LINUX Unplugged - 529: Changing the Game

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

Even if you don't game, the data is in, and the impact of the Steam Deck on Linux is massive. We'll go into details and then share our long-term review of the Deck. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Listener Jeff.

When we first started putting together the show for this week, I thought, okay, this is an episode with a long-term perspective on the Steam Deck. And then as I started digging into the work valves done and the impact on the projects around the deck, I kind of realized what we're really talking about today is one of the most successful Linux consumer devices. And I mean truly a Linux device, that has a GNU user land, it has SystemD, it has Dbus, it has a fairly standard file system layout, it uses regular old Plasma for the desktop mode, and they don't block installing any third-party Flatpak you want, including competing app stores.

And it's also had a big impact on the Linux ecosystem, the kernel driver and all that. We'll get into that in a bit. But I just, I'm really, as I kind of got into it, I'm like, even if you've never owned a Steam Deck, I think you should back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. And my name is Alex. Hello, gentlemen. We have a full house this week.

The Steam Deck might just be one of the most important Linux devices of our current time. And even if you don't game, we have some data and it checks out. The deck's impact on Linux has been massive and measurable. So we'll dig into that. And then I'll share some long-term thoughts. I've had it for just over a year and my use of it has evolved in that time. And I kind of think maybe I should have bought a different deck and i'll tell you why as we get there plus alex is here and jeff is here and they have more recently bought their decks and of course they've already opened them up and swapped some parts out so we'll get into that too and see how that went then we'll round it out with our usual accoutrement with some

great boosts and picks and more so before we get all that, let's say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. It's WireGuard, but magic. That's right, it's a Mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. You can set it up in just a couple of minutes. You got like five machines. You can probably have a Mesh network going in like three minutes. Mobile devices, cloud instances, physical machines,

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Hello, Chris. I'm your host, Brent. And hello, Alex. Hello. I love that showing in there. Mostly everybody on air this week. JMac up there in the quiet listening stadium. Why talk about the deck a year after it shipped? Why are we talking about it now? Well, one reason, we probably all agree,

not enough reviewers follow up on something after the new and shiny phase. Yeah, you hear the hype. You hear the like, oh, this is so great, and not the, oh, it broke halfway in, or yeah, still slow. Yeah, or it got crappy. We aim to fix that here at the Unplugged program. We like to follow up and tell you what it's like after you've owned it for a

while and i think that's one reason to talk about it now i think also we have some data on the contributions around it and then the third reason is it ain't going anywhere for a while and we're not going to get a new deck for a while in fact this week pierre loup grafias i'm so bad at this uh can we get brent you want to give it a go come on give us a good solid try brent let's give it the old podcast try pierre loup griefer all right thank you yeah well he's hinted to the verge and to cnbc individually that it might not be till 2025 maybe even 2026 before we see the deck two so my plan of just waiting for the deck two is a long-term plan yeah yeah yeah um you know what it makes sense because they've got a high performance device they got battery and heat

thresholds they're trying to reach and you don't get that with one generation typically you know you need the cpu and the gpu to go a couple of generations. Yeah, you're going to do the whole work to make a new second model. Yeah, I suppose you should have the new hardware to make it worthwhile. And Valve looks at the deck as a console in this capacity where we have a fixed performance target. And so we tell

all developers, this is your fixed target and so if we're going to mix with that at all and change things, then we have to define a new target for them. And we're really careful about that is what they said. Yeah, I suppose that has been like one problem in the just like the Linux world, right? Like you've got not only you just have PCs that can be whatever, but whatever your Linux is. So we've seen with other ecosystems having a common environment in however many ways possible just makes it easier.

I think it makes sense to wait a bit too because I think, number one, a lot of people are really price sensitive right now. With inflation, things are very expensive, and a luxury device is a hard call for some people. And so if you just ship the new one right away, you're not going to get very many people upgrading, I suspect. I think the other thing to consider is this gives Valve another year or two to see

what Meta does with the Quest and Apple does with the Vision Pro. You know, and I know I go to this all the time, but Valve is a big VR enthusiast group. And if they could turn the deck into a portable VR thing that you plug in a USB headset into,

I think they'd go that direction. But they probably need to watch with the public responses to something like the Vision Pro. If it flops, it doesn't make a lot of sense to invest in resources there. And if it's a big success, Valve can ship their alternative, which would be a much more open ecosystem. But we're all going to have to wait. In the meantime, though, there are OEMs like Asus

that are taking stabs at DEC competitors. Oh, yeah, true. Right. So we'll probably see more hardware. It'd be really nice, though, if Valve would release SteamOS 3 so we could maybe replace Windows on some of those devices. Oh, yeah, that would be great. Yeah, yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the DECX impact on Linux. There was a talk at OSSEU 2023 in Spain for LinuxCon,

and the developer went into the impacts on the overall Linux ecosystem and talked about how it's been a big impact for Plasma. The DEX made a big impact on Flatpak and their use of XGG portals kind of furthers those standards. And then he got into the upstream contributions. portals kind of furthers those standards. And then he got into the upstream contributions. Yeah. I mean, once you've got full-time devs that can just work on something when you have like a focused, especially you've got a focused product or a focused goal to iterate on, you can start really, you know, knocking away stuff that wouldn't be possible if you, you know, you weren't like laser focused on that stuff. And you can add a bunch of missing features that otherwise things like Wine wouldn't have.

Yeah. Yeah, Wine's been a big one. There's also been countless improvements to Mesa, Vulkan, and OpenGL stacks, the kernel driver components, the Zynq OpenGL and Vulkan that kind of improves it for other people outside the AMD ecosystem as well, Mesa resolution switching, SDL optimization.

They contributed features upstream to Extended 4 to make it a case-insensitive file system to make it more compatible with Windows. I mean, and a bunch of stuff in the kernel itself. Like new system calls that are better copies of what Windows have and that games are already using, so the only other option is

like slow emulation in Wine itself, which, yeah, nobody wants. It's incredible they even got all that stuff upstreamed, actually. There's about 22-ish projects by my count that they've touched as a result of this. The talk in the notes is time-coded. So if you click the link, you can go right to the talk that covers their contributions. And then also, Pharonix did an article that kind of summarizes some of it. We'll put a link to that, too.

Yeah, by Alberto Garcia working at Igelia. It's not an exaggeration to say that the impact goes well beyond just gamers. It's Plasma desktop users. It's anybody that uses OpenGL or Vulkan or, you know. Wayland? Yeah, Wayland users. They have some specific patches for Wayland and they have a game mode. Yeah, they got the whole, you know, game scope.

And you, like with so much of this stuff, it's not just they're only chipping it there. Other distros, other places are packaging it. You can find it on GitHub. You can just use it even if you're never going to buy a deck. It's where you're in and they did it right. There were some questions at the launch and I'm pretty impressed. But I'll get to my thoughts on it.

