LINUX Unplugged - 531: The Windows Challenge

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

We ran Windows for the week with three seemingly simple objectives. How we did, our take on what's gotten a lot better about Windows, and what still needs some work.

So in the spirit of today's episode, I thought I would share how I got my very first set of Linux CDs. Oh, please do. It was a very special edition of Red Hat 5.1 Manhattan. It had been released in May of 1998. It shipped with Linux 2.0.3. Whoa, that's an old one. Yeah, it came with also like a separate application CD, which was totally unclear to me what you're supposed to do with. And I think on that CD it had like Netscape, maybe Star Office, which was an open office precursor.

And then there was also like this experimental pre-release of GNOME 1.0 that you could install on there. But what was crazy is who gave it to me. It was a family member who worked at Microsoft. And this was before they had, because this was the late 90s, this is before they had formalized their internal Linux division. But what had started happening, and the family member was part of this movement, a group of interested geeks inside Microsoft in like 96, 97, 98 started really investigating Linux. And so they were like stacking Linux CDs and copying Linux CDs and deploying Linux and comparing it to Windows and trying to figure out what this Windows thing was.

And he'd just gotten done with a round of that. So he brought me over a binder that had several different versions of Red Hat in it. I want to say SUSE, but it was like a copied version of SUSE, not like the official SUSE disk back in the day. It was just packed full of this stuff that they had been running through the tests to compare, to see how it compared to Windows at the time. And he's like, okay, I'm kind of done with it. I don't really need this. Would you like this stuff? You know, back then I was on dial-up. So to actually have all these Linux CDs? Yeah, that's a great way to get started. Yeah. You might say, Wes, I was an early distro hopper. Hello, friends, and welcome into your mostly Linux weekly talk show.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show this week, we've all been running Windows. We had three primary objectives that we set out to accomplish, but you know us, we couldn't stop there. So we'll share our thoughts on the whole thing.

What was nice to see improved and what still needs a lot of work. We'll touch on all of that. Then we'll round it out with some pics, some boosts, some feedback, a special unboxing, and a lot more. So before we get into that, let's say good morning to our friends

over at Tailscale. Tailscale. It's a mesh VPN protected by Wirecard. Wirecard. Wirecard. Yeah, that's right. It builds out a mesh network in seconds.

You can put it on up to 100 machines when you go to tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. 100 devices for free, not a limited time trial. It's a great way to support the show and get yourself some private networking. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. And before we get into it, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our mumble room. Hello, Virtual Lug. Hello. Hello.

Hello, Wes. And hello, Brent. Hello. Hello. Hello, Wes. And hello, Brent. Oh, hello, gang. Hello, everybody. And hello up there in the quiet listening. Nice to have you on board, too. So let's get into Windows 11. I think this is maybe my second, if not my first experience with Windows 11.

I feel like maybe we gave it a quick go when we first heard they were kind of, you know, going with a new style inspired by some Linux-y things. For both of us, maybe it was when WSL 2 came out. But that might have been Windows 10, Wes. That might have been just a later version of Windows 10. This might be our first Windows 11. And it shows. And it's funny for me, because I used to make my living

supporting a lot of Windows systems. A lot of the client stuff was always on Windows. And, you know, I've rebuilt many Windows boxes. So I went into this thinking, this should be no problem. I've got this. But we'll see how that went. Brent, I'm curious. I've been waiting to ask you all week.

I assume you got it installed, but I just kind of want to know how the install process went. So I thought maybe we'd talk about how it went for each of us, getting Windows actually working on our existing gear. Then we'll get into our three objectives and our experiences. So Brentley, how was the Windows install?

Yeah, I really hesitated with this one, but I decided to install it on the new framework that NextCloud got for me. Ooh, right on the new hardware. I hesitated not because I didn't think the hardware could do it, but because I wasn't sure I wanted to taint the hardware with the knowledge of having done this. Like it might be like sticking around in your EFI boot menu

or something grows. Yeah, exactly. Okay. But then I figured, actually the framework, I think they offer a version that has Windows installed. So I figured, well, it's probably pretty well supported. So I did throw it on there. I used Ventoy actually.

Don't like think lesser of me, but this is the first time I actually use Ventoy and it worked perfectly fine with the... What? Yeah, I know. Well, i've been avoiding it because every time someone talks about it and they're like oh yeah this thing's great and they plug it in and then it just doesn't work like when i got the framework at our meetup in in berlin uh the same thing happened plugged it in and then it just didn't didn't work but i figure what the heck i mean why not layer multiple experiences on top of each other right who what could go wrong yeah but it went right and it totally worked so uh vento i was just kind of like

a check mark in the in the whole process which is good i think wes you had some fancier things around there i don't know if you actually went down that road but maybe we'll hear about that it was rough in like the most beautiful way it's like they make it really pretty the install like dialogues and everything but i had these bizarre scroll bars in different places and stuff because this monitor is like a four by three or whatever and it's i don't think what they thought would might be a standard so it was like really beautiful and then just broken everywhere all at the same time but i did eventually get through it um after about seven reboots during the process

because you know there were four during the installation two for updates immediately before i could do anything and then uh then i forgot like i was trying to scroll around and i couldn't actually do any scrolling because i forgot i need like drivers so luckily for the framework those were super easy to find just went to their website and downloaded i don't know the whole thing and uh installed those and everything seems to be working i have zero complaints around that Those were super easy to find. Just went to their website and downloaded, I don't know, the whole thing. And installed those, and everything seems to be working. I have zero complaints around that. Did you install those drivers later on, or did you actually try to get them in the install process?

Ooh, yeah. No, I did them later on because I didn't know what I was doing. So it was able to progress through the entire installation process without requiring drivers. installation process without requiring drivers. And then I was able to add the framework drivers on top of that just to add some extra features and such. But you had to go download those from the framework website. They didn't come via Windows Update. No, I did not see any automatic detection or suggestions that I should do that. But from my Windows history, I knew that was a thing. So I just did it myself. So you had a pretty smooth install experience. Ventoy worked for you.

You got the drivers going. But you said there was some pain in there. Well, one of the biggest pain points for me was when it asks you to log in with your Windows account, which I was like, I don't have one. account, which I was like, I don't have one. Oh, wait, I think I have a Hotmail account from like when I was a teenager, a hundred years ago. And sure enough in my password manager. So I, uh, because there's no way of getting around that. That's obvious in the installer. It seems like a must have. So I attempted to log in with this absolutely ancient account claimed that the password had been expired by, I don't know, probably for whatever reason.

So it never actually logged in via that account, but then it just got past the screen. So it's like I didn't actually log in, but I just, because they never thought that was a flow that they should think about, because I'm, of course, doing something strange. It just went past. Maybe they're just happy enough that, you know, all right, well, you have an account. We know who you are. Or maybe it's like if this process fails, then we just bail out quick to get them going. Is this Windows Home or Pro that you're doing? This one, I looked at the giant list of offerings, and I actually don't remember. I think it was Pro. Yeah yeah i think it's yeah yeah

yeah okay yeah it doesn't sound like you're ready for pro well i looked at what it offers and i was like i probably don't need that but i think i'll download it anyways uh there are some things in pro that are nice to have a remote desktop support is extensive in pro. BitLocker is not in the home, but it is in Pro. And there's things like Hyper-V that are in Pro that are not in the Home Edition. So there's some nice perks to getting Pro over the Home Edition. Now, Wes, I know you did a standard installation, but then I think you also took the route of like, hey, if I was going to keep this and maybe reproduce this and do it my way. Oh, yeah. Okay, so tell me how your experience went and tell us the hardware you put it on.

Oh, yeah, well, I just put it on this ThinkPad T480 here, which I've been using kind of as the main test laptop for the show. Works great with Linux distros. It's been around for a bit, so you know the hardware support tends to be pretty good. I want to know if you threw it on a partition alongside other Linux installs, or you just did a complete wipe. Oh, or you just did a complete wipe? Oh, I didn't do a complete wipe. No, I mean, there's too many fun distros on here to do that.

That was a tricky thing. It's like I wanted to put this on legitimate real hardware to give it a go, but I don't want to sacrifice my daily drivers either. I had to balance that myself. So I think this is a good machine because you really know how this thing performs. You've tested a ton of stuff on it.

Yeah, and it's got like a, I don't know, a terabyte or two in here. So it's easy enough to sort of just like pick a partition that's bigger than it needs to be. I only gave Windows 50 or 60 gigs anyway because I'm not planning to live here forever, right? Yeah, so I resized it. And then I thought, well, the Windows installer is no fun.

It's still like a Windows PE environment. It's not very fancy. I mean, they've put some more gloss on parts of it, but all the old part junk is still underneath there. And you know, you can't browse the web while you're installing like you can on any decent Linux installer. So I went the route of passing my whole disk, even though I was booted on it, which is a little risky, into my virtual machine so I could install Windows on the real hardware but from a Linux distro. Oh, I love it. So you essentially are

using some sort of QMU front end or something. Just QMU KPM. But instead of a cow file, you're putting it to the physical disk. I just give it right to the dev slash. And Windows doesn't freak out about all of a sudden it's in a VM one minute and then the next minute

it's on physical hardware? We'll get to that. Oh, okay. All right. Okay, so then, just to make it even more, you know, unusual, because someone's got to do something weird on the show, right? This is great so far. I'm curious if either of you have ever done it this way. And back when I used to use Windows more, you know, when there was less Linux compatibility, when I was just less good at using Linux, this is how I ended up doing it when I wanted to do kind of weird Windows installs or try to make things work.

Okay, so you boot into the installer. You don't need to do anything. You might want to go get your keyboard layout configured. We'll touch on that too. But you just do Shift F10. Yeah. And that'll pop up a command prompt. Yes.

So then, first things first, since I was doing this in a VM, my VM default setup uses virtio, which I wouldn't have to do, but it's the faster option, so I needed drivers. But thankfully, Red Hat and Fedora provide these drivers. Windows drivers. Windows drivers, yes, exactly. So download the ISO, which you can just go get really easily. Pop that into QEMU so it sees it.

I figured, since I was already doing this on the command line, let's take this to the max. No GUI install here. So there's a program called DRV Load. So you go, you know, you do CD into your mounted ISO, go find your INF files, and then use DRV Load to load that. And that just worked. It's great.

