the console window it strobes for sometimes a few seconds sometimes

longer. The window just strobes sometimes if I click it again and move it it stops. I didn't really notice that until I turned on transparency so that I

could just go in and try turning that off. But I left it on just to see if updates fixed or anything like that. How wobbly are your windows just so we know? Oh I got them set to wobble. And they wobble real that. How wobbly are your windows, just so we know? Oh, I got them set to wobble.

And they wobble real good. They wobble just fine. It's fully wobble accelerated. In fact, everything feels really smooth video acceleration-wise until I'm like in Firefox working on loading a complicated web page. And when I'm scrolling in Firefox, I can feel it kind of chug down and lag out. But, yeah, we're talking super early days here, right? It's not a big problem. Many apps are also not

compatible with the ARM desktop. This is not the Asahi team's problem. But Telegram, Element, these are just Electron apps, or at least Element. They make ARM versions for macOS. They don't make ARM versions for Linux. So a lot of things that you normally run, day-to-day desktop

applications, you're going to be using their browser equivalents if they have them when you're running on an ARM system. The thing is, the reason why I mentioned that, because it sounds so obvious,

well, of course, yeah, there's some things that aren't ported to ARM, Chris. Duh. When you're using Fedora 38 on a MacBook Pro M1 Max, it's weird to say, but it just feels like a really fast x86 system.

You forget. You're in this totally other world, totally other architecture. Yeah, because normally when I'm running Linux on an ARM system, it's constrained by the performance of the hardware, so I'm constantly reminded I'm on an ARM system. So I don't even give a second thought

to incompatibility issues, because of course. Right, you're on a specific system for a specific use case. But when I'm on the macbook it runs so good and so fast that it's i'm like oh right yeah no i i can't run that okay and it's manageable but it's something to be aware of so you know you combine it with the fact that it's kind of cutting edge software you're going to often run stream upstream patches that aren't yet downstream to your distro,

maybe necessarily. And there's going to be frequent updates. There's going to be a few glitches. And like I had one time where I closed the lid on the laptop, put it in the bag, got home, took the laptop out, and it was like 150 degrees in my bag

because the laptop never went to sleep. It did the other times, or maybe I just did a different process or something, but that time it didn't. You just get those kinds of little bit of bumps. So in some ways it feels like going back because you got to have an external USB sound card, for example, with the MacBook Pro. You're not going to get external monitors right now, but you also can really see the future. Right now at this stage where they're at, performance is such that when it is working well, applications on a Sahi-powered Linux

launch faster than the exact same application does under macOS. Without a doubt. It's just really something. I can launch an application under Linux, instant. Under macOS, bounce, bounce, page loads, or screen loads. Under Linux, it's absolutely instant.

Have you found any apps that do have ARM versions that you're running like a native? Well, Firefox being on ARM is just a lifesaver. And there's far more flat packs than I expected on Flathub that have ARM versions. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. So if you know where to look to, you can get stuff.

So I would say Asahi patched distros right now. Think of it as, you know, there's essentially going to be Asahi NixOS, Asahi Arch, Asahi Fedora, right? Because what you're really saying is this distribution is carrying the sets of patches that are still outside the upstream kernel. Right. Asahi's doing a pretty good job of getting a lot of things upstream. But if you want the latest and greatest, you need, yeah, stuff that hasn't quite made it there yet.

Ultimately, and maybe this is a ways down the road, but like these patches are going to be upstreamed and then it's just going to be one of the versions that a distro supports and it's not going to require

like the Asahi patches because they're just incorporated into the software the distribution's already shipping is the goal. It's pretty neat too with the mini setup and all where, you know, maybe it's a bit to get going if you, you know, have never dabbled in any of this before and you haven't got a Linux setup. But once you've got Linux setup one time, it's easy to try out other distros, get things done, wipe it, and then reinstall from scratch.

Like, it's surprisingly nice tooling. Yeah. And DNF still feels really great. DNF 5, I think, has a great future ahead of it in terms of performance improvements. I do need to play around with that. So here's how I'm describing it right now, is if you're willing to live kind of cutting edge, sort of the opposite user I was talking about in the previous half of the show, if you're willing to kind of be cutting edge, it's barely daily driver. It's daily driver material, but it's barely daily driver. You're going to have

single monitor. You're likely going to have to bring USB audio. You're going to have a couple of video glitches. You're going to have frequent updates, but you can effing run Linux on these M1 MacBooks. And that is a massive achievement. And there has been practically other than maybe a couple of sneaky engineers at Apple, zero help from Apple on this. And here we are. I'm saying it's barely daily driver. And that is a massive compliment to the project. I mean, you're talking about hardware acceleration. On Plasma, right? Like I could understand like, yeah, it only works with GNOME with a specific version of the kernel and a specific version of Mesa on this specific Mac, you can get hardware accelerated to GNOME.