Alex, compared to me, you're relatively new, right right it's been a few months for you that you had your deck i want to hear your thoughts on it you've got a little bit different eye than i do i'm curious i know you brought it with you on the trip so it must be checking some boxes i just looked through my emails i bought mine in august 2022 so i've had it for over a year now. Oh, okay. And I've used it quite a bit more than I expected, but I'm not a huge gamer per se. I will, when I'm traveling, look for something to pass a few minutes here and there. But when I'm playing video games, for the most part,

it's things like Factorio, where I want a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor, and that kind of thing. But what I've found is that it comes in fits and starts like sometimes I'll find a really good like when I was in Chicago a couple of weeks ago I found a game called Pixel Pals Soccer which I think was like eight dollars on Steam or something and it's just a silly little arcade football simulator thing and for those sorts of games it's absolutely amazing what really blows my mind is that i can

play some kind of a really silly like pixel pals soccer game and then if i want to switch to red dead redemption 2 on the same device yeah and okay that there are battery life and heat concerns of doing that but really overall it's just you know stuff like um you know without having a toddler around it's it's the instant resume then sleep stuff someone says to me you know ella needs a new diaper i'm like oh cool i'll just you know put it into sleep mode and come back to it 10 minutes later it's exactly where i left it yeah i love that too i did find so i bought originally the 512 version which i looked up and it was near enough 700 i don't remember it being that much but there you go the uh the receipt doesn't lie and so it came

with the fancy etched screen on it as well as the 512 storage i ended up a couple of months ago upgrading my storage to two terabytes there was i think a prime day deal on a two terabyte ssd i think for about 140 dollars something like that how was that process the upgrading opening it up couldn't have been easier i 3d printed a little caddy to rest it on so i didn't break the joysticks uh i didn't really need to right because it has to be face down of course screen down yeah i didn't i don't think i really needed to do that you know a couple of folded microfiber cloths would probably have achieved the same thing. But any excuse to use the 3D printer, right?

And now you have it for future upgrades. Yeah. So then whilst I was in there, I sort of saw how easy it was to get to the joysticks. And I was like, well, while I'm in there, those famous words, I may as well upgrade the joysticks. So I ordered a pair of hall effect gimbals off of amazon and installed those as well and that was super easy there was a couple of tiny little bits of soldering to do with those because there's like a ground strap for the joysticks but yeah the ssd was was physically really easy you just had to re-image the ssd using the steam os updater

which you flashed your us-C compatible thumb drive, plug it into the deck, and then it bootstraps the entire system off that, and it was completely painless. Oh, I love to hear that. And Jeff, I know that you've also opened up your deck. I think you've probably owned it for a little bit as well, and I'm curious to know what you decided to swap out, which deck you started with, and if you're able to take it somewhere better, and how the whole process was, because you open up tons of things. For sure. I have only done the SSD for now. I do plan on changing some things out in the future. But for now, the SSD was the first thing I had to do, and I did it before I even turned the thing on.

the SSD was the first thing I had to do and I did it before I even turned the thing on. I think Alex had it wrong with the 3d printing. Sorry, man. Just use the case that comes in. Just put the, put the joysticks down in the case and that's it. That's all you got to do.

Oh yeah. Oh my God, Alex. Oh, if the listeners could see my face right now, they would be seeing me going. Yeah. All right,

Jeff, you got me there, bro. That's a good idea. Pretty simple. That's so amazing and yeah just just like alex said it's very easy since i you know do have a very recent one i've had it for a month it is a later revision there are a few very subtle differences um one of them is the heat shield doesn't have that sticker you have to peel off anymore and those who have taken apart the deck know what I'm talking about. So to get under the heat shield in order to pull the SSD out,

it's just a solid piece of metal now for the newer revisions. I did end up getting the cheapest one because for the same price as a 256 model, I was able to get one terabyte SSD and a one terabyte micro SD card. So two terabytes total for less than the 256 model. Why not? And the gaming performance is the same. The only thing you're really losing out on is if you get the really high end, you get the etched screen. But if you don't care about the edge screen, this is the mistake I made. I think I should have got the cheap unit and did what you have just done. Spend that money on more storage.

but I think more are going to come down the line. I foresee new monitors. Obviously, we have joysticks, things like that. Joysticks are definitely in the future for me. They feel good as they are. My biggest problem with it is the D-pad. Mine is very, very stiff like yours is, and I've played with some other ones that aren't as stiff.

Oh, really? Okay. But I got to figure that out, man. My thumbs are getting tired these days, and I like using the D- yeah yeah yeah i could i could actually see myself swapping that out it's it's probably the least favorite aspect of the deck for me is the d pad it's it's bearable i don't mean to complain but yeah i was wondering did either of you get chance to play with any of the emulation stuff yet oh yeah yeah yeah that's one of my favorite aspects but jeff i'd love to hear what you played around with i went the simple route with emu deck um i i tend to like individual emulators versus this whole let's try to put everything in one ui because with the steam with steam us especially you have ui into ui into ui into ui and it just drives me nuts i'd rather

just launch an emulator hold the steam button, use the trackpad as a mouse, and then go to the menus like a desktop. It's just my personal preference. You can get buried in those layers, and sometimes it's hard to get yourself out. I've had this issue. But to counter what Jeff just said, I have found the family acceptance approval factor higher with the full screen immersed emulator. So it just sort of depends on your audience. Yeah, for sure. And if I were to go that route, I would probably just skin RetroArch.

So it's only one layer, right? Steam OS to RetroArch and then have everything. Whereas EmuDeck runs Emulation Station, which just launches RetroArch in the backend. Again, it's just layer after layer. So far for me, it's been great. I try to push everything down as much as I can in terms of performance for battery life.

And even with PlayStation, it's no problem to put the thing on like 5 watts TDP, turn off SMT, the hyper-threading stuff, and just drop it as far as i possibly can it's dead quiet hardly using any power and i do the same thing for any of the emulators how cool is it to play the playstation version of like crazy taxi and then swap into something like pokemon yellow on a game boy color and then you know it's, I don't think there are many devices because it's just Linux underneath, right?

You can just put an SD card with all your ROMs on and just swap it in and out. And it's, it's just, it's a total game changer for my personal perception of emulation stations. You know, EmuDeck made it so easy to get set up with. It was almost trivial. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's pretty simple. It walks you through every little thing, has all the folders listed out for you, where you need to put your ROMs and BIOS and save files if you have them. All that stuff is just dunked onto whatever

you want and through a nice little user interface telling you what to do. And something that not many people realize is after the setup setup you can go back into that emu deck and application and change some of the settings as well in my case i didn't want every little thing to show up on steam os in my launcher yeah i can go through in the desktop mode and remove it manually but yes emu deck gave me those options and just able to do it from there okay that yeah i do get it does get a little cluttered. That is a good tip. I think the other thing that you kind of just tossed in there, Jeff, but it demonstrates

the flexibility of the deck is you're tweaking the wattage on the CPU and you actually can turn those dials and affect those knobs. You can't do that with the Switch, right? You can't do that on the PlayStation. And you don't need to do it with the deck, but you can if you want to.

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And you can see how Linode just is getting better and help you scale your applications from the cloud to the edge. It really is a powerful tool, probably one of the very best in my tool bag, if you know what I mean, like proverbial tool bag. Linode.com slash unplugged. Chris, you've had your deck for a while. I thought we could review your history with this particular device. You reserved it way back in July 2021. You then had to wait until July 2022. Total of 364 days. Torturous wait.

Almost a year. Almost. Yeah, almost. But you've now owned it for over that time. 435 days. So, what do you think? You know, I thought I would screw with it a lot more than I have.