Pop that in. It says loads the driver. There's like two of them in there you can do. Then you open up disk part, which is the Windows command line disk partitioning utility, which it's not like it's quite as low level and it doesn't show you all the little bits that something like F disk does, but it's actually quite pleasant to use on the command line. I've used it a fair bit in the past, but it'd been a little while. But the commands are like pretty straightforward. You get fair bit in the past, but it had been a little while. But the commands are pretty straightforward. You get to just, you know, you choose your disks,

it shows you the partitions, it shows you the volumes. So I'd already partitioned things via gparted and Linux just to make the space available, but I left it raw and unformatted. Smart, smart. So you could use gparted in Linux, your preferred environment, your preferred tool, and then yeah, because the Windows Partitioner,

just as a side note, I'm a dummy. I admit it. But I accidentally deleted my boot USB drive partition one time because I was just going through like, oh, that's a partition. Clear that. That's a partition. Clear that. Oh, crap.

That was a different disk. So that's a much better approach is using Gpart. It's something you're familiar with. Yeah, I used to do that when I dupled too. You know know it's like use the linux installer get everything formatted and you can just tell windows like i got a slot for you already um so go in there uh format things with you know ntfs uh and then one nice part about the modern era and uefi is i think like windows actually plays it's like it's an easier environment because there's no like crazy magic stuff at the front of the disk bootloader that you got to play with, right? It's a FAT32 partition that's just got files on it. And sure, it might make itself the new default

in like your, but you can just switch that back. It's easy to do. And most BIOSes these days, like, you know, you can go and choose a native UEFI switcher. So even if Windows installs and makes itself the default, you can just hit F11 or whatever at the boot and still get back to your Linux without having to worry that you got to get a USB to repair things. That's so much nicer than it used to be. Yeah, it really is. And I didn't have to do anything to fuss with the rest of it. I only had to make the one partition for Windows because I was reusing the same USB partition I had. Absolutely. So then this is the fun bit. You use a tool called DISM and you apply the image that's contained on the install CD.

So if you go look on that like ISO that you put on there, there's like a sources folder. And in there, there's an install.wim or in this case, it was an install.esd file, but both work. And then it's got a bunch of different options there. As you see in the GUI installer, it's got like home and pro and education and all these different versions. And those are at different indexes in the command line version. So you can like use the thing to list all the options and all the indexes in there. And then when you apply an image, you give it a command line flag that says like, hey, I want index two. And that'll pick like pro versus home.

The pro image. Yeah. Interesting. So that's really what the installer is doing. When you choose it in that list, when you're choosing which version of Windows, you're really just kind of executing that on the back end, which picks that index. Yeah. And then so this just like it's just it's an image. It just extracts the image onto your C drive.

So it just writes out you get all the Windows and System 32 and all the wonderful stuff you need on a C drive to make it Windows. And then from there, you just need to set up the bootloader. That's pretty easy too. There's a command called bcdboot and Windows has this bcd file which is like a registry file that contains all the settings for the different like the Windows bootloader so it knows how to get into the different Windows because you can have, you know, it can do multiple versions of Windows. It's actually

pretty fancy these days. But you run bcdboot and you're off to the races. You give it a reboot. Now, here you could use the registry editor and bypass that Windows or Microsoft account thing, but there's another way if you don't want to fuss with it

during the installer, then just go ahead and reboot. As Brent experienced, you'll pop back up into Windows, into the installer, and you get that first welcome screen, the OOBE or out-of-box experience as they call it in the Windows parlance. Even the file name is so corporate. Yeah, it really is.

You probably want to restrict network access, so just, like, don't sign in. Yes. For me, in the virtual machine, I just, you know, disabled networking, didn't have a knick-knick at all. And then do Shift-F10, and in that environment, it'll also pop up a command prompt. And then you go into the System32 folder, and you run a command that's called oobe slash bypass nro. And that'll just, like, that'll modify your registry,

and then reboot, and then you'll bounce back into the out-of-box experience again. But this time, if you don't have networking enabled, when you get to that screen, it'll give you the option to continue with a local account, or it's like with a limited setup or something like that. And so, from there, you don't need to sign in with any account. It lets you with a local account or it's like a, with a limited setup or something like that. Yeah. And so, uh,

from there you don't need to sign in with any account unless you make a local admin account and you've got windows installed. Like the good old way used to log into windows. That's a nice little roundabout trick to bypass that. I thought my method was a little easier though. Yeah. Maybe two more, two little bits that were a slightly more complicated.

I realized I could partway go through the installer and like get my keyboard configured correctly, because by default, and we were using an all-in-one ISO to test with, the backslash was showing up as a pound symbol, and that wasn't going to work, because I was on the Windows command line, and there was a lot of backslashes involved.

So I got to figure out how to use the Windows PE util to set the keyboard layout on the command line. So that was fun. And then also I realized that loading that driver in the PE install environment didn't get it onto the C drive. So then you have to do

once you've got the C drive extracted, you can use PNPUtil or actually no, you might be able to do that, but I think that's for online systems. You can use the DISM tool to add a driver to the extracted image so you still have to modify the extracted image when you're all done too yes okay good thing to know so a few little bits in there if you if your system has like support and you weren't trying to do this in a virtual machine with virtio drivers you wouldn't

need to bother with that stuff but uh so that got me windows installed but at this point it's in the virtual machine but running off my real disk right Right. So then I used sysprep, which has a generalize option. Still around, old sysprep. Old sysprep. Man, I used the hell out of that back in the day. And then I rebooted my laptop and it had added the, you know, my UEFI system saw that there was a Windows boot manager now, selected that. And a couple more reboots later as it, you know, figured out what the new hardware was and like figured out how to make that work. There's a lot of reboots.

I got real Windows running on my laptop. And do you know what it complained if you switched between them about like you have to reactivate that kind of stuff? I know Windows is a little bit better about that now. No, I mean, yeah, you might need to in some circumstances, but for the most part, this has just been working. Oh, man, Wes. That's a pretty slick way.

I think it's kind of ironic, though though that you definitely did more command line setup to get windows installed than you would for any modern linux ubuntu or fedora install yeah i mean it's honestly more like doing it like an archer agenda way than anything else yeah really um so i did not have the luck with hardware that you boys did and i just thought this was going to be a slam dunk because, you know, I'm thinking Windows 11. What do I know about Windows 11? Well, I know it kind of has some modern hardware requirements compared to previous versions of Windows. And I know the adoption is kind of low because of that.

So I'm going to bite the bullet and really try this thing. And I'm going to put it on my dev one because that's kind of, you know, the most modern system I have. It's a pretty new one. I mean, it seems like it would be well supported by Windows. They ship a version with it, right? Right. There's an HP Pro version laptop that's designed

for Windows. So booted up the old Windows USB all-in-one ISO off of a thumb drive and doesn't see my disk. Doesn't see the disk in the Dev 1. Well, of course I go to HP's site. There's no drivers for Windows for the dev one because

it's a linux laptop so a little googling and barding and and duck ducking later i i kind of nailed down which hp model the dev one was forked from and so i go to the support page for that model and i down i i expand the drivers list and i see drivers for all kinds of things, stuff I didn't even know they made drivers for. But I don't see anything that says disk controller or SATA controller, but I do see chipset driver and I do see HP enablement driver. But of course, I download them and they're at EXEs. Thankfully, Wine runs them and they self-extract just fine so i copy them over to

like an extended fat usb thumb drive pop them in the dev one in the windows installer and for the life of me it cannot find any drivers anywhere in that mess at least for nothing that it needed and i looked and i looked and i looked and i burned a day trying to get this working and it just never i never got it working on the dev one. And what I came to, and I'm not exactly sure if this is right or not, but what I came to is I need to use the HP image assistant to generate the windows installer, which will lay in the drivers. And that's how they put the drill, those drivers. And that's how they distribute those drivers.

But in order to download the HP image assistant, you need to have an HP product with a valid serial number that has a valid windows license. So you couldn't go use like another Windows install somewhere to set? Seemingly. So at that point, I pivoted. I just thought, let's try it on a different piece of hardware. Let's try it on my old Sputnik XPS 13.

This is the OG Sputnik. It's been around for a long time. It's like a fifth gen i7 around 2.2 gigahertz, eight gigs of built-in RAM. There's no upgrade in that sucker at all. It's got a touchscreen. And for some reason, it's still selling for like $899 on Amazon. I couldn't explain to you why, but it is. It's got a nice, you know, it's the very, very first like official Sputnik. And I happen to buy mine i happen to buy the windows edition which will which will be relevant later and so uh then i

put linux on it and sure enough it uh it does boot and then it crashed the windows installer the windows 11 would just lock up the windows installer would lock up and i couldn't get it past the initial boot where we would just have a flashing cursor. And I remembered Brentley saying he tried Ventoy, and Ventoy had worked for him. So I thought, all right, well, I'll give Ventoy a try. So I slapped the Windows 11 ISO on Ventoy, popped that in the dev one. I boot it up. I see it on the list.

I select Windows 11. It starts to boot up, gets a little bit further, and then flashing cursor, flashing cursor. Oh. Well, I saw there was this other option in there. They have this kind of WIM boot mode. They say only use this if normal boot fails. And I think, well, normal boot failed. So I reboot again, go into Ventoy, select Windows 11,

but now I choose this WIM boot mode. And sure enough, it worked. Yeah, so that's a neat thing about Ventoy is you can actually boot into VHD or WIM files and on the installer there's the install.wim which has like the stuff that used to be the final system. There's also a boot.wim which has like the system stuff for the

PE environment. So I imagine it's finding that boot.wim and using that to get the installer started. Well, sure enough, it's clever because it worked and probably one of the reasons why the installer was having a little trouble is it's not really meant for this hardware and even the most basic animations they put in that onboarding screen are like eight frames per second on this laptop it's like i'm waiting to get my

input in until the animation is done and i'm just sitting there that's worse than my virtual machine yeah um and then there was like two reboots during the actual main install and then after i got it installed and i logged into my microsoft account which i decided i'd try with this oh you did it that well yeah i decided to give that a go um oh my god it like if you're a regular user and you're just installing windows you would you would end up just following their default workflow, which is they want to restore a backup from a previous machine. Well, like last time we tried this. I mean, that is kind of a nice feature if you're just like a normal person using computers. Here's the problem.

It has no taste. It has no sense. It was essentially forcing upon me through the ui a restore of a pc there was a test throwaway machine when you and i did our wcl test in 2021 so did you try it no because like it'd be like it's like from a windows 10 install with like god like and like you have to like really click through an anti-pattern ui to avoid this crazy ass recovery from a machine that's totally out of date. And then after I get over that mountain, it tried to get me to download and install some ripoff of KDE Connect and then pair it with my laptop right then and there, like stop. I'm like, bro, I'm trying to get to my desktop. And it's like, no, go get our app, man. It's cool.

