LINUX Unplugged - 530: Leave the Pi in the Oven

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

Why the Raspberry Pi 5 doesn't meet our expectations, and the x86 boxes you should consider instead.

The Raspberry Pi 5 has really stolen the headlines, but there was a pretty neat $25 ESP32-powered device that came out this last week. I think the company's called LilyGo, guys. But check this sucker out. Like you might expect, it's got Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on this little ESP-powered device. But LilyGo has also added an Ethernet port and a microSD card, so you can basically really turn the ESP into basically a full-fledged computer. Imagine that now, right? I only have one question. How many are we getting? Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, is the new Pi a little overcooked? We'll take a look at the new Raspberry Pi 5 and tell you what we love about it and where we think it might fall short. And then we'll look at some great x86 contenders that you might want to consider instead.

We'll make our case. And then I also want to pay homage, respects, pay the appropriate duties to the ecosystem that the Pi opened up and why I actually think it's just so damn important to Linux. So I want to get to all of that and then we'll round it out with some great picks, some boosts, and a lot more. So

let's say good morning to Tailscale. That's right. Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. You get like five devices. You'll get it up and running in like three minutes. And if you're an enterprise, you no longer have to deal with big clunky expensive VPN boxes with all this crazy architecture

around the security. Just embrace the beautiful lifestyle of Tailscale by going to tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. For personal devices, you can try it up to 100 of them for free while you support the show. It's tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. And time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris, Elvis, and hello, Brent.

Hello. Good-looking group in there Hello, Chris. Hello, Russ. And hello, Brent. Hello. Good-looking group in there. Good-looking group in there. I'm sure everybody saw the Raspberry Pi 5 was introduced. It's here. It's finally here. It's been a long, long wait, and we really do seem to have some clear improvements over the Pi 4.

So it's not one of these, like, is it kind of worth it upgrades? There are some obvious improvements here. It's got three new chips in there. One of them is their own chip design now. It's a pretty big deal. It's got bigger cache in there. They've got two 4K 60p HDMI displays. And I think probably the biggest deal for all of us is it also features a single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface. When used with the right accessory hardware, you can get some actual PCI storage on the Raspberry Pi.

How long have people been wanting or hacking that on? For five Raspberry Pis. Yeah. That's good for this, Wes. I mean, this is a huge deal. Of course, you got gigabit Ethernet on there. You got two USB 3.0 ports. You got two USB 2.0 ports.

It's a 2.4 gigahertz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A76 CPU. And it's got Wi-Fi on there. It's got the Bluetooth on there. It's got all the stuff you might expect. And the 4-gigabyte board, 4 gigabytes of RAM, is going to cost around $60. And the 8GB board is going to be around $80, which is a $5 increase

over the Pi 4. For that price, you're also going to get a power button now. And finally, a real-time clock right on board. Yes.

That's nice to see. Joking aside, the real-time clock, PCI lane, a power button. This is feeling like a real computer now, huh? Yeah. It's like a micro PC now. It's gone from like an SBC to like a full-fledged micro PC.

And I think that's kind of how they're positioning it as well. Now, we don't have the device in-house to test yet. Here's what I want to touch on before we get to where I'm not happy. They do seem to have nailed the performance in some areas. Michael Arable over at Pharonix did his usual battery of tests. And the new Pi 5 pulls ahead. It does a solid job of pulling ahead. And that's really great to see.

But it does it at much higher thermals now. But the one thing that kept coming up in Pharonix's testing and others, it's not just him, is the thermals, it's running a lot hotter for some of the same jobs. And this is going to be the pie where if you're really pushing this thing and you're having to do CPU bound tasks, which you're going to be doing more of, by the way, with the Pi 5, we'll get to that. You're going to need active cooling with this thing, I suspect. Or you're going to hit thermal throttling. Yeah, does that kind of change? With the transition to being more of a junior PC,

does that also then change the places you might think about deploying it? Does this miss some of the previous embedded light applications? If you might have to start thinking about stuff like cooling? It might. I have two thoughts on it. You know, it kind of reminds me of when the 486s started requiring cooling, and then when the Pentiums came along, you had to have cooling. And before then, you didn't need any of that to run a machine,

and it made them simpler, it made them quieter, it made them prone to less failure. So you do lose something when you move to active cooling, but of course you gain performance. Wes, I think where my concern is, and Brent, I want to see if you agree or if you think I'm off base on this, but where I think my concern is, is that when you combine all of the shortcomings together, so to take advantage of the PCI lane, you're going to need a hat. The Raspberry Pi 5 supports PoE, but you're going to need a hat. To really push it to its max,

you're going to need active cooling. You know, so now you're looking at a hat, you're looking at cooling, you're looking at all these things you really actually need to make the Pi 5 a viable device. So you're probably getting a pretty big case for this thing.

Yeah. What do you think, Brent? I mean, because that makes it more than an $80 device, right? To really take advantage of this, you're buying accessories, cooling. It's kind of a different deal now. that would cause issues for its popularity. Before it was so easy, you just plug it in with whatever power supply you have hanging around.

And these days, it feels like to run it at the bare minimum, you need a bunch of stuff. So I wonder, I don't know, is it in the same spirit as it used to be? No, I don't think so. I think it's changing. But will it still be popular? I guess we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. I suspect so. I mean, it's the Raspberry Pi after all.

But I think if you're looking at getting the 8-gig version, you're probably looking more like $120, $135 budget, not an $80 budget. That's fine, but I think then you need to compare it with $130 alternatives at that point. I want to talk about a couple other things the Pi 5 doesn't have. I mean, on the whole, I'm actually very excited, and I do plan to get one and review it on the show. And I really like my Raspberry Pis that remain in production today. I have one doing Pi Hole. I have the Home Assistant Yellow, which is CM4-based. That's a great point.

You know, I feel like on the show, the narrative has been a bit, you know, Chris abandoned the Pi platform. He's moved all these other things. We've talked about the Odroids a lot. But, yeah, I mean, you've still got them deployed. They're still out there. Yeah. And I have other ones that I turn on for private time for Sync Thing moved all these other things. We've talked about the O-Droids a lot, but yeah, you've still got them. They're still out there. I have other ones that I turn on from time to time for SyncThing and for

Shinobi Camera Capture as well. But the thing I really wanted to see in the Pi was eMMC storage. A little bit of built-in disk. 32 gigs, something just cheap, but on there and fast. So you weren't starting with an SD card? that sort of thing, or having to deal with storage

right out of the gate? The SD card's got to go. It's fine for storage. It's fine for, it cannot be the primary disk. If you run a Raspberry Pi on an SD card, it is a time bomb. It will fail on you. It is just a matter of how long. And if you do anything like run net data on there or you do additional logging,

you will dramatically decrease the lifespan of that SD card. So when you are having people deploy systems on SD cards, you're giving them something that is designed to fail. Yeah, especially, you know, it might be one thing for you to sort of optimize that or you start, you know, using TempFS for certain things or mounting stuff on the network. But if you're targeting someone

that's just sort of getting started and this is the first little piece that they start playing with and deploying and putting out there, ouch. I think we should think of it as a floppy disk. The SD card is the modern computer's floppy drive. And, you know, you could run an operating system off a floppy disk for a while, but inevitably something would go wrong. So, and then to kind of a double whammy there, right,

is to take advantage of the PCIe lane and to get good fast storage, you need a hat, which is all right. But we've seen a lot of other devices that have just managed to build an NVMe slot in or even just a PCI slot. We've even seen PCI slots in the Rock Pro case. So that's a bit of a disappointment. And then I'm still looking for confirmation, and I will test this on my unit when I get it. But I read there's no H.264 hardware decoding anymore. They've removed it. Wow. I wonder why. And there's no VP9 hardware decoding.

