LINUX Unplugged - 532: We Like Snaps Now

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Has Canonical finally nailed snaps? Why it looks like Ubuntu has turned a new corner; our thoughts on the latest release. Plus, a special guest and more.

It looks like within the next release or two of the Fedoras and the other distros, we're all going to be running Firefox on Wayland by default. It's heading upstream. But if you're trying out Ubuntu 23.10, the Firefox snap is actually Wayland by default already. So you're already in the future. I guess the question, though, Chris, is did you even notice Ubuntu's Firefox snap was using Wayland? Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. And in studio, it's listener Jeff. Hello, Jeff. Hello. Glad to be here. Welcome and congratulations on the mad dash up to the studio for LinuxFest Northwest Eve. It is our episode before the big LinuxFest Northwest mini-fest and coming up on the show today, I think Ubuntu may have turned a corner. At least I'll make my case and see if you guys agree. And we'll also share our thoughts on the new 2310 release, shipping with GNOME 45 and a bunch of other goodies under there.

We got Jeff in studio with us. Then we'll round it out with some great feedback, some picks, a real handy pick, and a lot more. So let's say good morning to Tailscale. Head on over to tailscale.com slash linux unplugged. That's the magic URL that gets you 100 devices for free. That's not a trial. You can just use it. I'm on the free plan.

I have been for, like, over a year. I love it. 100 devices is all I need, and Tailscale is such a great solution. It's a mesh VPN powered by... That's right. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Go there and support the show. And before we get into everything, let's take a minute and say

time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug hello mumble room how's it feel jeff you're on this side of the microphone i almost said hello almost i know i think we would have just it would have been normal that's right we would have thought anything weird about it so jeff's up here because next weekend, as we record, so this is the 15th of October, next weekend is the Minifest at LinuxFest Northwest. And Brent has the first session of the day, of course. That's wild. I can't even believe that.

So we're going to get up there nice and early, at least some of us are. And then JB is hosting the dinner in the evening, which I hope we can all make it for. And if you're going to make it out there, audience, please do RSVP so the restaurant can plan ahead. That's all at meetup.com slash LinuxFestNorthwest. It's going to be a smaller, you know, mini-fest. Right. It's going to be nice. Still looking forward to it, that's for sure.

Yeah. And the lead-up between now and then, like always, is just going to be slammed full of projects. Just going to be a bunch of stuff we're going to be working on. We'll be razzled and fried by the time. Just, you know, to stay with tradition. Of course. I don't think we know how to do Linux Fest any other way. Can you give the listeners like a little hint of maybe an item or two you have in mind, Chris?

Oh, Jeff, what are your, so I've made a whole list of jobs for Jeff while he's here because I didn't want him to get here without anything. And then, of course, I went overboard. Next Cloud Tasks, by the way, has been excellent for collecting all the ideas as they strike. And then I prioritize them in there. And it's a good little app, I have to say. And then you can sync it if you use DavX. You can sync it to your phone and then on Android use Tasks.org to actually have a nice local TAS app to interface with the NextCloud TAS backend.

So I can throw things on that TAS board for Jeff just as anything that crosses my fancy little mind. Oh yeah, I'll throw it on there. It's real easy. One of the two of you seems more excited about this than the other. I have a smile on my face. So you got any examples for us of what's on that list? Oh, we

have some Lady Joop's things. Oh, some? Some, mostly, actually, with the highest priorities. Yeah. A couple other things like the Studio Sensor. I haven't closed that one, but I don't think I will yet. But I think it's closed, right? We're going to find out.

I think we'll leave that one open. In general, your notes are fantastic. I try. It's hilarious. I actually really like the interface here. I haven't used NextCloud Tasks yet, and I think it's really, really slick. But, yeah, I closed out the lights in the kitchen. That one worked out good.

