LINUX Unplugged - 514: Connection Established

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

We get the inside scoop on SouthEast LinuxFest, and share a few stories from the early days of the Linux community. Special Guest: Noah Chelliah.

Well, just a couple of days ago, Debian 12 Bookworm has officially been released, and it's got Linux 6.1 under the hood, Plasma 5.27, and GNOME 43, as well as XFCE 4.18, depending on your preference. That's kind of neat. I don't know. I don't get quite as excited about a Debian release anymore, but it still feels like a noteworthy event in Linux. And it kind of got me thinking guys

what if you took a debian base you know just a base net install of debian and then you loaded the nix package manager on there okay and you install like the latest gnome 44.1 because nix has got gnome 44.1 and Debian's got Gnome 43. Could you build a full graphical environment on top of a Debian base using Nix Package Manager? I think you could. But would you want to? 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, we have a really fun episode this week. You know, we were looking back and thinking, with LinuxFest just around the corner, maybe we ought to touch base with our friends at Southeast LinuxFest. And there's probably nobody better than our buddy Noah, who is there on the ground right now at his booth at Southeast LinuxFest. Noah, welcome back to the show, buddy.

Hey there, good to be here. You know, I'm really glad, Noah, that we got a chance to connect while you're still there because Southeast Linux Fest is probably my biggest regret as far as conferences I've never made it to. We've just never made it down there. It's always at a time when something else is going on. So thanks for being here. We've got to catch up. We've got a few stories to tell and see what's going on there. And Noah's joining us for a double recording this week.

So that's pretty great. I also want to say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale is a mesh VPN that's protected by Wire also want to say good morning to our friends over at tail scale tail scale is a mesh vpn that's protected by wire guard you're gonna love it i have no more inbound ports on any of my firewalls do you no of course not no i got tail scale go say good morning and try it for free for up to 100 devices at tailscale.com yeah 100 100 devices tell them linux unplug sent you if you get an opportunity tailscale.com that Yeah, 100. 100 devices. Tell them Linux Unplugged sent you if you get an opportunity. tailscale.com. That just about covers your number of laptops, I think. Just about.

But then when you add the Raspberry Pis, yeah, not so good. Also, before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual log. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Brian and Chris.

Hello. Noah. Hello. Hello. mumble room hello hello hello hello hello hello everybody up there in the quiet listening to uh all right so let's get to business so noah is joining us here i got linux fest northwest on my mind this week trying to just kind of get some final details figured out hoping we have a great conference and i thought you know these fests are a moment for us to kind of check in as a community. And, um, I was looking back at the history of Linux action show and Noah and I did the last Linux action show episode 468 from Linux fest Northwest 2017.

I like, if that doesn't just kind of underscore what these conferences mean to us, I don't know what else would. And it gets me just really excited to be going back to LinuxFest. Noah's going to join us at LinuxFest this year. Oh, that's exciting. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Reminds me of the good old days. So Noah, before we get into self, I wanted to catch up. Let's start with the Linux stuff. What's your daily driver these days? What are you rocking as far as Linux distribution and laptop or desktop? So you may recall, we were at a sprint in New York and I was about to do Ask Noah and GNOME crashed, popped, and I lost everything I was working on. And at that time, you changed distros all the time, but you were rocking Kubuntu at the moment and you were like, you might give that working on. And at that time you were, you know, you changed distros all the time,

but you were rocking Kubuntu at the moment and you were like, you should, might give that a shot. And so I did and I've never changed cause I'm the Walmart of Linux users. It works and it never, so still Kubuntu and it's still working and I still love it. And then when I find something I can't do on it, then I'll potentially look somewhere else. What about on the server? What is, what is your go-to server distro these days? So it depends. If I'm doing ZFS, I've gotten bit too many times with DKMS on Alma. So I've switched over to Ubuntu on the server when there's ZFS. If not, then I'm still using Alma for just kind of a base, just mostly because I just know it so well. I've been using it for so long. It just feels like home. I see. And altaspeed still going and supporting customers running

linux as well right yeah yeah is alma linux the distro you guys are deploying the most for altaspeed customers yeah so if it's like a vdi infrastructure if there's if they've if they have a virtual infrastructure then almost becomes the virtual host so this is actually kind of taking off a lot of companies are either delivering their services via an RDP connection or companies themselves are wanting to virtualize their infrastructure and push Windows up into a virtual environment, which, of course, we love because we can make images. So in those types of environments, we're using something called ThinLinks,

which is a distribution that runs on a Raspberry Pi and, from the user's perspective, drops them right directly into that RDP connection connection so they turn the box on and the next thing they know they're sitting in front of a windows desktop what they don't know is running underneath the hood on the local hardware is actually thin links and then that's just connecting up to a libvert server that's running their virtual windows box so thin links is like an image that goes on the pi sd card exactly oh that's slick. And so what, you just tape those things to a back of a monitor? Yeah, so the Argon One is one of the coolest cases under the planet.

Yeah, so we're using that, and it basically makes the Pi into a little computer. Yeah, it looks slick. Oh, yeah. Totally presentable in a workplace. I could see that. Okay. All right. So I guess they're still using Windows.

There's just a little Linux between them and Windows. I guess virtual Windows is better than physical Windows. Yeah. If we can get away with it. You know, sometimes there's, you know, a lot of companies are using web apps. And of course, then it's just a Kubuntu desktop. But when they need Windows or when they need some sort of special application, then it's a virtual environment. But I mind managing Windows a lot less when it's virtualized because we just blow it away and start over or roll back to a sterile image.

All right. So the other thing I wanted to catch up with you about is last time, I don't know if it was on air or if it was off air, they kind of blur together. But you and I at some point were talking about like if you had made too early of a bet on Matrix. Yeah. Because the conversation at the time was really we ought to just go the easy route and go with Discord because that's where so many of the next generation already are. And we should be as Linux enthusiasts reaching out to the next generation where they're already

at. They're on Discord. Both you and I decided for our communities that Matrix was the route to go, even if it meant we wouldn't be reaching out to some of those individuals. And you and I were kind of having private conversations and on-air conversations, like, is this the right choice? Should we be doing something different? We're a couple of years past that now, and I'm just kind of curious,

how has it worked out? How is it running a large Matrix server? I know you run the business on Matrix too. Do you have any regrets and do you kind of feel pretty confident in your decision to double down and invest in Matrix long-term? This is no word of a lie. Matrix has changed my life. The ability to granularly drill into notifications to say, okay, here is all the work traffic is going to hit this place. All of the community traffic is going to hit this place. All of the private traffic is going to hit this place and where I need to overlap, I'll overlap because at the end of the day, they're all just rooms. And if that's all I got out of matrix, it would have been a check in the box.

And I would have said, that's good enough. That works. You're doing that with multiple user IDs that just join different rooms? Exactly. And so, you know, like the Sarah channel, I want to see that traffic no matter what account I'm signed into. And that offers me the ability to do that. And if that's all that I got, I would have been happy. But I've now been able to bridge SMS.