Only H.265 is hardware accelerated. CPU decoding for VP9 and H.264, according to Eben in an interview. That's a major downside. Even if the CPU is faster, because of the thermal properties of this thing, you're going to be putting, like say you run it for Plex or Jellyfin, you're going to be putting an additional load on your CPU, and that CPU runs hotter. This is a downgrade.

It's disappointing to see that. I'm going to try to confirm it, but I do have links to the interview where he talks about it. There's more and more starting to feel like a sort of a different device. I mean, maybe only on the edge cases like we're talking about, but just... Yeah, like in the educational space,

you know, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't have H.264 hardware. Maybe when you go to a website that plays a video, but that's probably going to be the most of it, right? And if you're just doing that, like that's what you're using the computer for, then it probably plays fine, right? It just eats a little more energy and maybe the fan spins up. Yeah. But if you want to do a video call, if you want to make it a media server, if you want to hook it up to your TV and play back videos,

well, now that's all on the CPU. And the CPU is faster, but it's only like three times faster, which is faster, no doubt. And then I have one last complaint, where I think people should consider an alternative, at least for a little while. This staggered release,

I think is a recipe for disappointment if you're in one of the later batches. First batch, you basically need to replace your order. Your order needs to be in and done. You'll hopefully get your raspberry pie at the end of October, early November. If you didn't get your order in already, which I did not, then you're going to be in the third batch, which is to be determined. There's already a second batch scheduled, which will go out in November and December. But you needed to have that order in before the end of September, which is today's October 1st as we record.

So now any orders that go in, if they're coming from, if you're not buying from a provider that has existing stock you have no current shipping expectation they have not determined when that third batch goes out yet that's a little uneasy for me a little uncomfortable about that maybe it'll be fine but their track record over the last couple years hasn't been stellar on shipping so there could be some resource contention there it's a big downer i know right i was very excited about the Pi 5, but when I dug into this, am I overreacting? Do you think these things are minor?

I suppose it depends on when those dates actually are and how fast, how they do on shipping. Because it could be that in six, nine months, a year from now, we're just living in the Pi 5 world and everyone's forgotten about it and the supply is fine and you can get it if you want it. There's lots of good cases for it that have a nice little fan built in. And, you know, for the most part, these problems have been polished over. But it does, I think,

at least got a kind of sour, sour the release excitement. I think individually, depending on your use case, some of these things might not be an issue, right? Like the H.264 decoding. Maybe that's not a problem. Maybe you run different OSs on this thing all the time and you're swapping SD cards like it's 1985 and you're trying to play video games and that's fine. And you're not really thinking about it. Or, you know, like me and many others that probably listen, you offload to external storage somehow. And so you, you know, you don't really worry about the SD card and they've made it easier and easier and easier not to use the SD card.

So depending on who you are, I feel like some of these aren't really a big deal. For me, the thermals, the hat, the storage, the availability, it all comes together to kind of reduce my enthusiasm about this particular release. And I think you could probably end up with a system that's easier to get your hands on, with slightly better

performance, around the same energy footprint. But we'll get into that right into the show. If you think I'm wrong, if you think my take on the Pi 5, this is the first Raspberry Pi where I've kind of been like, hmm, they managed to do a lot of what I asked, and I'm still not very satisfied with it.

I'm probably going to pick one up, but that's because I've picked up one of all of them. Of course, yeah. At this point, you're a collector. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. Let me know your take, or please do boost in and let me know if I'm off on this or if you think the Pi 5 is a slightly disappointing release, and maybe we'll get

into some other solutions now. Linode.com slash unplugged. Head on over there to get $ and 60 day credits you can really kick the tires and it's a great way to support the show while you are checking out the exciting news linode is now part of akamai all the tools that we love the interface like their cloud manager the api that has tons of libraries and is well documented the clanline tool that's so handy the stuff that you use to build and deploy and scale, that's all there.

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really makes a difference to go with a provider like Linode over some of the alternatives out there. Those are more short-term solutions. Linode's the thing you can really build something around. So why wait? Go experience the power of Linode, now Akamai. Go to linode.com slash unplugged to learn how Linode, now Akamai, can help scale your applications from the cloud all the way out to Brent's house, even when the weather's rough. Linode.com slash unplugged. weather's rough. Linode.com slash unplugged. For a long time now, I think we've thought of the Pi as something of a default. You know, it's low risk, it's low cost, great ecosystem compatibility, at least for an ARM device. You know, you could pick one up in the days where supply was easy, get started, point people to a ton of tutorials. But with the problems we're talking about,

and maybe with some improvement in the availability of other options and improvements in the power usage in the x86 world, there's things like odroids now. And it makes me wonder, like, do we need to open the net here a little wider? There's probably more things that you could have. You don't have to fuss with ARM if you stick with x86. And maybe you can get kind of close, especially if the Pi starts using more power. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

I guess each Pi is going to use a little bit more power. And so maybe they kind of meet in the middle because Intel has been doing a lot of work there. And you gain so much compatibility with x86. I was a little disappointed to see that Intel has decided they're ending the NUC line. Yeah, me too. I've had a couple of those things. And they have been handy boxes. Great little Homelab machines and more.

There are going to be third-party vendors that supposedly are still going to make them, but Intel has killed the NUC. Plus, for so long, right? I mean, it was all Intel, so all the parts pretty much just worked with Linux. Great, you didn't have to worry about it. That was, like, what you need. You knew that it was a totally Linux-compatible box. Back in the day, when that first came out, that wasn't...

In fact, Intel was kind of making it to showcase you could use all Intel. That was one of the reasons they were making the new unit of computing or whatever it was. So that's sort of sad to see. We'll put a link to that if you're curious. But Brent, you were recently spoiled by Alex. He left a treat for you. And it's one of these mini PCs that I think could be a viable Pi alternative. Yeah, he did.

He was here visiting in Canada all of last week. My gosh, I can't believe that was a week ago. And he brought a little gift. I didn't even know he was bringing this. Apparently it's a hand-me-down from Fuzzy Mistborn from the self-hosted show. And it's one of these

little one-liter boxes that I don't know. It's the first time I see one like in my own place and it's actually like, Oh, wait a second. This is actually kind of a great device. So this particular one, uh, is an HP pro desk 600 G one, I guess desktop mini is what they call it. And it is tiny. It's like seven by seven inches and like an inch and a bit tall. So it like, if you need to squeeze it into a corner of a small cabin in the woods, it's actually kind of perfect. It looks like it's almost the size of

a book. It fits in the palm of the hand really nicely. No, it's no Raspberry Pi, but you should have a sideways rack of these. And it's like a bookshelf. The funny thing is, is, you know, it's, it's got like a standard, almost laptop style power brick and the power brick has got to be almost laptop style power brick and the power brick has got to be at least 50 percent the size of the computer yeah alex showed me uh the you know the hp box and he's all excited about it because it comes apart really easily and it's very easy to install say a hard drive or some memory and stuff like that so it comes apart and it's very well designed on the inside um and he's like oh yeah you're gonna need a power supply too and he like reaches into his bag and he pulls this giant brick out of it.