And then you scan this QR code. I'm like, bro, go away. So I get past that. And and it's like no go get our app man it's cool and then you scan this qr code i'm like bro go away so i get past that and then it's like hey fam you want office 365 we got a great deal for you and i'm like no stop and then it's like okay all right all right you'd say you you don't you don't want to pair with our app you don't want to subscribe to office 365 but i bet you really want 100 gig more cloud storage right you really want that we'll give you a great deal on 100 gig more cloud storage, right? You really want that. We'll give you a great deal on 100 gig more cloud storage right now. We can integrate into your desktop. It's the best thing ever. And I'm just like, this is three upsells in a row. And you know, these are different fiefdoms inside Microsoft that all have been battling and advocating for getting access on this onboarding screen for years. And so it starts with one product and then another product and then another product.

And for Windows 12, it's going to be like four upsell screens before you get there. I mean, it's really an intense process. And then once you actually get the system installed, wow, like the updating takes forever. The reboots are constant. And at one point when it was like the shutdown screen and installing updates and just spinning i i was sitting for a half hour and i literally googled what do i do if windows freezes at the shutdown screen installing updates like how how bad am i gonna bone this thing if i have to hard reset and so it's like it says it's like if the process hangs for more than six hours you should consider rebooting six hours doesn't that tell you something i'm like i'm sitting here at 30 minutes thinking it's locked up so i just walked away and made lunch then i came back and it rebooted itself you know so then once i got through all those hurdles i was on the

xps 13 and i discovered somehow even though this thing is from the very beginning of the Sputnik program, maybe Windows Vista era, maybe, maybe Windows 7, maybe. Somehow, the Microsoft installer matched up my Dell serial number with a license and fully activated the thing. I never had to select an edition, even though we were using the all-in-one ISO on the XPS. All the other systems I tried it on, like the VMs and the Dev1, I always had to select the edition. What happened over there? Not on the xps 13 it just automatically selected windows home for me and activated it which i think maybe is why i got all the upsells and all that stuff because it's like the home edition and you did log in i was going to say i know it's funny logging in with a local account because there's just like a bunch of stuff like

in the spot where the old like you know they've moved where the windows uh icon is now and you know that spot there's now like the the uh widgets yeah but you like, you know, they've moved where the windows icon is now. And you know, that spot, there's now like the, the widgets. Yeah. But you have to be signed in to get the widgets. So there's just nothing there. Linode.com slash unplugged.

Go there to get $100 in 60 day credit and go check out the exciting news. Our hosting provider for three years plus now has, they are now part of Akamai, the Akamai. And they're keeping all of the tools that we love, like the cloud manager, the API, and the command line client, all that stuff that we've used and told you about that deploys and scales in the cloud at great prices. That stuff's sticking around, but now it's combined with Akamai's power and global reach. They are the premier network, and they're expanding their services to offer us more cloud computing resources and tools, while still giving us that reliable, affordable, and scalable solution that's worked for a small business like JB, individuals in our audiences, and large enterprises, very large.

In fact, some of the biggest names you've heard run on Leno. The infrastructure is that good, and it scales to what you need. We've brought systems from the ground up, up to massive monsters, and then we've scaled them back down as we've optimized the server. I think it's a pretty awesome experience. It's why we've talked about it. It's why we run everything here, and it's why so many people in our audience absolutely love it.

So go try it out. Get that $100 and support the show. Go experience the power of Linode now with Akamai. You just go to linode.com slash unplugged. That's how you learn at Linode. Now Akamai can help scale your applications, your projects, whatever it might be, from the cloud all the way to the very edge.

It's pretty great stuff. And I want to give a personal plug for their S3 compatible object storage. Using that all the time. You'll love it. Linode.com slash unplugged. The timing on this challenge is kind of funny. I saw this morning that Microsoft has launched a new web app store for Windows. They've rebuilt the app store with a web version, I guess built from the ground up,

to make it easier to find apps. I guess this is nice. We did spend some time in the Windows Store. So let's talk about our three main objectives that we had here. One was use the new Windows App Store, use it to do some updates, use it to install some stuff, figure that out. The second objective was run some Docker containers because it's something we do really easily on Linux. Just try to do this on Linux. And then the third objective was try to connect to another Linux box on the network. You know, so a lot of times we're always talking about how can Linux access Windows systems? Well, what if you live in a Linux household and you got a rogue Windows box? How well can it integrate and connect to your Linux systems? We wanted to test all those things there, kind of round it out,

and then, you know, just sort of feel out the other stuff and get our impressions in there. So, Wes, did you get a chance to try out the Windows Store, even though you're using some local hacker account? So actually, no, I'm going to be relying on you guys, I guess, I guess via proxy. But I went the route of just trying to get everything I needed installed via Chocolaty. Oh, nice. Yeah, I almost did that, too, except for that stupid Windows Store part of it. Yeah.

And how was the Chocolaty thing? Because that was something I really wanted to try and I didn't. Oh, it's been great. Kind of because like I started this install on the CLI. I figured like, let's take this, you know, that's how I do my Linux system.

Let's see how much I can do it on the Windows side. It's been pleasant. You know, definitely when you click over to their site, by default, you land on their like sort of product version. So it's kind of like the Windows world, right? Like there's a lot of proprietary stuff by default it's kind of

like selling you on the like you can use chocolatey with like your you know ansible and all this other automation at scale for your windows deployments which is all great i'm sure uh but then you got to go find there's like a community subdomain that has like the community stuff and actually has the list of all the packages it has even the install is kind of confusing because they've got like all the enterprise ways to get it automated and installed and like provisioned. And, you know, and I just wanted like an EXE or MSI to install. You know, it's a funny thing I've noticed over the years

with these Windows apps that start out as a community thing and then they get popular enough that people start like ramming them into corporate scripts. And then these companies figure out, oh, wait a minute, there's a bunch of money over here. And then their whole focus sort of pivots to enterprise, and it gets tricky. I've had that experience with some other Windows apps, too. So you get Chocolaty installed. Can you install things like VLC and Firefox?

You sure can. My Firefox is from that, Element's from that, Telegram's from that, Slack's from that. Most of the stuff that I've actually installed, I've just been able to do right through Choco. You got more stuff than I did. Element is not in the Windows Store. Yeah, Element Desktop, just right on. Gamma points out there's also WinGet, which is that new sort of... I've been meaning to try that.

I didn't get quite that far, but Chocolaty's been a great experience. I just got that installed, but I have no notes or experience on it, but WinGet, yeah. Brantley, what about you? Did you get a chance to kick the tires on the Microsoft store and install some apps? Yeah, my first reaction on day one was to try to do everything the Windows way. Sure.

And I knew our dear Drew told us about Chocolaty, or at least told me about it. And I thought, okay, that's here in the back pocket. But I'm going to try, because know, trying to do the Windows way. I'm going to attempt that. So I dug right into the Windows store. At least one of us is honest. Well, the honesty ends eventually. And so the Windows store actually was like, looks nice, seems like you can find things.

So I started looking up stuff and yeah, sure enough. The first thing I wanted to install was Slack because we use that internally here at jb just to uh well i wanted to get our show notes so i could write some notes down about the install process that was really what i wanted to do because i had a lot to say and i hadn't written it down yet some dog fooding and uh but i i don't know i guess i'm used to our dear linux app stores that have so much information because you you go to the slack you know at least i was able to find it so i click on there and it says release date 2014 and i was like wait a second that can't be the latest update right that doesn't make any sense uh so i couldn't actually look up any version history like past versions or which what was the current version even and i tried and i

try i don't know maybe i'm missing something but I tried and I tried and I couldn't get anywhere so I have the same complaints it's like that I just I wanted to know like the most recent updates and some of the changes and it's just not really in there it's really minimal description some reviews and screenshots and something I'm used to doing in various app stores is just checking to make sure that the provider is actually the project. So is this actually from Slack or is it some community edition? You know, if it is a community edition, maybe I have to go look it up and make sure that it's not just one guy and that it's some software trying to, I don't know, do some shady stuff on the back end. So I'm kind of used to that workflow. It's like just, so it's just like flat up basically. Uh, but I knew, I knew hearing about the windows store that it had a history of having just some bad apps in there and some

out of date stuff. So I was extra cautious and I actually wasn't able to get the information that I needed to make me feel more confident about it. But I installed Slack anyways, and it seemed to work. I think, I think the publisher information is at the bottom of the page. If you scroll all the way down, like where they also recommend other apps, pass like the reviews and the requirements. I think they have like the publisher info down there. Yeah, I did find that. And I, but anybody can write, you know, Slack, Inc or whatever it is. But they did have a contact button.

So I thought, okay, if there's like proper contact info in here, maybe I can, that can help me. But you click on there and there is no contact info. It just gives you the publisher name and that's it. And I did that for a few different packages. So it's like, come on guys. But I installed Slack anyways via that method. And I verified that it was on the newest version. You know, like, come on guys. But I installed Slack anyways, via that method. And I verified that it was on the newest version, you know, went to Slack's website and saw what the new version was, checked it out on the install and sure enough, it was the new version. So I was like, okay, fine. I'll keep trying this app store thing. But I did notice some weird things. So I,

we'll talk about WSL in a bit but in in the process of attempting to get wsl installed i noticed that there were only like 75 ratings for wsl in the windows app store for me yet if you go to the online store that you were just mentioning uh it has like 911 ratings or something like that why Why is there a difference? And it turns out that the app store only shows you the ratings for your country. So my being here in Canada. You're a trendsetter up there in Canada. Yeah, but it was interesting because then I started comparing certain applications both on the web version and on the version I was seeing on my local install here. And like the rating for the application itself, like five star, four star or whatever,

those were different. And also the like reviews were of different numbers. So I was like, why aren't you show like the internet is so worldly, especially today. Why aren't you showing me just what everybody thinks, you know? So that was a weird, strange experience. Yeah. That is a weird limitation. Like their opinions don't matter. Yeah. And why would the country matter for like most applications? I had a pretty good experience with the Windows App Store.

I had this odd thing. It happened. I could repeat it with Photoshop because I thought, let's try installing Photoshop from the App Store. That's a big one. And it is the boondockle you'd expect. What it really is doing in the background is just downloading the Creative Cloud installer. I suppose there's really only so much you can get past there.

