LINUX Unplugged - 521: Rethinking GNOME

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

Two important news stories, plus our thoughts on GNOME’s new windowing proposal and the Framework 16.

I'm putting a link in the live chat. I want you guys to go click over to the Framework Laptop 16 page. I don't know if either one of you have looked at this, but I am feeling really, really positive about this thing. So they've announced the preorder for the DIY 16-inch. It's going to be a Ryzen-based system, and you can do all kinds of cool things. First of all, they have all sorts of keyboard options.

You can have a center keyboard. You can have one with random OLED button pads. You can have a center keyboard. You can have one with random OLED button pads. You can put a numpad in there. You can have different sized trackpads. They all magnetically pop in. It's so well done. But check this out. Not only does it have a beautiful screen,

but they have come up with an upgradable modular graphics system. And I have watched this for years, guys. I've seen like manufacturers try this, right? I think Alienware did it. Others have done it. Right. And they've never really been successful at it. They never get it past one generation. So you never get the part where you actually try to upgrade it. Yeah. Maybe you get one upgrade, right? Yeah. It's like not worth the extra cost, but look at the way the framework folks have designed their upgradable system.

It's a modular system that comes off the back, almost like where you would expect a battery to be. But it is an entire graphics housing with a high speed PCI Express eight lane connector and power in there. And so they've developed an independent cooling system and housing just for the graphics card that pops into this system modularly. And you can buy a DIY 16 with just integrated graphics, which would be the Ryzen, still pretty good. And then later on, you could pop this in there and upgrade.

Now they can't really promise if they can do this forever, but in an interview, their CEO said, look, we wouldn't have invested our brand and all of our time to only do this once. Like, this is something we really feel committed to. And they've got a track record now with the motherboards. I think they've done, what, three versions of motherboard upgrades now? And then you get through everything else. It's still got the six module. It's got six module usbc bays

you can put multiple disks in this thing mvme high speed storage plus you can put them in those module bays it can do high-end consistent cpu performance with their cooling system in there i think they said something like a 45 watt continuous on this laptop on a Ryzen system. Okay. It looks really, really nice, Wes. And with this, like, OLED or whatever button pattern pad you can put in where the dumb key would be, you can assign those to any function because it's using that open-source keyboard firmware that I forget the name of.

Yep, yep. And you can just assign them to any function on your desktop. It should be so slick. Dang it. Is this my next laptop? I think it should be. I just, I want you to get it before I buy one though. Okay.

So I just got to keep talking you into it. You're going to be, you're going to test it for me. 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. Coming up on the show today, we've got some big stories we want to talk about and share our thoughts.

And then we're going to get into GNOMEome's big rethinking of the window manager, and we'll round out the show with some great boosts and picks and a few other things. So before we get into all that, I want to say good morning to our friends at Tailscale. That's a mesh VPN that's protected by WireGuard. It's going to change your networking game. We love it. Go try it at tailscale.com slash Linux unplugged. You get 100 devices for free with unlimited subnets, and it'll bridge all your systems together with a mesh network where they talk directly to each other. Protected by Wirecard. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. And of course, we want to say time-appropriate greetings to our mumble room. Hello, Virtual Lug. Hello, hello. We're rocking up there in the quiet listening this week. Hello, everybody up there in the stands. And hello, those who have joined us in the on-air room.

Grateful to have you here. We have a summer show this week, really, because Wes is traveling. I just got back from traveling, and Brent is still in Berlin. And I gather you've been getting a lot of sleep, resting, and eating moderately. Yes, yes. You know me so well, Chris. Actually, this morning I did sleep in a little because I was on a boat till way too late last night.

But so I hear that's the Berlin way, you know? Yeah, I mean, if you're going to be up late, being on a boat's a good reason. Do it in style, like, come on. But this morning, Chris, I had a wonderful experience. I think, you'll help me remember, I think I had the inaugural in-person brunch with JB listeners this morning in Berlin. Oh, that's great. It was actual brunch?

Yeah. Yeah, it was. It happened at 1 p.m., which is perfect considering my sleeping state. And we went to this amazing place. A listener, Pavel, suggested a place, which I think is called Dilstuhl. I totally forget. And it's probably German and I'm ruining the name. It was unbelievably amazing.

And we were there till like 4 p.m. or something. And we chatted about all sorts of things, as you know. But like went from like regional Indian dialects of English, because there are a bunch, to Nix was a big part of Rust beginnings as well. So I'm learning all sorts of things from our listeners. They're amazing. So I want to say thank you to everyone who came out this morning. I had an amazing time.

Well, I said morning. Actually, it was afternoon. You know, same thing. So you're telling me you went to a JB meetup and the topic of Rust and NixOS came up? Yeah, it's really weird. That never happened. That's strange. That's odd.

That's really odd. Sounds unbearable. Yeah, really. How obnoxious. That's really nice. I'm so, I don't know, grateful, I guess, that the audience takes such good care of you when you're over there. You are our ambassador, and I don't think we could have a better one. Aw, thanks.

Do you remember last time I was here? I went to see base that like underground crash spaceship maker space. Of course. How could we forget? OK, I just just in case. Well, this time, last time I tried to show up and it didn't work out. But this time on Tuesday, which is two days from now, there's an XOS meetup, which they do weekly. And I'm going to be there and I'm going to actually make it this time, I promise.

So I will have things to report back, I believe. I can't wait. Are you going to give NixOS an install before you go? Well, I do have some on my Pi over at home there. But if you remember, my house almost burnt down, so I had to unplug everything. So I think, yeah, I'll spin something up before I get there because I don't want to be the new guy, you know? So you're there for what, another week or so? Yeah, I thought I was going to leave on Wednesday and then I actually checked my flights

and turns out I'm here till Friday. So, you know, that's kind of how it goes for me, as you know. Good job, that's Brent. Wednesday, Friday, what's the difference? Yeah, I did want to say if there are any listeners who missed either the meetup or this brunch that we just threw today, if you want to do coffee this week and it works better for you because maybe you're on holidays or something, just hit me up in the Matrix rooms and I'll see if I can make something happen. No promises, but I always like to hang out. So send me a message. And you are going back. like fairly soon too it turns out i think i'll be here rather regularly or at least in europe uh seems there are events that happen

here that i'm supposed to be a part of and one of those is the next cloud conference which is happening in september now this is a conference for people who love next lab also people who love privacy and are privacy minded and like tinkering. There's a whole week basically dedicated to developers of NextCloud apps and such to just, you know, get in the same room and work on things and do some sprints. But there is a two day conference happening from the 16th to 17th of September that includes a bunch of lightning talks. So I would encourage anyone from our community who, you know, wants to practice some lightning talks. So I would encourage anyone from our community who wants to practice some lightning talks

or has a really cool project they're working on or some neat ideas, we're open to some talks right now. So send them in. I will make sure they get to the right people. I'll do that for you. There you go. But that means that I'll be here in September

and I'll be here for probably another two weeks. So I've sneakily, without Chris even knowing knowing created another meetup page for September 8th. That's a Friday. And, uh, I'd love to do another meetup. So if you couldn't make it this time around, I'm planning way more in advance this time. Hopefully that works for, uh, many other people. Very nice. And even sooner while we're talking meetups, Alex from Self Hosted is going to be in Chicago, and he's aiming for a meetup Thursday, August 10th. Details may change, but they hope to do it at a place with excellent deep dish pizza. So looking for suggestions. And there is a meetup entry for that, too, at meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting.