It's almost the same size as the device. And it didn't clearly come with it because I think it's like, I don't know, it's a different brand or something. And so, I don't know, maybe I'll find a smaller one of those. Because otherwise I need two bookshelf slots for those things. That's unacceptable. But, I mean, it works. So, I'm not going to complain. And it's a gift from the community

which also i should not complain about so i'm not sure yet what i'm gonna do with this thing but i guess let me describe the specs and uh i tested it a tiny bit but i'm open to suggestions from both of you and community as well yeah tell us what's inside that thing. This is the HP ProDesk. Yeah, it's got, I guess, an Intel Core i3. So it's a 4160, so fourth gen. You know, not super modern, but not crazy old either. Alex did measure the thing when he had it in his home. So it sips like 10 to 15 watts, depending how much, you know, effort you're putting

into the thing. It does have full-size serial ATA, so I was able to just squeeze a SSD in there. 10 to 15 watts, depending how much effort you're putting into the thing. It does have full-size serial ATA, so I was able to just squeeze a SSD in there. Oh, that's fantastic. Talk about convenient. Yeah, I just had one laying around that wasn't being used, and I just threw it in there, and that was actually really nice.

Yeah, especially compared to the Pi, to just have an actual SATA port is... And you had hardware laying around, you could just put it in, you don't have to buy special or think about it. Literally on my bookshelf. I was just like, click, done. You mean you don't have to have your disk hanging off your USB bus? Yeah, you shut

the case and it all just is inside the computer. It's inside? Oh. It's this weird concept. This thing has 8 gigs of RAM as well. It's DDR3, so again, not the most modern. This is an older box, but good enough, I think, for certain workloads. So no complaints there.

I did accidentally discover that it also has an audio speaker built in. During my test, I was like, I don't know, what uses a little bit of CPU? So I threw up a YouTube video, and all of sudden I heard like voices coming from behind my monitor. And so not a huge perk, but not the worst either, I guess. I did do some research. We have a few links. There's like a geek bench score that I'm looking to and also just the specs that came with the machine. And I did discover some pre-installed OSs that came with the thing. I thought did discover some pre-installed OSs that came with the thing. I thought you guys would think this was interesting.

Windows 7 or 8.1 came installed at the time of shipping this guy. But also, you could choose from FreeDOS 2.0 or Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11, you know, if that was your thing. Which one are you running right now? I assume you wanted to keep this historically accurate, so you installed one of those.

They run best that way. No, I couldn't find them, so I just ended up throwing NixOS on it because I thought that was easier. All right, all right. See, he got us because I can't object to that. No. But so far, this thing's pretty good.

I did notice that while installing NixOS and playing this YouTube video that I discovered the audio with, the YouTube video did chug a little and the fans started going. And I think that's one of the downsides of one of these machines. Yeah, because it's got such small fans, I imagine, right? Because it is so little. Yeah, I mean, when it's just idling, they're not running at all.

Or, I mean, they are so slowly that I can't tell. And also, the power brick makes so much noise, this old ancient massive power brick. It has that like electronic buzz. Yeah, and as the CPU, I don't know, is changing, it's what it's doing. You can hear it, yes. Oh yeah, and I shipped you a recording of that, Chris, too, if people want to hear it.

It's a little annoying, so I might hide it under something. Oh, it is the worst i have been there you're lucky that doesn't show up in your audio well i haven't even i haven't even tried but i'm sure it would maybe it sounds horrible right now wow wow wow yeah yeah i've been there and so this device i I don't know, I'm kind of falling in love with it. The form factor is really nice. The fact that it's so easy to repair and take apart. Like this thing has one screw on the back and the whole thing comes open. Actually, it's a thumb screw. You can swap that power brick out.

Yeah, the power brick's easy to find, I'm sure. So that's kind of really attractive. I was just checking too, Brent. Your CPU, I think it's an i3 that's in there or it's an i4. I don't know. Intel CPUs are complicated, but it's a fourth gen i3. That's what it is. And it does have quick sync support. So you would actually have a pretty decent little media playback system there. Look at me moving up inync now. I had a weird keyboard issue with this thing, though, and I couldn't believe it. I have this, like, ancient Mac external keyboard that's from probably the, like, G3 era.

It's, like, one of those colored ones, so this guy's green. And I don't know why I got this at a thrift store, like, 20 years ago, and I just used it forever as, like, the tinkering, you know, oh, I need a keyboard. You just plug it into whatever machine. It did not work with this thing. And I have no idea why. It's USB, but not universally USB. Yeah. Well, I thought universal was in the name. So luckily my sweet, sweet brother stopped at another thrift store and got me a $3 keyboard.

So that works just fine. But weird. Don't know why that is. But anyways, this is early days for this device for me, but I'm looking for, I don't know, suggestions on what to do with it. It seems really capable. I had NixOS installed on there with the Plasma desktop, and as long as you don't have, like, 18 different tabs open

or 100 like I like to do, it was actually pretty chipper. And so I think it's pretty capable. I bet it'd make a good Kodi box too, potentially, or something. Just looking on eBay, it looks like the price ranges between $55 to $110, depending on how that box is specced. So that's cheaper than if you go all in on a Pi 5 with cooling and maybe a case and, what, a hat.

Yeah, that's $55 with a fan and and memory i mean and sata ports and usually hard drive comes with it if you buy for that and yeah set of parts and a nice power button on the front it's real great hey the pi's got a power button now the pi 5's got a power button yeah okay fair enough yeah yeah i gotta i got a little surprise too so this is i think another really great solution alternative you could say to the pie that we talked about forever ago on the show it's one of these b-link mini pcs and olympia mike sent one to us this week and i got it right here in the box first of all the box has the B-Link in there, the power adapter, some goodies that we're about to find out, and it's like the size

of a box of envelopes. This might actually be an envelope box. Yeah, it looks like it. Well packed. Yeah, it's really great. I mean, who is this Olympian? Not only is he playing the meetups for us, but then ships his hardware? I know. And he got himself the new Ryzen edition of this.

Oh, fun! Which looks really good. So here it is, Wes. This is the little mini, the little Beelink mini PC. It's like a Nook-like form factor. It's a little bit smaller than a Nook. Yeah, it's in a Nook-like form factor, but about half the size of a Nook. Bright red power button, so check right there. Yeah.

Oh, and he put some goodies in here, too. Check this out this is a boogie blade speaker so it's about the size of a credit card and it has a usbc on the bottom of it and volume up and down buttons and it's like a little micro that looks neat we're gonna have to try that after the show this is so great for devices that don't have speakers little usbc connection for that looks like there's a cpu in the box i don't have speakers. A little USB-C connection for that. Looks like there's a CPU in the box. I don't know if the lights are bright enough in the studio, but there's a CPU in here, Wes.