I thought I'd, I don't know, I guess I fantasized about replacing the OS, but still using it to game. But then, I kind of realized after owning it for a little bit, I had this, my initial experience was at first I didn't go to it for gaming. I'd go to my desktop because by the time I got the deck, I had been gaming on my Linux desktop. So I had everything set up.

Yeah. You already had gaming habits. You had a gaming – yeah. Bigger screen, mouse, keyboard. And I was like, well, I'll just game on this. I'll just do it on this. But inevitably something broke or like actually probably what happened is the kids wanted to switch to a new game. And I tried to install and it didn't work.

And I hadn't spent the 30 minutes required to make sure everything was fixed, which is always how it was on the Linux desktop, especially around then. And so I had started reaching for the deck a little more often because it always just worked. Yeah. And then every now and then I would drop down to desktop mode, but I wouldn't actually find myself on desktop mode as often as I thought. And I would just go to play the games more and more that I would normally play on my desktop on the deck. And I found it to work really well for that.

But over time, I ended up putting it in a dock, hooked up to the TV, and now I probably do just as much gaming hooked up to the TV with a controller. So it's just like a game console that happens to be Linux-powered. Yeah. Every now and then I'll install a custom flat pack or something like that. I'll put a link to a cheap, really crappy, but works pass-through USB-C docking station that I got. It's just really simple. The nice thing is with the deck, any USB-C charger that does

PD you can use. So I picked up an anchor and I just plug it in and it just works and I don't have to worry about that. So I really get to treat it like a console, but then I sometimes get the benefits of a Linux PC. We had a friend, one of the kid's friends come over and we were short a computer and they all wanted to play Minecraft. So I installed the Minecraft flat pack. I put in this little dock. I hooked up the launch keyboard. I hooked up a mouse to the dock and I just set it right there

in front of the kid. And I said, there you go. You can game on the deck. And he loved it. That's great. He went home and asked his dad to get a deck. So every now and then, like, you know, you're using it like a Linux PC all of a sudden when you didn't expect to. And it just doesn't miss a beat. So it's basically become my main gaming PC, even though it's not a spec monster. You know, I could probably throw a nicer GPU on my desktop if I could afford it. Right. But Valve's setting these target levels of performance.

And so you're not going to max the settings on most modern games. But at the same time, at the screen resolution, you don't really need it maxed on that screen. So you're not, at least me for the kind of gaming that I do, I'm not missing the fact that it's not on ultra max. Maybe it's on medium for some of the settings. Well, you said you docked it a lot too. How does it feel when it's docked?

Do you feel a limitation when you're looking at it on a different screen? No, flawless. It really works on the tv you know the ui has been designed right in a way where it works so well on the on the device or on the tv screen uh the kids use it more when it's docked on the tv and we do more family gaming what i find really interesting about that chris is you're basically using it like a steam machine and instead of deck, which is hilarious to me. It's like, I don't know, harking back to a different time. Yeah, it's probably what I would have done with the deck, but they were right. And Nintendo cracked it too with the Switch. There is those times, like when you're traveling or when the TV is occupied, where it's really great to just take it and go in the back.

Like this weekend, some friends were over for the kids. They just took it just take it and go in the back. Like this weekend, some friends were over for the kids. I just took it and I just went into the back. And I just played a new game that I picked up. And it was really enjoyable. And didn't need to monopolize the TV for that time. And yeah, it's kind of limited in its hardware specs, but in practical use, you don't really run up against that. And I actually suspect that's going to be the case for quite a while. I think people will be picking these up into 2025, late 2025, and they're still going to be very happy with the performance. So I think it's still at a good time in the hardware lifecycle to jump in as long as you're not like an ultra-max setting person. Then you probably want to stick to the PC.

You probably don't want something portable. It feels like something steve's jobs would have made do you know what i mean like in terms of it it prioritizes the user experience over everything else it's not the spec monster like you say but the experience is good and therefore you reach for it more often yeah on the whole it's designed. It does what it says it will. And the battery for me, depending on the game, you know, two and a half, three hours for some of the more intensive games. But at the same time, that's probably the maximum ever for a gaming session for me. And it's just a USB-C plug away to run indefinitely. And I was curious how long, you know, could it hold up to

very long gaming sessions? Well, it was a rainy weekend at the Fisher household and all of the neighborhood's kids decide they should hang out inside my tiny home. So we had an RV with like eight kids and we were just letting them rotate through playing games on the deck and i mean that thing probably went for like six hours straight without a break just rotating through different kids maybe taking a pause during lunch and it just holds up in that dock inside a cupboard really well and continued to deliver exactly what they expected and part of it is because the thing's gotten better since i first bought it. The updates that Valve has done have made it better. And what the deck shows us is this is the way. When developers work upstream, the best way for them to take advantage of that

work that they've paid developers to do is to then ship that upstream code. And the way they ship that upstream code is by shipping a device that stays current and it gets updated frequently and can be updated in a way where it won't break. But the incentives align for Valve such that because the best way for them to ship those improvements is to ship current Linux and ship the current user land, they've developed a system that is very modern and improves month to month versus a traditional Linux-based console. The things get bastardized like we see with Android and Chrome OS and Tivo OS and all the other things out there where they fork Linux four years ago and then they start building that product and by the time they ship it, the kernel's already past its end of life,

the user land already has a dozen security vulnerabilities in it, and the only way the thing stays together is because it's got some sort of runtime controls. This flips that entire horrible, crappy, out-of-date hardware model on its entire face, and it provides the users with a better experience, it incentivizes Valve, Collabra, and the others to work upstream. And it trickles down to all the other Linux users because of this model.

So that's great. But there are some things about the deck that are not so great. And, you know, Alex and Jeff, you guys didn't have any complaints. I'm wondering if either one of you have any major negatives about the deck. Just the D-pad for me again probably fixable fair um it's a bit wide for my hands at first it hurt just took some time getting used to um i've got wide shoulders but even then it just took time for my hands to not hurt my wrist in particular and whether i'm you know resting it on anything or it doesn't matter it's just the

angle in which it sits the parallel handles just don't fit well with my wrists um other than that your you know your mentions about performance you're you're dead on there are i just want to mention there are a few very very recent games harry potter for example the new moral combat these games are nearly unplayable on the deck from what I've seen. I haven't tried myself. But I also just want to give another quick, you know, there are more powerful handhelds, but if you're trying to run with good battery life, the deck still outperforms at lower TDPs than the new ones.

So do your research. Look up the reviews. They're still being pumped out. And, like, you know, if you buy the Asus, you're not buying a device that's supporting the entire linux ecosystem development exactly that's that's the key for me right there yeah yeah alex i'm curious do you have any major complaints with the deck before i get to mine only really when it comes to entering text in desktop mode or trying to do anything outside of the golden path you know so for example at DevOps

Days in Chicago last month I was trying to install Tailscale onto my Steam Deck because why not it's just Linux right and I went to try and actually enter some text into the terminal in desktop mode and that was really painful now you could solve that by doing Steam Remote Play from your laptop into the Steam Deck if they're on the same network that actually worked pretty well for me probably the easiest way to solve it

is to have an external keyboard though but I do really like when I get home and I have a USB-C monitor that I can just one cable like you were saying, plug it in and suddenly convergence is a thing. Did anybody tell Mark Shuttleworth about this? Right, it's here.