Chicago is also high on my personal list. I'm glad we're getting another JB ambassador out there. is also high on my personal list. I'm glad we're getting another JB Ambassador out there. So if you're in the Chicago area, this is going to be your opportunity. meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting for details on that. Wes is a man of mystery.

I'm not even sure where Wes is, but he's on location, probably on some sort of fantastic assignment for the podcast, I assume. Of course. No, actually, I'm in Cape Cod, Massachusetts right now. That's not what I would have guessed, but that sounds wonderful. That's probably very nice there.

Getting a little beach time in, you know? Good, good. It is summer after all. But as a result, that means I'll be flying back the same day we're set to do the next recording. So as a result, we're not going to be live, because I don't quite know when I'm actually going to make it to the studio. But there will be another Linux Unplugged. Just check your feeds.

It will be in the feeds and the members will get their version as well. Yeah, it is the summertime, so it's nice to get out there and travel. And I'm doing one more call out. Your privacy tools, anything that's been a great tool for you to just maintain privacy, security, even if it's just a great practice or a tip. We're putting together a collection of our tools and our tips to use Linux and free software to help ensure your own privacy and your own security. We kind of want to try to make an episode that's one that we can refer people back to. Our goal is to record that next week. So you've got a little bit more time, but not much to get something in a good tip a good tool something that you think works really well that linux users should know about but i want to do

the news with linux action news on hiatus for the summer during adpocalypse there are a few things we want to catch everybody up on that we think will impact our community one that happened that struck close to wes and i personally is paypal over the last week shut down the GrapheneOS account that's used for donations. They write on Twitter, unfortunately, PayPal has permanently locked our GrapheneOS Foundation account today. No reason has yet been provided for the account being locked. All we've done is accept donations. We added our bank account information in order to begin withdrawing money and then it was locked could you imagine just the mood that would set for the project you know can't you have

the funds then you don't get access to them and think about all the folks that have donated to you the sort of goodwill that that burns even unintentionally and of course i mean how many folks you know you got involved with project to you know try to make a great secure privacy respecting os and suddenly now you're dealing with bank details and fighting for financials yeah there's over four thousand dollars that they were trying to you know get into their foundation bank account and paypal flagged it for security reasons supposedly uh they did an update graphene did an update on twitter said paypal has restored our non-profit graphene os account we should be able to withdraw all donations made through it in the past few weeks we've

received no info though on why our account was permanently banned with funds held for over 180 days they've now restored our accounts um and they have i guess also like a business account too so there's sort of that area there uh and it just sort of undercut them and then of course the thing that always happens on the internet is at least on twitter everybody's got a solution oh you should accept monero oh you should do this um oh do github sponsors and it's always this problem that we we run into with free software um the project already does accept Bitcoin donations. We have donated to the project in the past.

We collected some via split, and then we did a traditional on-chain donation to the Graphene OS project. Maybe the beginning of this year. I can't remember when we did that. But I wrote them, you know, and I did say because they are looking at implementing Lightning. And I said, we'd be happy to put Graphene OS in the splits for a bit, you know, and just help the project out that way, too. But they do have access now to PayPal. I feel like Graphing OS is entering a new echelon, like a new layer of awareness as well. It's reaching outside just sort of our local communities.

And I wonder if that isn't just also bringing down more scrutiny why is it you know and it's why is it why is it always these projects and these tools that get the scrutiny you know unfortunately i've heard this story repeatedly with paypal and uh i think maybe it should be a warning to other small projects and big projects alike who rely on some of these systems. Just choose wisely. I mean, maybe there are other ways to do it that would be less damaging if something like this happened. But man, from personal users to organizations, I've heard this repeatedly with PayPal. Yeah. yeah they they noted too in the twitter thread that uh they use bitcoin internally to like pay the project staff and involve and volunteers that do work on contract basis or whatever

like they use that internally as a payment system to avoid this problem but uh you know if people want to pay with credit cards which is probably going to be the majority of folks they need some kind of interface like this and i mean maybe they could go build something around stripe but it seems like what they're going to do is lean on uh bitcoin donations and github sponsors as their kind of primary ways yeah i suppose the sponsors is at least accessible to some of the intended audience but as we know right any any layers of friction in that like oh i'm thinking about it right now i want to give you some money you know the more steps you have which might be you know getting bitcoin or making a github account or whatever it is that just dramatically drops off yep yeah absolutely um it makes me want

it it does make me want to send them another update donation i have to say uh they have a they have several subscription programs on github as And I think they've talked positively about the program. It says they're 77% towards their goal on GitHub right now, towards $6,000 per month. And you know, at the pace these guys update the OS and the features they're introducing, I bet there are several people working full-time. I mean, there's got to be at least somebody working full-time because they're on top of every security update. They're on top of new features to the sandboxing stuff and to the open source apps that they replace some of Google's apps with.

They're constantly and consistently updating those as well. So it's the team executes, man. And I'm very happy with, I'm still running. How's it working for you, Wes? Oh, no, no major complaints here. I'm actually, you know, it's different. It's not stock Android. It's an outlier OS.

But considering I use Linux as my desktop daily driver, I'm kind of used to that. And I'm continued by just how compatible the darn thing is. Like, besides stuff like NFC payments and, you know, a few other things like that, stuff just works. Maybe a handful of apps I've had to turn off the extra exploit mitigation stuff, but surprisingly that's, that's under 10. So like, I don't, I mostly just don't think about it except that I see all the regular updates, which I'm not used to on Android. Yeah. Yeah. And it's going to get updated longer probably than stock. Well, that's going to be the point that I feel like will really feel great is when google has stopped updating years down the road the pixel 7 but graphing os is still shipping updates for years like that's gonna be

gonna feel real good wes you caught a story that seems to be perhaps a ansible alternative that's just getting started up this is not really my area but it seems like it's got a good old Rust angle. Introducing JetPorch, a Rust-based next-generation Ansible, you might call it. One of the founders of Ansible, Michael DeHaan, I guess co-creator, creator back in the day, is looking to develop a new open-source automation platform using Rust is look and develop a new open source automation platform using Rust and aimed at addressing basically all the scale of automation that's happened now, right? So like, back in the days, Ansible was new businesses were really just sort of embracing the idea that you could automate all these things that you could sort of have configuration as code, you could put this stuff in a get repo, and then deploy it and have a declarative way to interface and specify stuff.

And it turns out that works, right? Like, that's a good approach. It's not perfect, but you can really scale with that. And as a result, because automation became easy, businesses adopted it. And Michael's pitch here is we need some new, faster, more powerful tools that can sort of be the next generation of automation infrastructure. Integrating lessons learned type. Yes, exactly. You know, I mean, Ansible's grown, but Michael kind of stressed that what made Ansible really successful early on is that it was minimal.

It was simple. It was easy to get started with. And I think one of the goals for JetPort is to kind of get back to that, as he calls it, grocery list style simplicity. But at the same time, you know, being written in Rust, he kind of wants to add more of a systems programming or a quote unquote hard engineering lens rather than something that was born out of like a scripting type environment. So being implemented in Rust, it can produce efficient native binaries, doesn't have to deal with Python's global interpreter lock, so it definitely has more parallelism available to it. And some of the goals here is to use Rust's fancy compiler checks to try to, you know, catch a bunch of errors, try to pre-evaluate, encode a bunch of the automation information into the type system and into the, you know, the way that you're writing it with Rust so that you can kind of

catch stuff well before you get to the stage where you're actually executing something out on a server somewhere. What makes this even more interesting, though, is it sounds like one of their goals is to keep most Ansible or at least most sort of like YAML setups just working.