But no, it's whichever I want. It's just incredible. It's really impressive. I wouldn't buy a Mac yet for it, but, you know, give it, you know, maybe by the time we're talking Fedora 40, maybe, maybe. You know, I would imagine once it takes off,

because it will, it sounds like you're almost on the cusp, you know, give it another year or so, and who knows where we're going to be. But I would imagine that's going to be the key to getting so many other applications ported to ARM. Can you imagine like all the developers just want to put this on their laptops that they're currently using? I think it's going to be a huge shift. Right. Because who else is going to be running big ARM Electron apps, right? There's not going to be many Pi users with limited resources. That's a great point, Brent.

I also wonder, Chris, I know you were kind of down on Fedora on our last release. You know, we kind of dove into it and you were like, I don't know. How are you feeling now? I mean, in the first half of the show, you seem kind of optimistic. Do you think you might daily drive Fedora again or at least have a change of ideas? It's a good question. I think one of the things we didn't mention is that the FlatHub filtering has been

removed and that was where one of the concerns came from. So now it is genuine FlatHub. Unadulterated FlatHub goodness. Although, maybe this is just totally unrelated, but I noticed that Genome Software now has a free software only filter. Maybe that should have been the way to go about it all along. But it's nice to see that that's been sorted out. I have a lot of respect for what the project does, and I appreciate where they push forward. I didn't want to make a thing about it in the show. of release i saw have i saw people having issues with accelerated video playback and that kind of stuff and people were really confused and didn't know what to do and there's reddit threads about

it and there's other places where people are talking about it and i saw it in matrix as well and you know i can't think of any case of any distro getting sued over those video drivers decoded drivers but that stuff's still frustrating but it is what it is and that's the part of the project that's the role the project plays. So I, that stuff still tampers my excitement to a degree, but I can't let that get in the way of the fact that they truly are pushing the envelope forward on a really good stack. I think they probably have the best stack in the distro business right now in terms of out of the box, what you get. For just like the workstation users out there or the people that

maybe have a special use piece of hardware 38 is a pretty great release and chris how do you feel about the scheduling i know they were kind of early this time around which is actually not typical um do you feel like they released it a little too early and maybe they should have been late no no i uh so you're getting me to get me to talk about all the controversial topics so um i just want to point out i just want to point out and you guys know i love matthew miller so matthew this is in uh all love but i've heard matthew give other podcasters a bit of a hard time when they mention that fedora shipped quote-unquote late and then matthew will always point out that Fedora has sort of a set of

release target windows which go from early to kind of later than expected and they try to ship within that target and that was the answer we've all gone with and traditionally Fedora hits the later end of that target so we've just accepted that answer for multiple releases now however if you go look at the Fedora 38 workstation announcement or the 38 general release announcement I can't remember which one Matthew Miller starts by pointing out how early and on time they shipped which i find ironic because if you don't want us pointing out when you ship late you probably shouldn't be pointing out when you ship early to just not say anything and we all stop talking about it you can't have it both ways you know uh but it is really nice to see and i, you know, I think this is just a perfect release for that kind of thing, too.

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usernames and passwords and unique usernames and passwords on every site service and desktop app and mobile app I use, because it also integrates on mobile really well, really well on mobile. So it really has kind of made that possible for me to actually use security take advantage of those tools you know actually have individual usernames and passwords and email addresses at every site i use like it's not just something people it's not just something like oh you should do it like yeah i say you should do it i don't do it no like bitwarden actually gives me the tooling to do it and do it in a way that's not frustrating. Do it in a way that doesn't cost me time from like when I'm traveling or when I'm just trying to get into something really quick. Like I won't

name names, but I watch Brent struggle with that sometimes, you know, when he gets to a new location and I think, my God, man, my God, life is too short. And Bitwarden makes it so easy. It's beautiful. It's open source. And it's probably the low-hanging fruit you could just grab right now. Just reach out and snatch to make your online security safer. Maybe you already have Bitwarden. Maybe you know somebody, a friend, family member. Maybe your workplace. Maybe that open source project.