I've been able to bridge Telegram. I've been able to bridge Slack. I've been able to bridge Teams. I've been able to bridge GroupMe. And so depending on what organization I'm working with and what communication platform they are in, it's the Lotus 1-2-3 effect, right? The reason that Excel was able to take over the market was because they were backwards compatible with Lotus 1-2-3. And so from top of mind for me is

Matrix allows me to do that. Well, okay. So how brittle is that, though? Because I think I noticed this morning on the stream, the bridge to Telegram was down for the live stream for the end of Self. So does it break? Is that rare? Yeah, so the app service ones that you host yourself, rock solid work. Nothing works 100% of the time, but it's as good as it gets. The third-party bridge that is hosted, like the T2Bot one, where you're relying on a third party to exist in two places and bridge together that goes down and there's just nothing, there's nothing I'm prepared to do about it. Um, but that to me, that's not a limitation of the technology. It's a limitation of like, that's really nice of that guy to give me that that makes sense. Yeah, I also, my feelings are similar because, you know, you and I, we make shows for Linux users, and that is already a pretty self-selecting group of people. And so I don't think it is this huge leap to go from that to Matrix.

matrix. That's also a self-selecting group of people that are probably a little more technically illiterate that understand what a server address is and understand maybe the concept of connecting multiple systems together through a federation. And so it just seemed kind of like an obvious, yes, we'll be missing out on some, but we also want to create something that is fun for our community to play around with. And these are technologies that are just fun to play around with, too. You've replaced, like, any kind of internal chat at AltaSpeed, right? You're all matrix for internal biz chat, too, right? Oh, great. No, like, Mattermost or anything like that? Nope, it's all there.

And then it's even tied into Wazoo and all of our alerting systems. So when anybody opens a ticket, the ticket's opened up and it automatically sends a notice into one of the alerts channels. And so we have clients that we do monitoring on site, all of those alerts go into matrix channels, and then we organize those based on spaces. And so you can go into like the security operation space, and then we can see all the security alerts, or we can go into the internal space and just see you know all of our our alerts and so the ability to have that one central place to go to to get all of the stuff coming after you but then also have the ability to filter out and say okay right now i'm doing this thing i only want to see you know this selection what other platform does that the way that matrix does right yeah i agree that's been fantastic also

and you know the once they launch spaces where you could organize everything so you can say yeah here's our community and here's where everything's at uh that's just really really really brilliant and i i feel like the community has been probably one of our most successful that we've we've we've launched so i'm really glad we did it the one thing i would do differently and i'm curious if you agree like my i feel like my biggest takeaway lesson would be we probably shouldn't just opened up registrations we probably should have just had just the crew has at jupiter broadcasting.com because once you open it up it just really got abused like we got so many spam signups happen right away.

And I think I wanted it to be like, if you're a listener and you're early to this thing, you could have an at jupiterbroadcasting.com matrix. I thought that'd be really cool. I wanted to make that available to the community. And kind of try to get around a little bit of the go find a home server to choose. Be like, you're trying to figure out,

you're trying to play, just play with us. Yes, it also made it easier just to get started. That's a great point. And I think in retrospect, that made the server way more to manage than if we had just had like a dozen accounts and just left it that i'm curious if you kind of agree or if you would leave it a public what your thoughts are there yeah 100 so uh i 100 agree with you. So I watch my digital ocean bill climb and climb and climb and climb and climb. And I've gotten to the point where now we actually, we've purchased the parts to put a dedicated machine in our own data center to move it over. We're just completing all of the final testing.

And that process I thought was going to be like a few months. It turns out it's like a year to collect all the information you need to know what you need to purchase to then build the thing. So hopefully I'll be able to subvert that problem. But Synapse was never really, Synapse was designed to be like a demonstration of a thing. It was never designed to do what it's doing today. And it definitely isn't designed to be one central server for a ton of people. And so even from the conceptual standpoint, it was supposed to be everybody ran their own little home server with just a couple of users, and then Federation took care of the rest of it. So the fact that Matrix performs as well as it does, given those limitations, is nothing short of impressive to me. I think the best days are definitely in front of us.

I think it just takes a little bit of visionary and a little bit of looking into the future and saying, here's what we know is technically possible. Here's where we'll eventually get to. We just have to have a little bit of patience and then we'll get there. But I agree with you 100%. If I had it to do over again,

I would tell everybody, go to matrix.org. And they've had to hack things together just to make matrix.org work as well as it does. So if they can't, like I wouldn't have taken on that technical debt knowing what I know today. But like as well as it does. So if they can't, like, I wouldn't have taken on that technical debt knowing what I know today. But like you said, it was early days. It was like, hey, let's turn this thing on and see what happens. And it happened. Yeah. And don't you feel like, Wes, for like the last, I don't know, almost a year, the updates have just been

getting more and more solid? Yeah, definitely. It seems like it performs a lot better. I was just popping onto ours to see. And I mean, you know, we're still definitely using some resources, but it's light years ahead of where it once was. Yeah. All right. So just my last kind of like catching up with you kind of topic before we get to self-knowing.

So I think you switched to Drafting OS. Yes! Curious to know how that's going because I think it's been a few months for you now that you've been onto it. I'm sure you probably saw the whole thing about the founder kind of stepping aside. Just what are your current thoughts about Drafting, how it's working a few months for you now that you've been onto it. I'm sure you probably saw the whole thing about the founder kind of stepping aside. Just what are your current thoughts about Drapene, how it's working and the founder

situation? Yeah. So the founder's situation, I'll go backwards, very much concerns me. As far as Drapene OS as a product. So it was a two part process for me. The first thing was I divorced myself from the telephone. So I got to a point where I said, I want all of my communication to come in over IP. And so the first thing was move, importing my numbers and

moving calls and texts over to jmp.chat. Then part two of that was, okay, now that I can do everything from a laptop and I'm not tied to any specific device, it's just whatever device I'm on, phone, laptop, computer, whatever, just sign into the account. All of my communication winds up there. Now I want to move that over to a freedom privacy respecting platform. And I thought for sure, Chris, I thought for sure Grafino S is there's going to be paper cuts. There's gonna be something that doesn't work. There's going to be my bank app. Isn't going to work. Bank apps are notorious. If you don't have all of the right things in exactly the right places, it'll just crash on startup. And it works flawlessly. When I need Google services, and it's sad to say that, but sometimes you need Google services when you need it,

at least it's running in a sandbox. And when you have these idiotic apps that I had a metronome watch for playing music, and it wants my location data like good night nurse man but it feeds it fake sensor data so have at it have my sensor data there you go you know yeah enjoy yeah i i have to completely agree i thought i thought for sure i thought all right i've done this rom thing before you know i came in and by the i'm pretty i was pretty like i was pretty entrenched into iOS, too. So I came in with Android sucks, ROMs suck, the camera's not going to work, the Wi-Fi's going to be crap, I won't be able to use any apps. It, of course, was the opposite of all of that.

It helps that the Pixel 7 is a solid device, I will admit. My Pixel 7 sadly just died, but my replacement just showed up. And there's no question that Giraffino S is going on there. This is the first thing I'm going to do when but my replacement just showed up. And there's no question that... You're going back? That DraftVino S is going on there. Yeah. This is the first thing I'm going to do when I open this bad boy up. I think that speaks for itself right there. That's great.