It actually, it's shipped. Yeah. Yeah, I'll just plus one your keyboard comments. I made that observation in my original review of the Steam Deck 2 and my time with it has not improved my impressions, I very, very, very quickly drop to either a USB-C keyboard. But one tip I haven't tried, but a listener wrote in and said, I use KDE Connect and then I use the keyboard on my Android phone to do the typing. I'm like, OK, there could be something. It's so funny the way.

But you can rig it, I guess, however you want, I suppose. But yeah, the keyboard probably, there could be something. It's so funny the way – but you can rig it I guess however you want I suppose. But yeah, the keyboard probably up there on the top. It would be also really nice. This is just coming from somebody who is sometimes on a limited connection. Steam and the deck technically has this feature to schedule your downloads. And these games are big with lots of updates and frequent updates to improve compatibility. And like Jeff was saying, there's some modern games that don't run very well,

but there's several examples where like six months, maybe a little bit more patches came down and now they play great. One of the ones I play a lot is the Marvel Spider-Man game just because it's a great demo of the deck. And I've watched that game get better and better and better as I've played it. But the flip side to that is you've got to download those updates.

And their schedule feature only works if the machine's on. So the nights where I have insomnia and I decide to fire up the Steam Deck, those are the nights I get updates. Otherwise, I never get updates. And so it's always this decision of do i want to spend 15 minutes doing my updates before i can play my games i wish the damn thing when it's plugged in would just wake up and do downloads i don't understand if it's if it does do that mine doesn't and i drives me crazy when did we start recording maybe 45 minutes ago yeah certainly we connected i turned my steam deck on then i am still downloading updates because

there was a cyberpunk update that was like 60 gig i've now got a forza horizon 5 update that's 10 gig you know i'm not going to complain i can run either of those games on this thing but like you say the updates are pretty massive so for me upgrading to that two terabyte ssd means i can have more games installed but now it also means there are more updates to do yeah whenever i switch it on which i suppose is part of the modern gaming experience we just have to accept that like right whenever you turn a ps5 on or something after a couple of weeks it's at least 20 minutes before you're playing because there's some update to download or something so yeah i guess that's just par for the course these days it's just it's so

good at like the waking up resuming and going to sleep if it could wake up do all the updates and then go back to sleep i would be such a happy camper um you know one other thing my observation is and this is definitely trending in the right direction the verified list can be a little hit and miss like gta5 works but i had to kind of do some rigmarole to actually get the gta login screen to work and i had to of course go sign up and create an account and do all that and trying to do that on the deck was painful so part of that isn't really as smooth as the verified status or whatever the reviews might say it is but my trick there has been combine that with ProtonDB searches. When you combine the two results, you can pretty much sort

out all the different problems. It's a little extra legwork, but the resources are there. And then if I were just asking for improvements, these aren't really things I don't like about it, but the screen's fine. It does what it needs to do. I'd love to see a revision to of this device in 2024, mid-late 2024, that replaces all the bezel. Like, Wes, if you grab the deck there, we have ours here in studio. It's a real nice device, but there's quite a bit of bezel around the device. And if we could just pop the screen out edge to edge there kind of like the asus rog does i think that'd look really great and it might even be worth a little upgrade i think the other thing that would make it a no-brainer upgrade would be a second

usbc port oh right especially if you're doing something where you're you know connecting to multiple stuff docking it you want to be plugged in, there goes your port. Or a second micro SD slot, maybe. Sure, sure. A little extra storage. I'd take both of those. Because when your power is USB-C and your keyboard and your game controller inputs are all USB-C unless you go wireless,

it'd be nice to have more than one C port. Yeah, you're right. I mean, it's like a sleek design. I hadn't thought about the aspect of limited connectivity. Yeah, I mean, I'm mean, it's a sleek design. I hadn't thought about the aspect of limited connectivity. Yeah, I mean, I'm complaining, right? Because all it takes is a USB-C hub or a dock, and you've solved the problem. That's exactly what I do.

I've got a little anchor thing or something that I plug into the bottom of, and it's got A and HDMI and extra C ports and pass-through power, and it's not a problem. How nice would it be if that second port was on the bottom? So you've got one on the top and one on the bottom. Don don't know about you but i've got a bit of a belly these days and having a having a cable coming out the bottom sometimes would be a negative where it sometimes wouldn't be yeah and also when you're like when you're holding it on a table and you've got the

cord plugged into the bottom it's not comfortable it'd be nice to have the cord to have the option to plug into the top and then when i'm gaming a table, I wouldn't have that cord like under there in the way. And to that end, the battery life, it obviously depends on the game. But maybe, you know, if you're going to do a revision two of this, slightly bigger battery or slightly newer battery technology. It's not a killer for me. It wouldn't make or break it for me either way. Because, again, I don't know if I've ever actually drained the thing all the way down to zero in a single play session. My daughter has, but I never have.

So it's not a huge killer for me. But it's really – it would be great with two ports, plug it in and go. And just touching on the dad factor for those of you that do have kids for a moment. This device, I thought once I brought this home, all the kids would be clamoring for one for Christmas or whatever. Dad, we want a Steam Deck. Dad, we want a Steam Deck. My oldest did for a moment, but it faded, and none of them have asked for a Steam Deck. They like to play on it,

but what it has done is it's all pulled them into the Steam ecosystem more. And they're playing more Steam games on their Linux laptops than they were because they find them on the deck and then they play them on their laptops. And the deck's a treat because the deck's got a little bit more horsepower. So in a way, it's brought them back more into Linux gaming but not to the deck. But I think that's kind of a – I'll take it. And then a couple of hits just to leave you with.

We have the awesome deck list. Yeah, there's an awesome list for the deck. Of course they did that. We'll put a link to that. It's definitely worth checking out. There has to be. I mean, if there isn't one, one automatically appears. I believe that's, yeah. Once it's observed, it exists. And they've got accessories on there. They've got software you can install outside of Steam and some great guides. Also, a couple of games that I think are really great if you like 2D side-scrollers. Ori and the Blind Forest. I hear it's a good series. I just picked that up. It's on sale for like $4 right now.

have anybody in the family that loves cats or yourself stray sells the deck seriously stray sold the deck to the entire neighborhood of kids this weekend because they all love cats um and then if you want to try out a modern game that's been working pretty well for me on their dead space the new dead space the remastered dead space is looking pretty good uh and we'll put a link to all of that in the notes because it's quite a comprehensive set of stuff and the ecosystem has really grown. It's pretty cool to see. And I'm quite happy with the purchase. More than a year in, I don't regret it at all.

And I think the only thing I would tweak is maybe not get the top tier model. I don't play outside. I don't really need the edge screen. I could have gone like the Jeff Routt, a little bit more budget on the unit, but then spend that on the storage because that's clearly the way to go long term. Yeah. But OK.

So knowing that it's not going to get upgraded anytime soon, likely still a good buy. Yeah. Yeah. And the 512 for me, like Alex was saying, because you end up having so many updates, I just start pruning games. Right. So I'm kind of always around the max, but I can keep it inside that 512. So it works. Collide.com slash unplugged. If you are in security or in IT and you're feeling a little

burned out, wish things could just be a little better and you've got Okta, I've got a message for you. I've been there and I know that the source of most problems, vulnerabilities, mistakes, ransomware, it often comes from end user stations, maybe it's phished credentials. It's a problem and it's not really their fault. The tooling when I was in IT just really put the burden on the individual technicians and of course the security shop. And the real issue was the user just needed to be walked through appropriately on how to solve problems before they can connect to the infrastructure. And that's where Collide comes in. It's for those in security IT that are working with Okta. Collide ensures that only secure devices and credentials access your cloud apps.