Send them to bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's better for everybody, and it's a great way to support the show. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. great way to support the show. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. As always, we got some amazing feedback in this week to the show. Thank you, everyone. If you want to leave some for us, linuxunplugged.com slash contact for that. Mars X-Ray wrote in with some great feedback on the last episode. And Chris, I know that was a topic that really hits you hard. You want to take this one? I think it's one that a lot of us think about, especially the more stuff we self-host. And yeah, X-Ray points out that what we really were touching on, and Brent, the topic you were really

kind of bringing up was digital estate planning and kind of creating an if-I-die document that sort of helps one's family figure out what to do. And the thing that they point out that I think is brilliant, guys, is they say you can architect this document in a way where it could kind of be printed into a manifest file depending on who the audience is. You can have two sections, a simplified one for non-tech family members and a technical one that a friend could understand or help reproduce the system. And in you know, in the simplified section, you could inform about, like, the systems that are in use, what you consider to be important data

and important, like, subscription and logins. And then the more technical one could, like, kind of expand on what your environment is, how it works, like, maybe that's where the Nix config is. Yeah, maybe your spouse is getting help with the systems you've told them about in the, you know, the top-level document, and then you've kind of got, like, well, here's some more docs to give to someone if you've got them to try to help you've kind of got, like, well, here's some more docs to give to someone

if you've got them to try to help you. If you'd like to know more, here's this. You know, why not even put maybe who you'd recommend? That seems... Yeah, some contacts to call, folks that maybe have seen the system before or aware. Yeah, could help it keep running. Basically, everyone's just going to say,

call Wes, right? Yeah. Also, documenting hardware details can be useful if your family wants to donate any of the hardware. X-Ray points out that's a good point. Oh, smart. That way the nonprofit knows what they're dealing with. But yeah, he points out there's probably a lot more to think about than just backing up the data. which subscription services, be it a VPS or whatnot, that are absolutely essential for the infrastructure versus just, you know, something that is a lab or something that can be shut down, you know, right away to save money or whatever. And which ones, you know, it's like, don't turn

this off. Otherwise all the systems start breaking. And I thought that was really good insight as well. You know, kind of having a list of essentials and non-essentials that can be acted on pretty quickly. Yeah, that is a great point. It's a very helpful way to think about it. I almost feel like I want somebody to summarize this all up and create an action plan. Maybe ChatGipity could do that for us. You know, one thing I think is a problem here, though, is, I mean, we're all just constantly changing our infrastructure. So how do you keep this up to date? You know, especially if you're keeping it, I don't know, in a safe or something where you keep other documents that are super important. So that's a problem I think could use

some thoughts on and some eyes on solving. I would like to hear some neat solutions for that one. Yeah, the ever-changing environment. I know, Wes, you've been trying to train your dogs to be able to give people cues if something were to happen to you. But using positive reinforcement to train them on how to restore a seed key for your Bitcoin wallet is taking forever. They're really struggling with the VI bindings, unfortunately. Yeah, I knew they would. I suggested Dano. He just had to insist. Now, Chris, you're always interested to hear where listeners are within our back catalog.

And Joe admitted to having fallen behind this last year or two, but they're catching up. They wrote in for the first time ever, which is great, saying, I think I'm about seven months back, but catching up quickly now. I was about a year and a half back not too long ago, but been listening for a few years now and fell behind when COVID hit, especially when I got sent home to work with no commute, which is pretty standard. Just didn't have as much time to listen. But they swore to themselves that they would start listening again and listen to every single episode of Linux Unplugged, self-hosted, and LAN that they've missed. And so now, since getting a new job, they're driving again and have been listening every single day and are beginning to catch up

quite quickly. There you go. If I were doing a large back catalog catch-up, I'm not even kidding, I'd be doing it on Fountain and just stack those sats doing that but that's me that's what i did on my road good idea you know the trippy thing that joe may run into is when you're seven months behind in this economy if your other podcasts you're that far behind on there may come a time where you're listening and they go away this year that is gonna be a thing i don't mean to be doom and gloom, but I do forecast that we are going to see a reduction in podcasts. And I dread it.

