LINUX Unplugged - 526: Canonical Wins by Default

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

While chaos is brewing in SUSE and Red Hat land, Canonical stays the course and doubles down on the Linux desktop. Plus, our thoughts on the kernel team GPL-blocking NVIDIA.

We all want open source drivers for our graphics cards. But we don't often talk about the downsides that come with that. And some analysis was done, and it looks like the AMD open source GPU kernel driver is adding more than 5 million new lines of code. In fact, it now brings the total to 34.8 million lines of code of the Linux kernel, making up a measurable percentage of the entire Linux kernel. And I know, Wes, one of your favorite things in the whole world is to measure the value of something by the number of lines of code. Why, that's the only way to value it. No, no, of course, that's a, you know, that's a hard metric, especially here. A lot of this is going to be auto-generated header files, especially for these AMD drivers.

But still, you know, more code, more complexity, more to audit, more to look at, more to just deal with, compile, ship around. Probably should add some context that the Nouveau driver is like 201,000 lines of code. The Intel i915 driver is 381,000 lines of code, at least in these approximate metrics. That's literally millions of lines smaller. That is interesting. Yeah. Although it's not so much the case with the NVIDIA proprietary driver, is it? Yeah, there's also the aspect here that we get to see all the dirty works now.

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 there, gentlemen. Well, the Linux kernel team has moved to code block the proprietary NVIDIA driver. We'll dig in the debate. I don't know.

Our take might surprise you. And then, is Ubuntu our best hope for the future of desktop Linux with everything going on with Red Hat and SUSE and some of which you might not have heard of yet? Well, you've been asking us, so we'll dig into Canonical's future desktop plans and, of course, discuss. Then we'll round it out with some great boosts, some picks,

and a lot more. So let's say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. It's a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. Creates connections between all your machines using WireGuard's noise protocol. WireGuard. It's so great.

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Hello. Hello. Hello, everyone. Nice job on the coordinating of the outfits. We should have thought of that. I hate it when they look better than us, but that's most weeks. That's because they showed up for the production meeting and we didn't that's what we get right you're still here you're not in berlin yet but of course that's coming up soon so brent will be

traveling soon on the show and of course the meetup's coming up details at meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting yeah meetup is coming up this coming week so as this gets published this friday so if you're in ber or close-ish, we'd love to see you September 8th, 6 p.m. and details at meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting. You've got some miles to travel. Better get walking, huh? Are you stacking like frequent flyer points or something? Like, do you just have like a baller bag of points at this? Because why aren't you flying out here for free? You ought to be here every Sunday just using your points.

I don't understand. You know, I got much advice from our dear friend Alex and haven't integrated any of it. So I'm missing out on many, many opportunities. If anybody has some suggestions. I need a personal assistant or something. I don't know.

I'm doing it all wrong. Gaming that system is one of the perks to traveling for work. It's a high personal cost, but you get points. I want to give a shout out to Ohio Linux Fest or OLF. That's also going to be on the week that we're publishing. I think it's the 9th through the 10th.

OLF has details on their website, which we'll put a link in the show notes. And it looks like a killer lineup. I've been really focused on Linux Fest, so I didn't give them a... I hadn't been paying a lot of attention, but I want to give them a mention because it just looks like they've put together a great fest. So you'll have deets. If you want to make it, you can still have, if you're listening while this publishes, you still have time. It'll be this weekend coming up. All right, guys, let's talk about this change that's sort of been slow cooking in the Linux kernel for a while. There's been other steps that have led to this moment, but the real big action will be happening in the future in Linux 6.6. And Lewis

Chamberlain has sent out some module changes for the upcoming merge window. And the most notable changes in here is it builds up what is being described as a, quote, defensed against NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver from using GPL-only symbols. Or in other words, bits that only true open source drivers should be utilizing and not proprietary kernel drivers like NVIDIA's default Linux driver in respecting the original kernel code author's intent.

Wes, you remember when we talked about that taint proprietary module stuff, we talked about this a little bit back in 2020 when it seemed like this was a move to essentially create a drm scheme in the linux kernel that blocks proprietary drivers from getting to some of the bits they really shouldn't be getting to and legally i think the kernel team is on the right footing here and the whole idea about the gpl is kind of using the copyright system in sort of a judo move to protect free software and so now they're kind of implementing a technical solution to sort of enforce that licensing but we did get some more insights from

was it christopher hillwig yeah the uh it was merged by chamberlain but christopher hellwig was actually the author of these changes okay um and wrote that quote it has recently come to my attention that nvidia is circumventing the protection added in and then it links to a previous commit which is that taint proprietary module stuff from 2020 and goes on by importing exports from their proprietary modules into an allegedly GPL-licensed module and then re-exporting them. Given that symbol GET, which is a function in the kernel, was only ever intended for tightly cooperating modules using very internal symbols, it's logical to restrict it to being used on export symbol GPL and prevent NVIDIA from costly DMCA circumvention of access controls lawsuits.