It's great because, you know, Jeff has a knowledge domain that is adjacent to mine. So there's a lot of where, like, I can kind of come up with what I want to do in juke's like for a sensor for, for lighting or wiring. But Jeff knows how to actually do it, you know, and longtime listeners will probably remember that forever, forever. Jeff helped us get one of our first spots hooked up with full power for juice.

So it's always, it's always great when he, when he visits, it's like things always get better. It's things always improve. It's a really, it's fun. And he's a pretty good guy to hang out with too so there'll be uh brian you

got to get down here and hang out with us because we got a lot of i'm clearly missing out clearly yeah you just jump in the car after the show it'll be fine so while we were uh getting together and getting ready for linux fest canonical released ubuntu 2304 and this is the last interim release before the big lts so you know this is the last interim release before the big LTS. So, you know, this is always where if you're going to do something, you got to get it in there now. This is where you try stuff for the last chance to try things. And so we got Linux 6.5, and that has Wi-Fi 7 support,

MIDI 2.0 compatibility, Ryzen laptops, CPUs and GPUs see some bug fixes around suspend and resume and just improved graphics performance. Intel Arc users also see improvements starting with Linux 6.2, but now when you combine the Ubuntu release of Linux 6.5 with the Mesa version that Ubuntu is shipping, on 2304 you're going to see some pretty nice arc improvements for graphics. Also in this kernel release is an improvement to Extended 4. Is that old thing? Still getting some work. I couldn't believe this when I read it. You know what? That improved NTFS driver landed too, so you need that.

That's in there. Firefox is a snap. It's Firefox 118. I was just going to say, you know, we were just Windows users last week. So NTFS, you know, nice NTFS support. True. In dual booting environments, if you have multiple types of things on your network, it's just nice to see for a very widely deployed distro.

How quickly I forget. Network manager 1.44 is in their net plan as well. And pipewire 0.3.79. Which that version will become more relevant in the following weeks. And then, of course, the big headline item in here is GNOME 45. What is it? I'm sorry, GNOME 45. GNOME, I thought. And this is one of the first distros to land.

Of course, I think Tumbleweed already did. But one of the first regular shipping distros to land with Genome 45. And Canonical always likes to add a little extra spice to the pie. So they have added a couple of new things in here, including a quarter tiling extension. And it's sort of like the pop shell tiling, but watered down a little bit. Maybe a little more average user not so much power user and you have some settings in gnome settings in the ubuntu desktop area where you can tweak it um you know i played around with it and it's functional yeah yeah definitely i mean

it's it's better than no tiling support right you know i mean by by far and away i think yeah it something about it doesn't feel native and i wish i had a better explanation but it it feels a little clunky like it's not being like it's not of the system like it's overlaid on top of the system somehow and i don't know why it feels that way But the experience doesn't feel as smooth as if the GNOME project were to implement it itself. It feels a little rougher. Which, I mean, you know, as an extension on top, I suppose that's probably how you should expect things. Though some extensions obviously present, you know, don't feel that way. But as you said, I'd rather have it than not.

I appreciated the group tiling function. Did you guys notice that? How if you tile two things beside each other and you go to some other application, if you bring any one of those two tiled applications back, it brings them both back at the same time. They're calling it group tiling. And actually, I thought that was super useful. And I'm like, wait a second. I think this is a feature I've wanted for a long time, just never found anywhere. So that's something neat to play with. That is solid. Also, like, I mean, you know, obviously there's stuff, you know, like Pop.

It's fairly easy and there have been previous extensions you can get to introduce Tiling to your desktop if you want to. But assuming this all makes it into the next LTS, like that's just a wider audience, you know, between Windows having some more of these features and then now now the Premiere Linux on the desktop distro having them, maybe that will remind people that we can expect a little more out of our window management, even if it's just sort of basic tiling. It also makes macOS's window management features look old. Yes. Come on, Apple, figure it out. Figure it out.