I have a new problem. So I recently switched off of Ting because I'm going to be traveling internationally. And Ting is going through some transitions. And Google Fi had a deal. And I thought, okay, I'll try Google Fi. They got a good international plan. And I set up Google Fi on the phone. And I thought, there's no way this is going to work with Draftian OS.

No way. And it did. And because I was able to use the sandbox play services. And I'm like, okay, well, I've heard mixed reports on the privacy of Google Fi. I know what I'm getting myself into, but this is a test, right? I'm curious if it even works. And it worked for a while, and it is technically still working. But a few days ago, I just got this push notification that says,

tap here to finish activating Google Fi, which it was already activated. And I tap it, and it asked me to choose which of my way too many Google accounts I want to use. I tap the correct Google account and then it tells me I have an error activating it. Is it still working or did that break it? I can make phone calls. Okay. I don't know.

As I say, mine's been surprisingly flawless on that. I mean, besides the phone breaking, but the service part. Yeah. I just, I don't know. I wish we still don't have it solved at the carrier level, right? I just, I don't know. I wish, we still don't have it solved at the carrier level, right?

Like, you can do all of this, you can have, you can have your private phone, you can have your secure VPN, you can have your

encrypted data, you can self-host all of your sync information, but you still have to go through these carrier networks and they all feel like a bag of compromises to me. Yeah,

that's where I mean, I know a strategy. I've thought for years, yeah, be able to shift everything just to IP over channels you can control. That sounds wonderful. That's the way to go. That's the way to go.

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Visit linode.com slash unplug to learn how Linode, now Akamai. Visit linode.com slash unplugged to learn how Linode, now Akamai, can help scale your applications from the cloud all the way to the edge. It's linode.com slash unplugged. Support the show and get $100 in 60-day credit. linode.com slash unplugged. So Southeast Linux Fest is just wrapping up as we live stream this. It runs June 9th through the 11th. It's in the Sheraton Charlotte Airport Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina.

And Noah's been there since Tuesday of this week. Wow. Sunday today. So it kind of gives you an idea how long it takes to set up. And Noah, with LinuxFest on the mind, I'm curious, since you've done both a lot, what really stands out as the big difference between the two fests in your mind? I would say the biggest difference between LinuxFest Northwest and Southeast LinuxFest is the venue itself. And that's a good and bad on both sides, right? So

with LinuxFest Northwest, the positive side is the expo hall compared to Self is massive. There are tons of vendors there to discuss and talk with and all the rest of it. And then also because they have an entire technical college at their disposal, there's a lot of talks to choose from. Self, there's only three tracks. So you have three given talks going on at any one time, and then your vendor hall is limited to just the two halls in the hallway. So in that, LinuxFest Northwest takes the cake for sure. The positive side of Self is because it's adjoined at the hotel, and oh, by the way, it's not some massive hotel. So I was at Summit a few weeks ago, and Summit is attached to a hotel too,

but you're still walking like a bajillion miles to get from the hotel over to the conference. And it's just- That's a big event. There's just no, I'm going to run up to my room and take a nap, right? I'm going to go and relax for a minute and I'm going to come back down. So the cost is much higher to go back and come back. Whereas here, you can do that. That's nice. Well, what it leads to is more people hanging around. We don't have what I call slam clickers. You know, you get to the end of the conference and just the last thing you hear is the door going slam click. And then that's it.

They're done. People come back down and they hang out and then you wind up with conversations still three, four or five. I went to bed, I think last night, like five 30 in the morning, just hanging out with people and geeking out and hacking on stuff and playing with stuff and learning. And you don't get that at you. That doesn't always happen as organically at some of the other conferences because people have to leave. Yeah. You have to get back to your hotel. Yeah. All right. So does anybody stick out as traveling really far? is cubicle nate or nathan wolf so nathan will oh yeah works down in texas and so they tell him he was planning on coming and they and his work says you have to be in texas and he goes i can't be in texas i need to be leaving for southeast linux fest they said well we pay your bills so if you want to eat food you'll come to work so he comes to work goes to work he gets done on thursday flies out of texas back to his hometown in michigan gets his kids packed up. By the way, of course,

of course, they hadn't done laundry, so they had to do a load of laundry first. But then gets his kids packed up, gets him in the car. He drives 11 hours. Now, mind you, he's been up for already close to 20 hours at this point. Drives 11 hours. He comes like staggering in here Friday morning at eight and goes, I have to be at a nine o'clock meeting. I'll be right back. morning at eight and goes, I have to be at a nine o'clock meeting. I'll be right back. Goes, sits down, does his work meeting. I think he did take like a 20 minute nap and then hung out and did the whole self experience. But he definitely gets props for the coolest travel story and the most dedication. So you can use rough figures. I didn't warn you. I was going to ask you this question. If you consider yourself and all to speed, do you want to

give a rough number on how much you probably think personally and professionally you're in for this event? Ooh. Thousands. You know, there's, so there's, there's some, yeah. So the hotel alone, just for the, just for the days that we were here was like 900 bucks. And you got, yeah, you got, yeah, I got people. 1500 because we flew a team out yeah i mean i don't know it yeah it's it it costs your sponsors yeah it costs a lot however

i was telling somebody else's if i lived in a like an 8x10 shoebox my whole life like every day of my life and i could only come out of my shoebox for one thing i would come out i would do southeast linux fest i would go back into my shoebox and and I would live a happy man. It recharges my batteries to be around other like-minded people that want to explore technology and leverage it the same way that I do. And I find that at these types of conferences. That's not necessarily specific to self. I would say any of the community-based conferences probably have that to a degree. But I don't know. I've just... Being around other people smarter than you and being able to shut your mouth and just listen and learn. I just, you don't get that. And that's

particularly true with me because I'm, you know, in a small town in the middle of nowhere. And so, you know, coming here is you, you get exposed to stuff that I just don't have access to it from where I'm from. Yeah. And that there is that sense of community that is, I don't know, it is really energizing to have everybody kind of talking about the same thing and sharing ideas and whatnot. So it's been a couple of rough years for conferences, although I think Self has weathered it pretty well. What has changed that you like recently? What's changed with Self and conferences that you think is for the better? So we used to have four conference tracks. And one of the things that we talked about, it was either last year, yeah, last year, we started talking about, you know, we gather a

crowd anytime, especially even here around the booth, people come and they sit out and then they break out into little hack projects and stuff like that. And we wanted to give people a way to really leverage that. And so that that becomes, you know, we always say that the hallway truck's the best part of the conference. And that's true. But how do we embrace that? And how do we empower people to do that more effectively? And so this year, they set up like a gaming hack lounge. And so we had monitors, we had keyboard, we had good internet, we had power strips everywhere. And we had tables. And we just let people take over the fourth hall and sit down and hack on stuff or play games or talk or and connect with other people. And I think that I watched people go into there and I watch people sit and make new friends.

