LINUX Unplugged - 523: Ride the Rhino

Episode Date: August 13, 2023

We're trying out Rhino Linux—a unique take on rolling Ubuntu with AUR-like powers and other surprises.

This topic has me wondering, I just want to ask you two boys, if Ubuntu, say years ago, had developed their own rolling distro, do you think it might have kept you on Ubuntu proper if there was an official Ubuntu rolling release? Not on my, I don't know, play or like primary workstation, you know, like my Linux-ing environment, but for supplemental systems, maybe a workstation where I do a lot of stuff with containers or virtual machines, yeah, it's kind of compelling. I think we'd use it on some of our Ubuntu-based servers. Yeah. What about you, Brent? Do you think it might have kept you around?

Because I know one of the things that drew you to Tomboweed is the rolling aspect. I think I definitely would have switched to it because that's the exact trajectory I took without having an Ubuntu-based option. So I think they missed out on grabbing me there. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, meet the first official release of Rhino Linux. It's a rolling Ubuntu distro with some very special tricks. We'll dig into what they're doing differently that's kind of next generation, and then we'll round out the shows with some boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So let's say good morning to our friends over at tailscale.com slash unplugged.

Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. It builds out a flat mesh network where you can talk to all your machines directly. Protected by WireGuard. We love it. It's going to change your networking game. Go say good morning. Try it out for 100 devices for free at tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. And time-appropriate greetings to our mumble room. Hello, Virtual Lug. Hello. Hello, Wes. Hey, Wes, and hello, Bones. Hello. It's nice to be back with you. We missed you last week. We were pre-recording,

and now we're back together again. That feels right. Live streaming like we were meant to. So we want to talk about Rhino Linux this week. It's gotten a lot of attention because it just left beta. Now, if this sounds familiar, you might remember that it almost started as a bit of a lark on the Ubuntu podcast as a script to kind of ride Ubuntu development channel. You know, it's been about a year and the team has been working for a solid 10 months on developing this into its own unique distribution. And here's how they pitch it. They say, Rhino Linux reinvents the Ubuntu experience as a rolling release distribution atop a stable desktop environment.

And then they have Packstall at the very heart of the distribution that provides essential packages such as the Linux kernel, Firefox, and Rhino Linux-specific applications and theming, which we'll get into in a little bit. And they make it available for various ARM devices, including generic ARM, Raspberry Pi, the Pine devices, and of course they make it available for x86 devices. And I'm curious, when this idea was pitched to you guys what was your

very first impressions where did you roll your eyes were you immediately interested when you heard about rhino linux uh okay interested kind of for the reasons you were hitting on in the pre show but also skeptical and i don't know i felt like enough of a toy that i felt like i could you know it was interesting to read about glad that people were playing with it, but kind of could leave it there. Yeah, my very first impression before digging into it was exactly that, skeptical and thinking, oh yeah, this is just another project that's trying to turn Ubuntu into something it's not. And I think it's safe to say that feeling changed for all the reasons we'll explore. Yeah was about there as well i think that kind of something you guys summarize kind of where i was at and i have a theory that i've kind of been

chewing on in the back of my mind that i feel like the next generation of distributions are building a suite of tooling around them arch really showed the way with this with the aur arch really showed the way with this with the aur and nix os takes it to a whole other degree and there's other projects out there with similar kind of ideas and what rhino is doing is they have some secret sauce with their meta package manager called rhino package and their pack stall so we have a couple of different tools here so let let's start with PaxTol. That's basically AUR for Ubuntu. In fact, I'm fairly positive you can install this on just Ubuntu, and you can have an AUR-like experience.

Yeah, I mean, what's impressive about a lot of this stuff is it's just some nice shell scripts. Like, you go take a look at the PaxTol repo, and you'll go see PaxDoll, the program, a big old command line application that really, I mean, looks great, works well, it's very quick, it's minimal. Pulls in the right tool. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and one of the things it'll do is it can install files, essentially, paraphrasing, but right from a GitHub repo. It can look at what's there based on that build-a-deb package and install that, and then you can, like I installed NeoFetch from the GitHub repo. It can look at what's there based on that build a dev package and install that. And then you can, I installed NeoFetch from the GitHub repo. And so it's as fresh as NeoFetch gets. And that's pretty nice.

Yeah, they say they support binary. So like you can get Firefox-bin this way, which just downloads the tarball you get if you go to Mozilla's website and go download Firefox. And then like a package manager should, it keeps it up to date. Right.

Keeps it current. Or you can use Git, AppImage. You can build stuff. And of like a package manager should, it keeps it up to date. Or you can use Git, AppImage, you can build stuff, and of course.deb packages too. And the repository is based sort of like Nix packages, so they've taken some learnings from there. And then there's Rhino

Package, which is really part of their special sauce. This is a meta package manager, and this is trying to solve the XKCD problem of too many standards. Rhino package combines app, pack stall, which we just talked about, flat pack, and snap into one UI where you can search, install, uninstall, upgrade, all of those things from one package manager. And they really nail it. So it's one thing to say it. It's another thing to actually use. Now there's a couple of bugs when I was using it, but the output and the way it manages and displays everything and the way it, it gives you choices. It's kind of AUR like

it gives you choices. If you want to review the install script and then it asks you which source you want to pull from, and you can say repository or get or flat pack or snap and then it goes off and it does its thing and it doesn't bother you after that and then it just keeps it current from there and so as a user you don't really have to worry did they snap this did they flat pack this does is it a deb you could just choose the defaults you could be it'll just tell you what your options are and you can be picky at that point it it actually does the job they set out to do it's nice too because i mean i find myself between the you, whatever repositories are available by default for just base-level tooling, and then, you know, the sort of essential core flatpaks that get me my, you know, communications platforms and apps and packaged Electron apps and all that kind of garbage on the system. It always feels like two separate endeavors.

of garbage on the system but it always feels like two separate endeavors um it's nice to have that presented as a semi-unified front end at least in the sense where i kind of do just want to update things i want to install it and um for the most part i don't care or the the option i want is the default yeah like neo fetch i just want the or you or yt dlp i just want the, or YTDLP, I just want the latest one, whichever package format gets that to me, fine. And this just takes care of that. When I was saying that theory I'm chewing on about like an ecosystem kind of, or a suite of tools, they have that here. You could create, it's really easy to create a quick repository for Rhino, and now you can get something installed on your rolling ubuntu base like they have that next level of tooling that distributions didn't used to provide that is now becoming more common with the modern distributions they're launching with some of that right out of the gate with rhino and so if a community you know digs their teeth into this there's a lot for them to work with there's a lot for them to build with that rhino comes with and i think that's worth underscoring because if you look at the uphill battle for new distributions and what they can provide to get people to adopt it's that tooling where people can manage their systems and you know maybe have the dream one day of an ubuntu rolling workstation that you use for development or you

use for managing your systems and if rhino brings in this extra tooling on top of that, the community can then use to build value on top of that. It could really kind of take off. It could really kind of create its own little ecosystem. Yeah, that's what I was kind of impressed with so far, just looking at the PaxDoll available packages, you know. Let's see. I think I was looking here.