Another thing while we're talking about things they've added is a really nice dynamic workspace indicator in the top left corner. Yes. Just a little blobby thing that moves around as you move between your virtual workspaces. It looks nice even if you don't know what it does, and then when you figure out what it's actually doing for you, it's even better.

That was my exact impression. At first I thought it was just like the activities overview or something. I'm like, oh, it's a new button. And then I realized it had this cool little animation as I slid between my desktops. And I'm like, oh, I actually almost always turn on a desktop indicator extension. Yeah, I mean, it's nice to know where you are. I found it pretty intuitive as well. I was like, I'm just going to scroll this thing.

And I just scrolled my mouse wheel and sure enough it did exactly what I expected it to. So that was a nice little touch. That is nice. The quick settings menu now includes keyboard backlight toggling. The quick settings menu is really getting to a good place in GNOME 45. And they've added a quick settings menu super S

keyboard shortcut to bring it up. They've got the new version of files in there that is a lot faster, quote, significant speed boost is what they say. To me, it just seemed to work well. And then the thing that's probably one of the second big headline features in 2310 is the TPM backed full disk encryption, which they are labeling as an experimental feature. And they say this feature eliminates the need for manual passphrase entry at boot. Instead, the TPM securely manages the decryption key,

while the traditional passphrase-backed disk encryption remains available, of course, and is probably the one that's better supported at this point. Yeah, I was interested to note that they're using, this is something that Ubuntu Core can do already, I guess, and so it's using the same mechanism where Snapd is sort of responsible for in managing the full disk encryption, and then it actually uses the kernel snap that's sort of deployed in those environments, which

does mean right now it can't support stuff that might need NVIDIA, for instance, because you're using, you need to load extra stuff into your kernel, and this is using like a signed, you know, approved, secure root compatible generic kernel. So there are some limitations if you are going to try it. Good to know.

Yeah. Also make sure with anything like that, you might have to be more aware that since it's tied to your hardware instead of something you know, make sure you have backups. Yeah, I was curious about the use case in that regard, Wes. At least my personal use case is my laptop travels with me all over the world, it seems. And if I lose it, then that's like one more extra protection against anybody just getting my files, for instance. I'm curious about the TPM use case, because then the user's not entering anything. And presumably it just sort of gets past that step because the hardware's in place. So can you explore, like, a use would be handy in that for this function?

I'm not sure. Okay. I guess. What is your question there? Well, he's saying if you don't have to enter the passphrase. What's the point? And then somebody steals your laptop and they power it on and it auto decrypts. What have you gained?

Why would you use this over requiring a passphrase at boot every time and i'm wondering if we're missing something you got an idea jeff yeah i think that part of this that's coming is to allow things like pin unlock yes similar to windows definitely you don't need this long password a passphrase yeah i mean this still the same question comes up it's easier to you know think of somebody's pen or brute force a pin even if it's four digits yourself right but i think that's kind of where they're going here you can use other things like biometrics or a pin and then rely on the back end of the tpm for the the full encryption and then obviously it would still protect data at rest if the drive were to be removed from the system at

some point in the future then obviously the data would be protected then. And you would still have the credentials of the operating system that would protect them. And I think you have to have a chain of custody that's all secure. So I think if you were to boot a third-party operating system that didn't have a signed key, I don't think you could decrypt the data. Yeah. So that's where this is. The DBM backstuff in this design is explicitly to counter what they call the evil maid attack, where, you know, you've left your laptop in your hotel room, you go down to dinner, and then someone's in your room and can tamper it and, say, install a keylogger or other things onto your machine so that the next time you boot it up, you're not booting up what you booted up last time. And so that's where this full disk encryption ties together with the sort of TPM-backed verification steps. So you know that if you change anything about what's booting,

then it can't decrypt the drive. So yeah, it's not quite the same as manual sort of full disk encryption that especially Linux users are used to. But a lot of this sort of came about from the Windows side where they have BitLocker, and you might think like in an enterprise deployment where you don't necessarily, you're not trying to trust that your employees

are keeping this super secure encryption setup, but you get better protection than a non-encrypted drive built in without them having to have extra fuss about how to use their computer. Yeah, it definitely makes more sense in the enterprise scenario where the user logging in is enough authorization, but you want the data protected at rest. Yeah, it definitely makes more sense in the enterprise scenario where the user logging in is enough authorization, but you want the data protected at rest.