I dread that one of my favorite podcasts is going to go away. So we need to find a pick to pull down RSS feeds? Is that what you're saying? Oh, and archive them. And then re-host them as RSS feeds so then you can put them in your podcast catcher of choice. Right, just a transparent mirror that feeds somewhere that I can add back to AntennaPod

or whatever. Yes. Does anybody know? Is that a thing? If so, let's try it. I would really like that. I think we had a pick like this like six months ago. I mean, I feel like you could string it together with something like Subsonic or self-hosted GPod or on NextCloud. But what Wes is talking about is something that scrapes the existing RSS feeds, auto-archives

them as they release new episodes, and then automatically makes them available as an RSS feed. Right. Goes and chases all the enclosures and re-hosts those, I suppose, is the main bit you got to do. And now it is time for the boost. Well, speaking of supporting the show, Taco Strange came in with 60,607 sats listening to last week's episode from Fountain. And it is a zip code boost. And also to double down on the pronunciation of Chatjippity.

Yep. I guess that one's staying around. This is about a commentary on the way things are pronounced. And I think Chatjippity is wonderful. I think it's just fantastic. So 60,607. do we have a location 60607 is a postal code in chicago illinois oh we got to make it out to chicago one day oh a chicago meetup that does sound like fun thank you taco strange i really love that i love that username. That's pretty great. Danny 42 comes in with a big old row of grandpa ducks. This old duck still got it.

22,222 cents. Also listening to last week's episode, sending him from the podcast index. He says, if you want to get off Apple music, Chris, you should try music dash player. It's a very poorly named music player,

but it is actually written in rust. Well, there's something. It's got to be perfect. Then we can find it on GitHub. We'll put a link in the show notes. It doesn't have an Android or iOS app yet, but the seeds are growing.

It does have a desktop app and a command line to we have. All right. So. All right. That's pretty cool. I hate this. I hate, I hate the whole music management thing. Just really do.

I'm just sick of it. That's kind of why I just defaulted to using a service and I just downloaded, I guess. Probably shouldn't. Marcel also comes in with a row of McDucks. Quacka quacka. It's a treasure. Yippee. And listening to in with a row of McDucks. Quacka quacka, it's a treasure. Yippee! And listening to last week's episode with Fountain.

Way to go on the oven repair, Chris. Go right to repair in general. Appliance should last more than two years. To think they would have you throw it out over a dirty fan. So for you non, I don't think we talked about this on the show, right? Or got cut. Or it was only in the member feed. But my oven had an error when a support told us to immediately unplug it and imply that it

was electrically dangerous and to throw away the oven and buy a new oven and i just refused to do that and i took it apart took forever to take it apart and we discovered i mean i looked at everything everything looked perfect and then i discovered well, this DC cooling fan is a little dirty. Just dirty, right? I mean, I've got fans in this very studio that are five times dirtier than that DC cooling fan was. But it was an intake fan and it had some dust on it. I saw it had a positive and a negative and a third wire. And I figured that third wire might be an rpm sensor and maybe their software is just so dumb that like if it's just below what the exact spec of the rpm should be they just shut the system down for safety purposes because they you know consider cooling compromised this is all going through my head i'm looking at the dust on this tiny little dc fan so i you know squirt it with some compressed air plug the oven back and get it kind of you know back into like a semi-reconstructed state and immediately bake like a whole rack of cookies. And we've been using it for a week plus every single night. It's absolutely fine. They told

me to throw it away, an oven, because a cooling fan for the control board was just a little dirty. It's just absolutely unbelievable. It's a sad state of affairs. And they even imply it was dangerous, maybe in some cases, but not in that case. So yeah, I felt like a good win actually. It's just absolutely unbelievable. It's a sad state of affairs. And they even imply it was dangerous. Maybe in some cases, but not in that case. So yeah, I felt like a good win, actually. So thank you, Marcel. I was just chatting about this with the wife as we were yet baking another dinner. And I said, can you believe they told us to throw this thing away?

Ridiculous. Just so crazy. And it is so satisfying to keep, you know, repair things, keep things working when you can still get service and value out of it. Well, and we love it. We love the oven in general. It's been a great oven. You didn't need or want a new one. Exactly.

Patrick 925563907 boosts in. Oh, catchy. With 5,248 cents. Postcode boost. Love listening. Thanks for all the podcasts. And that seems to be if i'm if i'm right please let us know if we get this wrong patrick but a postal code in the netherlands

near uh rosemont no kidding let's hope so that'd be great how was right boost in with 2100 sets log seek detoured my entire week thanks i was using a combination of to-do apps and note-taking methods. Now I'm going all in on Logsync for note-taking and to-dos. I recommend Tools on Tech, the YouTube channel. His tips really help me get started.