All symbols except for four used through SimpleGet were already exported as export symbol GPL, and the remaining four ones were switched over in these preparatory patches. Right. Back in 2020, the original defense was added. NVIDIA recommended avoiding Linux 5.9 for the time being. But then they ended up having a supported driver several weeks later. It will be interesting to see this time how long Linux 6.6 thwarts their kernel driver. Yeah, either NVIDIA has to come up with a workaround or, you know, they just have to

go all in on the open source solution inevitably. But in the meantime, it's using a couple of things that are gross to me that the linux kernel team is doing and i while i appreciate the situation and how they kind of have to just move this forward to get nvidia to comply and others this affects other proprietary module creators as well not just nvidia i don't like the tools they're using here they're essentially using technology to create kind of a quote equivalent, a GPL equivalent of a DRM of GPL DRM. And they're using the DMCA as their legal justification to do it. And I think the DMCA is gross and I think DRM is gross.

is gross and i also have an issue with blocking the functionality of probably one of the most critical hardware partners in the linux ecosystem right now i mean that the rate nvidia gpus are selling they're not going into windows boxes that are doing ai stuff they're going into linux boxes that are doing ai stuff or when somebody buys buys a thousand dollar Nvidia card for their workstation that they want to run Linux on, this stuff just makes it less performant, harder. There's additional workarounds which are buggy. They'll have flaws at any time to be worked out. And so I'm kind of grossed out about it from a user standpoint too. And I have heard this emailed into Coder Radio many times and a Pharonaronix reader echoed this, and I want to get your guys' take on this.

The Pharonix reader said, quote, this sort of hostility makes me want to avoid Linux. This also affects other open source projects like CFS constantly. This hostility is unnecessary. Wes, do you think it's hostility? Oh, I don't know. I'm kind of of two minds. You know, the sort of argument is that, you know, not all modules necessarily are like a derived work of the kernel. Not all proprietary modules are, you know, necessarily then like infringing or doing

something bad. But if you are integrating so tightly that you're accessing a bunch of these kernel specifics, at some point in theory, you cross the line to kind of being like, quote unquote, derived work. Like you are relying so much on the kernel itself to do your thing that can you really argue you're a separate piece of software from it? Unfortunately, you know, the developers sort of making the decisions around what symbols get qualified as export symbol GPL only. They don't necessarily carry out a detailed legal analysis or a technical analysis to sort out whether that is the case. Are they qualified to do that? Often these symbols then just sort of

get marked GPL only as a way of then playing into these schemes and making stuff harder for proprietary modules. It also comes at an unfortunate time when we have seen this new open source work from NVIDIA. It's sort of like, is this necessary right now when they are maybe now just making some strides? I can see the argument the other way, though. You might say, like, this is the kind of stuff, the pressure that's maybe pushed NVIDIA to actually get off their butts and finally make some progress on that side.

And you look at some of the workarounds they have to do, and some of those do feel a little, even if you don't agree with the, you know, how it happened on the kernel side, sort of the GPL condom approach, making these intermediary modules. It's not like that feels super clean either. The most mid-level take I think I've seen online is that this is Linus who's just personally angry at NVIDIA. I mean, after all, I gave him the finger, and so he's been encouraging this to happen, to get back at NVIDIA. I mean, after all, I gave him the finger. And so he's been encouraging this to happen to get back at NVIDIA. I think that is such a such an off-base take. I think it's silly. But Brent, I want to ask you this. And I want to also ask the boosters to boost in their thoughts on this question.