Then I watch them come back out with new skill sets and new information. I thought, this is cool. This is definitely a win. Is there anything that, you know, concerns you? Like, is there influences that concern you or trends that concern you? Are more people tuning in virtually than showing up? Like, those are things I worry about. Commercial influences. I worry about, like, people kind of burning out on conferences after COVID, that sort of stuff. Yeah, I'm going to choose my words carefully here. I am deeply concerned that we have lost the ability to listen to one another and understand

the full context of the nuance that makes us up as individuals. And as part of that, because it's dangerous for some companies, if there are differing beliefs, if it's dangerous in the corporate world, that just means no. And so as I've watched that kind of take off and as I've watched companies become more cautious of where they invest money or where they spend money and being concerned about who believes what, you've watched some corporate entities go away. And with that drops attendance, right? You can see the difference as people are walking around. And then you also see that kind of conversation come up and people start talking about who we agree with and who we disagree with. And it becomes less about the tech and more about other stuff that just frankly isn't as helpful. So those kinds of trends I've watched come up more and more, and those are

really alarming to me because it seems like we're stepping away from what brought us together in the first place. We have this shared love for this idea of technology and these concepts around technology, and it seems like that dilutes. It seems like we start to dilute it. Yeah, I hear. I know what you're saying. It's like these fests and these events are a moment for us to establish a common ground and and talk about linux and geek out on a topic that others aren't necessarily as interested in and leave that other stuff behind to some degree yes yeah yeah we can talk about that the other 364 days of the year i suppose so i okay well um so last thing is i'd love your insights on uh i know you're doing you're running the stream over there

you did run the stream uh which was great and i also really appreciate how like on the ball they are with getting the youtube channel updated with conferences and talks like you can go there right now and stuff's like just a couple hours old. That's, how are they doing that? And are they doing it with free software? Because that's rare. Yeah, so every box running in the conference rooms are running on Linux.

So there's individual boxes running OBS and then the web socket is connected to Node-RED. So Node-RED sends a signal to an ESP32 that flashes, and it's a stoplight, so it's a red, yellow, green thing, right? So it starts on red. It goes to yellow, tells the speaker, you've got one minute before we're going to start. It goes to green.

WebSocket goes through OBS-CLI, says, hey, start the recording. Recording starts. Light turns green. Speaker starts talking. When we get down to the last, like, five minutes, it starts flashing yellow again, says, hey, wrap it up. Recording starts, light turns green, speaker starts talking. When we get down to the last five minutes, it starts flashing yellow again, says, hey, wrap it up. Then we get to the end,

yellow goes solid, then it goes red, and then it stops the recording. Those recordings are saved to an NFS share. That NFS share then uploads to YouTube and PeerTube. Holy smokes. I love it.

Well, it's working. You know what? And here's the thing, Noah. Here's the thing. As somebody who is trying to watch an event and determine how they're going to cover it, and obviously it is way more relevant to covering it either while it's happening or shortly after it's happened, that makes a huge difference for us. Because for Linux Action News, we'll sift through it.

We'll find clips, and then we'll link to the conference. We'll link to the YouTube channel. We'll talk about it, and we'll give the conference a reach just because that stuff's more available. Or in this case, I was able to go and just start getting a feel for what people are talking about, and there's some good talks on there. And I couldn't make it. I wanted to, but yeah. Okay. So now I want to be selfish just for a minute.

I couldn't make it. I wanted to, but yeah. Okay. So now I want to be selfish just for a minute. What would be like your dream setup for us to do at Linux Fest? And like, can you get out here a couple of days before Linux Fest so we can set it up? I can absolutely come out a couple of days before Linux Fest. And the answer to your first question is how deep down that rabbit hole do you want to go? So I've recently switched a lot of my video capture stuff over to SDI,

and that has changed my life because I just don't deal with a lot of the stuff that I dealt with with HDMI, and that's great. The other thing is it's amazing how consumer technology has just plummeted in price and the features that you get. So have you looked at the Procaster 2 from Rode? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I have the one, but I have looked at the two.

So the two, does the one have two audio interfaces on it? No, that seems sweet. Yeah. So you can, so that to me is the ultimate on-site broadcasting rig, right? Because you have the ability to bring in remote audio from whatever it is you want to bring remote audio in and then simultaneously send out to the stream. And so you've got a built-in mix minus, you've got all the physical controls you need to, to mute and unmute mics and set levels and all the rest of it. Um, and everything is configurable on the stinking box. So you don't need any window software.

I think that is just an awesome, awesome box. But something like that. And then the quality of webcams has just gone through the roof. So I have a small little camera that I'm using here. But the vast majority of the other cameras that I've been using over the weekend are just little C920s, C930s. And they look great. Yeah, and there's lots of nice tooling now to just bring feeds into OBS. It is an order of magnitude simpler than when you and I were trying to do it for the last LinuxFest. Yeah.

I mean, even with this, we do a minimum viable video stream for the show just because it's so simple now on Linux. How do you not? All right. Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'm sure you and I will have lots of time to scheme. And of course, this is my obligatory mention that the call for papers and speakers and presenters has been extended to, I don't know, something like the 26th, Wes?

It's just a few days out. But if you were thinking about giving a talk at LinuxFest and you haven't gotten just like an MVP of an idea in, and then you can flush it out later, you got a few more days. We'll put a link in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 514. And yeah, that's right.

It ends at midnight Pacific time, June 25th. Ah, 25th. Oh, even a day less than I thought. Better hustle, everybody. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Head on over to get started with a free trial for yourself, or if you're part of a team or a business, it's bitwarden.com slash linux head on over to get started with a free trial for yourself or

if you're part of a team or a business it's bitwarden.com slash linux bitwarden is the easiest way for yourself or a business to store share and sync all kinds of sensitive data bitwarden vaults are end-to-end encrypted with zero knowledge encryption bitwarden doesn't even have anything to sniff at you can learn all about it on their website when you go to bitwarden.com slash linux if you have an existing password manager i encourage you to check bitwarden doesn't even have anything to sniff at. You can learn all about it on their website when you go to bitwarden.com slash Linux. If you have an existing password manager, I encourage you to check Bitwarden out. I was using another tool for a while and I eventually migrated.

One of the things I like a lot about Bitwarden is it's open source. It's trusted by millions in the community. Organizations all over the world are using it to secure their secrets. It's what Wes and I use to manage our passwords, our two-factor code, and other sensitive data like recovery keys. And Bitwarden has great apps on mobile, on desktop, in the web, and across all the platforms you might want to use. And it syncs so

seamlessly in the background. Like I'll add a website on my desktop, and then moments later, I'll go over to my mobile device and I can log into their app with those credentials just synced right there in the background. And they make it super easy to switch between accounts. You could have a personal and a business or personal, maybe the project you're working with. That tooling also just gets turned up to 11 when you use Bitwarden in an enterprise and you snap it in with your existing policy management tools. Bitwarden is really one of the best out there and they're always making it better on a steady cadence as well. So stop waiting, go try it, or maybe you know somebody who should switch. Maybe it's the place you work, maybe it's your school, maybe it's a significant other or a family member. Just send them all to bitwarden.com slash linux. That's bitwarden.com

slash linux. And now it is time for the boost. And and boy did we get a boost this week our baller booster is enigma with a million a thousand and one hundred cents i gotta swallow here for a second that's's incredible. Thank you so much, Enigma. They're boosting and using the Podverse app. And they say, I've been a JB listener since Linux. I'm actually literally holding my chest because my heart's just pounding. I've been a JB listener since LUP 15 almost a decade ago. I haven't written in before, but I have met a few of you in person, Wes, Noah, and Chris at Linux Fest 2016 or 2017.