No one wants to write a new language as he puts it, or learn a new language. No one wants to have to import all of their automation content. So you, yeah, no one wants to write a new language as he puts or learn a new language. No one wants to have to import all of their automation content. So I think jet porch is aimed at something where you've, you've got a bunch of Ansible infrastructure. You can just shift on over to jet porch with minimal updates. And I suppose it also means that some of that would be applicable training for using jet port.

That, that seems like a really savvy move, right? Like that is probably the thing that would make people go, oh, I can take some of that and use that still. something that's kind of in the same lane as Ansible that offers a GPL to alternative to what Red Hat owns is probably probably something that the community needs. I'm not in this space, but I'm curious if you agree. Yeah, I mean, you know, it does feel like there's less active diversity these days. Now, admittedly, you know, platforms like Kubernetes and containerization and, you know, cloud systems that have their own declarative syntax, it's changed things from when everyone was manually configuring servers a decade ago or whatever. But there's still a big business to do these things. You still need to interface. And more of these tools can just talk to the cloud platforms or interface with other tools. There's some talk of having JetPort be able to sort of natively talk to Terraform so that

those two systems, which are Ansible and Terraform, are already used together all the time. JetPort might be able to just take some of the output from Terraform and understand it and parse it and use it in a way that Ansible can't. I think they're also looking at one of the things with Ansible is, you know, it's doing SSH and you might have some issues

or you might need to come up with alternate workflows when you've, you know, once you've gone beyond the sort of initial scale, where now you've got hundreds of thousands of machines and you've got to make connections to all of them. So they're looking at implementing their own sort of message-based system that'll try to be able to provision

to hundreds of thousands of machines at once. And a lot of times with Ansible, you sort of, you needed Python on the other side, right? Your other system kind of be configured enough that you could get the hooks, the base level of Ansible going. I think the combination of native binary output from Rust and just the new approach means they're looking at just needing bash on the target system. So I think that's like, it's not revolutionary. So I'm a little, I kind of like to see a little more like radical new approach, but I think it's very practical. And it, as a result, probably has more of a chance of actually seeing adoption. And that's the biggest sort of question here, right? Because it's like, there's a lot of big talk in these announcements there's starting to be

on github some like example content i don't think there's any code out there yet so it's hard to say like will this get worked on for six months and just evaporate or is this really going to be the start of the next era i guess that it really depends on how much demand there is out there in the community for something like this it looks looks clever on the surface, seems like a pretty solid idea. Ansible, what, came around in 2012? Seems like a hit. You know, I think it's going places. And it seems only obvious that we would have learned a lot of lessons from an Ansible-style

system and we could build it better. And I like that you could just basically get Bash working on a system and then it could take it from there. That seems like it opens it up to a lot of use cases. It also sort of fits in with a lot of the trends these days in the Python ecosystem, where I think successful projects, Pydantic is one,

which is a validation parsing library for Python. It's got a new version out that has a Rust-based core. And so I think there's a lot of successful projects that have explored ideas and had good implementations with Python to start with. And because Rust has come along, because it's so expressive and easy to use, even if you're just a Python developer, and because you can hook those things together in a really nice way where you don't have to write C, but you can still get faster than Python type speeds.

There's, you know, once you've worked out what it needs to do, you can build that next generation in that, in the new base tooling, but still call it from Python, still have it execute Python scripts, and it's kind of just better. those great tools like the cloud manager the api that's so well documented with libraries for days ready to go and the cli tool that i use nearly on the daily to snapshot my rigs upload to object storage and i mean just like all the little things you might want just quickly from my gwaik drop down terminal i love all the tooling that help you build that helped you deploy and scale in the cloud that stuff's there but now it's combined with akamai's power and global reach they're expanding their services

to offer more cloud computing resources and tooling to give you more reliable and even more affordable and scalable solutions for businesses and projects of all sizes all around the world. And they're going in big as part of Akamai's global network of offerings. Oh, data centers everywhere popping up worldwide. I think a dozen this year going online, giving you access to even more resources to help grow your business and serve your project, your customers, your user base, your friends, your family, whatever it might be.

It's what we use. We've been using it for years for anything that's audience facing. And we scale it when we need it. And we scale it down when we don't. It's really perfect. We get to play with the big boys now because Akamai is the best of the best.

So why wait? Go experience the power of Linode now, Akamai. Visit linode.com slash unplug to learn how Linode, now Akamai is the best of the best. So why wait? Go experience the power of Linode now Akamai. Visit linode.com slash unplugged to learn how Linode now Akamai can help you scale your applications from the cloud all the way out to Brent's house on the edge. So that's linode.com slash unplugged. You get that $100 on a new account and you support the show while you're kicking the tires and with $100 you can really try things. Linode.com slash unplugged. Now this week we saw a blog post by the GNOME developer Tobias Bernard.

And it's super interesting detailing work being done by the GNOME design team over the last several years to reimagine their window management. And the GNOME design team has been exploring these ideas of a new window management system since about 2017, so not fresh fresh, with significant milestones in 2019, 20, 22, and now 23.

What we've seen is there's currently a basic tiling functionality in GNOME. Chris, I would be interested in hearing how much you've used it. Apparently it has quite a bit of limitations, including being pretty much manual, sporting about two windows and that's it, and lacking some integrations with window stacking and workspaces. But this week, the proposed Mosaic concept combines automatic window arrangement with the option of manually tiling.

Chris, you're a big GNOME guy, and I think a bunch of systems you're currently using right now. Did you dig into this? And can you give us a little history on what's been there and what's coming up? Yeah, you know, right as Plasma added the thing I've always wanted, which is tiling on just one window virtual desktop, I decided to switch over to GNOME 44 and just experience it for a while. And when they're talking about the current tiling system, what they're talking about is the ability to drag a window to the side and have it snap and have another window drag it to the side and snap,

and then they're kind of working together there. It's very limited, and I don't even know if I'd call it tiling. I call it window snapping. But the thing that it doesn't do very well is it doesn't handle windows that overlap and pop over it. And you can very quickly get into the situation where you got three or four windows on top of your quote unquote tiled windows. And so what they want to do is kind of have their cake and eat it too. And because they control the desktop, they can do this. And the bit that's going to make their thing a little bit different is they're going to essentially have an API for the application to inform the window manager

about its preferred size and its size options. I can have this size, this size, and this size, or I need to be full screen. And it'll provide that information to the window manager. And then the window manager will then correctly tile and size them if you maximize a window it'll just maximize to its own virtual desktop similar to how mac os does now when you maximize a window on mac os it just creates a new virtual desktop which can work it's not bad and then i would imagine through extensions and whatnot you can probably manually tweak this system. I have tried over the years, you guys know this, to make tiling work for me. The issue is I grew up in the 80s very aggressively trying all of the windowing desktop systems, the systems that came out before Windows and all of it. And so I have always, always wanted the concept of floating windows that I roughly place where I want them.

always wanted the concept of floating windows that I roughly place where I want them. As I've gotten older, I do get more tired and I find it tedious to just sit there and arrange everything over and over again. And to the point of where sometimes I just leave my systems on so I don't have to sit there and rearrange the windows all the time because I got work to get done. And I've heard, although I've never tried it, I've heard that Windows 11 is really solid about restoring Windows across multiple screens when you connect and disconnect a laptop. So you got a USB-C dock, plug it in, you got a couple of monitors. Windows 11, I'm told, will just put the monitors back on those screens that they were originally on in their original places. And then when you disconnect,

I'm told, Windows 11 will then join them, combine them together on your one screen. I'm told Windows 11 will then join them, combine them together on your one screen. And this is an area where Linux has suffered significantly, is switching between multiple monitors, multiple screens all the time. And this system, although a bit limited, I think would go a long way to handling the tedium of managing the desktop. And I'm not really worried about it being on by default, which they do want. They want to design a system they think they can turn on by default. I'm not really worried about it being on by default, which they do want. They want to design a system they think they can turn on by default.