So you solve the problem of phish credentials or unpatched software, or maybe they're not up to whatever your standards need to be for compliance. You solve it before they join the network. And you give employees tooling through maybe direct messaging and other really clever solutions to just solve the problem their self. It really should be that simple. Maybe you could take away a good percentage of the tickets that come in if you can solve it with tooling like this. That gives everybody more bandwidth. And it makes IT part of the solution now.

So go experience it firsthand. They've got a demo over at collide.com slash unplugged. You can check it out. It's a great way to support the show and see how you can integrate this into your operation. So go to collide, that's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Now, did you know that we love receiving feedback from you? Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. You can send us in.

Kark sent us some feedback. And I think, Chris, this is about your little garage terminal that you are thinking about for a note system. Now, he has a few steps for us here. Step one, get an old ThinkPad like a Core 2 Duo or older because it can be had for a reasonable price. Step number two, take out the battery and just keep it plugged into the wall all the time, maybe on some kind of wall mount. Since it's so old, running a GUI might be painful, so just run it headless and just have Vim or Nano or even Emacs open and ready for text input at all times. It's sort of a great idea.

I do love the remove the battery part, too, for an old laptop like that. It feels so great that you still can do that. And if my notes are in Obsidian, but maybe I had the markdown files synced to the laptop somehow, I mean, a guy could just edit in Nano. That is true. You know, I mean mean love me the nano so that's a pretty good suggestion i'm i am feeling the advantages of the thinkpad pretty strongly but then there's the tinker in me that wants to do with another system so i i haven't made a decision yet because i've been traveling but uh what i what i will say to that is you can buy an X240, which is an i5 fourth-gen sort of era laptop, for less than $100 now.

And that's one of those small kind of 12-ish inch size screens. That'd be a pretty perfect note station. Yeah, the one thing I've definitely decided, it's either going to be a used system that I own, or used system I buy or a used system that's donated or something. It's going to be not a new purchase because for this job, for taking notes, it's silly to purchase a brand new computer. There's plenty of used systems that still have life in them. So I have decided on that aspect of it, but I really kind of like the idea of just an old school GUI-less machine. You could always just spend $1,200 on the latest iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard. I really kind of like the idea of just an old school GUI-less machine. You could always just spend $1,200 on the latest iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard and have some courage.

What about like an old school actual terminal emulator? Oh, man. Well, that's what I was thinking is like if my kids saw this, that's essentially what this would be to them. They'd be like, dad's old garage computer that didn't even have a mouse and doesn't have a graphical environment you know like that's essentially to them what it would be i'm picturing a jumanji moment where they find it in a corner in 10 years and blow the dust off it oh look here's all dad's notes it all they're all it also i mean again if we're just doing terminal it'd be really cool to get like an old power PC Mac. Oh, yeah.

And get that running Linux. And, you know, I've got that old Power Mac G5 tower that we put Linux on forever ago and then had the audience bang on. Yeah. Could convert that, but it's such a, yeah, it's too much power. Do you have a 486 anywhere whilst you're at it? I don't know. That would be awesome ah i was thinking chris you could print out all of your car maintenance scheduling on like a dot matrix printer you can hear it legit would love that i legit would love that we could

just have it going in the background while we're doing the pre-show and like keep the printed stack in the glove box you know then when people ask for my maintenance history i just give them a stack of dot matrix. You could even print on carbon copies if you wanted multiple copies. If I could, maybe like a monochrome display too. That would be really awesome. Oh, guys. And the CRT,

obviously. Because I wouldn't leave the CRT on all the time, but I'd leave the machine on, but not the CRT. Sit down, flip the CRT on, get to work. I do have like one of those old IBM PS2 keyboards around as well. Okay, perfect. So, I mean, we might be on to something here, boys. I wanted to say thank you for everybody who becomes a member to this show.

We really try to add some value to the member version. We have two of them. One, which is ad-free. It's nice, lean, mean, and tight, still produced by Drew. And then we have the bootleg feed. And we do a lot in that member feed to try to make it almost like a whole other show. And it's probably something we should talk more about because it's a pretty good product. But I just wanted to mention it now, unpluggedcore.com if you want to become a member or jupiter.party if you want to support all the shows, including the show and still get access to the member benefits.

Because we have entered Q3 of 2023, and the ad sales are not improving. I had hoped to bring Linux Action News back by now. There's some leads that I'm still working, but there hasn't been any real bites. And I don't actually see the ad market necessarily improving. So I'm very grateful that the audience has recognized that there's value in independent media specifically one in this particular niche and understands that it's not necessarily a niche that advertisers feel like spending money on right now if we were making videos about people making

pools full of balloons or something with a great thumbnail we'd probably be making great sponsor revenue but we're talking about linux and we and we're doing year plus reviews of hardware devices. Like, that's not the stuff that drives advertisers anymore. So I really just wanted to thank the audience. Also, the boosting has really stepped up. In fact, just in general, Albi, which is not even the most common popular way for people to boost in, but is one of the top ones. In August, Albi accounts have processed over 1 million transactions just in that month. And a huge, huge amount of that is boosts.

And, and that's, you know, Albi is a fantastic piece of software, but it's probably third or fourth on the boost sources. And they're doing a million transactions in August. It's really awesome. And it's,

it's to us, it's perplexing because in the old model, you do a show, you get advertising, you do the sponsor read, and it was a pretty cut and dry system like with Linux Action News. It's a lean, mean, tight show. We get you in, we get the information you need that's important that week, we get you out and get you back to your day. It's not a show that really supports boost segments and feedback segments because that's not the format of the show. It's really a show that really supports boost segments and feedback segments because that's not the format of the show it's really a show that was modeled and built to be sponsor funded it was built for that and it has great downloads it's our second or third largest show on the

network and we can't produce it right now office hours is our smallest show on the network. I mean it might get like 3,000, 5,000 downloads. I mean it just – it can't be sponsored. And yet with that, because it's a value-for-value-based show, the audience recognizes a certain amount of value for it and has boosted the bounty every single time. And when that bounty gets reached, the entire production of the show has been paid for. Drew has been paid for. Drew's been paid for. The network got its split. Brent got his split. I got my split.

Everything's done. The hosting people that we share splits with, everything. By the time that bounty's reached, the show's already paid for, and so we can produce a show that has a fraction of the downloads of Linux Action News, and we can do it without bleeding. And so the paradigm shift that Value for Value brings to podcasting, besides being divorced from the dependency on sponsorships, which requires a certain type of content and content focus,

besides that change, it fundamentally shifts what type of shows can be produced. And it means content producers can make shows they truly love and do for their community. And it's massive. So just memberships or boosts, I just want to take a moment and thank everybody who stepped up and supported all of the JB shows. Because as we get into the latter half of the year, the situation with advertising ain't looking any better, boys. So we're feeling really grateful for everybody right now.

And with that, Booster Graham. Let's get to our baller booster this week. He's back after a little bit of a vacation from the show. Ladies and gentlemen, it's John A. himself. Hey, rich lobster! Coming in with 98,951 sats using Cast-O-Matic. He had no message, though.