What the hell do I know? Should I just shut up and listen to the kernel dev team? Because they clearly have been great stewards of the Linux kernel. And maybe it causes a little indigestion for users in the short term, but should we just, as users, should we just let these types of things wash over us and see how it plays out? It feels like a tricky question because yeah, of course we should trust them. They're doing amazing work for the most part. And with little issues, you know, these kinds of things come up, what, once, twice, maybe three times a year at most. But on the other hand, I think it's important for us to keep questioning the team and to make sure that they're doing the things that feels right and in the spirit and legality

of what we believe they should be doing and according to, you know, their missions and such. So I kind of go both ways, but a question I also have is, you know, is this kind of battle just going to continue? You know, it gets solved here. Maybe in a few months we see another kind of rendition of this happening over and over again,

because that could get old pretty fast. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there right now to get $100 in 60-day credit, support the show, and kick the tires for real. You can really try things out with that $100. And while you're there, dig into the exciting news. Linode is now part of Akamai, but all the tools that we love,

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That's their vote of confidence. And I think you should check it out today. linode.com slash unplugged. The Ubuntu desktop seems to really be trying to chart a new course. The team at Canonical is trying to make it clear that they are focusing and investing on the desktop, and they have begun releasing a series of blogs that document the road to the future. And Oliver Smith at Canonical, who serves as the product manager for Ubuntu Desktop,

has published a couple of these now, talking about 2310 and then also hinting a little bit at 2404 next year, the LTS release. And in there, he teases a few things that they're focusing on for the Ubuntu Desktop,

along with things such as hardware partnerships with Intel to provide hardware-accelerated video for Chrome in the Snap now, as well as some highly experimental implementations of hardware-backed full-disk encryption as an option in the Ubuntu installer that we could be seeing in the upcoming 2310. And he dropped some numbers on us, boys.

The Ubuntu desktop has more than 6 million active desktop users. That's just desktop. That's huge. That's huge. That's huge. And they believe that the values of the Ubuntu desktop, from their point of view, which probably matters, is choice, quality, support, enjoyment, performance, privacy, by design, secure by default, seamless integration,

and looking towards the future. So here we are in a crazy year where you look back at canonical over the last two years things are looking pretty good they're just staying the course they're pushing in again on the desktop they're building out this ubuntu core desktop which we took a look at not too long ago and uh seems like it has some potential it could be an implementation of snaps where it actually seems like it all coalesces maybe we'll see but it's also canonical focusing and staying the course amidst chaos with seuss and red hat to recap ownership structures have changed at SUSE yet again. They've announced they're creating a RHEL clone that will eat at their own SUSE user base,

but also adopts the language of their competitor and essentially admits that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the Enterprise Linux. In their own way, they talk about the world. They concede defeat to Red Hat, and then they're going to build out a product that will be incompatible with their core product, which inevitably will lead to a hollowing out of SUSE engineers. My thought seems like an act of desperation or some sort of weird cold capitalism to me. Either way, I don't like it additionally seems there is work underway to put leap out to pasture the long-term release version of open seuss seems a lot of changes coming there 61 people are contributing to the code base and that's been fading it sounds like they took a survey and the community is somewhat interested in replacing it but seems actually

from my read, rather mad. In fact, God bless him, it seems like the entire thing is being propped up by Richard Brown. I mean, that's from what I can tell from the outside. That's Seuss. Then you got Red Hat. They've recently refocused open source desktop developers onto other projects, abandoning those open source projects. We know about the RHEL source code changes and the ripple effects and strong divisions that's created. The future with Red Hat and Fedora,

it feels a little unknown. It doesn't feel like it's in danger. It just feels like it's entirely not sure. And yet it's steady as it goes for Ubuntu. Yeah, they're sticking to their guns with snaps, but maybe they got something with Ubuntu Core. Their leadership has been consistent and has been steady. The company has been on a consistent course

after their big significant layoffs before their switch to Genome. And they're spending money on the desktop again and Linux gaming. And they're also trying to tell us about it, which is Signal in itself. It seems like a kind of far cry from, I don't know, the last era we were in for Ubuntu. You know, we had the time when they were trying stuff on mobile. They were, you know, MER was the like hot thing. They were, you know, Unity was out there.

And then refocusing felt like maybe Ubuntu's future was kind of, you know, there was the desktop, of course, but the server, the containers, you know, that ecosystem was where the focus is. Enterprise business. Yes, exactly. But yeah, in comparison to some of their peers and comparisons to just other efforts and the amount that they're telling us about it, it feels like a little bit of a new energy or at least a more public recognition of that energy. And in Brent, in a way, aren't they just sort of winning by default just by not screwing up right now? Like they just have to not screw up. Yeah, they didn't do any like really hot take on any of the recent news.