Oh, great. I wanted to say thank you for all the great shows. Some of the topics y'all discuss have had a great impact on my career and hobbies throughout the years. It wouldn't be the same level of engineer without y'all. Thank you. Brandon from Seattle and Mid-Ohio. Well, I want to know the story there, Brandon. We've got to say hi again now.

Yeah, and I hope you're going to make it to LinuxFest. You know, I think about this often after these shows, when somebody sends in a million sat boost and they say, hey, I've been listening for a decade. There's not really a way for me to spend time in a live show saying thank you, right? But I think about it for days after the show. So thank you for reaching out. And it's remarkable how weekly, week after week, we've been hearing from listeners that have been listening for longer than I've had children.

And they've never reached out before. And it's one of the greatest, most entertaining things for us doing the show. It's really great. And I go home and I tell the wife about it. You know, it's like, it's one of those things. Now, Chris, I have a question here. Now, Chris, I have a question here. Don't we have an active challenge that if collectively listeners boost over a million, then we'll pull a topic that they want?

But I don't see a topic in here. You're right. Brandon is actually totally within his rights now to boost in and ask for a topic for a show. And we will do our absolute top duty to try to make it as most absolutely interesting as possible so whatever they want us to talk about at a million sets yeah yeah flash gordon boosted in with 111 000 sets i hoard that which all kind covered i tested changing memberships to a monthly payment system and it was very easy easy. Too easy, really. I lost the Fountain app for a week having bought 11,000 sats. Here are those sats, finally.

I also bought 11,000 sats via Albi to send. So getting sats is getting much easier to do these days. Paid subscriptions to support Fountain and Podverse as well. Don't tell the wife. Flash Gordon, look at you, really making the podcasting 2.0 revolution happening. Thank you, sir. I was in. Don't.

This is private information, so maybe I shouldn't say anything. You need a cone? Do you need a cone? You know what? You know what? All right. Then I could say it, right? Because it's not.

Nobody's going to hear it, right? Them's the rules. It'll be fine. The cone of silence. So Fountain is really really really hustling right and uh they are doing a bunch of market research to figure out what they need to focus on because they're really ambitious and uh i was in a conversation and uh i basically said just drop the back-end custodial stuff and just use albie you know because once you get al get Albi, you can use Castomatic, you can use Podverse, you can boost from the web, you can boost from our web player. You can move to all these different apps.

It's a portable thing now. And it's like, that's the whole idea is this is an open network. I don't like having to have everything all into one app, right? And the nice thing is you can move stuff in and out because, again, it's lightning. You just send it, yeah. But the nice thing is you just, with Albi, you fund fund one wallet and then you can connect it to all these different applications. And I just I think that's the way that I get that they like the smooth integrated experience, you know? Yeah. But yeah.

All right. Anyways, we probably shouldn't put that on there. The cone of silence. VT 52 boosts in with 98,019 cents. First time booster here. I came across Lex Unplugged last year while looking for more info about NixOS. Love the content and just want to give some more love. Well, thank you. I've been running Linux off and on on since uh slackware 3.0 okay i was that weird kid that

always had his boot slash root disks at the ready hey love that nixos has brought joy back to my use of linux that i didn't really know i was missing i'm now running a home server with a gajillion different self-hosted services and i'm having a blast yeah right on you know i feel like uh nixos for me, and I bet a lot of people feel like this way when they discover Ansible or something like this, but for me, it feels like it's unlocked the power that was always there with Linux to begin with. Right? Suddenly the whole universe is at your fingertips. You can make it all work. You've got this nice high level way to just specify what you want without having really to get into the details of how it all happens,

and then it just happens. And VT52, along those lines, has a neat-looking pick for us. It's called Comma, and it removes a bit of friction around Nix shell or using Nix. So let's say you just want to run the command fortune in your terminal, get yourself a little daily fortune, and then you get, you know, that's not installed. You put a comma at the front if you've got comma installed, so you do comma

fortune, and it'll go out, figure that out, and if it's available it'll just run it via Nix. So no more worrying if the package is installed or not, it just literally doesn't matter anymore. I'm going to try this after the show. That's so cool. Noah, have you tried Nix at all?

I played with it once. My friend William is huge into Nix and he actually does a lot of the development with them and for them. So at scale one year, he sat down and kind of walked me through how it works and all of that. And I think it's cool. I'm kind of going a different direction by way of I take Ansible and blow my laptop away and I treat it like cool. It just, I'm, I'm kind of going a different direction by way of, uh, I take Ansible and blow my laptop away and I treat it like a piece of cattle and, and the, the playbook rebuilds my laptop. So kind of got a different way,

but I like what it does. Yeah. Uh, also neat VT here is, uh, in nine eight zero one nine as the zip code, which is right in our backyard here in King County, somewhere,

maybe around Duval. I recognize that. Linux Fest. Come on, come on in. Come. We should do another meetup before Linux Fest for locals to true grits comes in with 74,656 sets. I prefer the double episode members feed to get split up.

We were asking for feedback on this because we're recording some doubles. That's exactly for the reasons that Dom mentioned. love gets played i get it before uh anything else even before the back catalog i don't have the self-control required to wait i think we'll split it up right we'll do uh weekend releases that should be fine yeah we'll split it up file selector boosted in with 55,000 sats. Boosting for the splits. Enjoy the sats, boys. And technically, today, I am your boss.

Ah, very, very fair. Nice to see you again, Mr. Selector. And, uh, yes. We'll get to work, boss. Hybrid Sarcasm boosts in with 36,000 sats. Hey, JB Crew. Hated being missing in action this week. Posting what I can because a home plumbing emergency hit us out of

nowhere, but another great show. Keep it up. Yeah, sorry to hear that sarcasm. Hope everything's mended up now. As somebody who lives in an RV, let me tell you, plumbing is a constant challenge, and I feel you, but hopefully the podcast will be there for

you as you're repairing and fixing things up. You need something to listen to because I've been there as well. TuxMM comes in with 24,556 hats and they write, from the podcast index, I'm a monthly contributor and also that's my zip code last time i wrote in uh i was trying keto night since then i've given nix os a spin and after today's episode i want to convert all my machines two laptops and a desktop to nix there's a bit of a learning curve but i believe that the nix config will allow me to set up my machines once and then reproduce it in the future as needed and uh before we get to that uh area code i've had a little machine upstairs so we had an obs system here in the machine and we replaced it with a thaleo uh months ago and um

i had an identical workstation upstairs and we swapped them at one point because they were having problems so what i have done now is now that they're both decommissioned, I have Frankensteined them into one machine, right? With like the 64 gigs of RAM. I'm like, I put all the working disks into one machine. And so I put Nix on there because of course, and I'm like, you know, Mr. Cocky. So I just copied over my Nix config from my laptop. I changed the host name, hit save, hit apply and breaks i'm like what's

wrong and i realized that this old machine is using like legacy boot but my laptop is using like current boot and it's a totally different syntax for legacy boot but of course because i was being mr cocky i just straight up over writ the original configuration file. Didn't bother backing it up. I got this, right? And I'm doing this, of course, all over SSH. No, no screen. No, no, no protection. But just rebooted. You know, I rebooted. I didn't commit that.