Short, sweet, right to the point. It's nice to hear from you again, John A. He boosted into self-hosted this week, too, and it's nice to know you're out there and listening. Eric the Red boosts in with 98,029 sats. I hoard that which your kind covet. Coming in from Fountain.

This summer, I switched over to Tailscale from OpenVPN and WireGuard after hearing all the great stories on the show. Wow, what a Homelab game changer. During my summer travels, I had fast access to my LAN and set up a Linode exit node when I needed them. I avoided the hotspot throttling limits with EasyTether and a local exit node. I've been struggling to get EasyTether working on NixOS, though, but thanks for the great show,

and this zip should be an easy one to find. Looking forward to the meetups. Grab the map. Oh, geez, grab the map, Wes. I'll also just mention, not a paid-for segment, TailScale recently partnered with Molvad, and now you can use Molvad as endpoint for the tail net. And that's a great partnership right there.

So exit nodes now on Molvad means you have a lot of high-speed options. Yeah, right. How many folks are using those two kind of services already? All right. Do you find it? Yeah. I mean, this is a postal code in King County, Washington, somewhere over maybe by Issaquah. I thought so.

I recognize that. Issaquah. Some good walking out there near Issaquah. I thought so. I recognize that. Issaquah. Some good walking out there near Issaquah. Some good walking. Ain't that true? Yeah. Yeah. Issaquah?

Issaquah? Issaquah. Firetack came in with 73-73-0 Satoshis. Oh, I bet there's a meaning there. I like it. Hello, all. I just want to say thank you for the nudge. After a lifelong interest, but having never pursued it, today I passed my technician's license test as a ham operator. The first four digits of the boost is also a two-digit message repeated for my fellow hams. Thank you for the push a few months back.

I thought there was a message in there. So again, that SAT amount was 73730. Hmm. Congratulations, Friar Tech, on getting the HAM license. Yeah, that's great. That is really great. And we also appreciate you sharing some value back and sharing that with us. KMOG came in with 55,441 SATs from the index.

Longtime member, and I've wanted to do a zip code boost since it was introduced. Hint, I'm still hoping JB has a Midwest meetup nearby in the index. Long time member and I've wanted to do a zip code boost since it was introduced. Hint, I'm still hoping JB has a Midwest meetup nearby in the future. So it looks like the zip code, Wes, is 55 441. Hmm, okay. I've got a few ideas. How about Hennepin County, Minnesota? Maybe somewhere near Plymouth. Hello, Plymouth, Minnesota. Thank you for boosting in. And, yeah, I'm fantasizing a lot these days about getting out there.

We'll see. Maybe those gas prices come down again one day and we get a good cross-country road trip in. You know where those gas prices are nice and cheap? On the East Coast. It's like $3.40 a gallon. I know. So you just got to come out east, dude. I know.

Well, ship choups over, and then you fly out to meet her. Seriously. Seriously. McZip boosts in with $40,000. Had trouble boosting last week, so I'm doubling this week's boost. P.S. My username was originally supposed to be

the letters MCZP, but quite frankly, I like Mixip better. Keep up the great work. I look forward to the JB crew every week. Thanks. You know, thank you for being graceful about that, because I've boosted in to shows, and they're like, Chris LAX, Chris, and they just like, you know, it's like, it's just Chris

LAS. It's not that hard. I thought it was Chris-less, kind of like Christmas. That also has happened, and it's so, so I totally get it, it's like, it's just Chris LAS. It's not that hard. I thought it was Chris-less, kind of like Christmas. That also has happened. And it's so, it's so, I totally get it. And then we do it to the listeners too. So thank you for being graceful about that, Mick Zip. And thank you for the boost.

Nord came in with 32,450 sets. First time booster here. Thanks for all the great content you put out there. I listened to your podcast while commuting and I've actually begun to look forward to going to and coming from the office. So thank you. I really enjoyed the matrix topic lately and just want to chime in with how great it's been to have an iMessage bridge running. I run that matrix iMessage bridge on a Mac OS VM and can now get all my text messages and iMessages bridged to matrix.

It's great. Signal and Facebook messenger bridges are also running in containers on Proxmox. And I really enjoy my one stop for messaging and not having to have Facebook messenger installed anymore. P.S. The four last digits of the boost is my zip code from Denmark. Well,

I got to say, Nord, that sounds like a really nice setup. I have a couple of questions for you. IOS looks up that zip code. How does that bridge for iMessage handle pictures, reactions, videos, and group chats? Does it handle those dynamics okay? Because I find that happens with family chats quite a bit.

But I love your stack there. That's really slick. I think I may have to play around with that. Yeah, you have some homework. And thanks. That looks like to be a message from Copenhagen in Denmark. Hello, Copenhagen. Thank you for boosting in.

And thank you for getting it all set up for the first time boost. I know that can sometimes be a hill to climb, but you have arrived. We appreciate it. Gene Bean comes in with 31,109 sats using Castomatic. He says, I love the idea of a NextCloud app being able to exist in a container and utilize other languages.

This could open up all kinds of things, including one on my wish list, OwnTracks recorder integration. Now, wait a minute here. I thought there was something like that. In fact, I would like to ask the audience, what

are you using right now for good real time location tracking that's cross platform because the wife has asked that I bring the iPhone to El Salvador, not the Graphene OS device

because she wants to be able to use Find My for me while we're traveling. Oh. And I get that. And I would really like to have a super solid replacement. Own tracks seemed like a lot when I went to set it up. But Gene Bean also chimed in on Matrix vs. Discord,

saying, it's only a matter of time before Discord pulls the rug like Twitter and Reddit. I agree, actually. I think they actually have made some decisions I disagree with. They've walked some things back. But as a platform, they are always going to be under pressure. And, yeah, I guess you and Gene Bean connected in the NixNerds.

I just saw Gene Bean hanging out in there and the NixNerds being the wonderful channel that it is. It is a good channel. Helping Gene Bean out with all kinds of tips. If you're into Nix and you haven't checked out our NixNerds chat room, it's on our Matrix server and it's definitely worth digging into. Mally Strix boosts in with 30,000 cents. Just heard episode 527 and wanted to say how much I love when you review hardware. I was interested in the framework before, but really loved your take on it and how modular it truly was from a first-hand experience.

Oh, and yes, please, I'd love to hear Chris's take on the Steam Deck. Well, I guess you're getting that's take on the Steam Deck. Well, I guess you're getting that one. A little early present there. The reason why we did the Steam Deck follow-up is because we had more than a few people boost in and say, yeah, I'd like to hear it. You'll often hear me throw stuff out, and then if people bite and say they're

interested and I get more than a couple, then I'll generally pull the trigger. And if we don't get a lot of traction, I'll just let it sail by. Brian, I wonder if we could just get a flash framework update. How did it survive the travel? Is it working okay for you? Still happy with it? Chris, you're going to win this one. I haven't quite switched to it full, and I know you were efficient for that. Oh, you didn't switch over to it yet? Oh, I mean, I didn't see that coming. You know, it turns out i went to berlin to

be very busy every single day and did a bunch of oh you're working huh uh yeah and luckily um the dev one did survive however hardly i would say it is in desperate need of being switched over to the framework you say survived but for for anybody who's just listening to the show, his screen will move. We're in the same room, by the way, in case there's any confusion. His screen will move backwards and forwards three or four inches before the actual mechanism of the hinge engages. Like, that thing is done, dude.