It's not the perfect measure, but in their Paxdal programs repo, there's 459 at least packages in there. And it's a wide array of options, a lot of popular software, there's stuff like Pipewire in there. And it's very similar to the kind of script you'd write, like the package build from Arches AUR. It's pretty simple.

If it's the kind of program that is often installed and built for Linux, you know, like a make install or just has a build file that tells you how to build it, it's pretty natural to translate that. Now, it doesn't have anything anywhere near the fancy stuff of Nix or anything.

But for power users, developers, people who might be interested in having a rolling Ubuntu that has more up-to-date things and cares about what software and having up-to-date software, having that low friction to just be like, okay, well, maybe it's not there yet, but look, I can just copy this simple looking file from an app that's in there already pretty easily get going myself. Wes, what's your sense in that regard of the possibility of even taking some of those package files from the AUR and just converting them into this new pack style format? Like, should those two projects think about maybe in the future becoming one? Or is it just one piggybacking off the other? Are they two separate, very separate things. I suppose they probably have some different underlying, you know, the systems they're planned to build on top of are different.

PaxDolls definitely, you know, exists in a post-AUR world. So I think they've made some different choices, have some different priorities, probably also are trying to support a wider and different array of things than the sort of Arch simplicity would care to go along with. But you're right. There might be, you might be able to, maybe not entirely automated, but perhaps entirely automated or with the help of AI

or just a handy script. Imagine you could move a lot of things over pretty easily. So there's some of the tooling. And to their credit, they also have some documentation around this stuff, which you can go read

and wrap your head around how these things work. It's thin, but it's there and it gets you what you need to know and then their kind of last bit of special sauce other than the fact that it's a rolling ubuntu release is they have what they call the unicorn desktop they say it has the look and feel of genome with an xfce base and if we showed you a screenshot and we'll have links in the show notes, of this desktop, you would look at it, and I think you would probably think it is GNOME 3. They have a dock along the side. They've implemented a lot of the same themes, and they've used ULauncher as the launcher, which is a fantastic fast launcher.

And they have a look and feel that is very, very modern with vertical workspaces. And because it's XFCE, it'szing fast it's it's a nice base uh wes you you're running it right now and uh i mean it was your first experience like mine says well it's really snappy it really hauls oh yeah no for sure what was nice is i started using it in a vm and then kind of upgraded to running it on my full system and it performed well in both you know it just kind of fit I didn't feel like I was sacrificing anything it's not like the flashiest environment in terms of like you know we know animations or anything like that but the trade off there is it still looks nice and things just pop up and disappear when you want them to yeah

yeah it's it's it's a really solid implementation and and we have a lot of thoughts. We all three used it for the week, and we want to share those with you. And we'll have some links in the show notes, too, if you get interested to their quick start guide and their ISO builder. Linode.com slash unplugged. Head on over there to get $100 in 60-day credit. It's a great way to support the show, and it's what we use for everything that we host in the cloud i just recently spun up an ipfs podcasting note i'll tell you more about that in a bit but you got to go check out the exciting news because linode is now part of akamai yeah that akamai all the tools that we love with linode like their awesome cloud interface the api that's well documented in the command line client that's so handy. All those things, the documentation, the guides,

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Go to linode.com slash unplug today to learn how Linode, now Akamai, can help scale your applications from the edge and to the cloud. That's linode.com slash unplug. Well, I gave it a spin this week and, well, I found some bugs, but that's not, I don't think that's too surprising. I mean, this project is relatively, I'd say relatively new, and it's a really cool thing they're doing. One of the bugs I ran into, though, I was a little disappointed.

I always try to install these systems with some encryption on the back end, good old Lux encryption. And one of the sneaky reasons I do that is because often actually it can be broken. And this time around, I just could never get the system booting. It just, it would set it up and I was able to unlock the original crypt when booting, but then it just, the system never actually found it. And I complained about it. There's just probably a slight configuration, something going on there. I don't know if that's Ubuntu's fault or if it's Rhino's fault, but there's a little something there. But that led me to something else that I think was a little discouraging because I thought, oh, well, this is a great opportunity for me to get involved and write maybe a little issue to try to help the project. Good man.

You know, this is an exciting project. I'd love to get involved even in small little ways. But I had a really hard time finding a bug tracker. I eventually did find one on their website, rhinolytics.org slash tracker. But I can't really tell what the back end is here. They kind of suggest, you know, you can either join the discord or send a message in the relevant channels or use a form, which I guess I wasn't expecting. I was expecting to have, you know, GitHub trackers and things like that. So I'm curious about that design decision, but it actually ended up meaning that I kind of gave up with, with issuing, you know, a bug report and

trying to help, which, you know, the project is relatively small, but I hope they can find a way to make it maybe a little bit more friendly. I'm curious if you guys tried that at all. Did you? I don't know. Is it just me? This form they're using to submit the bug, it's interesting, and I understand the motivation. So it's using crippad.fr, and it takes a moment to load. It has to build its whole UIi and um i can i can tell they're doing this because they want certain information that they just need to know like

architecture what version are you on when did this occur they have certain questions that they want you to answer before you can submit it just to sort of filter it out and you know probably differentiate signal from noise but it doesn't really lend itself to the average sort of everyday go to github open an issue workflow that thousands of users are now trained to do and when you introduce friction like that and you kind of deviate from the norm sometimes for the better but when you do there will be friction you will lose some people it's just the nature of the beast so yeah i get it seven questions you have to answer in order to submit it to well and the uh the page on their website that kind of leads you to this tracker uh says past issues and they've only

got about four that were mentioned so i'd maybe they should look at that i think there is a huge community of people who are using you know git labs and githubs and things like that it's pretty well established and i think they're using it for development as well if i you know did my investigations right so i'm just curious about that choice and i it looks like the the project is very discord focused for discussion and i could totally understand for a small team inevitably build a workflow around discussing bugs in those channels and so you just kind of tell other people yeah join our discord to report an issue and it just seems natural because you've been using it all along but when the project gets to a next level and people start taking an interest some of them don't want to play around with Discord.