And, of course, the configuration file was back to normal. I was able to grab the boot config and then merge the two files and then rebuild. And I had my entire system set up it was awesome it was really great 24556 is a postal code in bedford county virginia oh bedford sounds cozy you ever been there chris no but i've been to a bedford in this neck of the woods but definitely not in virginia and hey uh Tux, follow up. Let us know how your laptop experiments go.

Yeah, which desktop did you go with? I just recently switched back to GNOME. I'm sorry, GNOME. Really? I had to. Yeah, I know it's weird, right? But I figured KDE Plasma, it's going to be a while until 6.0 comes out.

So why not go visit my friends in Genome Town? And so I'm over there and and I got the swipe gestures, and I got all my extensions working, and I got full-on Wayland, and I got blur my background, and it's just looking real good. Like the best, smoothest Linux has ever looked and worked, and it's goddammit if Genome doesn't just make a great desktop. I inevitably will get frustrated and go back to Plasma, but for these these next few months i'm really going to enjoy the heck out of it i was about to

say uh what could you say to convince noah to switch but it sounds like maybe no no the long term play is to just hang in with plasma it really is it is it is the power workstation interface and plasma here and plasma here and eventually plasma over here right it's xfce over there right now but all these machines in front of me in the studio are all going to be plasma even though i'm loving genome on the laptop and i have to also just as a follow-up because i know the lenovo boys listen sometimes uh the uh the thinkpad the x1 with uh nix the latest nix the 2305 release and genome 44.1 with wayland oh i i think it's if if i could get my hands on it and set it up i think it's a better out of the out of the box experience than mac os has ever been it's so smooth it looks so good it's so tight it's just the thing i lift the lid

the things the screens awake before the screen before i even have the thing all the way up fingerprint login it works for every pseudo fingerprint it's all just so smooth and then you add the latest genome oh i i should have brought it away you should have i should have brought it so you could see it it's just i have it all set up on a little table at home with the chair all ready to go with my mouse and it's just so good right now i didn't want to mess it up so now i have a question for you boys who've been playing with Linux a little longer than I have. When it comes to Plasma and their major release changes, how does that typically go? What's the history there? Like, am I expected to have tons of bugs and like have a bad time for a couple months or what do you think is going to happen?

I mean, they've been pretty good right now. I mean, over the history, they've been pretty solid. 8.6 is going to be a pretty major change, but I feel like after 4.0, they really kind of learned their lesson. Don't you think? I go sometimes months without even restarting, and I can't remember the last time I've had to, you know, blow away and reinstall.

And this is coming from somebody who has, as I said earlier, like I'm trying to make a very intentional effort not to have, you know, any sort of customization that I can't redo with automation, but there's just no reason to. It just works.

And that's largely why I've stuck with it is it works. Yeah. And they do such a good job at respecting your settings. Yeah. So it just, you know, they may change the default, but if you have something already set, they'll just respect that setting.

That makes it really nice. Yeah, I think it's a great power workstation. It's worth spending the time learning its nuances and learning how to configure it. My philosophy with Plasma is if it isn't like just already pre-set up for me somehow, I just spend the first two days, every time I launch the application, maybe it's Dolphin, maybe it's Console, whatever it might be, the first time I launch it,

I just commit to, on first launch, I'm going to configure the application. And I do that for two days, and by the time two days is up, everything's set. I'm good to go. That's all it really takes. And then you have one of the most powerful workstation environments in the world. Linux Teamster boosted in 5,000 sats from fountain. Hey,

I had a birthday last week and my girlfriend knew that I was a member of JB and tried to gift me a yearly subscription, but you guys don't even offer that option. That's a missed sales opportunity. It's true. It's not me. That's my bad. She also then tried to buy some t-shirts for me, but I already had the ones that you have in stock. So she was 0 for 2 on that birthday. It all worked out in the end though. And I was once again reminded that I have the greatest partner in the world. She knows that I love Linux and I love you all. I feel like we owe her a beer. I think so. Yeah. Right. Seriously was trying to help the business.

So the annual memberships, right. You'd think it'd be like a box you check. So you got your monthly option, right. You check a box and you got your yearly option, right? Like that should be a plan,

but just, and it's all managed on the back end. Yeah. Right. Nope. Oh, Chris here has to create like a whole new membership plan and integrate all the files and then group them together and so that is just preventing me from getting off my old butt and doing it but i do hear from folks that an annual plan would make a

lot of sense especially in the gifting scenario so that is something that uh i need to consider because our members uh are like a huge part as, as we go from somebody who is like, okay, try not to sound braggadocious, but like Linux unplugged was sold out for like nine years. It's just really hard to get ads on the shows. And that is not the situation anymore because things are just slowing down. Those are cycles seen it before.

I mean, we were around for 2008. We've been here for that too and the same exact slowdown same sort of trickle happened then and um the members are really kind of that consistent number that you can count on for planning which makes it possible to say yeah we can keep paying to have it edited and put it out we can make sure things get paid so appreciate that, Teamster. Sorry we didn't have the annual plan. I'll get that put together soon. The Golden Dragon boosts in with 6,666 cents. Howdy gang, got a few things. First of all, Oscar is a great guy and really seems to care about this app. That's the developer behind Fountain. And the folks that use it. The new update

is really good so far. No crashes, had a small resolvable hiccup. Secondly, another Nix system and way to do Nix is awesome.

Great episode. And on Fedora, it's fair of them to quote drop support for Leroy Office. There is much other work to be done

and there are other package managers that have Office fresh. All right. So it's been a week since we talked about the fact that Red Hat would be no longer packaging LibreOffice for future RHEL. That's presumably starting in RHEL 10. That would also kind of equate to a spin down in Fedora.

How's it sitting with us all? Noah, you've had a week to process it. I'm curious. I'm pretty sure you covered it on Ask Noah. How's it sitting with us all? Noah, you've had a week to process it. I'm curious. I'm pretty sure you covered it on Ask Noah. What's your take? Yeah, I think it's disappointing isn't quite the right word, but it's certainly an added hindrance if, I mean, I'm of mixed minds, right? So on one hand, you have a lot of infrastructure that's moving towards web-based apps. And so, you know, do people use local word processors or are they just doing that inside of a web browser or inside of whatever the end application is that they're publishing to? If you're the person that needs that word processor, there's plenty of ways to get it.

There's plenty of ways to get it. And oh, by the way, I might add now in the landscape of multiple universal packaging methods, is it really a problem? Right. Yeah, there's that. And, you know, perhaps if they do work upstream to make the flat pack even better, that's even more of a moot point. And when you think about like enterprise customers, I don't think they really care that it's in a flat pack. I don't, I don't think they care. I think what I care about is somebody that is passionate about making sure it's a great experience on the Linux desktop, getting that packaged up. And if that effort goes to the flat pack,

I think that's probably what matters. But that's a good question, you know, because to me, and I think maybe, maybe this is what I'm wondering what you guys feel, but to me, it does maybe signal the beginning of a slight de-emphasizing of staff working on the Linux desktop. That, at a meta level, is concerning because Red Hat's probably, by a pretty wide margin, the most important company involved in desktop Linux.