He's even cleaned off some of the thermal paste for us. Oh. Here, careful when you grab that. Can you read what CPU that is? No, it's dark in here. And then he's also included a, oh, boy. Looks like a little storage. Yeah, he's included a little micro, I think this is storage.

That's great. Thank you, Olympia Mike. So this could also be a, this could be a notes PC. There's a lot of things we could do with this. But it's been great to kind of, when I've been pricing these alternatives and looking at these B-Links, you know, you can pick these used up now for like 100 bucks i think or under there on ebay and you can get the new ones that have the ryzen 750 800h and then with 32 gigs of ram and a 500 gigabyte mvme you can pick those up starting around like 300 dollars on amazon and they ship like overnight and uh they run linux olympia mike's running nix on his and they they got a little new updated look for the B-Links.

Eight cores, DDR5 RAM, and they're doing this new, and Olympia Mike, if you're listening, I'd like to know your take on their new power adapter. The B-Links are using this new magnetic power adapter that kind of snaps into the bottom of the case. And I'm wondering how that is. The magnetic power supply, the 421 power supply module, the magnetic DC connectors on the bottom side, making room for more ports on the backside. But thank you very much. So I think these B-Links, again, a solid solution,

and now they've been revving the product in a direction that remains Linux compatible and performant. Doubledmi right here on the back ethernet i think there's four usb ports on this thing pretty great yeah yeah um and so there's the b links and then i think the other one is just a mandatory have to recommend because i've got two of them in production and my long long long-term review now of the Odroid H3, the H3 Plus specifically, fantastic device. I love them. They are fantastic home servers. They have great storage options.

They have great x86 performance. They sit power. They're reasonably priced. I think the case market could still be a little better. reasonably priced. I think the case market could still be a little better, but the Odroid H3, when you look, when you go all in on a Raspberry Pi 5 and you kit it all out with 8 gigs of RAM, I encourage you to do a comparison shopping with the H3. Odroid H3, link in the show notes, very, very great product. Just do a little side-by-side, maybe look at the B-Link.

I'm not like an ARM hater or anything like that, but I think the Intel platform has really stepped up. The compatibility is still the best. You're going to have the widest range of applications. The performance might often be better than what you're going to get on a Pi. We'll see. We'll see when we get the Pi 5 in our hands. But I think there's some real strong contenders out there. And I wouldn't mind putting together a little list for the show notes. So if you have a category of machine or device that is easily available that people can get their hands on that we didn't mention, please send it into the show and we'll update the show notes either this week or we'll put them in next week's show notes. Collide.com slash unplugged. If you're in IT, you have to deal with security and you've got Okta, listen up, guys, because this is a message for you. Because we all know the reoccurring pattern that seems like we've gotten locked into over the last few years.

You got everything locked down. You got your policies. You got your procedures. But vulnerabilities still get in. They get in often through phished credentials, maybe a vulnerability on the user's workstation. Maybe they didn't have the proper counteroffensive software before they joined the network, and they bring their problems with them to the network. It's not really their fault though, is it? It's been bad tooling, and Collide is the solution to this. So if you've had to deal with this, and I've had to deal with this myself,

you know the big problem is that it burdens IT. Well, what Collide does is it ensures that only secure devices can access your cloud apps. So you can just stop worrying about phished credentials and the hassle of managing all the different OSs because it supports all of them, including the Linux desktop, in a dashboard so you can see the state of compliance and you can make sure that a system and a user is fully compliant before they get connected. And if they have problems, Collide has some really slick solutions for walking the user through resolving it without having to burden IT. So it's really a win-win. They have a great demo and you can support the show by going to collide.com slash unplug to see how this works. It is really slick. You can discover Collide and see the demo

to get an idea of how this actually works by going to collide.com slash unplugged. It's also a great way to support the show. It's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. And you get some insights into how seamless all this is and how it could make your life a lot easier. That's collide.com slash unplugged. Now, if you want to send us a bunch of your feedback for these mini PCs, please do. Linux unplugged dot com slash contact. Now, this week we have send us a bunch of your feedback for these mini PCs, please do. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Now, this week we have a ton of Fest news.

Chris, you're going to a Fest and there's one happening in your backyard too. Can you give us a tour? The Fest is happening. Get your Fest on. Well, it's sort of like a.5 Fest. Fest light. Yeah, it's Fest light. Yeah, you know, it's like fest with less calories because the main Linux Fest event has been

postponed until the spring of 2024. However, a lot of us already have plans kind of locked in. And so we're kind of making the best of it and throwing together a series of meetups that will be going on Friday and Saturday here in the Pacific Northwest coming up on Friday, October 20th, which is close, and then October 21st, including a Friday happy hour and a game night. Then we're going to have some educational sessions Saturday, as well as a Jupyter Broadcasting meetup,

which already has a great amount of attendees, so that's going to be a lot of fun. All of these, since they're all under the LinuxFest banner, are at meetup.com slash LinuxFest Northwest. And we do ask if you can make it to go in there and attend just so that way we can pick the right venue, which we're going to need to do very soon. So if you're hearing these words, please go there to meetup.com slash LinuxFest Northwest and throw your hat in the ring because it's going to be great. Brent's just about ready to get packed up and start heading over here, crossing the mountains. You might be able to take the scenic route before they close it oh I would love that this time last year I think I was driving back from I don't know one of our crazy events and it was like

the most gorgeous drive I've ever done so I look forward to doing that again we have a lot of projects planned Jeff's coming up like the week before. It's going to be, there's so much. And then I would like us, if we get the right venue, to do a little live lup something. Doesn't that sound like fun? Don't know what, but a little get together, do a little recording session in the public, maybe at a pub, maybe at the college if they can make room for us, like somewhere. I'd love us to sit down.

So that's all going to be coming up. And if you can't make it to LinuxFest, we'll have some coverage, of course. We were going to do live streams and all that, but I don't think that'll be happening now. And then one other thing is coming up after LinuxFest Northwest on my schedule. My God, I hope nothing after this because I'm going to be ready to collapse. But I'm actually thrilled to say that Adopting Bitcoin 2023 is happening in El Salvador, San Salvador. It's running November 7th through the 9th of 2023. And I, along with the Bitcoin dad, will be hosting the open source track, which I think is actually going to be a really dynamic track at the event.

There will be sessions and panels and podcast recording at the Adopting Bitcoin conference because, of course, my point of view in all of this is free software and open source. And I was thrilled to be invited to come down there and share that perspective and run that whole area. Essentially, I'm going to become the king of it. I'll be the king of open source at Adopting Bitcoin. And all open source conversations will be had at my pleasure. Well, hey, send them our way, maybe. I'll just be sitting there. Hey, would you like to come on the show? Details are at AdoptingBitcoin.org if you can make it. It'd be really

cool to have some JB folks at that because most events I go to are packed with JB folks and I'm going to go to an event where there might not be any JB folks. You're the odd duck out. But I'm the open source king, Wes. Don't you forget it. We better make you a crown.

I predict. I have a prediction that you'll see a challenge going out there somewhere. No way in El Salvador? No, you never know. Man, that would be cool. Ask not what your podcast can boost for you, but what you can boost for your podcast. And we got some great boosts. Our podcast came in with our baller boost this week with 460,330 sass.