You know, they want to file a quick bug because it turns out the home encryption option is busted. They don't really want to set up Discord. And I get, though, when it's a small team, why they would lean that way. So you've seen a lot of projects. They used to try to make public slacks. Remember, that was a fad for a while. Yeah, that's all died off now. But that's good, though.

I mean, keep an eye on it, Brent. So you bumped into some bugs, had some issues submitting those. Yeah, I would say nothing major. Like that encryption thing is going to hit a small percentage of users. And I'm sure it's fixable if I wanted to dive into it a little bit more to just, you know, change a configuration file here or there. So I think likely it's maybe not even the project, maybe it's on the Ubuntu side, but it's something that, you know, needs a little attention. So then I went and installed it like usual and same reaction as you guys, super snappy, even in a vm and i was very very impressed especially by the interface i

will admit i haven't used xfce in quite a while and i was used to a very different paradigm and this i had to kind of check three times through our notes to make sure this was actually xfce very polished and really really beautiful yeah and it's nice because it's modern right everything's really new in there you got a pretty decent recent linux kernel in there you've got really nice up-to-date themes like yaroo dark and elementary xfce darker and then they clearly understand the xfce desktop environment and know how to massage it and combining it with Ulauncher. That's just, that's a recipe for success with XFCE. That's what we do here. We have one XFCE system, Ulauncher. It really wasn't until I tried to do a little bit more or wanted sort of naturally to do a little bit more fancy window management stuff that I was like,

oh, right, XFCE. Okay, that's where this is going to fall down. But I mean, that took me a little while to get there. You know where I could really see this be awesome is i always dream about like a a cloud-based desktop instance this would be great for that yes and a lot of times i only use them a few times a year and so it's like by the time i go to use them it's like oh a whole new release is easy snapshots too sort of snapshot it if you have any issues. And the XFCE desktop works fantastic in a remote session. So it just, I mean, this could be the cloud desktop OS for me. So Wes, you gave it a go. I know you got to play around with some of the tooling.

Yeah, I'm impressed with, you know, you kind of touched on all the tools they're using and providing and just exist now in the Linux ecosystem. And it kind of reminds me of like how far a small team of dedicated folks can really go because of that. You know, like the installers were using a lot of the Calamari stuff, which a lot of distros can just sort of take advantage and don't have to reinvent the wheel. The builder for the image building system uses LiveBuild, which was created by Debian. And then there's a bunch of shell scripts for automation, which came from vanilla OS.

So it's just kind of neat to see all these different pieces combined together into what still feels like a nice system. I do think I'm kind of spoiled by like the Nix, the Nix approach of, you know, the isolation, the way it kind of layers on top in an immutable and in light fashion. So I'm, I wonder long-term, isolation the way it kind of layers on top in an immutable and in light fashion so i'm i wonder

long term what's it like to just install in the apt and d package sense and with paxtal how well does all that mesh on a single system if i'm just pulling in random stuff from git and from some deb packages and from the apt repos and then those are getting rolling updates and or what happens if you're pulling it from a repo, a GitHub repo that goes away? How does it? Those are all kind of like longer term. As you use it, you discover that kind of stuff.

We also kind of had questions around, and I think, Wes, you had one of the better phrasings of the question of sort of what's the story around the security of the source packages, right? Because it's based on Ubuntu development's branch, and Canonical isn't really targeting that branch for production use. I'm not even sure what their security policies are. You had articulated some questions around that. Yeah, I mean, I wonder if you're using stuff in a non-standard way,

are you going to run into edge cases that just didn't get ironed out? Or does the process assume that because you're building traditionally towards these ironed out, you know, like coherently tested packages, does that mean that there's, you know, flux or changes that need to be integrated or plan to be integrated that

wouldn't happen if you were aligned on shipping more vanilla packages from the start? Yeah. I think think you know maybe that's the role of the team though right is to sort of be that buffer that sort of susses that stuff out before they ship it to their repo at least i think at least with pax doll and co you know you have access to all the get things so you could um you you wouldn't have access to maybe like a easy patched stable release of something but you could roll forward for the key stuff that you like are really trying to track for security yeah yeah it's it seems like if the team can keep it going and they can catch that kind of stuff where canonical is throwing something in there maybe a semi-broken state because they know another thing's going to be coming along that

fixes it and they're not shipping until that happens. Like if they can catch those types of edge cases and scenarios before it ships to end users and act as that buffer and they can keep it up at a, you know, pretty high clip that I think will be the recipe for success. I would imagine in that process, they could align with canonical a little bit because if they're, you know, finding bugs or have an incentive to try to fix them a little sooner in the pipeline it could be a relationship there as well i i don't think it's going to happen i don't think this is the way canonical works but i think they should lean into this so hard because the real hard truth is is there are is more than a handful of canonical employees that daily drive arch even at canonical's

offices and a lot of the people they hire that are Arch, even at Canonical's offices. And a lot of the people they hire that are in the Linux space that they bring on are Arch users that they then are asking to switch to Ubuntu. And there is a clear marketplace for something like this, for the higher end developers and workstation users that do play an important role in Ubuntu's user base. And if this was looked upon as a blessed project, I think it would bring a lot of modern and, you know, kind of a new light on the, like a new option for Ubuntu users that's sort of like the top tier aspire tier.

This is like the, this is the tier of Ubuntu you kind of aspire to. And when you become like an Ubuntu baller, you know, you go to this rolling tier with all these extra tooling and, you you know you can just live out your ubuntu bearded life there but without it without something like this they're bleeding even their own employees so it's they got it but i i just my gut tells me that because it's not on board with snaps because it enables flat packs and github installs and hey you can enable snaps you know that's true part of the integrated package yeah it's it's a comprehensive set of tools i really like that there's a lot there for the community to sink their teeth into if it gets

good traction uh by my count it's like a team of five which is a sizable little number for this type of project but it is that high bus factor number as well. There's a lot of bus factor there. How many in, say, the Sahi team, for instance? Depending on how you count it, I think three or so or four. It depends on if you count some people twice. Not uncommon for a project trying to do something like this. Yeah, in some ways, there's a law in software development where you add more bodies and it actually just slows things down. And if you consider that,

say, 70% of the work or more is being done by Debian, and then, you know, somewhere in that range, another huge slice of the pie is being done by Canonical, then they can kind of take that leading edge and then that team of five

can kind of harness it into this. It's interesting noticing, like, kind of all playing, like, the different different hats you know that you got the the lead developer of pax dolls helping out with like with a bunch of stuff and then someone got involved primarily to do like the branding and then ended up having a bunch of expertise helping getting all the image builds going yeah so it is it seems like an exciting project you can tell there's a lot of energy some of the folks behind it had already been, you know, using scripts or other approaches to use Ubuntu development releases already.