A lot of the technologies that we talk about on this show came out of Red Hat. So if they de-emphasize that, that's concerning. However, if they de-emphasize some things to focus on other things that are high impact... Right. If Flatpak being far enough along that this can happen, or, you know, in a way that isn't

horrible, and that means that that focus is now just on more of the fundamental stuff that really no one else is working on, or a few, very few other folks are working on, yeah, that might be a pretty big net win. Yeah. I mean, I hope. Good old Gene Bean comes in with a total of 12,636

sets. Coming in hot with the boost! And he would like to know what you thought about NetBird. So that's another WireGuard solution that's at a kernel module level that also creates a mesh network. And we were using it last episode. Yeah, I was pretty impressed. I mean, you know, it's in the space of things like Nebula or Tailscale or a bunch of different things, zero tier.

It was pretty darn slick, I think. It's not quite as fully featured as some of the other ones. It's still somewhat new, but it comes with a nice little self-hostable GUI that you can run that kind of matches what they offer as a managed service as well. So easy to get started with,

easy to run from Nix or just as a standalone Go binary and pretty lean. Where do you think it really differentiates between Nebula? Because it seems like maybe that's sort of the same sort of space. Is NetBird maybe a smaller scale? Well, NetBird is WireGuard-based for one,

so closer to TailScale in that regard. No, I think you could use them for the same sort of application. So it would kind of depend on, you know, which one has the features that you like. I know Nebula's had the, you know, very rich set of ACLs in the open source version from the get-go, so you might kind of compare and contrast there. And then do you need stuff that

WireGuard offers, or are you okay with the version that Nebula does, which has its own pros and cons? Yeah, okay. Oh, it seems hard to tell. I mean, from your description, I still feel like for a large fleet, I'd probably still prefer Nebula, but for a handful of systems, it seems like NetBird would be manageable.

Oh, yeah, definitely. What is nice is NetBird comes with kind of like the Tailscale style, where you can give it a key that just adds it to your collection, or it pops you with a little link and you can enter a code to just get it on board. Whereas Nebula, there are some third-party tools that sort of automate that, and their managed solution has APIs, which is neat. But otherwise, on the self-hosted version, you're kind of doing the management of

the keys and the different hosts you have on your network yourself, which does mean you have the fundamentals to roll whatever you like, but also means you need to do it. Whereas NetBird has a little more of the hands-held style that Tailscale has. Okay, thank you. Gene, I also wondered about a place to get started with Nix.

I saw recently going through our Matrix chat the Nix guide for the impatient or something like that. Yeah, that was a good one. I think it focuses pretty much on the NixOS side of things, but that honestly might be where you want to start if you're more on the Linux side than on the development build tooling side, because I think NixOS is really a great demonstration of why, you know, learning the Nix language and the Nix way of doing things

is worth it. Yeah. And I think we talk about NixOS a lot on this show, but the reality of the market is that the Nix package manager is going to be way and is way huger than NixOS. I mean, the fact that, I mean, it's just, it's so much better than Brew, right? Just that alone, being able to use it for developers on macOS and Linux, and the fact that you have things like Nix Portable, so you can just drop a Nix environment on anything and just spin up and start going and pull down all the tooling you need. So you could also pick your favorite distribution

and then just put Nix on there and install a few applications through that. I did find a nice, which I'll link in the show notes, I don't think I've linked that yet, a nice write-up sort of Nix and Nix Flakes from first principles, but in the Flake era. So one thing you could try

is just sort of, you know, use the determinate Nix installer, install Nix on a system that you use a lot, and then maybe look through that tutorial, a few others, and start playing with running software

from Nix packages. We've been checking the temperature on the community if they're interested in kind of doing like a little ham check-in from time to time. Maybe a competition that runs alongside the show for us all to go and get our ham radio licenses before LinuxFest Northwest. And Gene came in with a boost saying that he'd be down for working to get his ham radio license.

There's one. Ben the Tech Guy boosted in with a row of ducks. Thanks for mentioning the update to Fountain recently. I was about to switch apps with the constant crashing that the recent update brought and was glad and reassured that a fix is on the way. They have a saying in the podcasting 2.0 community and it's called running with scissors. And the idea is that they're figuring this out kind of in production and we make big changes, figure out what works and doesn't work. On average, we have more successes than losses. But every now and then a regression comes in, something has to be rolled back.

If you imagine that's the standard, right, which is a good thing. Podcasting has needed something. It's really been an MP3 in an RSS feed with maybe if you're lucky in HTML description for 10, 15 years. And now we're finally getting transcripts. We're finally getting chapters. We're getting host information. We're getting guest information. We're getting value for value support integrated and many more things that are being worked on right now, like live stream integration and all kinds of stuff, alternative enclosures.

So you could have mp3 or you could have Opus and all that stuff is kind of being developed. And if you could imagine what that's like from an application developer standpoint to try to keep up with it's a massive massive job and that's one of and fountains one of the ones right there really keeping up with it and so it's remarkable they have as many hits as they do and then generally when they have a, it sticks around for a week or two and then they get it fixed. So it's a tricky job. It's a fast-moving target. And the lads over there are doing pretty good work.

Zach Attack moves in with 10,000 cents. Hey, that's not bad at all. The crossover between Ham Radio and Linux, and this is answering a question you were kind of posing there, Chris. The crossover is the urge to learn new things and see how far you can push things. I've talked all across Europe and used Raspberry Pi's running Linux to send messages

across the world. It's a ride. Alright, okay. Alright. We're going to hold it there because that's what we're getting into real soon here on the show, but that does whet the appetite right there. Thank you, Zach Attack. Bear 454 comes in with 15,000 sats. The thing that really strikes me about Red Hat dropping LibreOffice RPMs

isn't anything to do with the packaging work or the user resources, but the support. Support is what customers are paying for when they buy from an open source company, especially an enterprise Linux company. I should know. I was a SUSE employee, or as a enterprise Linux company. I should know. I was a SUSE employee or as a SUSE employee, I should say. Dropping those packages means dropping support for those packages.

And that signals to me that Red Hat is not interested in supporting desktop clients in the way they have historically. The catch is they won't be able to drop them anytime soon as they already have long-term support contracts for distros that contain those packages, which they will have to continue

to patch for the life of those distros. But I can't help but wonder, does this mean there'll be no future version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation? For contrast, Sue still provides LibreOffice RPMs. We rely on a partnership with Collabra for LibreOffice support for paying customers. We've been doing that since 2013. That does seem like the better way to go. Soos has got them on that.

Yeah, a little schroud fighter for the Soos boys. I totally understand there. Yeah, the support angle is why you're paying for RHEL, right? And I guess that includes support for the things they package but that never seemed fully sustainable and i guess if you're not going to get a contract with collabra probably the next best thing to do would be to just send those customers to libre office and they can hire libre office support directly maybe it sends a little money their way f cooler boosts in with 10,000 sets.

Long-time listener, first-time booster. Happy to hear you all talking about KTail CTL. It's early days, but I'm working on a big update at the moment. Soon you can not only receive but send files as well. However, since I'm writing my PhD thesis at the moment, I can't allocate too much time for it, and hopefully we'll have a feature-full GUI on Plasma soon, too.