And I think that was probably wise. You know, they're just continuing to do their thing in their own lane and not getting tangled up with any of the fires on either side. Yeah. You know, I don't know if I have quite the same or as pessimistic a look on the, on the Sue stuff, but one of the things we talk about a lot with red hat is just the amount in the background that we don't appreciate that they influence and add to and build up the,

to be clear, it's still happening. Yes. Still lots of that happening. Yeah. Um, and I think a bunch of has been able to do some of that as well. You know,

there's definitely components of the desktop, especially that they're uh helping out with gnome and you know seuss feels like maybe it's off in its own world more so there there are a lot of good works like you've seen like the snapper stuff all kinds of neat integrations we talk about when we you know play around in that ecosystem but it doesn't feel like in the same way those uh additions improvements features make it back to like the wider Linux ecosystem in a way like Canonical has more influence. Yeah. Yeah. Like some of the improvements upstream to Genome Desktop that have been shipping in Ubuntu for a while.

I actually just recently did a little refresh and there's a lot of legitimate reasons why the patches haven't made it upstream to upstream Genome and they are working on it. the patches haven't made it upstream to upstream genome and they are working on it but canonical has been able to you know handle some of those edge cases and ship that stuff and provide a faster performant genome desktop and they're doing that now and they're that's that's engineering work they've invested into that that's results that their end users are getting are getting to see and i think the other the other way they win by default canonical wins by default with their release model i think that is a totally totally unique thing in the world now where you have the RHEL clones and the SUSE stuff that has just completely fallen apart. You know, I was reading a user thread and everyone is so confused as to what they should deploy on their servers now if they want to be in the SUSE system or if they want to be in the RHEL ecosystem. And with Ubuntu...

Nothing's changed, right? You just download the LTS. If you want the support, you pay for it. If anything, you've got more access to support. You've got longer supported timelines. Yeah, right. It's kind of a great time to be an Ubuntu server deployer. Yeah.

They just don't have to change a thing. They're already the simpler release model. Yeah, reading a little bit about how, you know, OpenSUSE Elite, Yeah. They just don't have to change a thing. They're already the simpler release model. Everyone went to by default and that tumbleweed was sort of, you know, more experimental. And now all of a sudden I'm really questioning like what Leap is to people or are a bunch of folks going to, you know, suffer if it changes dramatically and that that model for OpenSUSE goes away. I don't know. That seems wild to me. I'm still wrapping my head around that. wild to me i'm still wrapping my head around that i would like insight from our lizard listeners out there if they think that the the decline of leap is maybe at the cost of the success of tumbleweed perhaps susa just assumed there was demand for both but really there's just a lot of demand for

tumbleweed and maybe that's why they don't see the active contribution over at leap i don't know i'm not connected enough to the susa community but I'm sure some folks listening could probably share some insights on that. I think it's just sort of fascinating as the show has become so enamored with NixOS and that development area. But to take a second to step away from that, which is such an exciting area, and look at the architecture of what gets the Linux desktop built. And these individual companies and their levels of contribution come and go over the years. And we just as we kind of get used to, like, it's always been this way, things end up changing. But what does remain consistent are those individual contributors, some of whom you hear from on the show on a pretty regular basis, who are still passionate about that thing that stick with the community as the

corporate ownership structure changes, as the funding funding structure changes as the demand for the project changes they stick with their passion and they continue to build it and it's just it's such an awesome unique thing that we have in the free software community that you don't have in the commercial space you know a little bit before the show started on the um the live stream we were talking a bit about the Steam Deck and Linux gaming success and kind of touched on the productization and what that meant for the success of the Steam Deck. And it feels like maybe Ubuntu's playing,

and Canonical is playing an important role here, something we had previously seen kind of in the Fedora side and then on the Red Hat side of their own products. But, you know, maybe we're concerned that if Red Hat's a little less focused on Linux desktop, you need a product sometimes in these companies to really justify adding engineers to solve these problems. We might know about a bunch of problems on Linux desktop as day-to-day users we'd like to see, but that's not going to motivate anyone to spend their time, or at least not very many people. But if you're saying, well, we have this partnership, we are

shipping this product, it needs to work well, it needs to hit these measures, and that means we need to improve Pipewire or fix this X problem on the Linux desktop. That's how a lot of this stuff actually gets done, and you kind of need folks shipping products or thinking about it as a holistic thing. We were talking about it on the live stream before we sat down to record, and it was look at the explosive growth in the steam numbers for linux and it's really all thanks to the deck the deck is doing terrific as a product and you can see in the numbers because now when you look at linux something like 72 percent of linux users are using the amd gpu and graphics card that's in the deck because they're using the deck and it it's using technology for the most part that all three of us and everybody listening has probably had on their Linux desktop for years. And it didn't explode then. And now it's blowing up and it's because they productize it.