Right. That's really kind of how this started. Yeah, exactly. So that part at least sort of buffers my fears I stated earlier. Like it probably, it's probably a lot of potential places it could go wrong, but also in practice, it probably works pretty well. I think it is worth just giving a little airtime to Brent's concern there. You had a couple of questions in your last one there, Brent, was how do we know if we consider this more or less secure, right? Well, and also from a stability point of view,

because my experience with rolling releases, which I'm challenging currently on my current system here on Tumbleweed is, you know, eventually they just kind of start breaking in little pieces because with a rolling release, you know, there's these edge cases that come in or you haven't updated in three months because you're a, you know, bad administrator of your own system. And then all of a sudden you update and there's some weird things along that path. But it seems to me like the development branch in Ubuntu was never really meant to be used like this, where, say, something like Arch or Tumbleweed was designed to be released this way. So I guess we need a long-term sort of review of this

to see how stable it is over time. You know, we have a community behind it. I think so. There you go. You got yourself a new rolling disc. I want to sign in this week. Oh, look what I did. Also, I'd be open to hearing the development team's thoughts on that.

We did reach out via Matrix, but didn't hear back before we sat down to record. You should have tried Discord. I guess so. Yeah, I guess so. I probably should have. You know, I think we have some work to do, though, because I'd say, I think you agree, but my rolling experience is somewhat the opposite of Brent's. Oh, yeah.

I was going to mention that. You're right. Thank you. Most stable long-lived systems have been. Yeah, rolling. I mean, I do agree there's been times where I've had to do a little fix here and there. Oh, of course. That's just part of the maintenance.

You know, my go-to example is this 1804 install that has been upgraded over the years to current Ubuntu. You know, my go-to example is this 1804 install that has been upgraded over the years to current Ubuntu. And at least twice a year, grub or something breaks, and I end up having to recover it. And they're all based on LTSs. Yeah. So it happens to any long-term install. Well, except for Linux.

Yeah, that said, I've learned the most about Linux running rolling releases. I mean, there's a caveat, you know, if you want to a little because you don't have the resources like the ArchWiki, for instance, so that when things do go slightly awry, where do you turn for a little advice? That's true, but there is so much Ubuntu documentation. I grant you this, you know, you'd be on a really leading edge, so you'd have less documentation, but there's so much community around Ubuntu. I mean, that's really truly one of the benefits of using Ubuntu. You might then need to know, you probably want to have some ideas of how it works if you're going to use it, because you might then want to understand, am I getting this from the GitHub

directly from the project, or am I getting the Ubuntu version from somewhere? Probably worth reviewing the documentation links and the quick start guide that we have, because it is a little bit different beast with some powerful tools, but the documentation isn't super thick you'll get through in a couple of minutes and i think you're probably going to have a good time collide.com slash unplugged have you ever noticed how most data breaches these days or hacks tend to revolve around one common factor

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It's collide dot com slash unplugged. Well, as you all know, I've recently returned from Berlin. return from berlin but while there this time around since i screwed it up my first time back in march i actually was able to attend the nixos meetup that happens at sea base that like alien underground bunker crashed space station yeah maker hacker space that is such a great place to be in uh this time i made it and i was like early well i thought i was but chris you guys have to experience this i know i said this exact same thing i know i can tell i do though i'm such a spaceship star trek you know sci-fi nerd too you know i just love it well what's really great about it is to get to the front door which I shouldn't call it a front door because it's like a really

hidden door that if you are going there for the first time, you'll never find. So if you don't know, you can't even find the entrance. Well, that's, I think, part of the charm, right? You need to be guided by another member into the space. And that actually is a lovely experience in many ways. That's fun. Yeah. This time around, though, I wasn't arriving in the dark. So that was nice. And I was arriving sort of right at golden hour and, you know, path to get there.

You have to walk along the river and there's like a train on the other side of the river just going by. It's very, very, very Berlin-esque, let's call it. But just as I got there, it's just like such a friendly environment. And so I met some new people. Christian is someone I met there. And I think we did a pretty good job at converting him into a new listener. But I grabbed a few clips that I thought I'd share. at converting him into a new listener, but I grabbed a few clips that I thought I'd share. Well, I'm here at CBase,

and I made it to the NixOS meetup this time, but I'm meeting some new friends. Can you introduce yourself and give us an idea of where we are and what we're doing? Yeah, sure. Hi, I'm Christian. I'm a software developer located in Berlin. So software developing is my day job. I come to CBase like every week by now.

And I started like half a year ago. A friend pulled me in and asked me to go to the NixOS meetup since we are both using NixOS. to the NixOS meetup since we are both using NixOS. And yeah, it just caught us. And it's so nice to be around here. Lovely. And how would you describe CBase if you had to describe it in a few sentences?

Well, CBase is just a bunch of nerds sitting together, having a good time. And you can ask every freaking question. Like, the dumber, the better. So if you have problems with your NixOS or if you struggle to install Linux all along, just come to CBase. You'll probably find someone to give you a good advice lovely and so i think this particular nixos meetup is a little different because we're sat outside there's the river to our you know to your back and the trains are going by it's actually a lovely scene there are laptops everywhere on all the picnic tables and tons of people just hanging out. I would imagine that's a little different for an XOS meetup, usually not outside.

So actually not. So actually it's like in the winter we get inside, but in the summer it's nicer out here. So we sit outside, but of course in front of our laptops. Lovely. And so you have something to show us. Can you walk us through what you're about to show us and then give us an idea of what it solves for you? Yeah, okay.

So about three years ago by now, I started tinkering with my operating system. By then it was Arch, now it is NixOS. And so I took my operating system, plugged on a window manager like sway and some other stuff and i designed the whole system just to use as much screen space of a laptop as possible because like if you look at max or mega os or windows they there are always bars everywhere taking up screen space. So I decided no screen space for bars and put everything of these bars inside of a launcher.

You probably know Spotlight Search of Mac OS. Think Spotlight Search but extend it by all the stuff you normally would have in your bars, like switching windows, opening applications, even using your clock. And yeah, much more, as far as you can think. So I took a launcher system by System76. They built this backend for desktop launchers. And it's extendable and you can build plugins for it. So I built a bunch of plugins for it.