Well, thank you, sir! Wow, that's incredible. Love hearing from the developer of one of the picks. That's always a treat when that happens. And if you don't recall, KTailCTL is a little Plasma frontend to Tailscale, which Tailscale status on the command line is fantastic,

but sometimes it's nice to have that stuff in a GUI. You can click copy. Yeah, go take a look at what peers are there. And it's on FlatHub now too, so it's really easy to get going. And FK, thank you so much for your hard work and good luck on your PhD thesis. I appreciate you taking the time to boost in

and thank you so much for the app. It's now one of my go-to. Thank you everybody who boosted in. We will be banking for a future episode. So next week's episode won't have a boost, but one of the things we're going to attempt, we don't have it figured out. It's like a 88% probability is we're going to attempt a live insert or like a real-time insert of your boost for the LUP that comes out on the 25th.

So next week's episode, we won't have any boosts in there because we'll be banking them. We'll include some of those in the 25th live if everything works out. Just a little boost break. We're going to try it. Keep boosting in because they will get read.

Yeah, we've never done this before, but we felt what a great way to send some value back to the folks is insert them into a pre-recorded episode. We've never done that before. Like once usually something's in the can, it's done. We give it to Drew and we never touch it again. Sealed up, ready to process.

Somehow, because all three of us will be traveling, we'll get together and do a live boost segment and insert it into the show. If you'd like to send a boost into the show, you can get a new podcast app at newpodcastapps.com and join the podcasting revolution uh or you can keep your dang podcast app probably works pretty well for you just get albie get albie.com then head on over to the podcast index and you'll find linux unplugged over there and you can boost in from the website thank you for the uh for the boost, everybody. Our total for this week's episode was 1,463,879 sacks.

Wow. That's a lot of digits. We had 16 boosters. And this is one of those episodes where the core boosters really took us across the line because it was 16 unique boosters. Total of 25 boosts. We see you, multi-bo boosters we really appreciate it i have i have something i want to share with all of you but i'm going to save it for next week's episode thank you everybody for the support and of course we really kicked it off with a million sat boosts for from enigma so enigma you now have the right

to boost in and ask for a topic on the show, which we will try to incorporate in the future. I also want to give a shout out to our members. Thank you so much. That matters more than ever. Unpluggedcore.com if you'd like to sign up directly or if you want to support all the shows. Jupiter.party. As a thank you, you get the ad-free version of the show. Or if you're a maniac, you could subscribe to the Total Raw recording, which people do,

especially if they like long stuff. And you get everything. The warts, the swears. Brent is such a potty mouth. Occasionally, it's, I mean, it's kind of a whole different show. Well, it's like two shows. It's, yeah, it's something else. And it's a thank you to our members because you help give us that foundation. UnpluggedCore.com and Jupiter.Party

for the whole network. I've been trying out a new matrix messaging app and I'm saying it's early days and it doesn't do everything that the more feature complete apps do like elements. So I want to set the expectations because, you know, it's early. But Fractal on the Genome desktop is so awesome. it is so lean and mean and it is written in rust

not electron and it doesn't have all the features like a real low-hanging fruit one would be reaction emojis doesn't support that no i could have a whole conversation with a rack reaction emojis and a lot of the moderation tools are not available. But reading messages, responding to messages, markdown support, attachments, really clean, fast interface, snappy as hell. It has all of those and it has them in spades. So I wanted to give Fractal a plug on the show because I have been using it for the last week or so. And not that I have any disrespect towards element. They do a great work,

but man, fractal feels so fast. Yeah. I'm impressed. You can run it right from Nick's packages, which is what I'm trying right now. I've been using all for the show and yeah. Besides the reaction thing,

which okay. Give it time. I could sure keep using this. Yeah. It looks fine on plasma. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's not, not i mean it's not going to

replace element for me i gotta be real i was chatting with noah about it before the show he had a few questions i'm like yeah like when i launch it has to sync you know that kind of stinks because it takes a while to sync sometimes i know it sounds like you tried it and maybe like it didn't stay logged in for you all the time so that's a disclaimer. But you know, for me, it stayed logged in. It just had to sync. And so I thought what I would do is I'd put in an also a second recommendation for another kind of light touch matrix app that isn't quite as heavy as element. And that's called fluffy chat. Now, have you tried fluffy chat? Love fluffy chat. So fluffy chat is if, if you ever used element and you're like, this seems like it's

something that's designed for business and it, you know, the way it's laid out feels very businessy and very clunky. And I wish it was just a plain messenger. FluffyChat is the cute messenger. And so it, I would equate it a lot like Telegram. If you wanted a Telegram client for, on the matrix ecosystem, you should definitely look at fluffy chat. And I actually, I have, I run fluffy chat,

just literally chat and, uh, element all on my phone, um, for being signed into different accounts. And then I can do fancy notifications things and say, these get through this and these don't go through that and whatnot. Uh,

love fluffy chat. Yeah. I kind of, I mean, nowhere nearly to the level you do, but I have Fluffy Chat on my phone, and I'm in a chat room with just the wife. And it's like, if I get a notification in there, I know it's her on Matrix, right? And that's really nice. And it's a good solid app on desktop, too. You can use it in mobile or desktop, and it's really mean. I kind

of think of the UI as the real early clean days of Telegram before they just lacquered on a whole bunch of stuff. That's what I think. That's where Fluffy Chat, I think, gets their inspiration. Noah, thanks for hanging out with us for this first episode. Where can we send people to get more Noah? Thanks for having me. Yeah, asknoahshow.com. Every Tuesday, 6 p.m. Central.

Going strong over there. And I imagine probably going to have some additional self content. I would, I would think we did. We recorded an episode live on yesterday. And so whenever I get my lazy rear end to chop it up and get it published, hopefully tonight at the airport at some point, if not latest by tomorrow,

that is the challenge. That is the challenge with these events is you got to go, you got to have a great time too, because you don't want to waste that. You got to cover it. Oh, and then you got to edit. got to have a great time too because you don't want to waste that you got to cover it oh and then you got to edit that's the worst part yeah well thank you so much of course uh we'll put links to to noah's podcast as well his social profiles and all of that in the show notes and we will not be live next week which is a little weird to say but we're

taking a couple of weeks off doing a little bit of a road trip myself and Wes is traveling and Brent's actually been contracted by one of the many Canadian spy agencies to go into the mountains and hunt for rogue moose who have been threatening the local population. And not everybody has the stomach for it, but Brent has the stomach for it. So we're all three doing something i actually spotted one yesterday but it got away from me so we'll see yeah and well like you and i were saying on the phone like don't start killing until you're getting paid for it right i know you love killing but just just wait don't work for free yeah don't give him the milk for free i always gotta tell brent that moose milk yeah moose milk It's valuable stuff. Links to what we talked about today, linuxunplugged.com slash 514.

Of course, we've got a whole network of shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com, including Linux Action News. You can get just what's going on in the world of Linux and open source in a few tight minutes. Lead me in what you need to know with more Wes and myself, linuxactionnews.com. As for us, well, we'll be back soon on the live streams, but if you're subscribed on the RSS feeds, you keep getting shows like nothing ever happened. Isn't that nice? Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program.

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