I'm not really worried about that because I'm sure there'll be an extension in about three seconds that turns it off if I don't like it. And this, to me, seems to be combining the one bit that works well for macOS and then solving the other bit for tiling desktops, which is you either end up creating this massive config that describes how every window should be laid out, or at least a subset of your applications, or you come up with a system like this, where the application provides windowing metadata, and then the window manager lays it out for you. I think they may be right in the sweet spot with this mosaic window management mode. What say you, Wes?

Yeah, honestly, I'm kind of excited. I don't know. It could turn out that we don't like it. It could be an unsuccessful experiment, but I appreciate the open, sort of like willing to reconsider the metaphors and play with the ideas of the desktop approach that's going on here, because I don't know.

I don't think I want a Linux desktop to just be copycat, or like, especially because it's always going to be worse, right? If we're just copying exactly what the proprietary systems do, we don't have the same resources. We're not really going to compete. One area we could compete is being willing to try things that the more conservative proprietary places might not necessarily do. I also think like you're saying this, getting more information from the Windows, from the applications themselves, it, you know, not everything will work. Legacy applications won't work with it, probably, you know. But for modern Linux desktop apps, that's one of the big pain points with Tylan, is it's sort of like, this one just doesn't play. I don't know how to

fit it in here, right? Like chat apps or, you know, your Slack where you can't even get rid of the full bar and it's just unusable in a tiny little environment, things like that. Once you've at least got the primitives, it seems like that's the necessary start to even have hope of a better world where we have that kind of information for window managers to use and run with. And I think

if it does happen, it'll probably be useful for things that aren't, you know, right? Other sort of GTK desktops could use it, other desktops could use it, extensions couldktops could use it. Extensions could use it to sort of customize their interactions. So it's exciting to me. I have two thoughts. One, I feel like what's become the mark

of a good modern GTK desktop app is how quickly they adopt these new things that the Gnome Shell's trying. And I think it's a good thing because it keeps it fresh. It keeps developers moving forward. It keeps moving the bar it makes me check back in right i every few releases i'm checking back in because things are improving um so that's that's that's that's really nice but to your point about there's always going to be applications that

won't provide that metadata and slack is probably a great example wouldn't it be great if there was some bit of metadata that could be provided via the flat pack so something that where the flat pack just declares via dbus or something i don't know this thing and whoever flat the maintainer is they kind of say like here's a few suggested window sizes and they put it in there as flat pack metadata information and then the gnome shell window manager could read sizes and they put it in there as flat pack metadata information and then the gnome shell window manager could read that and they wouldn't have to like you know have slack in gtk4 or whatever to make it work right like an override layer that sort of bridges the gaps for applications that people are willing to go put in the manual effort to to figure out and i can

imagine too an extension developer could step up and could create a set of window rules like i do in KWin, where I could say, always put slack at this or something like that. Could be some workarounds there. Speaking of extension developers stepping up, one thing I noticed in this blog post was a call at the end for, you know, if you wanted to help, one thing they're looking for is extension developers to create sort of, you know, try implementing this mosaic idea, the principles behind it. Sort of, you know, try implementing this mosaic idea, the principles behind it, which a that seems like, yeah, of course, that would be helpful. Right. Because you got to change a lot of the internals trying to do an extension might be a quick way to sort of validate the UX flows. But then also, it's quite a first party, just sort of endorsement in a way. Yes, it reminds me that things have really shifted in the extension ecosystem from the old days. Yeah. Well, and an extension is a great way to try this out, right? You could try various versions of extensions. Maybe they're only developers that are sharing them or something, but you could prototype really quickly via the extension system. And then you figure it out and you build it into the shell layer. That makes a lot of sense to me and i think if they don't do it this way what we're going to end up with is essentially self-implemented tiling uh we're going to we're going to have

applications that are like a timer or a calculator that you open it up and it maximizes to the full screen and it's taking up an entire virtual desktop because there's no standard there's no implementation at the desktop level and it'll be self-implemented and it'll be the Wild West of ginormous applications with 90% white space taking up your screen. So I think they have to try this. I don't know really how it impacts what System76 is doing. Maybe they could leverage this down the road. I mean, I bet they're pretty far along with their extension system so

they may just want to stick with that but i'd love to know i'd love to be a fly on the wall in the in the chat room or wherever where they're like discussing this as a feature to gnome shell why now why are they now doing tiling where this come from at all the things where did this come from is it because other desktops that are based on Genome Shell or GTK are implementing tiling and they're looking around and they're feeling like they need to stay competitive? Is it just because this has been on their roadmap since like 2017? It's just something they've been wanting to get to and now's the time. You got a vibe on that, Brent? Expect that the new Cosmic desktop might perhaps be something that is going to impress a lot of people when it comes out. Hopefully. I mean, you did say Rust, right? I wonder if they're trying to hedge their bets here. They're trying to implement something before that happens, or at least gain some interest, keep some people on the desktop.

That way, I don't know, maybe there aren't eyes looking away from GNOME. Is it Altaria, Alatrak? I'm sorry, I always get it wrong. But you have some background for us. You're in the Momber room. I'd love to hear it. Yeah, hello. I mean, this has been like a thing that has been like discussed for years now. Since like 2017, because like, it's not that it has anything to do with the current situation, It's not that it has anything to do with the current situation, but it's like it just took a long, long time to finally come up with a concept that could work while also not being like automatic tiling the calculator to maximize.

It has been like... I've heard about this since forever, basically. Since as long as I've been known to be, as we've been talking about this, so yeah. It's something that's been in the works. Yeah. Was the addition of the applications providing metadata, was that a more recent breakthrough?

Because that seems like the really unique sauce here. I mean, I'm not exactly sure on that specificity. This is all still just concepts. There hasn't been any code or APIs or specification on how it would work. It's a very, very rough thing. Right, roughly maybe we might see something in GNOME 46. Yeah, maybe 47 and after.

But yeah, in general, we already have hints in GTK and probably like all the other toolkits do too for like the minimum size an application wants and the default size. So it's only really the maximized size. Oh, so I'm sorry, just so I can understand, that information is already, the GTK applications already provide that information?

Some of it, yeah. Okay. Oh, well, that's going to make it a much easier transition, I would imagine. Yeah, hopefully. I mean, still a lot of things to be worked out because this would need a lot of work in the compositor, a lot of work in the toolkit, and then adoption by the application.

So there likely will be needed possibly Wayland protocols in order if we needed to define any application-specific behavior or hints, extra hints that are missing. But who knows? It needs to be worked on i guess so this is the input phase like this is truly bringing it to the community at a really early stage trying to form input uh yeah it's like uh half of us learned about it like very recently and there was like yeah the the blog post came like uh minutes after the talk at Gwad ended, basically, where they came up and presented it publicly in the conference.