It's finished. It's so sad. It's like an old steering wheel on an old car. It just has so much play in it. But it's like this beloved device that I just don't want to get rid of. It'll be repaired. I'll make some efforts to try to get it repaired and up and running again. But that said, there is Nix on the framework now.

And I did have some help doing that at some of the nixos meetups at cbase and i spent some time over a you know several breakfasts just kind of poking around and getting some of the hardware optimizations going and i mean early days but so far really great and i'm beginning to catch the bug so we will see what what comes up next all right well i brought with me a little present for brent as well i brought him i have a small form factor little one liter pc with a i think an i3 fourth gen in it which is going to become his home server and yeah you're gonna put nix on it you heard it here first i think yes maybe that's probably nix or proxmox. That's awesome. But probably Nix. Or Proxmox with Nix inside it. Yeah, totally.

Limiting factor boosted in with 30,000 sats. Hey, I don't think you're going to gravitate to a garage PC that isn't 100% and doesn't have all your tabs from Googling sessions while you sat in the air conditioning wondering what went wrong and wish you had never started on this project in the first place. I vote docking station with a keyboard. You really don't care if it gets oily. That feels like a really good insight. Maybe limiting factor has been there because that is, especially in the summer,

that is exactly when I thought I had broke my oil filter cap stick thing, and I forget what they call it, and I had to leave the garage and go somewhere thought I had broke my oil filter cap stick thing and I forget what they call it. And I had to I had to like leave the garage and go somewhere where I had AC. And so I could just think clearly. And then I had to take a bunch of notes and bring them back out into the garage with me. This kind of craps on the idea I just gotten really excited about, though. I mean, I'm willing to pivot, but you make such a good point. Not only would it be nice to have a browser, but it'd be nice to actually have the tabs from Firefox or Edge or whatever. I think you're just not taking notes hard enough.

You've got to put that stuff right in the notes, and then it sinks over. That's it. That's the other option. But a lot of times it's, you know, I sit down and I watch stuff on the TV and I take notes. Yeah. Go air-condition those fingers as they type, too, you know? I want them to look good. Brilliant.

Well, Chris, I think the solution here is to air condition in the garage. Well, there's that. Brent, you're just making more work for yourself. Yeah, Brent, could you help me do that? Yeah, we'll see.

What, April? Yeah. The show mascot comes in the Golden Dragon with a total of 11,110 sats across a bunch of ducks. Yeah, I believe

at least some of these were some live boosts that we just missed last week. Yeah, he came in live. We will get down to that at some point, get that down at some point. But yeah, it's always nice. He says, speaking of data sovereignty, which is our main topic last week, I'd love to know how I can close up my ports and just exit with Tailscale.

I've been using it for about a year after having some issues initially, but it's been great on the second go around. I can't wait for the meetups next month. So you know what? You might want to look into GoldenDragon as the Molvad integration I just talked about. That might just be the easiest click-click way to do it, my friend. Or you could do a Linode and install Tailscale there,

and then you can do it all on the command line. You could just do dash-dash help, and it'll give you the commands, and then once you get to the individual commands there's an additional help stanza you can do and you can get the individual sub commands and set it up pretty quick. Feel free to reach out to me as well. Alex KTZ on the self-hosted Discord.

I'll happily talk to you all day about Tailscale. There you go. There you go. Davrolin? Davrolin? Davrolin? Davrolin? Davrolin. Davrolin.

Boosts in with 5,000 cents. Not sure if it was mentioned on the show, but you can add funds to Albi directly using MoonPay, and they accept Visa. I'm from Norway and had no problem adding to my wallet. It was even easier than regular BTC without the need for extensive KYC. Yeah, the reason why it is so slick, MoonPay will have different levels of KYC depending on your location and if there's anything sus about you. So it is there and it's definitely one of the great options.

A lot of people I find already have the Cash app or something like that in the States and that's on the Lightning Network. But outside the States, I think MoonPay is a fantastic option. It can work in the States too. And it's built right in, like you said, built right built right in 7100 sats came in from jen holbo jen jen jenelbo someone will tell me how it's done jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen jen this is the risk you take when you boost so yeah, I'm sure I nailed it. It's pronounced poutine, people. Oh, gosh.

European skepticism around the U.S. security agencies, including the NSA, in my opinion, stems from the quite wide authority given to such agencies without requiring a court order. In Denmark, any wiretapping would require a court order, even in terror-related cases. And now, in some cases, and then ask for the court order in retrospect, with the risk of being denied such authority, and thus lose whatever intelligence is gathered. Oh, and by the way, the boost amount is my postal code. Hey, can we work this episode? So I totally get it and understand. I guess I was still – the point he's responding to is the remark I made that when I watched the Q&A for the next cloud sessions from a couple of weeks ago, the audience was very, very preoccupied with privacy issues around the NSA. I am too, but I generally feel like I'm the one guy in the room that cares about it,

metaphorically speaking. Then I just saw a room full of people that cared about it, and it was, I feel, a stark contrast between a U.S.-based audience and the questions they would have asked and a European-based audience. And they're dealing with ramifications of U.S. agencies that are basically running unchecked for anybody who's not a U.S. citizen. And I get it. And it looks different if you feel like you have a better trust or relationship with the system in your country.

Do we track them down? Yeah. I don't know if I'm going to pronounce it rightly, but Weiler, somewhere in Denmark. We've got to get a Deutsch specialist on here. I think so, yeah. Somebody just sits on a hot mic and helps us with this. But hello, Denmark. Thank you for boosting in. Zoltros came in with 5,000

stats. I decided to take the plunge and set up Alpine Linux as a workstation. Fun. Oh, alright. It went pretty well, but I gave up when I couldn't get power management working right. Would love for you guys to try it out sometime. Maybe a distribution based on muscle rather than glibc. Yeah, that would be fun to try.

I mean, obviously, there's a ton of Alpine containers out there, but going full workstation. It does seem like it'd be a fun experiment. You know, there are some folks that blog online and extol the virtues of going Alpine. Hey, it wouldn't take up much disk space, at least. Yeah. Oppie 1984 boosts in with 4,000 sats. On the topic of the no-nix challenge, saying something nice about a different Linux distro is easy. I say the challenge punishment should be having to say something good about Windows.

Oh, Oppie, those are strong words for a 4,000-sat boost. But I kind of agree. I would be down if it was easy to somehow put Windows 11 on a machine. I might be able to find some good things to say. I'd be up for that idea. I know they just did some major updates to WSL. We almost covered those today. I don't know if they're actually shipping to Windows users, but if they are, I'd be down for trying them

because some of the things they fixed around networking sound really kind of nice. It's probably been three years since I tried new Windows. I think the last time I tried it was WSL 2 or whatever it was when they shipped that, and even then you had to be in the early ring or something. I'll give Windows a compliment.

I love the fact that in Windows 11 they let me move the star icon from the middle to the bottom left again Oh, that is nice, yeah That's the kind of flexibility and customization I like about Windows Now gentlemen, I feel like we're going to need a ham boost sound For anyone listening, please send us in some suggestions

because Faraday Fedora came in with 7373 Satoshis It's a shame that LinuxFest Northwest got delayed, changed, modified, but fingers crossed, it can keep up the momentum for spring and I'll make a solid effort to make it there. You guys still need to get your ham tickets, by the way. That's true. I guess we have more time now. Yeah, I'm mixed on it. I'm mixed because I've been going to this thing for 20 years, and I want to see it continue and thrive, and we put a lot of hours and time in as a group to try to make it happen.