Hey, Rich Lobster! Our podcast coming in on Podverse. How about that? It says, hello, JB. I have an Atari VCS that needs a new home. It's only been powered on once and it works well, but I simply don't have time to use it these days. What?

I'd be glad to send it your way if it sounds good. Let's get in touch. And the first five numbers of this boost are my zip code. Whoa. That's a lot packed in there. Whoa. Okay, first of all, great to hear from you again on our podcast. Number two, I humbly would love to accept that Atari.

I feel a little bad about it, but at the same time, it's like completing a story that spans like a decade almost on this network. That's like when do you actually get to close the loop on that kind of thing? And it would make such an awesome Notes PC, wouldn't it? Yes. Once the VCS was brought up as the Notes PC, I have been searching for a cooler alternative and cannot find it. We should chat. That'd be really great. Okay, we've got

46033. That's a postal code in Hamilton County, Indiana. Hello, Hamilton County. Thank you, our podcast, for boosting in and being our Baller Booster this week. We really appreciate it. And we have another Baller Boost from Anonymous, if you can believe it. One million sats. Anonymous writes, I've been a longtime listener and a longtime lurker. I enjoy all the content

and I love the Linux community. However, I'm a very shy person when I'm online and I'm not really sure how to make friends without being in person. I guess you could call me old school. I would have given you all of the stats earlier, but I had to wait for BlockFi to open up my withdrawals. Oh, congrats on that, man. 66227 KCMO BBQ is the best, he says, and he is at Scooter at LinuxRocks.online on Mastodon. Go say hi to at Scooter. He's a major supporter of this week's episode.

Thank you, sir. Looks like a postal code in Johnson County, Kansas. Ah, look at you. You've found that one. Sneaky, sneaky. Hello, Kansas. You didn't even have to unfold the map either. It's amazing. I know.

I'm using a digital version now. Well, you know, when it's a million-sat boost. We pull out the big guns. We go for the fancy stuff. That's no expense is too much for that. Yeah, if you could make it to LinuxFest, the meetups too. There'll be some barbecue there in person. I don't know.

Maybe it won't be as good. But thank you, Scooter, or aka Anonymous. We really do appreciate the support. Deleted boosts in with 222,222 sets. Things are looking up for old McDuck. I'll back up Oppie1984's challenge and take it a bit further. I'll challenge you to a week using Windows as a daily driver. Specifically, show how to integrate Windows into an otherwise uniformly Linux environment.

Respect should be earned. Sort of like a flip the script. Normally, you know, like many of us went through the world of like, oh, I'm the odd little Linux user over here. I got to work in this Windows environment. This flip the script. Normally, you know, like many of us went through the world of like, oh, I'm the odd little Linux user over here. I got to work in this Windows environment. This is the reverse. You're right. It is a flip of the script.

Okay. I'm kind of in. This is the third request I think we've gotten. Brent, are you down to try this? I feel like if we set up a few objectives and then we all go to our corners and try it and then come back and report how it went, it's probably Windows 11 i guess it seems like i'm feeling pretty reluctant and also i don't know if i want to taint my hardware with well that's that is what are you going to put it on for the show man for the show yeah i mean we i mean you could probably get away with a vm but i think i'm gonna

do it on i'm gonna do it on hardware and you can punish the dev one with Windows. That's true. And then it would kind of force your hand to migrate to the framework. So it's a win-win. Okay, okay, fine, fine, fine. Polar Bar came in with 95,000 sats from Fountain. B-O-O-S-T. Hey, LepCrew, I'm looking at the new Pi 5, but I can't find an answer to one major question that I have.

Does the new Raspberry Pi 5 have AV1 support? Also, thanks for that great show. That was something else that probably should have been on my list. I'm pretty sure it does not. And here's the thing that kind of burns me about that. You imagine you're in that third stage. You're probably not getting your Pi until January, you're probably not getting your pie until january march april so you got a 2024 piece of hardware that doesn't support av1 decoding while youtube and online platforms are trying to transition to av1 again that's something i want to test when it when it comes in house because if they don't like they don't do a great job of telling you what it doesn't support they'll do a great job of telling you what it does support support. They'll do a great job of telling you what it does support, and then kind of through a process of elimination,

you can figure out what's been left out. It seems AV1 support has been left out. Polar Bar. Thank you for the boost, sir. Della Rimen comes in with 50,000 sats. I got an old iMac with Linux on it that just vegetates unused on a stylish desk setup just because it looks nice. I will now set it up and boot it to obsidian because why not?

Oh my goodness. So on the pre-show for the member stream, I was just talking about taking an old G4 iMac and trying to make a note station out of that. You know, the one with the floaty lamp screen, it's probably, it's probably too much of a,

of a lost cause, but Dell, I would love to know how this goes for you because this is – I was thinking, you know, an old Mac running Linux could be kind of a fun thing to just beat on. You send us a pic if you would. Yeah. Let us know how it goes. We got a second boost from you as well, but there was no message there. And mentions of a zip code boost following, but the second amount was –

The same amount. The same amount same amount 25 000 i did a little searching and trying to interpret that as a zip code or a postal code but there wasn't any clear hits i got maybe some maybes in pakistan algeria and the dominican republic so uh if any of those are right let us know that would be great give us another guess how great would that be yeah oh yeah you have to let us know. You'll have to let us know. Dude Person boosts in with $49,999. I had the same find my problem, so I wrote Beacon. It's not perfect, but it meets my needs.

And they link us over to their GitHub, realdudeperson.beacon. It's a Python Flask app designed to be a self-hostable location-sharing web server aiming to leak as little data as possible and uses mostly self-contained libraries and local database files. I did kind of experiment using the Home Assistant Companion app to see how does that work for just tracking each other's location. And it's a solid 75 80 solution like if you just want to know broadly where somebody's at it's i think it's the tool but like with the find my built into the iphone platform and the the google ones you know you can go full stalker mode so you can like see somebody going down the road in real time and stuff like that and when you're trying to find somebody in a new city that's really neat so i wonder, I wonder if beacon would be that for me.

I've had others that wrote in and said, own tracks is the way to go. I'm going to keep kind of thinking about this because for the wife, she wants me to bring the iPhone with me to El Salvador, unless we can completely solve the find my situation. Wow. She, for her,

it's like more important that if something goes down, we can find each other than me having my paizel 7 with my drafting os do you feel differently well i understand and i would also like to be able to find her i suppose and i need to yeah you got to have an apple device to is in response to our trying to guess their location for several shows now very poorly yes so uh here we go i will attempt this since you know chris needs a break so the message goes as follows you need another hint still not germany been down that road twice hel Helsingborg was close. Ish.

You need to look to the east a bit, between Herbie and Sobo? He's leaving letters out to make it confusing, I believe. Well, yeah. Also, one of the characters is just a question mark, so I'm not sure if that's our system. Ah, could be lost in translation.

Yeah, yeah, maybe. Okay, I'll give it to you. It's Wollsch, and then some other character. V-O-L-L-S-J, question mark for me. Okay. Cannot wait until I hear you pronounce those names. Wes, I feel like this is probably the closest amount of hints we're going to get.