It's kind of outside of Microsoft's control. But what was weird is three out of the five times I would go to the Photoshop app listing, the install button just wouldn't be there. If I restarted the Windows Store service or rebooted, it would be there that time. But then if I went and installed a bunch of other apps

and then went back to go install Photoshop, there would be no button. No get, no buy, nothing. Just where the button would be, nothing rendered in the UI. Is this why they needed to make a new app? Maybe. But then, like I said, I could get around it eventually and then discover

that it's just loading the Creative Cloud installer. I also tried to install WSL from the App Store and I clicked it and it would spin and I got one security prompt, one UAC prompt.

I said yes. And then it would just go back to a git button. So I'd do it again, get the UAC prompt, say yes, and then it would just go back to a git button.

So I went to the command line, and I did the WSL dash dash install or whatever it is, and it told me I need to go get a bunch of Windows features and check them and turn them on, and I'm thinking to myself, why does WSL dash dash install not turn those Windows features on, or why does the Git button from the Windows store, like why even have that if I have to go do that first?

I wonder if this is a consequence of you being on home. Oh, maybe. Because for me on Pro, like, I just went to the command line, WSL dash dash install, worked first thing out of the gate. I just checked while we were talking here. I'm also on Pro, and I had the same experience as Chris. I tried to install it. What?

Yeah, yeah, various ways. And it took me like half an hour to go through all the different error codes. I'd get a new error, go look that up on the windows documentation which was thick oh yeah he's got a fight for his qa chief title here and so it took me a while to get it working and of course like various uh places suggested different things and uh the documentation said like oh yeah just repeat step four i I was like, there is no step four on this whole page. So I had to go. Yeah. Anyways, it was a bit of a disaster, eventually got it working, but it just felt like that was rough. Like they have an install button.

I should just handle all that for you. Another thing that's kind of out of side Microsoft's control, but so Slack and Telegram and some of these things are there, but I can never get VLC to install from the store. That's another one where the button just didn't render for me. So I ended up having to go to VLC's website. I had to go to the Element Chat website to get that. So I still did 50-50. I wonder, there's probably like a fancier Windows, you know,

like the MPV for Windows that we should be using instead. Yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I just, VLC I know. And some of those media players on Windows are just garbage. So I just wanted to avoid those. But so I think maybe not 50, 70% of the apps I installed came from the app store. I think the app itself is well done. I think it's better built than, it's definitely better built than Apple's desktop app store for the Mac. And it's snappier and fancier than something like GNOME software, I suppose. I don't know if it's fundamental features are any better than what GNOME software

does, but it's got more swooshes and lagger and stuff. I thought it was, what struck me about it, one last note on the store before we move on. When you open up the store, it recommends TikTok, it recommends

Acrobat Reader, it recommends iTunes and Spotify and Netflix and WhatsApp. Microsoft's apps are in here, but it was surprising to see competitors' apps just so front and categories. So it's, I mean, I don't know. It doesn't feel like they're really pushing too hard on the scale like Apple does. Like Apple really pushes their stuff and Google does too. But Microsoft, like the top, like the first listed app is TikTok. Second is Adobe Reader. The third is Adobe Express. The fourth is Adobe Photoshop. Fifth is Adobe Access.

I mean, they can just install in the background. They don't need to put it in the store. Well, they do that. They do a lot more of that now. They did a lot of that, a lot of cleaning up the stuff they pre-install. A lot more junk comes along. I will say, just as you were talking there, I did get VLC installed via Chocolaty. Okay.

That's the way to go. Did you guys notice the AI Hub category? Yes. Yeah, they have a whole section in the store. Just quickly. A lot of it looked like junk to me. Oh, there's Moises, which we use on our drum challenge, listener Jeff and Alex and I, to deconstruct songs.

So at least there's something useful in there. Well, that's kind of cool. I did try another app store, which it doesn't sound like you guys tried. Oh. There's another app store? When I was doing research, I learned one of the major features for Windows 11 was the ability to run Android apps. And now these, you can't find through the Windows App Store, but there's a partnership with Amazon.

So if you install the Amazon App Store, it installs some virtualization like the Windows subsystem for Android, if you didn't know that was a thing. I couldn't really find any useful Android applications in that store. It was mostly games. So anything I wanted to run didn't exist, but I was able to find Plex. So I was able to get Plex up and running, but then I needed a Plex pass to actually watch anything using the Android app. So then I just gave up. But what is the app launch experience like? Do you, do you see much of the machinations of launching an Android app or does it just pop up like an old Windows app? Well, I'm seeing it in the Windows menu here, like just the regular old menu.

So if I run this Plex app here, yeah, starting Windows subsystem for Android, and there's like a scrolly bar, and it's still going now that I've run it, and it takes a little while. And this is a modern laptop. But okay, now Plex is starting, and we're good. So it's definitely virtualized and shows it. I'm glad you tried that. That's something I should play around with. There's a lot to get into still. But let's talk about some of the things I think they're doing well,

since we just gave them a hard time for a few things. I really kind of like the tiling features. I like the way they've implemented the tiling stuff. If you hover over maximize, you get your options, or you drag and put the mouse in the right spot, you kind of get this drop over, and it works. I think in general, honestly, if we think about the Windows desktop as like a DE in the Linux land, I'd use this on Linux.

If there was a Linux version, I might consider it for some machines. It's a pretty nice environment. You're right. If you're just talking the Windows management stuff. Especially the new stuff. Maybe not some of the legacy bits, but the new virtual desktops and the auto-snapping.

It is nice. The other thing they've done that kind of minimizes the UI is they're really just by default hiding a lot of the system tray icons. You don't see those unless you manually turn them on, and it's nicer that way. Off by default should be the system tray icons. So you don't see those unless you go manually turn them on, and it's nicer that way. Off by default should be the way to go.

I thought that that kind of stuff, it needs a little more power options. Like I wanted to see, and this is not in there, something like Windows rules that Plasma has. So every time I open Telegram, open it on the third virtual desktop and put it on this half of the screen. Every single time. Just do that. There's nothing built into Windows to do that.

There's also, although there's tools, there's nothing built into Windows to just display down in the tray what desktop you're on. It's a nice little thing. In Plasma, you can put on the little virtual desktop so you can select your desktop. Or you can do it with a GNOME extension. Something like that would be really nice so you can quickly see what desktop you're in and make it easy to swipe and you can configure the gestures so you can do the three-finger swipe between desktops. Yeah, that part's nice.

It's really nice. I got to say, I really liked that experience. What about you, Brent? Did you struggle with it? Did you find that pretty functional? I also had the similar initial experience of thinking, yeah, this actually looks really nice and the tiling especially caught my eye i guess on plasma i'm so used to using the super key and then just uh like my arrow keys to move windows around between you know the side of the monitor and tile it to a certain place yes

and that just worked by default here so i didn't have to learn like a new shortcut or anything it's super nice so i just instantly moved to doing it that way what i did notice about the hovering to tile certain windows is it works in most places but in some applications like slack and the docker desktop for instance it you're you know you hover over that guy and it just doesn't do anything so it must be using i don't know it's using something different that the tiling just doesn't play nicely with and so it's not universal but it's nice when it shows up there's this not surprising feature because it's kind of same true for all desktops but my god was it true on windows 11 what I discovered using virtual desktops is there's really no point to using virtual desktops on a low-resource machine.

Because mind you, I'm on a fifth-gen i7. I got 8 gigs of fixed RAM. I actually got out-of-memory errors. It really – Windows 11 struggles with a few apps to perform with 8 gigs of RAM. And that was a little brutal, I have to be honest, in some periods. It's just trying to kind of maneuver and operate was that was a little brutal i have to be honest in some in some periods it's just trying to kind of maneuver and operate in that space and so things like explorer launching even can kind of be slow as the chrome draw draws in and so i had to go in and kind of turn things down and i was able to customize and i got rid of the widgets menu and i put the start menu back where

it should be and was able to kind of make some of that work on a lower-end system. But, and I mean this with all honesty, it's just the facts, this Sputnik machine has run Linux its entire life. Like, I never even booted Windows on it when it came. I immediately wiped it. And it had elementary OS on there before I reinstalled. And I put Windows on there. And it is clearly more performant under Linux for just about every task. I mean, launching applications, just using the system feels faster.

There is a noticeable performance delta on older hardware between Windows 11 and even modern Linux. So I just thought that was pretty jarring because I didn't expect the machine to feel that slow because I've used that machine for years, and it's never felt like that before. In our matrix, Tears Arm points out that I think technically maybe your hardware isn't supported by Windows 11.

Yeah, I get you get you get like some you get some notes like, well, you can join the insider program, but just so you know, your hardware is not supported. So things could be extra breaky. But in a way, I got to respect the fact that I was able to do it. You know, I appreciate that they just didn't say straight up, no, you can't use this machine. No, you can't join the insider program. I wonder, there are, like, I think Ventoy has an option to disable sort of requirement checks. I wonder if that happened or if your system was close enough that they didn't come into play.

I'm not sure. I was surprised. I was surprised because I don't think there's like a TPM chip in there or anything like that. For contrast, on this ThinkPad, I think Windows has been like very pleasant, super snappy. There's still little bits like updates, reboots, shutting down for some reason. It takes forever.

But like once it's up and going, all the window management, everything sort of like day to day, it's keeping up with the best of the Linux installs I've had, I think. That's what my expectation was because, honestly, a new Windows install tends to be pretty snappy. I mean that's why people go through the trouble of reloading every now and then because you do notice a difference. Yeah. And it usually performs pretty well. So I don't know.

All right. So let's talk about two other objectives. Maybe we pick up the pace here. Did you get a chance, Wes, to try running a Docker container on Windows 11? I sure did. Yeah. And kind of what's neat, I was looking at it, I guess, since WSL came around, Docker Desktop can actually hook into WSL and use it as, and I think these days now it even uses it as its default background. So once you've got WSL installed, Docker Desktop is kind of just like another way to interface to it.