Well, publicly to the rest of the world, yeah. Well, I won it already, so now I understand it's going to take a while. Thank you for the background. That is exciting to hear that some of that information is already provided by the applications. It makes it feel like it's a little bit less of a lift by the developers, which is really great to see. Yeah, you know, we are so spoiled at this point. I'm really excited about Plasma 6. We saw an update that some applications are getting removed from Plasma 6, but it all seems pretty reasonable.

All seems pretty understandable. What's getting pulled out at this point. And Gnome seems to be going from release to release. Just really great. Now. I, I just love it, love it,

love it on my laptops. Just think it's the best desktop manager for my laptop right now. So we'll have links. If you guys want to check out the window management proposal and we'll have information about how you can share feedback, but also they have some animations in there. So if you want to put some visuals to what we're talking about, check out the link we'll have in the show notes that'll show it to you and kind of give you a better concept possibly.

Collide.com slash unplug. If you work in it or security, well, this message is for you, unplug if you work in it or security well this message is for you especially if you use octa if you've noticed i certainly have the majority of the data breaches recently are those really annoying low-hanging fruit types you know where it's often staff their machine gets hacked they download a trojan something happens on their system maybe their software isn't up to date their credentials get phished unfortunately that's still very common ransomware all of that but really it's not the user's fault is it it's the solutions that are supposed to be preventing these breaches they're

just they haven't been good enough and it doesn't have to be this way my friends imagine a world where only secure devices can access your apps in In this world, say, phish credentials, they'd be useless to hackers. And you could manage every OS, even Linux desktops, from a single dashboard. Best of all, you could get employees to fix their own devices before they have to create a ticket and bother IT. Well, the good news is you don't have to imagine. No, snap out of it, because that's what Collide does. Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta. Collide ensures a device doesn't connect to your apps unless it's trusted,

secured and verified, but isn't ready to go. It can't connect to your apps. It's that simple. Go visit collide.com slash unplug to watch a demo and see how it works. It might sound like magic, but it's not. It's going to save your it time. It's going to help educate your users and best of all, keep you complied. So it's K-O-L-I-D-E.com slash unplugged. You go there, support the show and check out Collide. Collide.com slash unplugged. You know, Chris, I figured I'd bring my mailbag all the way to Europe with me because, you know, you got to stay on top of the mail. I was a little nervous when you checked it,

but it made it, huh? Amazingly, the airport said no problem with it. I don't know why. Maybe. I'm not sure. Maybe it's because you dressed it up like Santa Claus's present bag. It was the beard, I think, that really helped.

You know, security seemed fine with that part. Wes said you didn't need to do it, but you were right. So I found a letter in there from Cohen who wrote in to say this. I was just listening to Linux Unplugged episode 520 and a listener boosted in saying that they're looking for a way to migrate listening data between podcast apps. It's not a solution just yet, but with some folks, we are working on the Open Podcast API. The aim is to allow listeners to sync all their

subscriptions and listening data between podcast apps, effectively enabling data migration between them. We're done with the subscriptions endpoint and are writing the specs for the episodes data right now. Still early days, so it might take a while before anything hits production, but I'm very excited. There are a bunch of free and open source software projects engaged already, but anyone is welcome to chip in to the discussion. And a good place to go for that would be openpodcastapi.org if you're interested. He also says, keep up the great podcast and cheers.

Aww. That is a great heads up. I don't know if I had heard of this, so I really appreciate it. They say their goal is to provide an easy way to sync subscriptions, listening progress, favorites, queues, and more between different apps and services with the ability

to switch providers without hassle. I like that idea a lot because I hop podcast apps all the time these days. I'm always trying out a new podcast app. It sounds like it was a sort of offshoot from the old gpotter.net implementation efforts. And then folks from AntennaPod and FunkWale and Cass and PodFriend and the gpotter app for NextCloud all kind of got together to start compiling together a solution. Well, I like all of those folks. So that's really great. Now I'm even more interested.

Fantastic. Thank you, Cohen. George also came in with a bit of ham. Says, furthering the interest in your ham journey, here's a fascinating project in your area making use of ham radio and in particular the 44.0.0.0 subnet, which is dedicated for ham operator use a link you provided ham when.org says perhaps packet radio is the gateway drug yeah i would i yes i think it is too this looks cool i think it i think so i see that was my suspicion and look at this wes it's like literally our area although the studio is not covered but uh not yet right oh right right there's a need for us we need to step up we sure do this is so cool hamwan.org so when we get through summer stuff we really got to get serious about this you know when it

gets crappy outside and dark really early and we're inside all the time again perfect this is when we gotta get this we gotta get serious because hamwan.org just blew my mind thank you george and now it is time for the boost dj hunter 67 came in with a whopper this week. 633, 325 sats. Coming in with Podverse, he says, I use Arch, by the way. I'm confused about the RHEL controversy. For work, I regularly host my apps and deploy to Fedora and Ubuntu computers that are shipped to customers. Am I doing it wrong?

Why exactly are there so many clones of RHEL? He says, a short bio, because I'm always curious. I'm a one and a half year software dev with Python and Rust mostly at a small RF shop. Homelab has five monitor GNOME setup on Arch and the last five of the boosts are his zip as well, Westpain. Uh-oh, did you bring them? Oh yeah, you brought them out with you. Ah, clever boy.

Let's take a look. Looking through. You know, I don't think you're doing it wrong, DJ. I think it's, if you're the vendor and you're deploying the applications, that's totally fine. The RHEL requirements really come from the application vendor, in my experience.

Broward County, Florida. Maybe Sunrise or Plantation. Hmm. Got any RV parking down there, DJ? vendor in my experience a broward county florida maybe sunrise or plantation got any rv parking down there dj never never brought the rv to florida before another baller came in this week and they're anonymous anonymous sent us 112 307 sats i hoard that which your kind covet long Long-time listener since 2021. First-time booster. Thank you. Really appreciate that.

I've been enjoying all the shows on the network, but Linux Unplugged is my absolute favorite. I just want to say thanks for all you do. Because of the show, I'm self-hosted. I'm using Tailscale. I'm on Obsidian. And I'm dragging on Nextcloud for the first time in years. They continued,

I'm using almost all the features it offers. I'm also using Linode as well as Nextcloud and several other systems to play with Kubernetes clusters. Oh, you madman. There's also countless other tools I've learned from the shows. The main point of the boost is to express my gratitude for making me find a whole new world and exploring Linux

and open source. The zip code is, again, the last five digits. Oh, get the map out again. Get the map out again, Wes. Anonymous, thank you. If you go into Podverse and you're meant to put a username in there, you can follow up with a small boost, and we'll try to credit you. But we really appreciate that a lot.

I hear you. Wes, why did you fold the map up? I figured you'd just leave it unfolded, you know, so that. It's like he does with his mic cord. He folds it up and twists it up every time. Oh, yeah, that's true. You just have to put it unfolded, you know, so that it's like he does with his mic cord. He folds it up and twists it up every time. Oh, yeah, that's true. You just have to put it away neatly, right? But according to my calculations, 12307 is a postal code and it's connected to New York.

Hey, hello, New York. All right, Mr. Payne, you want to take FC Greg? FC Greg boosts in with 100,818 cents. I hoard that which your kind covet. Gentlemen, first-time booster here. I'm embarrassed to say that I've only recently discovered the JB network, even though I'm a longtime Linux user, software developer, and network administrator, starting with Red Hat Linux 5 back in 1998.