And they what you're saying is exactly true. They hired some key smart developers to close those final gaps so they could actually make it a supportable product and you know valve came this time we've had red hat here for a long time these things are a little cyclical but in their own pursuit of their own interests they help us close these gaps and when they kind of move on and they refocus those contributions don't go away and they continue to be supported. Collide.com slash unplugged. If you're in IT or security, take a listen to this, especially if you work with Okta.

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It's a great way to support the show too. Go check that out. See what they can do. See if you can integrate that into your workflow. Maybe free up some of IT and security's time. So go to collide.com slash unplugged. I want to talk about something that's so fun that is really blowing up right now. It's a new genre of podcasting, and it is really thrilling because you guys know I have just I have sucked at finding new music over the last few years, really.

And since I switched to streaming, like my ability to curate and find music has just fallen apart. It's nothing but Backstreet Boys. Yeah, that and Hanson. curate and find music has just fallen apart it's nothing but backstreet boys yeah yeah that and hansen um but there is a genre of new podcasts coming out that are music podcasts and they're using value for value and the sat splits to send the sats to the artists while the tracks are playing so the podcaster can do their style and i've i'll link to a couple of different styles in here uh the one that i was listening to this morning while i prepped the show is dj v for v and it's an all music podcast there's no talk he just finds the tracks he plays them and then while the tracks are playing the album art changes

to the album art of the artist nice and if you hit the boost button 95 of the boost goes to the band and then five percent goes to the show and the show splits and i've been listening of the boost goes to the band and then 5% goes to the show and the show splits. And I've been listening to the boost of Graham ball, uh, the fairly fun show and before the schemes and behind the schemes, which are also really great. And then our buddy Kyron over at mere mortals has a value for value podcast that explains all of this. If you are an artist and you have some tracks that you would like to publish,

there are platforms that are coming out like wave lake w-a-v-l-a-k-e.com where you upload your tracks they build the rss feed for you and then set up all the lightning stuff and then you put your tracks up there people boost when they listen and if you're boosting our shows you now have another way you can support independent creators using those same sats and using those same tools because these also show up as tracks that are available to podcasting 2.0 apps and you can boost from the web using albie and there is some tooling that i'll link to in the show notes that you can use to host it all yourself it's so awesome because the entire thing is just RSS feeds,

open standards, and you just need a place for the MP3 file and a place for the RSS. And then you can completely self host your music and participate in this value for value ecosystem, get boost for your songs. And it's thrilling for me as a creator because music has been something that is completely cut off to podcasters. No kidding. Radio stations buy these global licenses that are lots of money every

single year and they can play songs they want they don't actually pay the artists they pay this licensor that's not even available to podcasters so often podcast music sucks right or like we also compete with all these proprietary platforms that do the same thing right oh yeah if you you know you only publish here then sure you can use our catalog we paid for this is an open source system that you can self-host and then it lets podcasters play music in their songs and it supports the artists and it is a genre that is blowing up when i first started telling these guys about it there was one podcast doing this now there are one two three four and a fifth that i didn't link to in here that i know of and probably more that are happening and i'll if you want to get in if you want to get in on this

take a look at how it works go to music side project.com it's some tooling that a band can use to just create all this stuff for them they don't have to know how to write the xml and then they can put it up on an endpoint and publish it. I like two aspects of this. First, it feels like a lot more of a sort of like open collaborative culture sort of idea from the start that's less super concerned about these like restrictive schemes to tightly control stuff. And it's more like, well,

we're putting this out there. And then the other aspect is that we're building in the make it easy to provide value back from the get-go yeah you know like i often go try to buy you know flax from bands i like that support that and i can go give them some money but i find myself if i want to support them more i have to like buy it again or like right some of them have donations but it's often like okay i guess i'll buy your record even if i don't have a record player or but having this just like ready to

get go right there easy to to boost, easy to support. Seems like a good idea. Ansley Costello is the number one and number two and now number three on wavelake.com. And she's made something like nearly three grand now on the platform. She was on Spotify and all the other services for something like six years and made a total of like 300 bucks from all of them combined for six like six years and made a total of like 300 bucks from all of them combined for six years for having her music on there. She put it up here three weeks ago and now she's got the top one, two and three song and she's just doing great. Her number one

song alone has made 1.1 million sats. And it all plugs into the existing tooling that people already have for podcasting. So if you can boost this show, you can boost these artists. This is how it works. I thought, I honestly thought maybe a jump from podcasting to software development because the situation is so dire, but there's just, there's too much culture there, right? There's too much historical momentum, but artists, music artists, they don't have a lot of options. Like the mainstream system doesn't support them.