I tried on the WSL side to get NixOS going, and there is a sort of like a build setup you can do. I need to play more with that, and I will. But just to like not fuss with it so much, I tried, figured I'd run a NixOS container or a Nix container via Docker Desktop, and yeah, it worked just fine. Ran a couple different test containers and

worked just like you'd expect. So it's a slam dunk with Docker Desktop to a degree. The UI for me is very thick. I find it to be a lot of application. They want me to sign up and all this kind of crap that I hate just so I can run a container on my machine. It just seems ridiculous. Nice thing there, too. So like, these days

on the Docker website, yeah, they want, like, they want you to, like, make an account and sign in to get the download for the Docker desktop app. But you can, with Chocolaty, you can install it that way, and you can bypass that part. Skip the, yes. Yep, that's definitely the way to do it. But once I got it up, on

Home, they have a peculiar limitation that totally doesn't bother me, but might bother some people, is that you can only run Linux containers on Windows Home. You cannot run Windows containers. In order to run Windows containers, you need full Hyper-V support. And to have full Hyper-V support, you need to have Pro. Hey, don't do anything business-y like on this thing, OK? It's a home edition.

This is honestly – and I hope they do one day. If they dropped this crap, this product differentiation crap with Windows. I mean, I'm fine with a Windows client and a Windows server, but outside of that, give me a break. But Docker desktop, you know, it's fine. I got HedgeDocs up and going. I assume you're kind of familiar. You've used the Docker desktop on the Mac side already. For like a hot minute.

Yeah. You know. I first, though, and I think, Brent, you probably tried this route too, so I'll let you talk about this. You know, I first though, and I think Brent, you probably tried this route too. So I'll let you talk about this. I first tried to get just Docker running inside Ubuntu or Arch in a WSL environment. Did you try this route, Brent? I did use Chocolaty and I just went, I don't know, Chocolaty install Docker. And I figured that that would work well.

So I guess in a way it's attempting to do what you're saying. And I just couldn't get anywhere with that. Just so many run errors. So then I figured I would then use Chocolaty to install the Docker desktop. And that did boot up and everything. And I agree with you about the interface. I just sat there for like many minutes trying to decide like where am I supposed to be going? Oh, man.

The end goal I wanted was to get our website up and running like as a developer environment because i figured well that's probably the most useful thing we should be trying right it didn't work very well for me it's still kind of looping around saying preparing and i ran into they're like they have a button you know they have one for like containers and one for i don't know vms and images and. And there's one called create a dev environment, which is it'll pull down a Git repository for you and stuff like that, which seems useful. And I figured that's what I'm trying to do. It does say there's a little beta tag beside that button. So I think I'm running into the Brent state here because i've found several instances where it just breaks and

i haven't actually gotten anywhere so i failed this challenge i will say i think the funny thing about docker desktop is like it's this whole as you say right this whole gooey app um but you really just install it to get docker on the command line and then you can just go from there right i will say the uh windows x thing is nice have you been using that windows key plus x pulls up this little sort of like quick admin menu thing it's got like power options installed ask apps system device manager and then right at the bottom it's got uh a task manager of course uh but terminal and admin terminal so it makes it really easy to just pop one of those up you kept this from us all this whole time the new windows terminal has gotten even better it it is slow to launch on my xps like it's that it's like that the terminal launches and then again the chrome kind of builds

in and then the environment starts and it's it takes about as long as it takes me to describe it and it's kind of painful but it's really nice to just have an ubuntu terminal by default that's been really great so i tried to get this is dumb. And maybe it's possible if you keep looking into it. But I tried to get Docker going inside Ubuntu in WSL 2 because that's what I want. Why not just run it in my Ubuntu environment? I'll just use Docker Compose and I'll just run Docker containers inside WSL like I would on regular Linux, right? Yeah. Well, I don't exactly know because I couldn't be bothered. But I think it's, you know, I got an air like something about like I'm not running on PID one or PID zero. I can't remember what the air message was, but it's essentially because it's already a virtualized environment. Docker is not happy. And I think there is guides out there to get this working. But it was kind of a red flag because when I looked into Docker desktop, I realized that's essentially executing in the WSL environment for me.

And it's sort of the blessed way to go about it. So the route I was trying to take I feel like was futile ultimately. But it was like the Linux user trying to solve it on Windows. And so once I just settled on Docker Desktop, I got that part working just fine. But I only started up one container. But I feel like I probably would use that more if i were to stick with windows perhaps all right so then our very last objective were you boys able to connect to a linux system from the windows system i mean i just did it right now i connected to one of the servers here at the studio because you know um with the windows terminal and the nice

little powershell environment and all that like just use SSH right on the command line by default. Oh, yeah. Sure, that counts. SSH absolutely counts. I didn't even think about using SSH. Oh, I assume that's what you meant. Anyway, any method at all. Just any method. Yeah, but SSH is right there. I mean, just like a Linux environment. That's nice. That's surprisingly nice. What about you, Brent? Were you able to connect from

Windows to a Linux machine? Yeah, I'm with you, Chris. I admit I didn't think of that very simple way. What I thought was, okay, well, I use Vorta and Borg to do backups on my laptop. I'm going to try to duplicate the same thing here in my Windows environment. Now, the recommended way of doing that, I guess they're working on a native solution to run Borg. It's a pretty Linux-y solution. They're apparently working on it, but that's not the way it's possible so what ended up happening was i was able to run vorta within

an ubuntu uh wsl instance and get the gui up and everything and i was able to do a backup using that that's neat neat. That works. Yeah, and just like the container, the WSL container just automatically gets the C drive and everything. So I didn't even really have to do that much work in order to get it working. It just kind of like just worked. That's okay. That's good to know.

I think that's an interesting, you know, like my Windows admin skills are definitely not what they once were, and they were never very good. That became very apparent to me, is that oh, this stuff has changed enough. Some of the old stuff's still there, for sure. Yeah. And like, there's lots of nice admin stuff from Windows, for sure, right? Obviously it's deployed in huge environments, and you need those controls. But it's neat, as Brent is finding out right here, that like

with WSL, it might not work for everything, but I can port, if I had to exist in Windows, I could port some of my Linux stuff to actually get this stuff done in this environment. Yes. Unfortunately, the more I thought about it, the more I figured that I had just cheated and not actually achieved the objective.

So I think I failed on two of our three challenges here. I don't know. I don't know. I think that works. Oh, thanks, Chris. You're so sweet. I mean, it took them some time to make that file system access work as well as it does. That was not initially so smooth. So I noticed, and this has been true for Windows forever, that by default, the Windows networking is a lot more protected. A lot more stuff is turned off by default.

So I did the right thing and just turned everything on, all the auto discovery, all the DNS broadcast, you know. And I just let it go hog wild, and I opened up what we used to call Network Neighborhood and just let it scan the whole network. Holy smokes, man. It finds – now it lists in Network Neighborhood web instances, other MDNS stuff it discovers. It's not just your Samba shares anymore. Your Hughes Bridge will show up in there. Home Assistant will show up in there.

Like a lot of stuff. Some of your TV set top boxes will show up in Network Neighborhood. And I double click on the NAS here, the Linux NAS here in the studio, and I get an error message. I go, go figure. I can open up the damn Hughes Bridge,

but I can't connect to the Samba server. So I realize, you know, what you really do is you don't need the GUI, so I just go into the location thing, put in the old whack whack 172 or 192, you know, give it the address slash the file share I want, hit enter. Boom, comes right up. And I'm moving files in and out and I'm copying photos. It worked just like you'd expect. Now I cheated a little bit in that I already had Samba set up,

but I was pleasantly surprised how much more aware it is of your network in some ways, I suppose. You know, ultimately, I also always in the back of my mind, I'm like, are they logging this? Because it's really hard to trust this platform. There is that aspect of it, but that's just the nature of Windows, I suppose. But I had no problem doing that. I had no problem streaming videos and copying files around. I thought that all worked perfectly fine. So as far as the objectives go, I think I technically checked all the boxes there. You know, it does feel like using this, as I like to say, there is, in fact, a strategy tax.

It's clear throughout the entire operating system. I mean, the fact that the widgets that are basically their MSN website from 100 years ago that they've just now widgetized. It's incredible how the two primary commercial platforms, some of their top features for their current OS releases are widgets. It's like I can't believe we're here again. The way the strategy tax works out is whatever division is in the Bing division that runs those widgets and runs the MSN.com homepage, they've got enough clout now that they managed to get the freaking start button moved and the widget button put. Now, just from a UI design, it's so useless that it's clearly the result of some internal power struggle to push that those widgets and that on those online services because everything's got to be online now yeah it's funny like i don't mind the stuff being centered now that that part especially because you know like i've had plenty of linux uis chromebooks do that yeah people have seen that by now right but like they must know they

must have thought right like people will have it ingrained to go to this bottom left corner iconic since windows 95 the start menu has been the iconic branding for windows i mean they we'll have it ingrained to go to this bottom left corner. It is iconic. Since Windows 95, the start menu has been the iconic branding for Windows. I mean, they licensed the Start Me Up song and the entire thing. It's an iconic aspect of the interface. If you want to say, it's like one of their contributions

to the standard commercial desktop space. And they've moved it in this result. I was pleased to see you can just you can turn it off and move it and move it yeah you can put the start menu back yeah since widgets was nothing for me without a microsoft account i disabled that one right away which you can't do which is great i was way more excited than i should have been to discover that i can still right click on the c drive go to tools and launch something that looks an awful lot like this defrag it's now doing like ssd trimming sure but it looks like this defrag and i love that check disk is way faster now too by the way holy crap good lord um and windows update just as a side they've really buried some

of the driver stuff now you like you really got to dig in there like it had a plethora of driver updates that it recommended i install but i would go, and even though I turned on like the Microsoft, it would say all your updates are done. And then I would dig into the UI into the advanced section and expand this menu and I'd see like, oh, you know, if you want to install a driver for your sound card, you can. I'm like, well, that would be great. Which honestly, even after the driver was installed for the sound card,

my sound still never worked until I went into the BIOS, toggled off the sound card in the BIOS, hit apply, toggled on the sound card, hit apply and rebooted. And then I came back and I had sound in Windows. It is funny how many times, like the auto-discovery, the sort of like, just make it work stuff has all gotten a lot better in Windows for sure. But I feel like you got to give it a couple of reboots to even be sure, like, has it, it's a sort of a round of, you know, it gets some hardware one time and then you do it another time and it gets the rest of it i don't know i'm never quite sure when it's actually done or when it's seen everything i don't know if i

couldn't finish my thought on the virtual desktops too but i ultimately didn't use them even though i really like their implementation for the most part you got the swipe working and everything yeah but i what i discovered was that and this is true for most desktops. But when the apps are up front and they use a lot more CPU, like Element and Slack, 10 to 20 percent. They would hover between 10 and 20 percent CPU usage. And then if you minimize them, it drops to like zero and it gets a little green leaf in the task manager that says this app is saving energy. And it's like well okay i guess i just have to keep so what's the point of virtual desktops if i keep windows open and it just slams my machine and then like just the whole thing about just task manager still it's

good and bad but ultimately i just ultimately couldn't really use the virtual desktops because i wasn't on a computer powerful enough but what the experience left me with was this thought of this was better than I expected and if I had proper hardware I could even see myself considering using this as a work primary machine it's like visiting an old town that you spent a lot of time in as a kid and maybe it's been 20 30 years since you've been there and you come back and there's lots of new buildings and new business and things have been painted. And where there was empty lots, they're now filled with really junk stores that are really flashy in your face trying to upsell you constantly. But when you walk around the place for a day or two, you can still find the old parts of the town that you knew growing up. And some of those bits still really hold up.