Yeah, I mean, that seems like it is. Now that we are told this is indeed a postal code in Sweden, And now that we are told this is indeed a postal code in Sweden, 275 space or dash 67. And you know, you pop Sweden in there, it pops right up in a search. Without it, getting all kinds of other things. So thank you. I take some pride in my map skills, but clearly we were failing on this one.

And the internet makes me think maybe that town is pronounced Volsja, something like that. I love Volsia. Well, Corinne, it gave us an opportunity to flex our map muscles. We appreciate the support and the opportunity for that. B. Peters comes in with 25,414 stats using Podverse. In my last boost, I mistakenly used my old zip code. This is my new actual zip code. And we apparently have a pretty good lock on where this one might be. 25414 is a postal code in Jefferson County, West Virginia.

Hello, Jefferson County, West Virginia. You ever been, Chris? Not yet. One day. And I hear there's a data center alley down there. I want to check that out. No way. VT52 boosts in with $22,222.

I think Chris is really close on that garage PC, but I think the client can be even thinner. Have you considered dumpster diving an old deck terminal? We have been thinking about really basic terminals, old CRT screens. I hadn't gone to the deck. Like, if you look at the Deck 500, that has one of the coolest designs. I think maybe it was the VT05. It has one of the coolest designs

of any computer ever. I would have to somehow figure out a way to get the Markdown files on there. Yes. If somebody were to come over and set that up, I'd use it. I start looking at some of these, and it's like, oh, that's a six month project because some of the machines I was looking at,

they don't even boot anymore. They need certain repairs and stuff like that to get them in a price range. It's reasonable. And I'm just like, I better bail. I better bail. You know what you need is another system around that doesn't quite work.

Yeah. Yeah. Another project. Hey, listener Tomas sent me a personal message for a suggestion for you, Chris. So this is an indirect way of getting it to you. Hand delivered boost. Do you remember that orange pie that we built together that has the thermal printer on it? Yeah. Have you considered that thing? That would be kind of great with that

tiny little LCD screen comes with a little tiny mini little tiny keyboard on it. Just, yeah, just kind of like punching out with my thumbs, the notes. I think I want a big keyboard though. You can always plug one in. I want to go full mind dump. Yeah, but then like you change your oil, you could print a little like record. That would be cool. I do want to get the dot matrix because I think I do want to

have a stack of dot matrix printouts. So I was looking at old oaky dot matrices and stuff and sure enough, you can still find dot matrices for unbelievable prices. But if you're willing to get one that's kind of gunked up and maybe missing a few parts, you can get around it for $120, I think. But then it's like, do I need to go down the rabbit hole of researching, like, what is the best dot matrix printer? What has the best Linux compatibility? And am I really going to spend that life energy on a dot matrix printer?

I think the answer is yes, but I'd also love some dot matrix recommendations this week. We're really close on this notes thing, but I really think I'm picturing an Atari VCS with a screen and a keyboard and a dot matrix printer, and when I complete a maintenance task, the

log prints out, and I put the log in the glove box. Is the glove box your filing system? Well, you just want to have a record in the glove box. Is the glove box your filing system? Well, you just want to have a record in the car, too, I found. Do you remember changing the ribbons on those dot matrix printers? Yes. Oh, yes. Yeah.

John A. boosts in with 20,000 sats using Castomatic, and says, Looking forward to seeing you guys in Bellingham. John A., I am thrilled to hear you're going to be there. Looking forward to seeing you, too, sir. Looking forward to seeing you too, sir. Looking forward to it a lot. Very much so. The Golden Dragon show mascot boosts in with 10,000 cents. Hey-o! Can we all just take a moment to appreciate Drew's wizardry on the audio?

What an absolute audio legend. Yeah. No argument there. Last week's episode was really tricky to listen to live because at times it was crossover between Alex and Brent because they're in the same workspace together. Brent box is what we call it. Yeah, the Brent box. And, you know, Drew just does his magic. Also, I was sick and only muted it for the live stream and not for Drew.

And I apologized profusely to him for that one. Oh, man. Yeah. No, we really, and Drew's a hard worker, too. More than people realize behind the scenes, it's really great. So we agree, and thank you, Golden Dragon. Layman came in with a row of ducks. Hosted web and inbound mail at home for about 20-plus years in dynamic IP,

and more recently on IPv6 as well. Had some dynamic IP for years and a thingy that updates DNS if it happens to update. Static IP is overrated, but I would love it on the v6 side rather than 6PD. But hey. It is v6 after all. Wow. 20 years on a dynamic IP. That's got to be one of the highest signal feedback boosts we could get for this question. That's impressive. I agree that if you have a good DNS provider and a solution on the LAN that is monitoring IP changes and can, over an API or something, update that remote DNS, that is a pretty workable solution, especially for, like, you know, your home stuff.

Where I always come to, though, is deliverability. Like, okay, you can get it to run and work, but that's not the end of it, right? Well, I think the way I would have to do it is I would have to have, like, some sort of, like, mail route service or something sitting in front of my box. So the mail all got sent to mail route, and then mail route would forward it to my box on my land.

I think that's how I'd want to do it. Yeah, man. I really am impressed. 20 years with a dynamic IP doing email inbound is, that is remarkable. Thank you for the feedback on that. Maybe they can host your email for you. I should be running the JB email, dude. mail for you. I should be running the JB email, dude. Gene Bean

comes in with a lucky 6,666 spooky sats using Castomatic and asks if we've all checked out RetroDeck.net. Actually, didn't we make that a pick? Yes, I made that a pick on our deck episode.

Love it. As a matter of fact, I'll give it a plug again. RetroDeck. It was how we played aladdin this weekend at home he also sent me the feedback that he uses own tracks recorder for his historical data and then he uses the home assistant companion app for other location info and i followed up with gene in matrix and asked him a couple of questions about how he uses own tracks he's not using it with next cloud he He'd be interested in that. So if people do have experience there, I think that might be something we might throw together.

Calm Brewer boosts in with $11,060. My vote for a ham soundbite is to use a CW code like CQ, 73, QSL, QRP, 72, 77, 2, TNX, or any of the other good codes.

Alright, well you gotta give us the soundbite. I mean, I could probably go find it on YouTube, I suppose. Yeah, but you got any links? How do I know if it's legit? It might sound like amateur hour. But then again, it's amateur radio, so. Would it then be ham-ature hour? Yeah, it sounds like ham-ature hour around here.

Sir Alex Gates came in 5,000 Satoshis through the Podiest Index. No one tell Europe that their agencies actively work with the U.S. and others to undermine their own security, sidestepping their own legal requirements. Oh, Alex Gates coming in with the hard truth. Everybody was worried about the NSA, but the reality is they're all part of the Five Eyes program, and they're all sharing information with each other. Coming in with the spicy truth, I got to say. Vectron's coming in with some 5,672 sats, saying instead of a no-nics challenge, you should do a complete no-nics November. Whoa. Also, my boost is a German postal code.

Just insert a zero after the five because I'm cheap. Hey, we appreciate the boost regardless that's right okay so that's uh five zero six seven two yeah that appears to be a postal code in cologne germany cologne hello cologne thank you for boosting in and no next november girl i'm scared already girl i don't think i can do that. I don't think. A whole month. The alliteration, though. Maybe for like a 500,000 or a million sat boost, maybe.