Nice. Your shows have definitely filled a void in my life, and I look forward to continuing as an avid listener for many years to come. Also, thanks for your balanced coverage of the recent Red Hat changes, which has really put things in perspective for me. And note, my zip code is 5,000 less

than my boost amount. Hey, hey, hey. All right, Wes, get that map back out again. Wes, you're going to get your calculator out too. You're going to have to unfold that thing. Yeah, I know. I need a bigger table. Man, thank you for the long time listening

and thank you for the boost for the first time. That's really great to hear from you. The long timers are always like the special boost because it's nice to just hear from folks. And even though you've been out there for a long time, never reached out, now's your moment. We appreciate you and appreciate the support. All right.

You track them down. Yes. Nine five eight one eight is a postal code in Sacramento, California. Ha ha. Hello, California. Hope the weather's treating you okay down there. Martin DeBell boosted in 90,015 Satoshis across five boosts. Coming in hot with the boosts. Says Chris, Wes, and Brent, and listeners, of course.

I'd like to comment on Ubuntu Core because I think they are onto something. I know that SUSE is working on a similar proposition, so please check out this video. There's a mountain to climb, open SUSE's response to Sousa ALP. A stable and immutable core system with containers on top just seems like the best way to go. I think we completely agree. In fact, that's how I run all my systems now. I have really landed on Nix as the solution, but I feel like I need to take ALP a little more seriously. I feel like I need to take ALP a little more seriously. I'd love to have a sit-down conversation with somebody working on the project and just really kind of get it firsthand

because everything I read online doesn't really click for me. And I'm not sure what it is. Maybe it's just me being an old man. But I keep hearing the SUSE folks talk about ALP quite a bit. It feels like it needs investigation, but I completely agree with the premise. I like having a system that is the applications and the data are separate from the os and however you achieve that if it's through virtualization if it's their process isolation if it's jails on free bsd i'm here for it he continues i personally prefer flat packs over snaps i do understand why canonical is

using their own technologies because it creates a unique vendor lock-in and makes sure that their customers stay in the Ubuntu ecosystem. But on the Red Hat situation, it is interesting that Sousa is forking Red Hat with a 10 million investment, as you described last episode. Because of the press release, I learned that Sousa's ex-ceo melissa d donato and current ceo is dirk peter van lewin previously worked as a senior vice president and gm of red hats north america yes i i was aware yeah that's an interesting little twist huh yeah it sounds actually like there's i mean familiarity there and maybe changing of direction because of that. It's interesting.

Yeah, Dirk Peter was a Red Hatter. And now he's at SUSE. There's this information. There is this fork in this foundation. It does feel like, Martin, I think you're onto something. Putting the pieces together. I haven't fried that bacon on air, but I do think it's an interesting connection. Martin does continue. I wonder if this moves from Sousa changes the game for Alma,

who decided to drop the aim to be one-to-one with RHEL and instead be ABI compatible. Do you think they'll join forces in this foundation? Rocky Linux will surely profit as they don't have to do it themselves anymore. I just don't understand what SousE has to gain about all of this. Yeah, I don't know if Rocky needs to officially partner, right? If SUSE creates this foundation and throws SRPMs over the fence,

Rocky could use it just as easily as they can if Red Hat's creating them without any contract or agreement necessary. Though I would imagine their incentives are going to align with Seuss Liberty and Rocky Linux in a lot of ways. So I would imagine naturally they're probably a pretty good fit. Martin, I feel like you have

a really good take on the situation. Thank you for the support and thank you for the boost. I think it's a nice capper on the discussion, kind of wrapping up some of those end pieces that we hadn't gotten to.

Nev comes in with 43,331 sats. Boost! From Podverse. A lot of Podverse this week. Great to see people using the GPL podcast app. Says, I'm not going to lie, the only reason I quit using RedHot on my home lab is because I got tired of finding out things aren't working because of SE Linux, which gives me obscure error messages.

All right. I think we've all been there once or twice everybody's turned off se linux when they shouldn't admit it not saying they do it currently i don't know if i've ever really on any modern fedora install had a problem but yeah back in the day man back in the day he says it's just really been a lack of understanding he decided to bash his head against gen 2 instead as portage still has the best log output. That's true. It is a good-looking package manager.

Also, that zip code might have historical mafia ties, since, quote, objectively, this was the neutral meeting grounds for Russia and Italian families. Ooh, Wes, have you looked this one up? 43331 seems to be a postal code in Ohio. Maybe Lakeview, Orchard Island, or Chippewa Park. Okay.

All right. All right. Hello, Ohio. Kraftnix boosts in with 31,223 cents. I wish I could have made it for the meetup. Berlin is just far enough away that I would need a little more heads up to join since it's a half day's travel and an overnight stay. As soon as you have dates for the possible September meetup, please share.

NixCon 2023 is 8 to 10 September near Frankfurt. So if it's directly before or after that, it would be ideal. Well, Craft Nix, I did create that meetup page specifically with you in mind, but I do now notice that you're busy on the 8th going to the next con. And maybe I want to be there instead. So we'll see what we can do. But thank you for asking for a longer heads up because it gets my bum going and I feel like I owe it to you guys to give a big heads up. So hopefully we can get some other folks from around Europe to join the meetup. Now there's some value returned on your boost, Craftnix.

Yeah, Craftnix is really on point with us this episode because in the second boost wrote that they were surprised not to hear us mention or compare the Infinity book against the framework as it's also a 14-inch and officially supported on Ubuntu and Fedora and works amazingly well on XOS from their experience. I'll be replacing my 12th gen Intel mainboard with the new AMD Ryzen 7040 series mainboard at the end of the year. And I'm going to use that old one as a

mini slash blade server. It's so nice that I have the ability to upgrade my laptop frequently without all the e waste yes please let us know how that goes because that is my exact thinking too if i do end up one day with a framework 16 when i upgrade that motherboard yeah i'm gonna make that a home server if i can so please let me know how that goes the reason why i didn't really compare the two is because i feel like the framework diy laptop and the infinity book are two totally different markets right um you get the infinity book because you want a laptop that comes pre-loaded with linux and is supported by that vendor and has a whole process there the framework diy is kind of on the other end of that spectrum where you build it kind of assemble it as it is and and then you put your own Linux on there and you're kind of the support person for that Linux install, which is probably my speed and sounds like

it's your speed craft, but not necessarily everybody. And I know one of the biggest entry points for those laptops, because I've just seen this in the, in what I've been in contractor, is developers that want a Linux desktop to develop on and don't want to mess with the hardware compatibility stuff because it still has a reputation for that. They just want to buy a system. That's why Dell makes their Linux box. System76 has a huge customer base for them as well.

And I don't know if the framework is that overlap as much, but for people that are big on right to repair, reducing e-waste, and self-support, I feel like it is, and I'm probably more in that category. So once Wes tells us it's okay, I'm going to get one. I just got to have him get the first gen, so then I can get the second gen

that's better a little bit or something. I don't know. Well, and we still need to make a little more space at the studio to fit more laptops. That's true. We've got to give you time. We should probably clear out a few dozen. You savage.

Mr. Kiss comes in with 30,000 sets. Boost! He says, I might have found the holy grail of notes for Chris. Anytype.io. It's a website. And he says, lots of love from South Africa as well. Anytype.io. All right.