Honestly, services.msc, you can still hit that in there. ncpa.cpl, you can still type that in the run box and bring up the network config, right? You can still get to the event viewer. Like, that stuff is there. The command line stuff's only gotten better. But there's still parts of the town that probably should be condemned. And it really is feeling like we're multiple lacquer layers on top of like the control panel now i can't believe windows 11 has yet another control panel ui that sits on top of yet another control

panel ui um and they're doing a better job of integrating some of those older windows configurations and they try and try and try to prevent you from having to drop down to it but i just i can't believe one of the richest tech companies in the world can't solve that problem and so i see some of those bits and some of the things around updating and using the system and some of the hoops you have to jump through that you just don't have to jump through with Linux, like the versions and the activations and all of the problems trying to get it installed on hardware. It just feels so out of date. And why, for God's sake, can't I just go buy Windows Pro under my Microsoft account

and then just run Windows on whatever damn machine I want? And as long as my account is authorized, I can use the machine. Like, why is it still tied to hardware? And I'm sure maybe I could lift and move that license. But what is this, 1997? And I'm installing Red Hat 5.1? I mean, give me a break. Assign it to my account.

And when I log in, I'm good to go. It doesn't have to be the only model. But, like, this idea that when I want to try it for a week and maybe I really like it maybe I convert but this whole thing around activating and which versions and all that it's such a damn turn off and it has been forever. The very first Linux system I deployed in production at a school district was because we couldn't install Windows 2000 because we couldn't get access to a CD key that late at night. The system was down. We had to fix the network. We had to get a server installed and we were stuck at the stupid CD key. And we said, well, let's try this Debian. Debian doesn't need a CD key and we can use Squid. And from that moment forward, my career trajectory and that entire

network's trajectory changed. And I know it sounds like a simple thing, but it whole it. It's essentially restricting access to thousands of categories of people and potential enthusiasts who want to see what Microsoft's been cooking up and they want to try it out. So the all of the stupid chicken different product versions and the crap activation and the tying it to hardware and somehow and then the way they try to make it all work by somehow knowing that my sputnik machine from a hundred years ago had a windows 7 license on there so they're activating it's creepy and then you combine it with the metrics and you combine it with all the tracking and all the strategy tags and it just ultimately ends up not being a system that i want to use. But if they started taking care of just a couple of these really obvious problems, they

actually have a really good system now. There's a lot of things I liked about Windows. And it's nice to have the app compatibility and then also have a terminal that has Arch and Ubuntu running at the same time. That's nice stuff. There's just those problems there, I think. But do you think you're going to stick with it on that machine and keep it? I mean you got a nice setup

yeah I don't know that I'll be booting into it a ton I might leave it around just for the odd thing that doesn't work in wine you know occasionally that's useful and it is nice to check in and play around but I don't think it's quite at a place where I'm going to have as much fun with it I think I could see it maybe taking the place like I'd be a little torn right now honestly if I was, let's say I'm getting a new job

and they don't offer Linux, but I could get a Mac or a Windows machine. Now the Mac hardware might be what actually would sell me, especially with the new era of chips, but assuming I could get like a, you know, taking that factor out, I might be torn to just take Windows because I think I could get I could make a lot of work. What about you

Brent? You going to keep it on the framework any longer or are you putting Nix back on there? I like how you stuck Nix in there. Yeah, I realized my approach, and I think this is just because of familiarity, but I realized my approach was just to install all of the things I love about Linux. So like I, you know, threw Kate on there and Firefox, of course, but that's not Linux specific. And so I was just kind of reproducing everything that I've done in Linux. And my last experience where I had a job at a, I guess, a local food co-op where they were like, this Linux thing you want to run? No, no, no, no, no. Just use this ancient computer with windows. I don't know. I was,

I did the same thing. I just like tried to recreate the environments that i wanted and i didn't hardly used any of the local locally available software and so i guess i'm just adding layers to running the software that i want to in this in this way so i that doesn't really make any sense i should just go straight to linux run linux yeah exactly i think it is at a point now where like like, I expected to hate myself a lot more this week for having done this, you know, for having used Windows and suffering through it. But I didn't suffer as much as I thought I would. So there's a possibility there. But I mean, why?

Collide.com slash unplugged. Why? Or maybe they just didn't have any malware protection and they're on the Windows desktop and they go on the wrong website, like that kind of stuff constantly happening, constantly inundating IT. And honestly, it makes it hard to be compliant as well if you're in that particular sector. I was in banking and then I was in the medical sector and compliance was a big part of what we had to manage. And it's not the user's fault. It's inadequate tooling and inadequate preventative measures. And that's where Collide comes in. They are the solution to this problem. That's why I'm like, man, maybe I could have stuck around a little longer because not only do they help your users preemptively solve these problems before

they connect to the network and they can send them messages in a DM or something like that to help walk them through and send like a knowledge base article. So it takes some of that pressure off of IT, but it also lets you check the status of all your systems through one single dashboard, Windows, Linux, or macOS, one pane of glass. You can see if everything's compliant. You can run reports. It's really powerful. You got to go experience this firsthand. They've put up a little demo at collide.com slash unplugged. You go there, you support the show, and you see how they make this so seamless and how they actually can do it. It's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged.

If you're in IT, you're in security, this is an area of interest, you've got to go check it out. Collide.com slash unplugged. We received a nice present in the mail from our podcast this week, but it's not here in Canada. It's over there at the studio. Gents, you want to do an unboxing? Yes. Yes. I'm very excited about this. It arrived on Friday. Eric sent this in. Thank you, Eric. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there you go. Get the unboxing experience. Oh, nicely done, Wes. Oh, there's a note in here. Oh, all right. Do you want to read the note to us? Thank you, Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hello, Chris. I know you've heard me say this before, but I'm so thankful for Jupiter Broadcasting opening my eyes to the exciting possibilities of how far we can take open source software and how Linux would eventually bring immense value to both my career and my podcasting and Linux adventures. And if that wasn't enough,

I also have to thank you for discovering Value for Value Podcasting 2.0. This Atari VCS was begging for a new home, and I dare say you and the JB crew are going to have a load of fun with it. One small bit of history, while I had a little time to play with the console itself, the gamepad included in this package was a huge part of my online hotshot racing adventures with Martin Wimpress and a merry band of racing enthusiasts. Oh, that's great. What a great way to use the VCS. And speaking of open source, this letter was written with a completely open source stack, and the source is available on a GitHub repo. That stack is KDE Neon, RStudio,

published in an engine called Quarto, and powered by R, of course. Of course, Eric Needs. Can I see that? Thank you, Eric. Oh, wow, this is... It's a beautiful, well-typeset letter. I mean, gosh. We could use this as a JB, you know, standard header.

This is nice. I think we can go find the GitHub, so there we go. Using KDEd neon 2204 thank you eric from our podcast all right let's uh so we have the vcs in the box now listeners you may remember i backed the vcs when it first launched and i never ended up receiving my unit so this is the completion of a journey very excited too because it's going to be so awesome for the notes pc project here we go westp, what do we have? Oh, there it is. It's smaller than I expected.

It's not much bigger than a shoebox, actually. It's a big pair of shoes, but. Yeah, maybe a long, you got long feet over there. Yeah. Well, here you go. All right. Wow. He even included the original packaging.

How about that? How about that? It's a very retro-looking packaging, too. And they have asteroids on the box inside. That's adorable. And also included here, we've got a wireless modern controller. I think two of those. Okay.

No, one controller and one wireless classic joystick. Okay. Yeah, wow. Okay, so here's the PC. I'll put the box down. PC's even smaller, obviously. He's even got the original plastic wrap. Can you believe this? This is as close as I was ever going to get. Wow, attention to detail here is wild.

There it is. After all these years, there it is. It's a nice looking box. It is. It is. Really would look at home, you know, next to a TV in your living room or on your desk. Or in your garage as a notes PC with a dot matrix printer that I just ordered off of eBay. And, you know, if I go out there and did a little gaming too, that's not going to hurt anybody. So is it going to have like a launch and then also a wireless classic joystick?

Yes, I think that's exactly it. Yeah, the dot matrix printer, that's it. No mouse, nothing else. Chris, can you describe what's in your hand for us for those of us who are not in the room? So the VCS is – it's almost like if you were to find a micro VCR, right? It's just really small kind of pizza box style with rounded edges and then orange back to it where it has Ethernet and HDMI out and the power connector. So all the ports are on the back of it. Two USB, HDMI, Ethernet, and then a DC plug.

And then it's got a USB port on the front too. Two of them. Oh, tucked away there. For controllers probably, right? Uh-huh. Sure, that makes sense. The size though is what surprises me. It's, you know, it's about,

I'd say it's a little bit larger than the NUC Skull Edition. That's the power button sound? That's the power button. That's really cool. Thank you very much, Eric, from the R podcast. Go check out the R podcast, everybody, if you're interested in the R language. He does great work over there.

He's very dedicated. I have a follow-up thing, too. Olympia Mike sent us some goodies last week. Yeah. And he sent this USB speaker that we were talking about. And he sent me a correction after the show. This is even cooler than we thought. So this is a USB speaker

surface thing. You plug it in and then you put it down on a surface and it turns that surface into the speaker. Whoa. So we could turn Brent into a speaker? Yeah, he needs a skull. And if he opens his mouth it'll probably be really loud. We'll try it at LinuxFest. We'll see.

Maybe that's how we'll have some podcasts playing. Thank you everybody. It is a special kind of thrill to get that VCS just because that's the one that got away. That's the one that got away. And we will put it to good work. Hopefully have it set up in the next day or so. I'm really excited about that. If you want to send us an email, you can go over to linuxunplugged.com contact.