Ah, so that is, again, LogSEQ, if you guys want to look this up. And I have also noticed a slow burn in our Matrix chat room. Like every day or so, somebody comes in there, oh man, I've been trying out LogSeq for the last week.

Anybody else trying this? And I see it over and over. People are, it's funny to see it trickle out and people are trying it. It's an exciting time in the note-taking world. You know, more people trying out things

like Notion and Roam and Obsidian and LogSeq is a nice contender if you like the graph world. True. You got GeneBean too. GeneBean boosts in with 1,337 sets. I've been trying out LogSeq since y'all talked about it. I am cautiously impressed. I've decided to contribute to them so that I can get their sync functionality on my iPhone. The other place I'm using it is my Linux laptop,

and there I have the data stored in a folder synced with NextCloud. My intent is to have NextCloud be the source of truth, but the encrypted sync from LogSeek solved a hurdle for significantly less money than Obsidian wants. I've heard the Obsidian sync is a little expensive. I haven't looked into it. Yeah, I think LogSeek is $5 or $6 a month. You've got to donate to their open collective

and then you're eligible to use their encrypted sync backend. That's not too egregious, I suppose. That's one of the things I just love about having my own Nextcloud is that if I can, that just is how I sync this stuff now. Gene Bean came in with another 2,000 sets. Someone mentioned a QR code for supporting a project. Maybe y'all should talk about www.thesplitkit.com.

How about this? The Split Kit, the innovative app that harnesses the power of the Lightning Network to boost your project and reward your team in the process.

Well, hello, beautiful. With Split Kit, you can create a unique and engaging promotion page for your podcast, album, event, or probably open source source project while also enabling fans and supporters to send boostograms which is a combination of message and lightning network payments so this is really bridging boosts that we've been using here in the podcast with podcasting 2.0

to the rest of the world this This is boosting for music creators, software creators, and it generates a QR code. You can just put that on your webpage. I can log in with Albie. Of course, dude. Isn't this great? Isn't this ecosystem just... Because it's all an open protocol.

And it's all an open network, right? So it's so great. Even if you weren't using Albie, you could still log in with your Lightning address. It's just so neat to see it coming together and not requiring all this crap. Pretty cool. So yes, Gene Bean, thanks for sending that in. That is a

particularly neat project that we're keeping an eye on. Mickey Will boosted in 4,000 sets, boosting in everything I've got currently in my Fountain wallet wallet swapping to pod first for a while uh since it looks kind of great also tagging along for the postcode shout outs i'm in two one two one coming in hot with the boost well thank you for the fountain transfer boost and enjoy podverse podverse.fm the g-platform podcasting 2.0 app.

Wow, Wes, have we tracked down a... This is a great zip code, 2121? Could be a postal code in Sydney, Australia, perhaps? Ah, good day, mate. I hope. Mickey Will kind of sounds like an Australian username, right? Only time and boosts will tell. Let us know. Space Ninja also boosted in with 5,000 sats. As a native Virginiate, did I say that right?

I think so. Virginiate? We're going to get a follow-up for this, too. I think it's Vegemite. Virginifolk? I have to correct the pronunciation of London County for the lulz. It's Loudoun County. Oh, God. But i love you guys anyways i'm mostly messing with you because of the pronunciation stuff wait or is it pronunciation oh darn i

never remember that one damn humans dude i cannot believe the humans i tell you what uh mclane comes in with 17 955 sats boost and uh coming in from the podcast index says uh not even close we were trying to guess on his location last time no cigar guys but maybe my hint was too vague you did find nice surrounding area though the boost again is a quarter of my postcode in the land where linus s was born. So Linus S would be Linus Sebastian. So that would be China. And the boost amount is 17,955, which is a quarter of his postcode. Do we actually know where Linus was born?

I mean, we kind of know where he currently is. He said it before on a video once, but I don't remember either. It's apparently a middle of nowhere area. Greenland. I don't remember. He grew up in Maple Ridge, British Columbia. He was born in August 20th, 1986. According to Wikipedia, he was diagnosed with ADHD as a child.

Good to know, Wikipedia. That doesn't surprise me at all. Well, we've got the quarter part, right? So, 17,955. Multiply that by four. Canadian postal codes have letters in them, right? So, it could be alphanumeric. That's what I'm confused about.