It does look really nice, I have to say. I'll put a link in the show notes, the Everything app for those who celebrate and trust autonomy. That does sound like me. It really does. Zacatech boosts in with 22,222 sets. Things are looking up for all but duck. For your privacy episode, a tool I really like is the GLiNet routers.

I use a flint at home and a broom when on the road. I'll either connect to an open wireless network or just tether it to my cell phone. The router will start either a WireGuard, OpenVPN or Tor Tunnel and then any device I run can connect to it via wireless, USB-C or even Ethernet.

It goes through the tunnel and this lets me have a private connection when using the Internet at home or when I'm away. Also, it runs AdGuard and, with OpenWRT, can be expanded to do a lot of little things for self-hosting or those with privacy in mind. That is a great recommendation. Let's put a note. We've got to put that on our list because i own two of these things and i want to i want to plus one zac attacks recommendation one thing i haven't tried zac attack uh can you put tail scale on these things now i know i could do subnet routing but i'd be interested to know if i could run the tail scale client on open wrt and then things like jellyfin would be a snap

from any hotel room or anything like that so yeah let me know a little follow-up if you wouldn't mind about tail scale and i'm definitely putting that on our list that's a great recommendation plus one here's concept boosted in with a grandpa row of ducks as well quacka waka it's a treasure yippee hey i had these sats burning a hole in my wallet and needing to be spent way better to spend them on my favorite podcast so hello from toronto hello toronto thank you curious concept we really appreciate that gene bean comes in with a row of ducks so how does that all intel tuxedo work with obs does it keep up okay gene bean you are reading my mind. Yeah. You know, I actually think everything since the Intel 12th gen is fine for OBS and the 13th gen is even finer. It is not even breaking a sweat. I have gotten the fans to spin up and make some heat when I'm building the system and things like that. But running OBS, doing screen cap, it's a champ at that whole driver pipeline is in a pretty good shape too.

So it seems to be reliable and stable. I haven't done extensive streaming with it, but I did do a little screen cap session to record a few things for the test and used OBS for that. And it was like, it wasn't even running. Didn't even break a sweat. Didn't even break a sweat. Scott Boosin with 2000 sets.

Okay. So I'm not from Berlin, but I am a climber, and I can back Brent up on the fact that Berlin is one of the hubs for climbers in Europe. Saying this as an American who's only ever talked to people from there online, so take that for what it's worth. All right. I like that we're getting climbing boots now. I mean, we got a garage going.

I guess we're going to be rock climber. Keep it up. I'm just glad he didn't boost in to debunk my claim that Boulder is big with climbers too. I've been to Boulder and I've seen it, so I imagine it's true. I'll take these last couple just to round us out. Adversary 17 comes in, as I like to say, with 2,000 sats. Getting caught up after listening to 517. I feel a lot better about the changes Red Hat are making.

To me, it makes sense. Any company that uses RHEL for a few of the most important applications we have, they are one of them, like their EMR system. You pay for that. Thanks for cutting through the extra fudge like you always do. And then our last boost this week that we're reading on air, but thank you everybody who boosted in, is from Sully86. 6,112 sats.

Coming in hot with the boost. And this is a podcast boost from Australia. Wes Payne signed up to Jupiter Party to support the preferred podcast network of choice. His question is, I'm starting my own IT company and I want to try to focus on open source. What solutions do you recommend, especially for email? NextCloud works great for data. I use it internally, but I'm thinking about what else I could use and offer. Most solutions will either be hosted on-premise

or I'll put them on Linode. I'm used to supporting Microsoft and Google, but I want to set myself apart. So when you say you want to host email, you want to host email for clients is my question, or are you hosting it for your company? Because that's two big separate things. That's an interesting area to try to offer a little special value i think you should consider how you're going to the mail inflow they're no longer a sponsor but i still really like mail

route and companies like that that kind of act as a spam and and malware catcher before they make it to your mail server of choice but the other reason i really like them or others like them is because they can act as a queue. If you need to take your mail server down for maintenance, which you will, they will queue up messages. And then when your system comes back online, they will deliver those messages to your mail server.

I think if you're going to be providing email to clients, you want that kind of system in place. In my opinion, there's a lot of ways to architect that, but that's the way I would do it. As to which software? That's a tough of ways to architect that, but that's the way I would do it. As to which software? That's a tough question.

I think what we should do is solicit recommendations, Wes, unless you have a suggestion for a mail server package. We've had several sent into the show. We've tried some of them in past episodes. You could go through our back catalog. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of tricky. It depends where and what value are you trying to add that will distinguish it? What can you support operationally with the size of your company? I think some suggestions from the audience, folks who might do this, would be awesome.

And then just longer term, let us know how it works out and what you end up picking. Yeah, definitely. Brent, you wanted to pull up a boost from the thank you pile. Yeah, I'm literally pulling out a boost here. I have a 50 euro boost here in my hand. If you remember from last episode, Listener Pavel, who is a big NixOS fan, was on the train and put NixOS on his laptop

but realized one of his essential work pieces of software wasn't packaged in Nix. And Listener Craft Nix answered his bug bounty in our own very own Matrix Nix Nerds room. And so I have collected the bounty and will put it in the JB pot where appropriate. I mean, it's currently a euro, so we'll have to do some magic to get it in the right place.

Thank you, Craftnix, for the boost. That's great. Thank you, Craftnix. I'll pull out one, too, from the thank you pile. The Golden Dragon, the show mascot. He came in with a boost this week. Long time no boost. I hope that Brent's home

will be okay. I'm also trying to figure out Oak Note, which is a system that sort of automatically schedules boosts since I run my own Umbral now. I hope to get back

to regular boosting. So Brent, I know you mentioned your home didn't burn down, but as far as you know, everything is okay there. Everything's good. I've been checking in the last few days, and it seems like you know, those forest firefighters, they

kind of know what they're doing. They did a bunch of prescribed burning, and then the fire has not expanded. So it seems like the evacuation notices are going down, and I mean, a bunch of other fires popped up elsewhere near us, but not in a threatening kind of way. So I think we might be near the end here.

And maybe, potentially, the best news possible of all of that is it didn't interrupt your Starlink delivery. Yeah, you're right. It did arrive. I hinted to my brother who's there. I said, hey, if you want to get this up and running while I'm not there, you go for it. But he didn't take the bait. So I don't know. I guess we'll have to figure it out when I'm back. The question here is, I think we have a challenge. Do you think there's enough time between you getting home and our next show that you can be on? You can be on Starling. Oh, Wes. If you just did the base, turn it on and just connect to the Wi-Fi access point.

That's a two minute setup process. So that would be feasible. Now, integrating it with the rest of the network, that's where that's insert your own amount of random time takes place. But it runs like a little open WRT router with a good little processor in there and a decent little antenna. So it isn't a bad router if you don't have one and you don't have Wi-Fi. So for folks that are just really getting their first Internet, it works, right? If you needed to slam something together in five minutes, you can do it. You're making this too easy on him.

You know, the way to get a head start is you're going to need the Starlink app. You should probably go create an account if you haven't already and get that signed into the Starlink app. So that way, when you got to do all the setup, you're not fiddling with the account creation. Well, it sounds like we've got ourselves a challenge, don't we? Thank you, everybody who boosted in the support. It really matters because it validates our approach to try to lean into making the audience the biggest customer instead of going with some dynamic ad platform. And that platform becomes our biggest customer because it doesn't matter what the platform is. The content has to be altered in order to be acceptable by the platform. An example of that. And I, even though I own my

own business and we are on this path, I still am a victim of this because I say certain things and I play certain things before I start the commercial streams. And then once I'm on YouTube and Twitch and Ustream and Twitter, I have to self-censor. And it's fine. It's not like it's some big loss. It's not like you're all missing out on some brilliance or some artistic expression. But I do alter what we play, what we say, what we show. I do. I have to in order to be compliant with those platforms. And whenever you join a platform that's big like that, especially one like a dynamic ad platform that is directly responsible for a big portion of your revenue, you have no choice but to be compliant. And now with the audience and their support, they're our biggest customer. And that's exactly how I want things oriented.