You can always ask for the address to the studio there if you've got something you think we might be interested in. And we always love hearing from you. Thank you everybody who does write in to the show. And now it is time for Le Boost. Yes, it is. And Deleted

came in as our baller this week with 135,801 sats using Fountain. And he has a space ball amount. So we are introducing the space ball boost. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. Thank you very much, Deleted, for boosting in.

We need more space balls. We need more Spaceballs. We need more Spaceballs in our life, and I got to rewatch Spaceballs. I think the kids would like it, too. Maybe I'll watch it on the flight to El Salvador. Cyber Gray boosts in with 123,456. That's the Spaceballs boost. That's also the Spaceballs boost. What is the chances of that?

All right. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. I've got to watch Spaceballs this week. Cyber Gray went on. Digging all this mini PC love. I started with a mini PC home lab, then moved to Proxmox, but running Plex in a dedicated device

had me running back to a cheap used NUC. Plus, who can say no to the quick sync capability? By the way, someone from work recognized the JB stickers on my water bottle, and it made my week. Great show, guys. P.S. This is a zip code boost, believe it or not. Just remove the one.

All right. So that makes it 23456, which is a postal code in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Well, hello, Virginia Beach, Virginia, CyberGrey. Nice to have you boosting in. That's great. Every now and then we get notes like, I was wearing my JB hoodie and somebody recognized me.

It's like, you're in the club. You get it. Let's talk about Linux really quick. That's great. John A. came in with 98,951 sats from Castomatic. I was hoping to make the love plug today, but something came up. So I'm just sending these boosts instead. Thank you, John A.

You get it. You know, like when I see those boosts from John, I saw it come in this morning as I was prepping the show. And it gave me like that little literally a boost. I'm like, he gets it. You know, like when I see those boosts from John, I saw it come in this morning as I was prepping the show, and it gave me like that little literally a boost. I'm like, he gets it. You know, coming to the Mumble Room, that's some value for value. Sharing the show, that's value for value. And boosting in and sharing a little treasure is value for value. And John, I really appreciate you.

Looking forward, I hope, right? You said he's coming to Linux Fest? I hope. I hope. I know he's a little bit. That's fine. Let's hope. Gotta come over here before the, you know, I hope. I hope. I know he's a little. That's fine. Let's hope. Got to come over here before the snow comes.

TechNoise comes in with 83,642 sats using Fountain. A zip code boost for the Windows episode. Somebody's been paying attention. My day job has me managing a lot of Windows, so I think I'm switching over from Linux. Any tips for the transition? Should I bother with Active Directory if I have a few systems? And by the way, it's a zip code boost there, Wes. 83642.

That seems to be a postal code in Ada County, Idaho. A little neighbor, huh? Oh, a local. Fine. Yes. Maybe we'll see you at Linux Fest 2, TechNoise. Okay, so tips for the transition. If you're coming from Linux, you're going to want to use the new Windows terminal

because all the other terminals that I used on Windows were garbage. So give that a go. Sounds like chocolatey. Yeah. That's a big go. Active Directory. That is a tricky one. I suppose if you had three or four Windows boxes,

but you could also, if you want to, just use the Microsoft online account stuff. I mean, if you're going in all in Windows. That's true. I hear Ansible works well on Windows these days, too. So that might be another option for some things. That could be a good one. You know, if you're already using Ansible for other things, that could be a good one. But, you know, Active Directory is pretty common, so I'd be surprised if you didn't end up with it.

I would be tempted to just because both Fedora and Ubuntu have pretty easy integration with Active Directory now. I've been able to do it in SUSE in the past. So I mean, tech noise, try it and boost in. Let us know if it works because I do like the idea of centralized login and then you wouldn't have to bother with all the online account stuff either. Grounded grid boosts in with 50,000 cents. Another listener suggested a Morse code clip for ham radio related boosts. On the air with Morse code, we have our own sort of language. Think chat lingo, but from the 1800s. My favorite farewell is C-U-A-G-N for see you again. With this in mind, I suggest the only farewell appropriate

in the LUP community, C-U-N-S for see you next Sunday. I'll send my hand-keyed recording through the contact form. Oh, I look forward to that. C-U-N-S. I don't know, but is that any easier than just saying see you next Sunday? Try it and find out. Okay, all right. VT52 came in with two, what are we calling these? Grandpa Duck boosts? McDucks?

McDucks for a total of 44,444 sets. Things that are looking up for old McDuck. And they have a confession. I've never actually set up a hardware terminal. I felt a little guilty after suggesting something I've not personally run

so I acquired a Wise WY55 Inglorious All the Feels Green for about $150. It shows up tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes. Yes, please do. I'm looking up the specs of this thing right now. That's a classic piece of hardware right there.

He sent some extra info here. The RS232 can go over Cat 5 or 6. Unassisted, you can supposedly get run lengths around 100 feet. But with a booster, you can get up to 1 kilometer. Wow. And finally, they say it's worth setting up Linux to expose a serial console, even if you don't have a terminal. I've used a USB null modem cable plugged into my phone to recover my headless home server after making some, let's say, ill-considered config changes. That does sound like a nice backup. It does. You

know, where I would think maybe I would use that is maybe my Odroid at home that's in a booth with it's all sealed up. And if it crashes, which it hasn't yet, but if it were to crash, I'd have to like fetch a keyboard over USB and an HDMI monitor of some kind and kind of have it all awkwardly propped on the booth while I'm trying to work on it. A serial cable you could run quite a ways back to your laptop where you could just sit comfortably does sound really nice. That's kind of a fun project idea, I think. Techolarian writes in with 24,522 sats coming in from Fountain.

It's a zip boost. Listener for about eight years. This is my first time reaching out. I previously had Pis, but was recently able to get some HP ProDesk 400 G5s from work, so I'm moving over to them. They have a 9th Gen Intel, and they can be found for around $100 also. So I'm probably not going to get a Pi 5. Yeah, that's a pretty nice setup. I think the Foundation might be coming after us with all of our talking people out of Pi 5s.

I know. So, yeah, 24522, postal code in Virginia. We got another Virginia check-in. This time it's somewhere near Appomattox. Hello, Appomattox, Virginia. And thank you, TechLarian, for boosting in. I feel like we did get some negative takes on our Pi 5 coverage. Maybe we'll do a follow-up on that at some point. But until then, Fuzzy Mistborn boosts in with 22,222 sets.

This old duck still got it. Oh man, I'm feeling so embarrassed now. The AC adapter I gave Alex, and now Brent, was the one I had lying around when I shipped it out. And I didn't realize it made that horrible sound. The normal adapters are much smaller than that one and run about $15 on Amazon or eBay. Here's some stats for Brent to go replace it all. Oh, Mistborn. That's really nice. Yeah, my main intention was not to make you feel bad. And it still works wonderfully, despite the slight, you know. Mistborn shouldn't mistake. Our intention was not to make you feel bad and it still works wonderfully despite the slight you

know Mistborn shouldn't mistake our intention was to rib Alex yeah actually because you know he was traveling and he pulled out this one liter pc which was very impressive out of his bag and I was like he flew with this giant you know relatively you know I had not considered that and then he reached his hand into the bag again and pulled out this equally giant AC adapter. And it was just funny. It was really quite a funny scenario. So that's what I was laughing at. Yeah, he had to legit trade off.

Probably didn't bring something so he could fit that. Like a steam deck? Oh, no. He didn't bring that. Oh, he did? Yeah, he did. Good. Good, good, good.

Miss Bourne went on to say, I will say, though, that I love the small microform factor PCs. I've standardized on some Dell Optiplex with 6th Gen Intel CPUs, and they perform great as workstations. I've also used them to run Blue Iris for a time while I was moving things around in my setup. Just bought another on eBay for $45 the other day. No, I don't have a problem. I swear.

Yeah, no, I think you don't. I think you're onto something. Keep it up. And thank you for the support, Fuzzy. We really appreciate it. Now, Marchie boosted in with 20,000 sats with Castomatic. I listened to JB on and off for a while, but Wes on TechSnap is what really converted me.

I honestly think I never missed a minute since then, and I appreciate everything that all the hosts do and chris of course you rule however wes is my hero seriously i know shows are at a premium but if we could get wes talking more in a lot pre-shows for instance even just getting his balanced and expert take on hacker news top stories i'd love it thank you all oh i, I'm Archie. So sweet. We all love Wes.

We were joking earlier that maybe we'll have Wes call in on us because a lot of times the pre-show kicks off while Wes is still driving up because the commute can vary depending on, you know, traffic or whatever. A lot of factors, it seems. Yeah.

How the morning goes and when we're starting the stream and all that. So we joked maybe we'd have wes call in you know and do the drive chat with us but we agree marchie wes is the best 412 linux comes in with 5100 sets using fountain says greetings on the pi 5 i've owned every pi and i don't have the same enthusiasm for the Raspberry Pi 5. I'll buy it mainly for collecting purposes, I suppose. I believe the Pi shortage, or maybe better, the competition and lack of updated Pi storage options has left me meh overall on the Pi 5. I was really

hoping for better storage options. We have multiple Beelink products, and they have been great. My kiddos have endless OS running on a Beelink N9095. No issues. I recently purchased a Ryzen 7 version, and it's fantastic. It even has USB 4, which has been great with my eGPU. Oh, wow. How about that? I spent about $450. I got eight cores, 32 gigs of RAM, 2 terabytes of storage, and he's using an eGPU. He says it's a sleeper product.

Also, not to self-promote, but go check out 412linux.io for more details. I think we will be. Yes. 412linux.io. Thank you very much, 412linux. That's some great feedback. I had no idea that the Ryzen 7 version had USB 4. I mean, that with Ryzen is...

I want to try that. That's huge. Yeah. Show mascot, the Golden Dragon boosts in with a row of ducks. Just a few more weeks to mini-fest. Yes. Yes, looking forward to seeing the dragon. He's going to be bringing a miniature mascot with him, so we've got that covered.

It's going to be great. Bear454 boosted in with 5,000 sats. Hey, my current HP color laser jet is the best printer I've ever owned. It was preceded by a long line of perpetually disappointing inkjets, which never lipped up to the second best printer I've ever owned, which is a Gorilla slash Banana GX100. My dad bought it for our Timex sinclair 1000 originally it hammered out lists and school reports and dithered artwork for years first with the timex then a ti-994a a commodore

128 and finally a trs-80 model 3 it wasn't put out of service until we got our first clone pc and a very disappointing inkjet bear sent me a version of this matrix printer that he found on ebay oh so i went ahead and pulled the trigger i don't know if it's in full working condition they said it's untested but after the praise like that how you know so i'm going to pair that with the vcs it's going to be incredible i'm really looking forward to it. It will do a future episode on it. Thank you, Bear, for the boost. Gene Bean comes in with 7,000 sats using Castomatic.