It's not designed for them. Some of these people have created these tracks years and years ago, and don't have a lot of options. The mainstream system doesn't support them. It's not designed for them. Some of these people have created these tracks years and years ago, and now they have a place to put them and monetize them and create more music and build an audience. And I'd love to see it spread to software, but now in retrospect, in hindsight, it's so obvious why it spread to music first. But the whole thing, it's open spec rss feeds podcast players http endpoints

and then the lightning network and it all comes together and it's really really awesome because as a podcaster i've just sort of stumbled into watching this new genre from the very beginning you know it's like incredible to see it blossom and when podcasting is kind of in a fade right now and advertising's completely crashed and i think we're going to lose more shows over the next year just not us but people what a change of pace what a silver lining a ray of sunshine to see this uh to see this booming so we'll have links in the show notes if you want to kick back and listen to a music podcast it's there's a lot of different ones for just about every possible kind of taste and preference. Yeah, I will say if you're interested in checking out that topic a

little bit more, we did dive into this quite a bit of depth in the latest Office Hours, number 34, officehours.hair slash 34 for that. Yes, in fact, we test it live. We give a live demonstration of the switching to a song and then switching back. Ask not what your podcast can boost for you, but what you can boost for your podcast. Ross came in with a hundred thousand sats using Podverse and he is our baller this week. Greetings from Devon, UK. I think, Devon. Home of the best pasties and clotted cream in the UK. All right, what is clotted cream?

I think you shave your face with it. No, I think that's something else there. And actually, those are pasties and they're delicious hand pies. Not pasties? No. No, these are like... With tassels? These are meaty hand pies.

Yes, those are... Actually, I feel like a life hack that we should adopt over here, because you take one of these things, you put it in your pocket, and you got yourself lunch ready to go. A clotted cream is a thick cream made by heating full cream cow's milk, using steam or a water bath, and then leaving it in a shallow pan to cool slowly. So, there you go.

Can we come up with a better name? Sounds like they discovered that by mistake exactly leave it in a pan calling it clotted it sounds like oh well let's make lemon out of let's make lemonade out of these lemons i mean we have sour cream right that's the same right all right i don't know guys i don't know but i'd be willing to try it cyber gray came in with uh 46,912 sats. I hoard that which your kind covet. Hey there, Jupiter family. Adding another

vote for the Framework laptop. Batch 6 user from the original shipment of Framework 13, and this baby has been my daily driver through several different distros, and continues to be solid as a rock. Alright, I mean I am really tempted. I don't have the funds

for it, but I do think it'd be a great, great purchase. I might've done this this week, actually. Well, as you know, uh, I've been having issues with the hinges on my dev one, which is very sad. I really like this laptop. So this week I took it all apart to try to repair it. Uh, if you remember, uh, recently we had a clip where I was at Seabase with a few fellow listeners trying to repair my laptop and I kind of gave up. It was dark and we were on picnic tables outside. It was not the place for it. I figured, you know, in my home with lighting and tools and such was the better place. So I tried that this week and failed pretty miserably, actually. I got to the point where I could see just how terrible

the condition of the hinges were, but I could not, without, you know, damaging things further, get to the place where I could repair them. You know, with my old ThinkPads, I've repaired countless hinges, but I just, yeah, never got far enough. And unfortunately, the internet told me that, you know, the repair manuals for the HP, standard HP laptops was going to work for the dev one, but the screen's totally different. So I just kind of had to say, no, I can't go further. I can't do this myself. uh, seeked a new laptop solution and over and over people have suggested that I get a framework. And so I have one shipping to the Europe to listener Tom Ash. We'll see if he doesn't like run off with it before I get there. So you're going to try to do a lap.

You're not going to, you're not going to swap laptops while traveling. I know you, you've been here at the studio with two laptops. You're like, yeah, I don't want to move because I'm in the middle of doing a lot of stuff. Do we want to bet like what episode number?

He'll be fully switched over? Okay, so this is 526. 538. Whoa. I'm going 530. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think I'm joking when I say 538. I think I'll go one under 529.

Just do the Price is Right move. But that's only because we've now motivated him. You have such little faith in me. Jeez. No, it's just you're going to be traveling. Who wants to move and switch their main machine while they're traveling? Yeah, I'm just so fearful that this, you know, the monitor on this one is going to flop off of the chassis at some point. So I, you know, at least there's insurance there.

Maybe. I don't know. Did I make the right decision? Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it. And also, because you know you've got a critical eye, but also to hear the comparing and the contrasting with the DevWon. Oh. Complete noobs boosted in with 33,333 sets.