And this week, we really felt the love. We had 19 total boosters across 25 boost total. So some multiple boosters in there was really, the love. We had 19 total boosters across 25 boosts total. So some multiple boosters in there was really, really awesome. And I am very happy to say that we got 1,104,179,000 something sats, million sats into the show. It's such a big number. 1,104,179 sats. How about that across 19 boosters, we got to 1 million this episode. That's the kind of value that really can actually go to a significant way to funding the stuff we need to make the show possible, which is just so exciting to see. And the great thing is, it's like it goes directly to the guys, too. And to Drew, it goes directly to the developers of some of the podcasting to apps and it goes to the podcast index to support what they're doing all directly.

apps and it goes to the podcast index to support what they're doing all directly, right? They don't have to wait for me to do accounts receiving and get the payments from the sponsors in six months and then make sure all the accounts are balanced and then send out payments over PayPal. And then they log into their PayPal and transfer it to their bank account. If their PayPal account doesn't get shut down, none of that. When you boost, it immediately goes to Wes's wallet. It immediately goes to Brent's wallet. It immediately goes to Brent's wallet. It immediately goes to Drew's wallet. It immediately goes to those developers. It's in their wallet and it's settled. They have it.

It's done. The contract's in the RSS feed. It's brilliant. It's transparent. And you can review it as a listener and you can see it. And I love that system. If you want to boost and support the show, you got two paths. You can keep your podcast app and just get Albie.

Get Albie.com. Top it off with like the cash app or directly, then head on over to the podcast index. I'll put links to this in the show notes. You can buy Linux unplugged over there. You can boost in once you got Albie right from their entry right there on the web. It's beautiful. If you're ready to try out the new hotness like Podverse or Fountain or Castomatic,

we're going to be playing around with new features and you can enjoy the new things like cloud chapters, transcripts, and boosts, of course, and a lot more like live support. New podcast apps dot com. Go grab one, put some stats in there and send a boost in. We love it. Boosting is love and we appreciate it. And we hope you appreciate this pick that Mr. Westpain found. What if I told you you were you were trying to find files on your file system all wrong, Chris? I would believe you because I've been doing it old ways for a long time. I got me my update DB and my locate west and it's great. Okay, well, that does work, but that's kind of cheating, right? Because you're building yourself an index to go consult from. What if you're on some system,

you don't know what you need to find, but you got to go find it? Well, there's plenty of good stuff. There's GNU Find, of course. There's FD. There's a lot of tools in this. But you might want to check out BFS, especially after BFS 3.0 was released this month. And unlike other find tools, BFS does breadth-first searching rather than depth-first searching. And those are sort of the two of the the high level ways when you're trying to walk through a tree of directories is, you know, if you're in a folder, you've got several folders, sub folders in there,

and you're trying to find some files, you know, Python source code files or files that have the word Linux unplugged in them, or, you know, whatever it might happen to be, you kind of got to decide in what order are you going to walk through that. And one way you can do it is depth first, where you just pick the first folder and you keep going and you recurse down and down and down until you've gotten as far down as you can go. And then you go back up the tree. And the other way is breadth first. And the author of BFS argues that breadth first is actually kind of what you want, because most interesting files tend to be kind of close to the top, whereas most actual files, the whole bulk of the files, are lower. And if you think about all the library files, other stuff you don't see, like Python modules and all these nested directories,

whereas you probably are trying to find some stuff that are maybe a couple layers deep in some text files you wrote, or in your directory where you clone source code out, or that kind of thing. directory where you clone source code out or that kind of thing. And one thing that really plays nicely with this is when you're doing a breadth-first search, you can search all those top-level directories at the same time. And with BFS 3.0, there's asynchronous parallel directory traversal, which makes it, at least according to the author, the fastest find yet. I believe it. That sounds wicked fast.

You combine that with new high-end MVMe storage. Woo! You're finding your files so quick, you're going to save minutes on your life. You're going to save minutes. Wes Payne, you just gave people hours of total life back. That's what you did this week. I like to help. It also plays really nicely with FZF, the fuzzy finder.

And because you're doing breadth first, it's really good for doing tab completion I like to help. It also plays really nicely with FZF, the fuzzy finder. And because you're doing breadth first, it's really good for doing tab completion because you're trying to complete stuff, tab complete stuff right at the top layers. And for that use case, BFS is about 430 times faster than GNU Find. Wow. That is. Now, it is packaged in Nix, although it looks like the Nix packages package is a little bit behind. This is still a pretty new 3.0, but stay tuned. Something tells me that'll get updated sooner rather than later.

Yeah, tends to. All right, if you want to suggest a pick, you can always go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and email us in, of course. Boosted in. We always love getting your feedback over there. We read it all, even if it doesn't get on the show. We're checking that inbox. We're reading the feedback. We're incorporating it into the show, and we read it all even if it doesn't get on the show we're checking that inbox we're reading the feedback we're incorporating it into the show and we appreciate it and don't forget linux fest

northwest it's going to sneak up on you sooner than you expect and we want to see you there it's going to be a big event for details you can go to linuxfestnorthwest.org october 20th through the 22nd at the bellingham Technical College in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Just as the trees are changing color, the cool, brisk and warm days. It's such a beautiful time in the Pacific Northwest. We'd love to have you here. And I'll cook you a dog or something to come see Jupes. Say hi to the wife and kids. Say hi to Brent and Wes. Be a good time. LinuxFestNorthwest.org for details on that. And don't forget, we're also soliciting your privacy tools, tips, things like that. Slight router.

Choice. Choice right there. And I'd also like to know what you think about the GNOME window manager ideas. I think I'm a little bit in the minority overall with the reaction I read online. I'm looking forward to the changes. A lot of what i read online i've seen some skepticism but maybe you feel differently something tells us uh we'll be trying them here on the show a little bit before they're ready yes with an open mind of course with

an open mind of course we'd love to have you join us live but we will not be live next sunday so i will have to say you'll have to join us in two weeks, which will be over at jblive.tv. We do it on Sundays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. But we will be in the feed, perhaps slightly later than usual. But we will be in the feed, of course. Linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe for that. Links to what we talked about today are over at Linuxunplugged.com slash 521. And go check out the self-hosted podcast and a bunch of other great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash five, two, one, and go check out the self hosted podcast and a bunch of other great shows

over at Jupiter broadcasting.com like the Coda radio program, which is always a hoot. 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. Nat, I noticed in the chat room, you're in the mobile room too, I noticed that you were saying there is like a go-to Nix mail server setup. I thought so, but I don't know anything about it. Yeah, I've never done it, but it does exist.

That is probably something to check out. Maybe that's the way to go. Honestly, if I was going to run mission-critical infrastructure, I would definitely run it on Nix now. I'm going to redo one day our Bitcoin node and all of that onto Nix, and then it's just going to be more and more things going to be on Nix. Darn right.

Maybe it's time to check out the mail server project, too.