Just sending some support and trying to avoid the unfortunate total that results from sending three rows of ducks in an episode. Maybe the number. You got to watch that numerology sometimes. Kmogged boosts in with 5,000 sets. First, always look for the neglected PCs for projects like this. I had a need for a small display PC I could use instead of switching to my personal machine while working. I had a eureka moment and dusted off my old Samsung Slate 7 PC. This was from an era when they tried to make Windows 7 be a tablet.

Of course, I installed NixOS. On eBay, I saw a lot of 10 for $249, or you can get one with a dock for less than $100. The dock fully functions. I don't know if the camera works, but this could work as a home assistant dashboard. Aha, my thoughts exactly came out when you said you could get a batch of them for $249. Even if only 8 out of the 10 or 7 out of the 10 worked, you could put them all over the place and I'll have them as home assistant dashboards. That's a great tip. Thank you for the boost. Mr. Pibb came in with a row of ducks.

Thanks for the review. I'll pass and save the pie supply for someone else. The Beelink products, though, those look cool. We're going to get a note from Evan here pretty soon, I think. Dar Devlin's back. 16,500 stats too using Castomatic. I say no to no NixOS challenge and absolutely no to a

Windows challenge. Sorry, man. Sorry, sorry. But he says after you guys have talked, Chris specifically has talked about the corporate strategy tax so often, what about a challenge with no corporate tax November? He says, after you guys have talked – Chris specifically has talked about the corporate strategy tax so often. What about a challenge with no corporate tax November? No mention of Red Hat, Oracle, Suze, Ubuntu, Canonical or any corporations. Instead, just stick with Nix, Arch and maybe give Debbie and the credit it deserves with a proper review.

And then he goes on to say you guys could leave the news section exempt because that's going to be kind of hard right there, right? But everywhere else in the episode, no corporate tax product allowed. That's an interesting idea. Yeah. I mean I feel like we delivered. We had several people boost in. It takes a couple of suggestions before we take it seriously. We had a few people boost in, say you should do the Windows challenge, and we went all in on it.

I want to hear this idea a little more refined, I think, because it's not that out of step for us to do an episode on Nick's arch or Debbie, and it's just, we mix it in with everything else. Yeah, how else? How can we take it to the next level? Yeah, I'd like ideas on that. I'd be down for a whole month, though. How do you even keep that interesting? I don't know.

Maybe we could do it around the holidays when we have, you know, themed episodes to fill in. True, true, true. Soltro spoofs in with 10,000 sats. I have two x86 servers running Intel i7-2600s, 16 gigs of RAM each. One runs my home infrastructure, Nextcloud VMs, containers, etc. And the other runs Plex and Jellyfin as a backup. Got both for under $100.

Way better than the Pi 5 at this point. Yeah. How many of us are running Plex and Jellyfin at the same time? It's great that they can just work together like that. That is true. I just thought I was the weirdo the one weirdo out. But now I see Soltros is doing it too and he's weird with me. I wonder are other people running both of them at the same time?

Is this a thing multiple people are doing? Let me know. Boost it and tell me. That is a really nice setup. An i7-2600 and 16 gigs of RAM is going to make a nice little NextCloud box or something. You know, that's all you really need. Or Plex and Jellyfin. Thank you, Soltros, for the boost.

Thank you, everybody, for boosting. And that helps support this individual production. Your boosts use something called the splits technology. So Editor Drew gets a split. We each individually get a split. And some of the developers of the podcasting 2.0 apps out there, as well as the podcast index, get a split. So we're financing a lot of people. And it's all just transparent right there in the RSS feed.

So your support goes far and wide, I guess, through the magic of splits. and wide, I guess, through the magic of splits. And this week we had 18 boosters, and we stacked 656,594 sats, which is really, really impressive. I was kind of concerned after the performance we had last week that maybe we'd have some sustainability issues, because that's one of the things we're watching with this experiment is, is it sustainable? And we're growing it, and we're growing it right as, you

know, the next ad season comes. And it's just really very exciting to watch this come together. We appreciate everybody who supports through boosting. You can do that directly with a new podcast app. They're really slick, lots of new features. For me, it's a little bit like distro hopping. I try pod verse and fountain and I'm using pod fans right now. I'm, I'm podcast catcher hopping, but it's all the same standards, right? And then you can boost in directly. It's pretty fun. If you want to keep your app and our statistics suggest you might, then just get Albi, getalbi.com. You top that off over the lightning network. You can do it directly in the app or something like the cash

app or RoboSats or Strike. It's a standard. It's an open network. Get the stats into Albi, go over to the podcast index and you can use their website boost it. And then you don't got to switch apps. It's not the most popular way, but it is an option. There are other ways to do it as well without having to switch apps, but that's a pretty easy one. We'll put links to all of this in the show notes. And thank you to everybody who streams out there as they listen. Those stats are coming in all the time. I open up the dashboard, and I just doop, doop, doop.

I see some batch of stats coming in and we really appreciate that. And we'll have more on that in the future. And we also want to take a moment and thank our members who support the ongoing production. So the Boost, they're supporting this particular episode and that's extremely, extremely appreciated.

But what the members are doing is giving us a foundation, an ongoing foundation. So we know this production cost is covered. We know this particular aspect is covered. We know this particular aspect is covered. We know the show can actually go out. The lights can stay on. That's massive because what it does, the combination of the two come together

to make our audience the biggest customer. And that means from a business standpoint, from a motivation standpoint, from a what we spend our time on standpoint, it's the audience. And, you know, I've been doing this for almost 16, 17, 18 years. I don't want to do it any other way. I want to do it for the audience and by the audience. And I think when you look around what's going on with the media, especially like the coverage of Sam Altman and OpenAI, you really appreciate why independent tech media is extremely important. And the sponsor-funded stuff isn't telling you the full story. Thank you

everybody out there who does that. And Wes, you brought in a last minute pick. We were trying to debate what we should pick this week and you got one. Yeah, it's not new and probably most folks and Windows users out there know about it, but how about the Sys Internals suite still solid as ever absolutely installed this um you know they have uh now like a a power tool that keeps your system awake which you can invoke to so if you're going to be running some tasks and you don't want the power management to kick in one of the little tools you can install with their power toys and the sys internal stuff both of which are great we'll solve some of that but the sys internals really lets you dig in and get stuff that, like, maybe you're kind of used to from Linux. You can install it with Chocolatey as well, so that's nice.

So I got that going real quick. Of course. And then even though I hadn't signed into a Microsoft account, there was still a bunch of, like, OneDrive stuff in the background running in the SysTray and, like, you know, taking over Explorer, which I didn't need. I wasn't going to sign into it. And Sysinternals and the, and the startup and features stuff you can control. So I just went in there and toggled it all off. That's a great pick. Sysinternals and PowerToys combined together is probably like one of the extra installer options they might as well add.

Add another index to that disk, boys, because you might as well make a pro install have that stuff on there. It's pretty good. I think it's mandatory for a Windows install. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. And let us know your thoughts on the state of Windows. Did we miss something? Is there something we should have tried? Also, there's rumors that Windows 12 will be subscription only.

Oh, no. Is this our last Windows review ever? I don't know. I mean, I think there's room for a different way to buy and license Windows, but I don't want to pay monthly. I'm going to have to start expensing it to the show, huh? Yeah, right. It's a tax write-off.

You tell us, too. Could you see a future, maybe? And I'm wondering if you guys, maybe we'll talk about this later in the post-show. Could you see a future where there's a Windows subsystem for Linux? And what I mean by that is you have a standard Linux install in Ubuntu or Fedora, and then Microsoft is packaging up either via Docker or some other method, a subsystem for Windows that lets you run Windows app and build Windows apps. Because so much of what we, all of us were taking advantage of was bringing our Linux stuff to

Windows. And what Brent said earlier rings true for me. It's like, well, why not just run Linux? And I think more and more developers are going to be thinking that way. So why not just run Linux and then run the one or two Windows apps you actually need through a subsystem? And then Microsoft could begin deprioritizing the Windows system over time and focusing on the Windows subsystem for Linux. And it'd actually be properly named. You could still call it WSL. So it's a win-win for everybody. Let us know. Do you think I'm crazy? Boost in or send us an email. We'd like to know your thoughts. And we're also looking forward to seeing everybody at LinuxFest Northwest.

That, of course, is coming up really, really soon. And you can always join us live. We do the show on Sundays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern at jblive.tv. Last but not least, links to what we talked about are at linuxunplugged.com slash 531. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode. We'll see you next Sunday. All right, so do you think I'm crazy? Or could there one day be a Microsoft piece of software made by Microsoft?

Maybe it's even open source up on GitHub. It's a package they distribute or it's a container and you put it on certain Linux distributions and you can just run Windows apps. So this is almost like their own version of Wine, like a Windows environment that can run on top of the Linux kernel. But maybe it goes as far as they submit a few upstream patches to the kernel, to Linux, to make this work real smooth. It does make me think of the audience theories that have been going for a while.

What if Windows was pivoted to a Linux base? They dropped their own custom kernel, but they kept the top layer. See, I'm thinking the next version of that theory. I'm not picturing the Windows desktop environment on top of a Debian base or whatever. I just don't think they're going to do that. It's too much of them shipping GPL software. Right. But I could see them releasing, like they do VS Code, like they do a bunch of other stuff for Linux.

It's like Rails UBI, but like a Windows version. Exactly. Exactly. And with a more desktop focus. You could actually run desktop applications. You know, because they've done a lot of the plumbing for WSL2, so you can run Linux GUI applications. It's kind of like a reverse of that work. I mean, no, I don't think this is going to happen, but I would love

for it to. And I would sure as heck try it and probably keep it around. You almost had him there. I think my biggest question would be, what would you run? Like, you could argue VS Code, but that already, you know, that works fine. And so, where would you go? Games? I don't know.

We kind of already got that solved. You already got that with Proton. And that's a better solution. But it might meet some edge cases. Could be more complete. If it had good performance. Yeah. Or like for anti-cheat stuff, maybe it still wouldn't work, but would have more of a chance.

I think that's the question to the audience. What would you run?