Simply saying, computer science will and should be open and free libre free word yeah yeah amen brother yeah yeah linux is a big part of that free software is a big part of that i i want to get my kids playing around with the esp home devices one day user 66 came in with 27 567 sats using fountain says nope you says, nope, you guys, not from Germany. Further north, to the land of Saab. Now swing it again, Wes. Postal code for the win. Oh, and NixOS? Well,

I'm slowly getting around to figuring out all the ways to do things. This might be boost number six for all of JB. Well, thank you very much, User66. And I think we thought last week, it sounds like we thought he was in Germany last week. But Wes, did you bring the correct map? Yeah, yeah, I know.

I get a little confused with Europe sometimes. Try it again. And it looks like maybe the digits got mixed around. I think from last week it was 25,767. And that appears to be a postal code from Helsingborg, a city in Sweden. So let us know how we did. Hopefully I got it this time. Yeah, find out.

And thank you for the support. Appreciate it. Torped boosts in with 21,984 sats from Podverse. My whole week went by and I was thinking, I called Brent Brad, didn't I? Sorry, Brent. You know, it happens and I don't take it personally, so all good.

Sometimes, for some reason, I'll type something wrong and it corrects it to Brett. So I've called Brent Brett a few times. Well, autocorrect has, and I just chuckle and let it go. It's slightly closer, or feels closer, I'm not sure.

Torped also sent in a story. Now for a story, since I feel I owe you and the audience some entertainment. Quit Windows cold turkey and went to Linux some years ago. I went with Debian, thinking that I'll probably bork my system at some point beyond repair. Three years later and

I'm still on that first ever Linux install with 32 gigs of swap. What? The installer said to use the same amount as your system memory. And BS, this is a back to the future boost. Wow, that is, that is really, like to have your first install last like that, that's a rare thing. I mean, my congratulations to you, sir. Mick Zip comes in with 20,000 sats using Cast-O-Matic, and he just says, boost! We'll boost right back at you.

Back at you, yeah. Fair Day Fedora boosts in with a row of ducks. For anyone on the fence about boosts, it's literally open source money. It may seem daunting to get started, but it's actually much easier than opening a bank account or applying for a credit card if you were starting from square one. I'm willing to give some support for Canadians looking to get some sats to boost. Just DM me on Matrix. I'm sure others out there are willing to help their respective countrymen as well thanks faraday appreciate that what a nice offer i agree

with that message too the bender cop boosted in 15 000 sats with breeze nice intro to fedora asahi remix and great defense of bitcoin it'd be cool if you could go a bit into gaming on Asahi someday. Yeah, I hope so. Future assignment. You got to remember, though, it is ARM, right? So you're either looking for ARM compiled games or you're going to be doing yet another layer of emulation potentially. So many layers.

x86 and the Proton stuff. So, I mean, you know, if they build powerful enough machines we can do it maybe it's i wouldn't have thought so but it seems to be happening a row of ducks from men on our beat comes in using fountain here's my remaining sats from fountain thank you man i appreciate that of course you can't always move those to a new app but we're happy to take them off your hands opi 1984 boosts in with 4 000 sats uh and this seems to be a reply to a previous booster asking about you know what uh how to get some something on their desk or desktop that could receive a call do screen sharing but like an agent on there yes um and uh opi writes i don't know if this will work but a while ago i watched a youtube video where uh a guy showed how to build a private voip network

with off-the-shelf parts here's a link to that video so we'll put that in the show notes and uh yeah hopefully that helps it looks like i know nothing but i see a device that seems to be maybe bringing ipn and then sending it out over potsOTS lines to like any old POTS phone. I love that. I miss having desk phones. You know, as a kid, I was alive at the very end of the spinning dial era. So like my family all had the, you know, we spun the dial around for the number. And then we kind of, you know, quickly adopted the new phone technologies.

The phone companies would send you a new phone. So I have a lot of nostalgia for that old stuff, Oppie. Thank you for that. We got a row of ducks in from CG Barrows. I was thinking that when you guys say that you're actually using one of your sponsors' products in a day-to-day life, it gives me more confidence that it's actually a good product and not you just reading some script they asked you to read. Like Chris saying that Tailscale changes self-hosting life. I guess I grew a thick skin over those stupid lying advertisements on TV and now on the internet. This is my kind of second or third concern with dynamic ads is that they're not products that we personally use necessarily. We may not even be aware in some cases of what ads are being inserted. I wonder if there will be or if anybody knows of a dynamic ad program or platform, I guess I should say, that is self-hosted, that ideally is open source, where you could use your own CDN and you could just cut your own ads in.