But I just, I mean, I use it on all my daily drivers. And truthfully. It would be painful to replace some of that back to the different. Yeah. And Vectron, I'd ask you, where is more exciting development taking place in Linux right now? I think it's these immutable systems, and in particular, I think Nix has something really special going right now.

And I would ask you, what else is as interesting and rapidly developing into something quite new and unique in the Linux space? I think it might be Nix. Cospland boosts in with 3,390 sats, but just sent the sats, no message this time. But Oppie1984 came in with 4,000 sats and said,

agreed, 4,000 is a small amount for the big words, but I spent the majority of my stack on the Bitcoin Dad 100 boost. I'm slowly rebuilding that stack now. Oh no, Oppie, I was just teasing you. In fact, Oppie got the Windows Dad 100 boost. I'm slowly rebuilding that stack now. Oh no, Appy, I was just teasing you. In fact, Appy got the Windows Challenge ball rolling. So your boost inspired another, and now

it's happening, Appy. Thank you very much. Community backed you up with some more sats to match those big words. That's right. Nord came in with 10,000 sats. Through Castomatic, actually. Hey-o! Regarding your questions to iMessage bridging in Matrix, Chris, I can only recommend to check out the Matrix bridge for

iMessage. I'd love to hear more of the usage of Matrix bridging, all chat applications on the podcast. My experience with pictures, reactions, videos, and group chats has been great. The only caveat is where you have macOS running the bridge, it needs to be set up with no SIP. Even typing notifications are supported though, which blew my mind a little bit. I do have experience with previews for videos not showing, and of course calls don't work either, but otherwise I enjoy the experience quite a lot. That does make me feel a little more comfortable about the concept. I wonder if you should try it out, You know, don't depend on it, but just see, you know, keep it running in the background, see what

it's like. How often does it work? How often does it stop working? I really should. I know. I know. Tomato Deer, boosted with 10,000 sets, and boosted to remind listeners about the bounty for Wallabag 2.3.8 on NixOS with ProSquare's 14 behind Nginx. You can earn 300,000 sets.

Nice. Nice. Yeah. Help TomatoDeer out. Yeah, I had forgotten about that, TomatoDeer, so thank you for reminding us. Zacatech comes in with 8,888 sats. Thank you for the show this week. I was wondering if you guys caught the latest news from OpenSUSE regarding their new distribution they dubbed Slow Roll. That will probably be something I will try out once it leaves beta.

I love Tumbleweed, but the updates are way too much. Having a slower cadence would be preferable for me, at least on my laptop. Brent, you're our lizard correspondent. What are your thoughts on a new experimental slower OpenSUSE? It's based on Tumbleweed, so it's not based on Leap. It's based on Tumbleweed, but it's a little less tumble. Yeah, they say it updates every one or two months with bug fixes and CVE

fixes as they come in. So major updates every one or two months, bug fixes as they come in, but now instead of Leap, you got it based on Tumbleweed. Yeah, we did briefly look at slow roll a few episodes ago, and it Slow Roll a few episodes ago, and it tickled a few fancies, I think.

I think we did agree for me, Tumbleweed seems just crazy enough. But I think this would be an interesting alternative to the Leap stuff. Is it really the right way to go? I don't know. We're just going to have to wait and see, I guess. You know, I was very happy with susa on the pi 4 when we ran it on the cm4 oh yeah and maybe slow roll i mean leap would seem like a great option but maybe slow roll is another great option for a home system type box i do like the idea like i could see

like tumbleweed on a workstation where you're using it a lot like you're touching that system all the time but for something like a pot you know somewhere it's like off in the corner you need good application availability and you might need some later or newer stuff for a couple things but yeah you don't need to you know you're not trying to run arch on that thing you know they do have an iso available so maybe after we get done screwing around with windows we get slow i kind of feel like slow roll needs to be installed and used rolling for a while yes uh-huh right So that's the one thing is maybe if I could

put it on a Linode or something. And try it as a server for a bit. That's a good idea because we could get that going simultaneously and kind of get that cooking. Yeah, it does have my attention. I don't know what I'm going to do about it just yet or what my use case is going to be or if it's going to be for me, but you know, they're trying new stuff.

I think they identified maybe Leap wasn't doing it for their users and they're trying to find something else and glad to see it. And our last boost this week comes in from Rotted Mood, 50,000 sats.

I hoard that which your kind covet. Oh, and he writes, I've been working nonstop for the last six weeks and getting caught up on shows so I wanted to boost in. Never work in cybersecurity.

We appreciate you being busy and still taking time to boost the show. Thanks, Shraddha. And you know what? It makes me feel a little bit better that someone in our community is in cybersecurity because some of the individuals I've met in cybersecurity gave me a little pause about the industry. So that restores some of my faith, Rotted Mood, and thank you for the support. Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We had 25 boosters this week

and we stacked an incredible 2,112,680 sats. Thank you very much. That is a massive milestone for the show to reach. Winner. It really whips the llama's ass.

And the support that we get from the community on this is so, so, so, so reaffirming because I really have tried not to make – I've tried to cut back on my proclamations of concern about the ad winter and all of that. And I've tried to just let it be even though I'm very concerned about the direction that the ad market is going in and it's getting worse. Even though – internally, I've been worrying about that but i haven't i've tried not to be bringing it on air and the audience is still stepping up we're we're keeping it sustainable and i look at this and i think my god we we may we may actually make it and it's just an absolutely reaffirming an incredible thing to have independent media financed directly by its audience and so we may be entering an era

as 2024 comes near where we are more independent and directly financed by the audience than in the 18 years that I have been doing this. And it is an incredible time to be making this pivot as the ad market continues to crumble and collapse around us and where others are going to have to make compromises and do dynamic ads or increase their workload and increase their shows and drive down the quality. The audience here has stepped up and recognized the value, and we're just extremely, extremely grateful. And we're going to keep focused as hell and keep trying to earn that. When we see those numbers, that's what our immediate response is,

our immediate reaction is we've got to earn that next time too. Thank you, everybody, who takes a little bit of time to support and boost. If you'd like to boost, get a new podcast app, man. They're getting so, so good. PodFans is coming out soon. I'll be talking a lot more about it very soon. It's like one of the new all things podcasting 2.0 app.

Podverse remains the GPL champ available on all the platforms, including the web. Castomatic is great on iOS, and Fountain is such a strong contender with a great community. These are apps that give you more features and more functionality around podcasts, transcripts, live support, chapters,

alternative items like video and Opus and MP3. And that's just scratching the surface, including things like Boost right there in the app. But if you're not ready to switch apps yet, totally get you. I know you love it. You've been using it for a while. Just get Albi. Get albi.com. You top it off over the lightning network,

go to the podcast index. You can do it through the podverse web player and you can boost in using your web browser and you don't have to switch your podcast app. Of course, you could also become a member. Use your fiat fund coupons directly on a monthly basis by going to unplugged core.com. You get an ad free version of the show or the one that's really more popular, unpluggedcore.com, you get an ad-free version of the show, or the one that's really more popular, the member version. It's like double the show. You get like double the show, and it's a little more unplugged, so we don't promise a lot, but we try to deliver every single week as value to our members. That's at unpluggedcore.com, where you can support all the shows at jupiter.party, and a big shout out and thank you to everybody who just streams and listens. You sat streamers, we see you, and we appreciate you.