And now I have this launcher, which basically can do everything that your boss normally would. Nice. And how long have you been working on this? So the system itself, like, probably three years by now. And on Nexo S, like, one year. And the launcher, like, half a year. Can you tell me why you chose something from System76 that they were building specifically? Because I would imagine it wasn't the only option out there.

So before, I used Rofi with a bunch of plugins, but it started getting slower and slower. And so I looked for a new option, and actually someone from CBase introduced me to the solution from System76. And it's quite nice, actually. And it's open source. So I contribute a bunch of fixes and it's cool. Lovely.

Well, thank you from everyone for doing that, you know, doing your little part to help everyone out. That's so great that he could customize it and extend it the way he wants. And, you know, it just makes me smile that we have the type in our audience. It's like, I want to maximize this laptop screen space, the most screen space possible. Put the clock in the launcher. It was so impressive. Like I, I, it was one of those moments, Chris, you've definitely been here where he's like, Oh yeah, here, I'll just show you. I was like, wait, wait, wait, let me get the recorder out. Yep. And, uh, it was, yeah, really neat to see in person. I, um, recorded another little clip that maybe we'll play in the post show or for the members,

uh, that he just dives in a little bit about what this can do, but can the launcher can bring up like your git repositories if you want if you want to jump into them really quickly and there's some really cool features there so it's a neat neat project definitely we've linked to his repository which which you may have noticed is about 44.3 percent rust based yeah it's also got a nix flake, so it seems like it should be pretty easy to try. Oh, boy. Talk about our two favorite flavors put together. Christian is our kind of people. That said, we had other friends join to the meetup, which was really, really fun.

So some familiar faces. But it didn't really go that well for us. Okay, well, I have a little story. I brought my laptop to get fixed because the hinges were a little not quite right. But I didn't have any tools. But this fine gentleman to my left brought some tools. Can you introduce yourself again? We met last time I was here, but you're here again. Sure. My name is Sandro. I am a software developer, like I guess most people here. So, yeah, I met Brent the last time he was in Berlin. And today he asked me to bring some tools and it turns out more people actually needed them.

Yeah, so I brought my laptop. We had it half apart and decided maybe outside on a picnic table in the dark wasn't quite the right place to take it all apart. But Pavel, your laptop is blinking beside me. The keyboard light is coming on and off. What is happening here? Yeah, I had lots of plans and projects to think with on the Nixos meetup. But unfortunately, my laptop won't turn on at all. And we took it apart and believe it may be a power

issue? Is that what you think? I think it's power cycling all the time, so that's why the keyboard's blinking. And yeah, we're out of ideas, basically. I put NixOS on it a few days ago, and now I will probably have to buy a new laptop and redo everything.

But, you know, we have great conversations here, so no time lost. I love how you have a sticker on your blinking laptop that just says, should be fine. It's the LTT sticker, should be fine. Goes nice with all my other stickers, JB stickers on my servers. Big fan.

Lovely. And how come you don't have your laptop out? What happened over here? So yeah, I brought a laptop, but unfortunately when I snatched my things, when I was running late, I took the wrong one. So, yeah, I brought my works laptop.

So, yeah, with three people without one functioning laptop. We have failed the NixOS meetup. Maybe next time. I mean, you know what, Brett? It happens. I mean, a perfect adventure, right? I think. So we had a good time, and instead we got a whole tour of Seabase again, which I think is the third tour I go on.

It's different every single time. You know, it depends who's taking you around, and there's so many tales and lots of history. So I would say if you're in the area, you definitely have to check out Seabase. If you're at all interested in NixOS or just hanging out with people every single week on a tuesday they do this nixos meetup so even if you're not into nixos just show up it's a good group of people um as a reminder i think next time maybe i'll have a functioning laptop at the nixos meetup i'm headed back to berlin in sept September and am planning on hosting another one of these lovely JB meetups September 8th. It will likely be at NextCloud again. And the reason I'm in town is for the NextCloud conference, which is happening September 16 to 17. So if you're in the area interested in throwing a lightning talk into that conference, please do. We'd love to have you. Meetup details, of course, at meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. Boys, it's been a while

since I brought out the old soapbox, but I want to take a moment and touch on free software and value for value sustainability and zoom out to the big picture. If you look at the big picture, I don't think it's ridiculous to say that the free software ecosystem lives and dies on ideas. Everything that gets created is an idea. And I have felt for a while now, but I feel more strongly than ever, that one of the roles in that, I guess, ecosystem for Jupyter Broadcasting is consensus generation. Nearly all the companies that we talk about, all the projects, almost all of them listen to the show. Take that in for just a minute. Think about that. We're trying to help those developers, the CTOs who are maybe not actually

super technical, and of course all of the end users. We want everybody to reach a logical consensus, informed logical consensus on the topics we discuss. And sometimes we're having fun, but sometimes it's pretty serious. And I think the history of the show speaks to that. And I think it's kind of obvious, but I'm going to say it. Too much commercial influence on that ecosystem can be toxic. It can encourage certain ideas, hype certain ideas, and suppress other ideas. I have seen this. I know this to my core. And that's really why at great personal expense,

I bought Jupiter Broadcasting back. It meant a lifestyle change for me. That's my choice. That's my contribution. I'm not complaining complaining but i made that life-changing choice because after 18 years of doing this i've come to the unshakable conclusion that a company will do whatever it must to survive and that means the way that works what what ends up happening there is your biggest customer must be made happy or customers depending on how it shakes out and a lot of times, especially in media production, that manifests in really quiet ways, because they don't really want you to know about this uncomfortable truth.

So it's really kind of quiet. And I could give you hundreds of examples, but just going back to most recently, this most recent round of Rocky coverage and Alma coverage and the Red Hat source changes, some of the more vocal and prominent actors in that space have been paid by CIQ, or at least have a long-term ongoing relationship with CIQ.

But they didn't disclose that when they were writing or discussing Rocky Linux. I bought JB back because the only solution is the audience has to be the largest customer so that way the business or i don't know maybe it's a community or it's a team or it's a group or maybe it's an open source project the focus of the content will naturally align to the built-in incentives of the group or the people that are making that content that's just that's just the reality.

And the truth is, right now, it's a really, really tough time in advertising land. If your podcast or your project is made possible through sponsorship, certain lines that would never have been crossed a year ago are being leaped over right now. And I really do hate to say this, but but i was right i warned for more than a year that this pain was coming and i tried to onboard as many people who would listen to me to solutions outside that system but a lot of the content creators out there doubled down on a system that's failing some of the more prominent ones in the podcasting space and those systems they force middlemen they force compromise just not overtly but through the incentives of those systems and having a middleman

and there's always third-party risk for example patreon just went through weeks of high decline rates they moved their payment processor from cal to Dublin to save some money, but that ended up flagging fraud on a bunch of U.S. accounts. Some report as high as 30% decline rate in the U.S. I think they've gotten that from what I read from various content creators down to like 5% now. But imagine that. Just take that in at a moment. When the ad market is drying up and there is so much pain being felt there. Patreon shits the bed.