That'd be nice. Yeah. And then it would be our own ads and that wouldn't seem like such a bad system. And maybe then we could actually do a good job with the chapters because that's another thing that gets screwed up by dynamic ads is the chapters. I wonder if that's something like Castapod or similar, whatever support. Maybe, maybe. But yeah, otherwise I really have a concern because I think a lot of the value in those

ads for the listener and for the advertiser is that we really do use Linode. We really do use tail scale and we can go in there and tell you about it. Like it's, it's a hard thing when you don't use those products to, or you're not even aware of what products are being advertised. Cause it's like, it's not the same kind of endorsement. It's a, it's a cheaper, lesser thing. thing i don't know but i do know the podcasting industry as it was or whatever you want to call it is sliding into dynamic ads as if it were being sucked into a black hole it's just it's happening so damn fast dan johansson came in with came in with 10 000 sats thank you dan using podcast index, I cleared my desk today.

I removed the wires from the keyboard, the mouse, the headphones, the USB hub. I spare ether and HDMI cables and lots more since I started moving some stuff over to Bluetooth on my desktop. It really is a great feeling. Got to keep it nice and tidy. Good for you, Dan. I agree. I should do it more often.

But it's such a nice feeling when you finally do clear out an area and make it all tidy. Yeah, having a nice desk before you can get to work. It's the workspace, especially. Keeping that tidy is nice, and my ADD brain has such a hard time with that. Now, that was our last boost before the cutoff. We have some below

the cutoff. Was there any that you wanted to pull ahead this week? I think we received one with a emoji story that I think you should tell chris right right okay thank you smart or uh smart talk or whatever you want to call it he came in with a puzzle and i don't know how we're going to crack this thing it's snowflake plus penguin so that sounds like nixos plus honey, badger, X, hand sign, poop. So again, snowflake, penguin, plus honey, badger, X, hand, poop. I think he's saying NixOS plus maybe home manager. I was thinking SSH maybe.

Yeah. Oh, I was thinking maybe they're saying like Honey Badger doesn't care about NixOS. Like they're like, enough with the NixOS already. That might be it. Yeah, because that could be like no more hand poop. Uh-huh. Yeah, I like that. Let us know.

I mean, it's fun. So we get the boost live, right? So would I send that to you on the first? I sent that to you guys like, okay, guys, let's crack this code. We still didn't crack it. We had days to prepare. We still didn't crack it. Thank you, everybody who boosted. We had 15 total boosters, 15 boosts, and we made 287,527,000 sats,

just below the 300-sat goal I was trying to get to, really. Thank you, everybody who does support the show. We need just a few more. If you think about it, 60,000 people might might listen to this episode but we had 15 people step forward and support us we just need a few more and we can begin to really move that needle so thank you everybody who does it's a great way to give us feedback and interact with the show you can get a new podcast app at podcastapps.com fountain or podverse pod versus gpl so we really like that or you can just uh get albie get albie.com

then you boost in from the podcast index we'll have links to all of that in the show notes to make it real easy for you now before we go i want to remind you that the show is live on sundays and the mumble room's going we got it look at that showing in the quiet listening wow there's a whole raft of people in the car and that's a great way to get just a super low latency Opus feed direct from the studio mixer. Powered by open source? Yeah, man. It's like you're right here next to us in the studio or almost. It's about as good as it gets. You may actually have, depending on the day, a faster connection to us than Brent does. Hey, I'm going to space here. And then you're just

one room away from popping down and telling us what you think about something. So that mumble room, that's our virtual lug. We have details at jupiterbroadcasting.com. There's a mumble link there. You can get you all the information. You can always participate on Sundays. Or if you're just out and about, you can tune in radio style at jblive.fm. We have a radio stream going all the time that plays old JB shows.

And then when we cut in when we're live and it's pretty nice and easy just load it up on your mobile device in the web browser you don't have to install an app just go to jblive.fm and start streaming on sundays at noon pacific 3 p.m eastern but don't worry we'll still keep publishing it we always do at that rss feed in fact so you want a little secret that's how most people catch it so it's always there the same bad time on the same bad channel see you next week same bad time same bad station there's a whole raft of shows over jupiterbroadcasting.com coda radio got into some spicy stories this week of course self-hosted is always pushing the envelope we got a new one coming up soon and office hours is testing brand new grounds. The most recent Office Hours is a barn burner. All that's over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.

We just really are grateful for you listening. We appreciate your time. And we also really appreciate it when you take a moment to share the podcast. Word of mouth is really the best way for a podcast to get discovered. In the meantime, we hope you have a great week. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you.