Our picks have a theme this week. Do you see what it is, Wes? I think I do. Weyland can be kind of, I guess, non-obvious if you're using it. Are you on X right now or Weyland? Who knows? How do you know? I don't know.

I mean, there's like a dozen ways to find out, but I thought I'd give you a couple of picks. So if you're trying out some new hardware or you're finally making the move to Wayland, how do you know if your Chrome window is using Wayland? How do you know if your Firefox window is using Wayland? Maybe you've got some apps that are and some apps that aren't. My friends, I've got three solutions for you. Number one, it's on Flathub. This is if you like to open up the hood and look at the engine and all the parts. It's called WayCheck.

W-A-Y check. It's on Flathub. And it just gives you all the internal support components that your system has with Wayland. Like protocols, versions, whatever Wayland thing your computer can do. This app just gives you a GUI and identifies them and flags them as functional or not functional. So you basically know how much Wayland support you got on an install. So that's WayCheck. There's also, if you're on Genome, a really handy Genome extension that is just a little icon up in your corner.

And it shows an X logo when you're using X11. And it shows a W Wayland logo when you're using Wayland. Oh, neat. That's really, really simple. And you just look up there and, oh, for some reason I logged into X today. I don't know why. Let me log out, log back in. Okay. Yep. Now I'm on Wayland. And then last but not least, there's this very, very simple way to identify what windows on your desktop are X Wayand windows and which windows are actual native Weiland windows. And you want as many of them as native Weiland as possible because they're going to be the best performance. They're going to interact together the best. They're going to have the best security architecture.

The stupid simple way to figure this out is just install XIs, the old graphical X11 utility. XIs? XIs, the old graphical X11 utility. XIs? XIs. And if the eyes, they follow your cursor. If the eyes follow your cursor when you're over an application window, that is an X Wayland application. If you move the cursor over a Wayland window and the eyes don't move, then you're over a Wayland window.

It's silly, but if the eyes move, it's an X window. If the eyes don't move when you move the mouse over that, it's a Wayland window. It's silly, but if the eyes move, it's an X window. If the eyes don't move when you move the mouse over that, it's a Wayland window. And it's that simple. Do we have a pick that gives me a working X eyes for Wayland then? Because I'm going to need that. You're going to need X Wayland dependencies. It's funny because I actually did have to install it.

But you hear like, oh, Firefox has added Wayland support. But then you're using it and you discover, oh, Firefox is out of Wayland support. But then like you're using, you discover, oh, mine actually isn't. Mine's not. And then you could make whatever config change you need to make and check it with XIs. It's silly, but it actually kind of works. And you know what? If you're getting one of these, I guess not new, but one of these budget x86 rig, or maybe you end up with a Pi 5, you want to use Wayland on there. You want that performance.

Come on, you want to use Wayland if you can. And so you can use these tools to kind of figure that out. We'll put a link to all that in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 5 3 0. You know, the thing that could have made our list, but didn't, because it's kind of outside the price window,

the framework systems. I think, you know, you get a laptop today and that becomes your home server tomorrow or something like that. Nice. Yeah. Upgrade the thing you're carrying around, but why let it go to waste? You still got a nice system. You know, it's going to be running Linux beautifully. So.

And the framework laptop has gotten to the point where both you and I are thinking like, we know a family member that could probably use this framework and be very happy with it for a long time, right? I think I'm getting my mom one tonight after the show. Yeah. That's exciting. Don't tell the wife. But if the budget works out, she might get one for Christmas. I think that could be really great for Hadeah.

You know, I had the quick idea of like, oh, maybe there's some like old boards that people are trying to sell on eBay. Yeah. Exactly none. So don't even try. People are using them. Yeah. It's too soon. I mean, I'd hang on to sell on eBay? Yeah. Exactly none. So don't even try. People are using them. Yeah. It's too soon.

I mean, I'd hang on to mine, right? Wouldn't you just hang on to it, put in a little case or something, and make a little server out of it? Yeah. I think it's got a bright future. It just didn't quite fit with, like, the $100, $200 budget machines, low power. Yeah, they're still new. They're still shiny.

Yeah. But maybe. Yeah, exactly. And maybe there's one out there we didn't think of you could always let us know. And don't forget, we are live. If you want to get in our mumble room or our chat room and yak at us or give us real-time feedback, we do it on Sundays at noon Pacific,

3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And don't miss out all the other great shows at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Coda Radio just went out with our unique perspective on the whole Unity licensing situation. Yeah. That whole episode's full of spice. You can go check that out at Jupiter Broadcasting. Of course, the latest self-hosted is over there.

Office hours and more. Plus, you'll find links for this show, RSS feeds, and everything. And specifically, linuxunplugged.com slash 530 will have your feedback form links, sponsor links, and of course, links to everything we talked about. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program.

I'll see you right back here next Sunday. Speaking of the Odroid, I was definitely putting it through some robustness testing yesterday. Is that right? Did you spill something on it? No. So I'm trying to figure out where all the different outlets are wired back to the main breaker panel in the RV.

A little outlet map. We got a couple of mysterious ones. Is this the same story? It seems unassociated. And so I think maybe this plug doesn't have anything plugged into it. And I worry that this other breaker has like half the house on it. I'm like, oh, man, we need to redistribute this.

I'm looking at this. And so I'm like, okay, Hadiyah, I think this, this, and this are on. So I'm going to flip the breaker for this. And you go around and check if all this stuff's off. So I flip the breaker. And, of course, the lights in the living room turn off. And everything I expected to turn off turns off and um I went to go open up the home assistant app to turn on some lights to test others to see if they turn off and I just get the spinner spinner and go what's

wrong here why what why isn't my home assistant loading and then it dawns on me that the odroid sits in the booth of the living room that I just cut the power to. And I just, but because I was double checking, I also like had turned it on and off again. So I did the couple of times, the off on, the off on. So like powered up the server, powered down the server, powered up the server. And how's it doing? Totally fine. Everything came back.

Everything auto starts. You know, sometimes when you set up a server and a rig and like you got to log in and like manually start some stuff. Not this rig. Because we built everything in the Nix config and it just all works every single time. But I was worried I could have fried something like a disk or something. Super robust. Sounds like you need a UPS there, Chris. I hear a listener, Jeff, can hook you up with at least some kind of shenanigans.

Brent, the whole house is a UPS. No, and you go around flicking the breakers. I know, but that's why I think I have this mindset of things are never losing power. Yeah, fair enough. Because I have a giant battery-backed house that I move around. Right. So then I just get it in my head, all good. Well, let's just start willy-nilly flipping stuff.

The human factor again hits you are you running that thing on an ac adapter or is it straight dc well that's my shame that's my shame it is i know bro come on i knew it okay well so jeff you just got to come up for an extra week ahead of time and we'll just get everything switched over to dc it'll be fine this problem will be solved i don't know if i have enough connectors