It's just it's third party risk having them in the middle. And any kind of platform that has responsibilities is going to restrict certain types of content. And because they have incentives and their own strategy taxes, they limit flexibility. One of the reasons we had to leave the Patreon platform is we couldn't deliver the things we wanted to deliver to our audience. They were restricting us. So we're on a path between our memberships and our boost to solve this. But it has to be sustained.

So if you get value from an episode, please consider boosting or becoming a member. If you feel the community got some value and you think that message should be amplified, please consider boosting or becoming a member. If you feel the community got some value and you think that message should be amplified, please consider boosting that episode. That's a great way to say plus one to that message. And of course, support the show. And now it is time for Le Boost. In it, six boosts in with 85,435 sats. Here's some value back for the privacy discussion, which gave me a few new projects to try out.

Also, the amount represents the zip for the closest town in Germany. Did you bring the map? Yeah, got it here right in my back pocket. Atta boy, Wes. Ah, closing in. Yeah, this is a postal code in Erding in the state of Bavaria. Hello, Erding. Thank you for boosting in. And at six, you are our baller this week. Deano boosted in with 23,222 sats. Is that like an upgraded duck? Yeah. Is that like a duck plus one? A mighty duck, perhaps?

I'll give him a McDuck. Things are looking up for all but duck. Thanks for the privacy info in the last episode. I wanted to give my vote for Fastmail. I migrated from Gmail and Fastmail has easily covered my Gmail use. The mobile app works well and the integration with Bitwarden to generate masked emails is awesome. Definitely worth a try. By the way, the last four digits is my postal code. And this is my first boost from Cast-O-Matic. Take care, guys, and please keep doing what you do. While Wes looks it up on the map, I'll just say I did a quick little check in on Cast-O-Matic over the weekend while I was testing some office hours stuff. And

man, is that a nice app. Oh, Cast nice app oh castomatic has got it going on if you're an ios user and you're looking for a really really complete podcasting 2.0 app i really like it okay taking a shot here how about uh a postal code in the netherlands oh perhaps uh near drysdale hello drysdale i'm sure we're getting that right, right? Of course. Right, Wes? Yeah. Hello. Thank you for boosting in. We appreciate it. What I see you wrong. Hero comes in. K-I-R-O-F-M-97-3.

Tacoma, Seattle. Your world. With a row of McDucks, too. Things are looking up for old McDuck. And he's using Podverse to say, last week's demonic boost sum was completely by accident, so I'm sending some positive ducks this time around. Oh, okay. I got that wrong. I was sure you had connived that one. Appreciate it, sir. Thank you.

Retro Penguin boosts in with 28,000 sats. Right on the nose. A team long-time listener, first-time booster. Hey, hey. Thanks for the privacy-focused episode. I wanted to add some things I've run into over the last couple of years in regards to privacy. In my experience, I wasn't able to get NextDNS to work on top of ProtonVPN.

Good to know. Yeah, I could see sometimes, you know, multiple layers like that, they might be fighting each other for control. Pyhole is amazing. A website called TheFirebog has a solid list of block lists that are color-coded with how aggressive they are or how likely they might be to break something. And then if something does break, you can just always add that needed address back in.

Fireblog. I've been wondering where people go to get their lists. Where do you go to get that? So Fireblog sounds like it could be a great one. Thank you, sir. We really appreciate the support. We received 2,000 Satoshis from iraq boosting and from podverse i left giraffeen for the four days i ran it but no tap to pay

was the deal breaker for me i know it's not a privacy friendly service per se but i've become too accustomed to being able to tap my phone to make payments. Yeah, that and Android Auto are the two big ones. Now, I'm not so sad about giving up the Google Tap-to-Pay because the Google Tap-to-Pay is so invasive that it's not really worth the trade-off for me. But on the iPhone, I'm a lot more comfortable with their security model for Tap-to-Pay, and you can integrate it with the Cash app.

So I can take Satoshis can integrate it with the cash app so i can take satoshi's load them into the cash app and then i can go and tap to pay and buy stuff with sats essentially and it's so slick and it's all going over the lighting network instantaneously as i tap to pay and i do miss that deeply with drafting and i'm going to el salvador in november and i'm taking my pies l7 and you know we're paying for everything with sats down there and i'm going to El Salvador in November, and I'm taking my Paizel 7. And, you know, we're paying for everything with SATs down there. And I'm going to be doing a lot of QR code scanning, man. A lot of QR code scanning. Just get that practiced.

But I just am not comfortable with the Google Tap-to-Pay privacy model. So I've been willing to let it go. But, man, do I feel you. That and Android Auto, killers for me. Killers. But i somehow soldier on the golden dragon the show mascot comes in with a row of ducks and he just simply says boost boost uh glad to know about the layers the coin would be 3d printed and a bit thicker than a regular coin oh a 3d printed uh love coin okay i'd love to see an example of that, Dragon. You know, because we've got to do the quality inspection.

High quality products here on the Unplugged Program. You turn Brent loose with it, he finds bugs. No kidding, that's who you send it to. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm in. Hal was right, Boozzen, with 2,100 cents. Hello, sir, using Podverse. What do you mean as privacy as a human right?

Are you saying there should be laws preventing people from collecting information on other people? So if someone was found to be collecting a lot of information about someone else, then they should go to jail? I just think privacy is important and people should learn how to use tools to protect their privacy. I don't think it's wrong to collect info. protect their privacy i don't think it's wrong to collect info when i say privacy is a human right i sort of mean it as by default you should have the right to keep certain things private like you shouldn't it's not it's not something that's granted to you by a company or a state it is something that is a doubt endowed upon you at birth as a human being you have the right to keep certain things private maybe you're just a weirdo or maybe you're a political

dissident and you're bringing the revolution but either way you have the right to have privacy i feel we also exist in a world that makes a bunch of laws and rules around information and what people do with it in terms of intellectual property and all that so i think there's also maybe a reframing where you try to think more of like the information we're generating is something that we should have more yes by default like access and control over and i think in a more explicit way i think it's the key message right is be more aware of what you're putting out there and opt for privacy when you can um it doesn't necessarily mean going off grid per se it just means be more aware of it but you know i think too like for privacy for me it's i'm i'm just kind of trying to bake everything i deploy from the