So, we've got 71,820 to work with. But we might need to do more research. Mick Lang, you've got to give us some more leash to hang ourselves with here because we just... Or ideally, maybe another booster could solve it for us. Like boost in with thoughts about where the zip code is. There needs to be some nice value. Yeah. Well, it seems, Mick Lang, you still have us stumped

because we're running the numbers over here and we don't have it figured out. But we have figured out that Linus Sebastian seems to have perhaps originated in Maple Ridge, British Columbia on August 20th, 1986. That gives us some hint. Maybe another booster could solve it for us or give us a little more rope to hang ourselves with. If you'd like to boost in and support the show,

we really appreciate it. This matters a lot to us, more than ever going into the remainder of this year. And there's several ways you can do it. You can go get a new podcast app, a newpodcastapps.com and try out a podcasting 2.0 app or keep your dang podcast app. Use the podcast index first, just get Albie, get albie.com, then head over to the podcast index, find the

unplug program and send the boost in from the website. Always appreciated everybody who boosts in, who streams the sats or boosts in below the 2000 sat cutoff. We appreciate you. And we'll have resources in the show notes for you to check out. Thank you very much, everybody. Now, I put a pick in here that is not very applicable. It's not an applicable pickable to everybody. Ah, sort of a niche pick today. If you need a really solid digital audio editor.

I do. Something that you could use day in and day out in production. Offers multi-track audio, MIDI support, podcast editing, music production editing, post-processing tools, a good set of mastering tool sets for, you know, beginners. Reaper has now been packaged in Flatpak and is available up on Flathub. And Reaper is the application we've been using for years now to record all of our podcasts on JP. We're all recording in Reaper.

We just love it. It's what we use to edit, too. You know, when we edit. It keeps getting better. It's actively developed. It's not open source, but it works real well on Linux. Very reasonably priced, and it has a long trial period,

so you can use it full-featured. And it's just so great to see it packaged up in a Flatpak to make it more accessible. I haven't tried it myself, but traditionally, I've had to just download the binary and extract it and run it. And maybe now in the future, on some of my systems, I'll just install the Flatpak. That's going to be really nice to see. And I'll just get the updates with all my other Flatpaks,

which is nice because they update the application for Linux semi-regularly. It's been well supported. Do we know if for this pick, is it Reaper putting the Flatpak out or a community member? I believe it is a community member. That is always something to kind of be aware of, but the brand new gorgeous FlatHub website that just rolled out this week makes it a little bit easier to figure out where it's all coming from. So you can determine that. Maybe it is being, actually, maybe it is being published by Reaper. It is not. It's unofficial. Either way, a thousand installs already.

Okay, so it is not official. A thousand installs already. That is really great to see. 12 megabytes once installed. Great application. It's one of the secret sauces for JB, is that Reaper application. Yeah, it's great.

And they even have an ARM Linux version. Yeah, and you can get it on the Mac too. So you can take it with you, which makes it really handy because it's a tool you can then rely on. I also use it extensively for playing music. It's a bit of a different use case than our podcasting stuff.

But man, it has so many great functions for all the things. the things so i gotta say if you're a musician as well uh on linux that i it's a heavy recommendation indeed we all love it we're very grateful that's an application that's come to linux and they've made a native build of it and now it's even more accessible hey you know we're wrapping up but if you want more show, go check out Linux Action News. Was it this episode or was the episode before? I can't remember, but we went down through

some of the major Genome 44 features, which is a big part of Fedora 38 and a great compendium to this episode. So go grab that episode of Linux Action News and catch Wes and I covering everything that matters in the world of open source and Linux.

Otherwise, we'll be back here live next Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And of course, links to what we talked about today, LinuxUnplugged.com slash 507. A whole network of podcasts awaits you over at JupyterBroadcasting.com. Go check those out. You can get more Brentley over at Office Hours

and more Wes at Linux Action News. Yeah, I believe that... No, never mind. Oh, you almost had a little something for us. Did you almost solve it? I thought... You're still working at McLean? You're still working at McLean? Yeah. It'll haunt us. But, shouldn't haunt you out there, dear listener. We'll solve it.

In the meantime, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We really appreciate it. Hope you recommend this pod to a friend. Until I solve it. In the meantime, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We really appreciate it. Hope you recommend this pod to a friend. Until I'm told to stop saying it, thanks so much. And see you right back here next Sunday. It just feels dirty. Pod. Pod.

Pod. Pod. The podcast. Yeah, don't miss the pod. The cast is too long Thank you.