And, yeah, I would probably be more inclined to use something that didn't require a passphrase to make the system boot because I want my systems to boot all the way up to the desktop without my interaction. It's interesting to see more use of the TPM. Like they've existed in machines for a long time. And I feel like it's been like hesitant in Linux to use this. And now we're kind of seeing just Linux vendors lean in. And then, you know, there are other things you can do if your operational model supports it. Like you can have the TPM sort of be responsible for your SSH keys. And then you could say, you know, it's like you're not doing this one key.

You're like, oh, I'm blessing that particular machine to log in. Oh, man. Huh. Okay. It's a bold new world. It is. Whether we like it or not. One we're slowly but surely going to end up in.

Then we also have one of their new – one of two. We'll talk about both of them. But App Center is a Flutter-based app that Canonical has built. You can browse and search and install snaps and devs. And they – you know, it's pretty good really. It's – I wanted to come on here and complain about it using snaps because I'm still – I still prefer flat packs. But the availability was great. The process was smooth.

I could do the thing that I have a minimum requirement of these app centers. I have a minimum requirement of these app centers. Let me queue up multiple things in a row because I'm blasting through this thing like I'm, you know, moving like Superman, man. I click, boom, click, boom, click, boom, click, boom. And I don't want to sit there and do one each one individually. And it supports that. And honestly, the UI is clean and minimal, but it gets the job done. And once things are installed as snaps, I really tried to like notice that they were snaps and it just

really wasn't an issue. Yeah. I think, you know, it's, um, it has been an issue in the past and we've complained about it for sure. Yeah.

Previous releases, like the first one that was a snap Firefox was crap. And then I think that's left sort of, um, you know, then there's like you, four users who

peek under the covers, you see that and then it sort of rubs you the wrong way, right? You're like, oh, it's no longer really the system I understand. It's using this new technology that I've grown not to fully trust. But at the end of the day, at least from a desktop user perspective, if it just works, if it gets out of my way and I don't have to care the containerization

technology, I mean, it could be an app image back there. And if I have the tools to like administer it, if I have the ability to connect things, or if I just don't have to think about it and it works, okay. I guess, I mean, how can I object? I ran into a tiny issue that made me question this when I tried to open the App Center and also, and just nothing happened. And then I had to click on it again and then it booted. So I know we've seen that style of issue with snaps a couple of years ago. And I wonder if that had something to do with it.

I mean, maybe it's just me because it seems like the screwed up ethos seems to follow me around when I'm trying new software. But that was a little indication that made me go, hmm, I wonder about this. I feel like what Wes just said is really wise because if you put aside your Snap prejudice and you just evaluate it at its functional level, in 2310, it's there, I think. I don't know if I would say from any previous Ubuntu release review where I felt like it was there, especially with Firefox. I felt like that was a step backwards. But we're there now. but we're there now. And when you bring together their new app center to manage this with the experience of using Snaps,

it is just as functional and just as performant as Flatpak seemed to be for me. And so I really have to give them credit that they stuck with it and it's there. But in order to really appreciate it, you have to put everything about Snaps aside. Because like you, Brent, the second I have a problem, I'm like, oh, is this because it's a snap? Is this not working because it's a snap?

And maybe it is, maybe it isn't, right? But if you can stop thinking like that and just think about it from is this functional standpoint, I think they got there. Zero indication that this is a Flutter app. The way I would describe the App Center is clean, minimal, performant, functional. I wouldn't describe it as slow. I wouldn't describe it as an electron-feeling experience. It feels like a native application. If I didn't know it was Flutter, there would be no way for me to kind of suss it out using it. So that's a win, I think.