future going forward with privacy built in self--hosting, that kind of stuff. That's how I kind of look at it. Faraday Fedora boosted in twice with some rows of ducks, which I think might have been maybe unintentional. But even then, thank you. Recently switched my email hosting to Proton. Their VPN also seems pretty solid. The drive, though, is lacking at the moment. There's no auto-sync for Android

and no Linux client. So, fingers crossed, they give it some development love. Well, thank you for the field report. I mean, those are the kind of little details that we need to know and we'll be looking for as you try to slot those things in. I feel like the thing that Proton Drive is really competing with for my use is, why not

just encrypt locally and put it on object storage of choice why do i need a drive why do i need a service i already have like linode object storage and i'm pretty comfortable not only with their privacy settings that they have there but if i just locally encrypt on both ends and decrypt locally and what's stored on the object storage i mean mean, and it's not public, I feel like I don't even need something like ProtonDrive. But I don't know. It's just crazy old Chris. I suppose for folks not hosting their own NextCloud or other option,

and they want access to that, maybe take a quick view of it or edit it or something like that. Or if you're, I guess, maybe the implication is on Windows or Mac, it does sync. That could be handy. I would imagine too like a single login for all your privacy conscious services might be a nice handy feature. High five, Connoisseur

is back with 5,000 sats from the podcast index using Albie. I really enjoyed the privacy discussion in this episode. We all need to take it seriously. I had one comment. The folks with less money who will have a harder time taking just the time to gain the knowledge to set up these free solutions.

It's true. I don't have a good answer for this, but the privilege of having time and energy to learn is something we should all think about. Yeah, I didn't really touch on it in the show, but I really feel like there is going to be this digital divide of people who know about these privacy issues, data collection, know that there are services like Telegram or Signal or Simplex or Element, and people who just don't, and they get channeled into the defaults. And they're going to be preyed upon, and they're going to have information mined, and they're going to have potentially AI models to build around them to advertise to them better, that are going to be integrated into their company profile. I mean, there's all kinds of things that are going to happen there they're totally unaware of right and it's going to be essentially

two groups of folks the people who know and the people who don't know right and like you don't you don't know what all is collected and then you don't really have the full understanding of how that all can be used or might be used right on the road right and then you're not really aware that like because you're not aware that's happening then you also aren't aware that there are other options or services might differentiate based on how much they use and for what of those things. You're just in the dark. Yeah, it is complicated. And there is a bit of privilege understanding a bit of it.

Thank you, High Five Connoisseur, for boosting with 5,000 sets. Forward Humor sent us a row of ducks from Fountain. Heyo! Hello, Forward Humor sent us a row of ducks from Fountain. Heyo! Hello, Forward Humor. Brent, I want to hear more about your experiences with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. All right. If I remember correctly, you're several months in on a daily grind usage now. I'm a little cautious on rolling releases for a daily driver workstation.

How has it been? What kind of things have broken with updates? And have ButterFS snapshots been part of your stability arsenal? Is that via Snapper? Thanks for your feedback. Well, we did touch on this a little earlier in the episode,

and I will say I didn't give a very good review of Tumbleweed. That said, what is it like? Is it a year now I've been using Tumbleweed? I think it, yeah, like a couple months after I got the dev one. So I think it's been about a year now. And I will say I did run into a few tricky points originally in the setup.

Getting media to work reliably out of the box is a little tricky. So a few little things in the setup that were maybe, if you haven't used OpenSUSE very much, they're a little tricky. So a few little things in the setup that were maybe if you haven't used open SUSE very much, they're a little different, but once you got them set up, actually, I kind of forget that I'm running a rolling release, which is I think the point every time I update it's, yeah, it's a little bit more packages than if you were running, you know, a point-based system and LTS or something like that. But honestly, it's been great. I haven't run into any issues. You asked about ButterFS snapshots and if that's been important for stability. I will say at this point, it's been insurance, but I haven't actually needed it,

which is, I think, a good piece of review. That said, I did struggle a little bit, a good piece of review. That said, I did struggle a little bit, if you remember in some previous episodes, with syncing those ButterFS snapshots over SSH to, say, a backup server that I'm using. People find very, very good success at just plugging in a USB drive and doing it that way. Now, there may be something I'm missing there, so I still have a little bit of work to do to really get this system in a place that is optimal. I'm open to receiving links and tutorials from anyone who knows better than I do. But that said, it's been great. So I am at a place where I feel very comfortable recommending it, which I did last episode. So I think, yeah, if you're interested in a rolling release and you're

interested in having ButterFS snapshots and you don't mind a little tumbleweed, then give it a shot. Yeah, I think when people try it out there, I think you generally can kind of get a sense of there's some engineering, real engineering that goes into SUSE. Noodles 1, 2, 3, 2 boosted in with 10,000 sets. Coming in hot with the boost. Using Podverse. Hey guys, just a reminder to everybody, the lack of data is still a fingerprint. It's still better to not have the data come in at all. It's still less data, but it's still easy to know when somebody isn't sending the data over.

So, if you always access YouTube with the same client, NewPipe for instance, If you always access YouTube with the same client, NewPipe, for instance, that itself becomes a fingerprint they can use and tie to your IP since it always has the very same behavior. It's tricky. It is. Wes and I, to a lesser degree, have discussed the concept in the past of keeping some of these accounts around just to put some signal in there. A little bit of, you know, Gmail activity, you know, a little bit of social media activity. Just keep a little bit of signal. Just be really mindful about what you're putting in there. A little bit of, you know, Gmail activity, you know, a little bit of social media activity. Just keep a little bit of signal. Just be really mindful about what you're putting in there. You know, I read a little something about Simplex, and I don't know if this is true or not. Maybe we should verify this. But I read because their relay system kind of goes between several relays and several users that they actually inject a little bit of just noise signal in

there just to add a little bit to the, I don't know, entropy of the entire system. I don't know if this is true, but to me it was like, oh, that actually sounds like it solves this problem in a really interesting way. Remaking Eden Booston with 10,000 cents. Brilliant episode as usual. I wanted to add in something I've been using every day for the past month, and it is incredibly easy to use with Tailscale and Nanoed. And we are linked to SearchNG, a free internet meta-search engine

which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. And it can be used over Tor for online anonymity. Well, this looks worth checking out. Docs.searxng.org. Of course, we'll have a link in the notes.

This is pretty cool, Wes. Yeah, Eden goes on to say, for me, I changed all my browsers to search using my nanoed magic DNS, and now I can search Google and DuckDuckGo and a myriad of others without them fingerprinting me.