But at the same time, I'm a little relieved because it's going to be a little easier for us. We'll have more time to hang out. Yeah. Both as a team and both with the community. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, Faraday, I'm kind of with you on it uh penguin stargazer came in with 15 000 sats i just signed up to become a core contributor here's to many more episodes man thank you very much nice boost and a member we really appreciate it coming in from podverse

no less yeah user 30479 and that's all you get. Came in with 9,000 cents. With Simply, love the show. The idiot Uyel also was doing a plus one for a deck review. He sent us a row of ducks. And you, sir, you got it. And then we had a question and follow-up. We had a question last week and a follow-up this week. Goose comes in with 5,000 sats.

This will be our last boost for time this week. And he says, follow-up from a boost question last week and a follow-up this week. Goose comes in with 5,000 sats. This will be our last boost for time this week. And he says, follow-up from a boost from last week. Turning on the exploit compatibility mode in Graphing OS fixed the issues I was having. I think you'll recall he had like the Starbucks app or something was crashing. It's always nice when that works, right? Yeah. That is generally the fix. And all you're doing is essentially restoring it to the standard Android security model for memory protection.

So, you know, that's not so bad. It's just nice, too, to have that, like, background of it continues to work well. It's realistic. You can use the apps that you need to use one way or another. We also got a note in from a listener who said, you know, another thing you can do, just use their progressive web app. Just don't use the app. He says the PWA is pretty good. Thank you, everybody, who boosted in.

We're going to stop there for time this week, but we really, really appreciate it. We had 23 folks boost in this week, and we stacked 571,681 sats. That is fantastic really appreciate the support especially after the week I had with the conversations of sponsors I had to see that little number come in when we were doing our prep it really made me feel good

and it is a motivational thing too, there is an element to it and the interaction is fantastic, we end up talking about things we never expected to talk about it's really kind of a chance for us to have an improv moment in the show, more so than normal. It feels like a conversation with the audience every week. It's async, but it's a real connection. It's a real connection.

And if you'd like to participate, you can get a new podcast app at podcastapps.com. Fountain, Castamatic's really popular. Podverse is great. It's GPL. Those are all over there. Or if you want to keep your dang app because you love it just get albie get albie.com top it off directly with moon pay or something on the lightning network because it's all just an open network like the cash app or whatever and then you head on over to the podcast index you find unplugged and you boost from their

website and just keep your app i will have that all linked in the notes too to make it real easy for you and of course you can do it the traditional way with your Fiat card, your Fiat Fund coupon card at unpluggedcore.com or jupyter.party, and you get a few perks for that as well. And a shout out to all of our sat streamers out there who are just turning on that stream and supporting us as they listen. We see you, and it's pretty fun to watch that stuff trickle in. Y'all are just the darn best. And when the ad market is really freezing over, I look at that and think, we're going to be all right.

Now, Jeff said it right. Like, there's a lot of options when it comes to these emulators that just take over the whole deck. But I wanted to give a shout out to RetroDeck. It's the one that's worked the best for me and the family. And it's based on a really popular emulator that just just really solves this problem but this is rebased specifically to work on the deck so it's a kid tested chris las approved yeah and the nice thing about it is like some of these others do is it it's powered by emulation station and so it's really pretty compatible it's really good at detecting what

roms you have and showing the correct menus for that and making it a fully immersive experience. It's still early days, but I've been using it since it was pretty much released on the Steam Deck, and I give it the old thumbs up if you like this style of arcade emulation station, where it really gives you some of the knobs you want to tweak. It makes it really simple for anybody who's non-technical to launch a game. And then this machine. This machine is so great at these emulated games. Oh, right. Yeah, of course.

And you can find guides where you can run, say, like Breath of the Wild, the Switch game. You can run it better on the deck than it runs on the Switch. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just fantastic. You know what? Nintendo's gotten plenty of my money,

but it'd be great to be able to play that game when I want on the device I want. And being able to load things on there to do that is a really powerful thing. And RetroArch is fantastic. Emulation Station is fantastic. And RetroDeck kind of brings it all together and is a flat pack that is designed to be installed on the steam deck so we'll put a link to that in the notes i think you'll like it it's a great device i don't know if i sold you on one west because

you're not a big gamer but every now and then you get hooked on something yeah and i mean having it ready to go now you know i haven't fiddled with it uh the little bits of convergence stuff alex is talking about you that there's a lot to like there, and it's really not a bad price point. Yeah. And if nothing else, you could look at the hardware in that, and you could buy an equivalent for a pretty good price on a laptop. You could game on a laptop and get essentially the same benefits. You know, that's what's nice about the Dev1 is it's kind of like the same GPU and stuff, and that's a perk of it. of one is it's kind of like the same gpu and stuff and that's a perk of it so i think for me to summarize my general feelings on the deck as a device as a whole i was on the fence about buying

one i think i was probably in a similar situation to wes and then i thought one day screw it and just maybe uh bought one on a bit of an impulse i am very glad that i did because in hindsight for all the reasons that you've mentioned today, Chris, about supporting upstream stuff, it's the single most important milestone in Linux hardware that there has been for a decade. I don't know. Like if you remember the steam boxes that you were partnering with alien wear on all those years ago,

this is the fruition of all of that work and I can hold it in my hand. It's the year of the Linux desktop people. I don't know what else to say. Like it's can hold it in my hand it's the year of the linux desktop people i don't know what else to say like it's it's in my hand yeah i mean i'm trying to think of a more important linux device right now i mean there's a lot of important linux devices out there but something that impacts so many of us and is pushing this forward and bringing a new category of user to Linux. And it's real genuine Linux, too. It's not some weird, crazy, bastardized thing. It's, dare I say, it's a game changer. It's a game changer, Alex. We've had a game changer for LinuxFest, as we mentioned, but the meetups are cooking. In fact, they're looking like they're going to be pretty well attended. Details are at meetup.com slash

LinuxFestNorthwest. We'll be there. Not quite doing the same thing, but we'll have bells on, and perhaps we'll do a live Linux Unplugged on Saturday or something. Cooking that up. We're just going to find the right venue, and we'll update the meetup details. This time around, it's at the LinuxFestNorthwest meetup page. Again, that's meetup.com slash LinuxFestNorthwest.

If you're still going to make it, that's where you'll find all the goodies. As for us, though, we're all done here. We will be live next week, Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, over at jblive.tv. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And of course, links to what we talked about today

are at linuxunplugged.com slash 529. Go check out Self Hosted, hosted with Alex and myself. And we just had a new release where we get into some disturbing Plex news. Yeah. Oh, and a lot of other things, a lot of other things,

but that's definitely one of them. So go get some self-hosted while you're over there. You can check out Coda radio too. All of that's over at Jupiter broadcasting.com. And if you're wondering what's going on behind the scenes, details of what it's like to run a podcast network, stuff like that, Office Hours is posted over there as well. But, as for us, the Unplugged program's all done. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for sharing with anybody you think that might enjoy the show. And we'll see you

right back here next Sunday! Hey! Thank you.