If self-hosting isn't your thing, there are also public instances. Some do rate limit, though. You know what would make this perfect? We need some suggestions, boosted with some ideas. You need a great, short domain name for this. Yeah, where are you putting it on your network? Yeah, we need something you could just type in

like you're going to Google or Bing or whatever youing or whatever you do duck duck and you just need to be able to put it in the old browser and uh get access to it that is so slick do you mean like schmoozel.com or something like that like something really kind of close but not quite that you can just your fingers are used to most of it but just one letter away bonk would be hilarious i think bonk would be hilarious. I think bonk should be. I don't know. We need some suggestions in there.

Thank you, everybody who boosts in. We had Scott who came in and recommended DuckGo's tools on that same topic. And we also had 40 Dukes come in talking about PopOS tiling. We tried to cut it off around 2,000 sats just for runtime, but we had a total of 16 boosters and 17 boosts, and we made 197,044 sats. I'd love to see that go up a bit more next week. I actually have a question, too, if you're looking for an excuse to boost in,

because it's heating up here in the studio, and I'm wondering, what's the hottest room temperature you've ran your gear at like your home lab or your pc and it survived i'd also be curious to hear about stories where it got too hot and it died but you know do you run your home servers when it's like 87 90 degrees ambient temperature in the room when do you start to worry yeah when do you shut it off sweat let us know if you'd like to boost in without switching apps you go to getalbie.com, get the Albie extension. Top that off either directly.

There's a couple of options in the app or use something like the Cash app and you just send it over to the Lightning Network because it's all an open network. Then you head over to the podcastindex.org. You find Unplugged on there. You can boost right from the website. But like almost nearly everyone with a couple of exceptions, you can also try out a new podcast app because they're getting really cool. Podcastapps.com or newpodcastapps.com go over there fountain pod versus gpl castomatic is fantastic for ios and we're really doubling down on some cool features and office hours it's all podcasting 2.0 which you can check out with a new podcast app and thank you everybody who does

and that brings us to the end of this week's show. If you try out Rhino Linux, we'd love to know your thoughts on it or answer our initial question. If Ubuntu, and they'd say it was an official, blessed release and they really nailed it, maybe they added some new tooling. If they had come out a few years ago

with a rolling release, would you have stuck? You can boost that in or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and let us know. Things are really heating up for LinuxFest Northwest. Of course, that's going to be in October. Details at linuxfestnorthwest.org. There's going to be a call for a lot of community sponsors.

If you'd like to get yourself a nice booth in a good spot, it's a pretty reasonable price, and we'd really like to see it go that way this year. And we're going to be doing some cooking. So bring your aprons, boys, because it's going to be a big old jb cookout too i'm wearing mine already can i bring my favorite spork you should definitely bring your favorite spork yeah and your favorite apron maybe a maybe a hair probably a chair yeah i don't know if we'll do much sitting but not a bad idea of course links to everything we talked about today those are at linux unplugged.com 523. We're back to our regular live time.

We do that on Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And don't forget, there's a whole gosh darn podcast network over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Self-hosted show is chugging right along past episode 100. Some fresh office hours are coming out. And of course, the ever and beloved Coda Radio.

Still going like a champ! If you haven't been catching it out, we've been covering some really interesting discussions over there. You can find that directly at Coda.show or with all the shows over at JupiterBroadcasting.com. Thank you to our members over at UnpluggedCore.com and the Jupiter Party. We appreciate you.

You are our core. And thank you everybody who listens and shares the program. We really you. You are our core. And thank you everybody who listens and shares the program. We really appreciate that too. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll see you right back here next Sunday. All right. I got to get that soapbox out of here. Get that out of here. You know?

I'm just glad to see you've been using the soap. Yeah. Well, you got to get the soapbox from somewhere, so I had to buy the soap. It's just sitting over in the corner, though. But those boxes, they're so sturdy. And you smell nice. That box is really clean, too. I'm impressed.

Yeah. I really think it's, you know. I mean, for how much you use it it's great it's really perfect it really is just the whole assembly is a bit much with the tabs and whatnot did it come with instructions uh no no no no i had to watch a youtube video it was bad i had to watch like three youtube videos you know and of course they had to watch the whole, hey guys, like and subscribe. Okay, so this clip is Christian's little launcher tool. He gave like an extended deep dive into actual usage. So a little bit of a taste of what it might be used for and what it can do. So I was just tinkering with the theme. And so that's the current state of the search.

So you can just search time and it will show you your system time or you search for Git repositories on your hard drive and it will find them too. And actually I built a small plugin for that which launches my editor, my Git UI and a terminal in this folder,

so I can just start working on the project right away. Oh, that's actually really slick and lovely, and simplistic. It has a beautiful simplicity to it. It is. It is. And I don't know. If you put everything inside there, you save a lot of screen space, actually. Do you have hopes for maybe the next feature that you're looking to integrate maybe in the next few months?

Oh, actually, I would like to go more into system settings. Like, you know, all these settings stuff that Gnome gets you, or if you go to preferences on your Mac, like, all of that should be in this launcher, too. And I'm currently tinkering

in a way of integrating all of these options in there. Wonderful. Well, looking forward to it. Thanks for sharing. Are these Linux guys and these NixOS enthusiasts that are just tweaking this to the ultimate custom install? Are they like modern day car enthusiasts that would tinker and build these cool rigs and just build performance and do things that no average person would do? But for them, it was just the ultimate machine. Is it like the next generation of that?

I think that's definitely the energy that was at this meetup. Far less like air compressors and, you know, lug nut guns and things like that. And less cursing too, which I think is a good thing. But there were certainly some experts. Listener Kenji was there again, has showed up, I think, to every meetup that we've had in Berlin and introduced me to CBase a bunch of times. Just such a great person, but a deep expert on the topic as well and was just helping all of us understand further and further and further of what's possible with NexOS. further and further and further of what's possible with nixos i think you know we've become relatively expert-ish here on the show but uh what i learned at this meetup is actually we don't know anything and nixos is capable of far more than we even realize in really beautiful ways yeah i was

gonna say i think there's like a like a mad scientist or a like a wizard sort of energy as well especially because you've got all the especially with nix things like you have so Like a mad scientist or a wizard sort of energy as well. Especially because you've got all the, especially with Nix things, you have so many higher level primitives that have built in, right? It's so easy to compile stuff. You can just emit templated text all over the place. You just have so much functionality and so many things at your disposal, like all of Nix packages to help you build the thing you're trying to do.

You might call them incantations. Exactly. And then you just kind of have to string them together in the right way. Right? It's magic.