You know, it's on one level, whether you like it or not, and maybe you can make the classic sort of, you know, canonical go in their own way with their own customized stack and such. But yeah, they're investing in sort of newer tools like the installer, which I'm sure we'll be talking about. And so far, they feel nice. And yeah, they're way better,

they're a different class than an Electron app. And for good or for bad, you could really kind of steel man this either way, unique. They are value-add stuff that is unique again to Ubuntu. Plus, it's pushing on that Flutter actually, like, you know, if these are deployed and Flutter makes it wide into, you know, actually deployed deployed lts's that's a good lobby for continued linux desktop support in the flutter toolkit yeah flutter takes off in other environments developers who might have used it for mobile you know maybe that's one more step to be able to target the linux desktop in a non-electron way than learning qt or gt. I mean, having using these tools, I would prefer the apps be written in Flutter over Electron. And when we saw the announcement,

and we covered the announcement on the show, that they were going to be using Flutter to develop a new installer, I believe our reaction was something on the lines of, well, okay, we'll wait and see. But if they nail this, they could, with these tools, on the lines of, well, okay, we'll wait and see. But if they nail this, they could, with these tools, prove this works and inspire other people to develop this.

And people that haven't been using Linux for very long might forget, but when Ubuntu first came out, and I know you guys know this, when Ubuntu first came out, they set a direction and a tone that caused all these third-party developers to adopt GTK and Python and develop things in the spirit that would work best in the Unity desktop environment. And there was really kind of a trendsetter of how things should be built. is they were looking for an avenue to take that said, if you want to develop an application on Linux, use this toolkit, package it in this format. You can ship it in the Ubuntu app store.

You do it this way, and you can use this for the indicators. Here's an end-to-end example of all the stuff you might want to do that isn't the actual thing that your app is doing. And as a result of that, we got developers creating applications for desktop Linux that we haven't really seen. We're actually starting to see it pick up again, but it's been years. And what

Canonical could be doing is beginning that process once again by creating some of their most important tooling, like the installer, like the App Center and others that are based on Flutter, that look good, that are functional, that are well-performing, that do things that maybe other applications can't, which we'll get to in a little bit,

and they set a new standard, and they just do that by leading which is what shuttleworth did when he came to desktop linux and he said you don't need three email clients you don't need six web browsers you don't need seven different text editors pick one of the best and ship it as the default and we'll do it on top of debian and that was a big deal and it set a trend and i think you think if they can keep at it and they keep making it good, there will be developers, maybe not the diehard free software developers, but there will be developers that are maybe one ecosystem out,

that are just a little outside our orbit, that will be monitoring this and see real results in code that's on GitHub that they can use, and I think it's going to result in more applications. Here's hoping so. Now, this is a small thing. I'm curious if you guys noticed. 2310 is actually making a little bit of a change to the old fonts. Oh, really? Yeah, swapping

Deja Vu for Noto, if you were using those before. Don't think I noticed. But I would notice if they sucked, and they didn't suck, so... I think maybe it just falls under sort of, you know, it's like the layers on top of GNOME. But I would notice if they sucked, and they didn't suck. Right. I think maybe it just falls under sort of, you know, it's like the layers on top of GNOME. It maybe goes along with using Flutter and having a full package experience is the polish layer, you know?

Mm-hmm. There's been more focus there, and much as we badmouthed it. No, it's good to see. Yeah. That's nice. Right? People use Ubuntu. Raspberry Pi 5 is going to be big.

And the timing is good. They should just work. The early orders, the Pi 5s could be arriving in the next few weeks. 2310 just came out. Try it out. Let us know. I wanted to mention that the Noto font is the Google font, so it's familiar. Yeah. Probably why you didn't notice.

Yeah, and I use it on other distros, like ones where I have to choose my fonts. I generally go that route, so I'm pretty adept to it. But I think it is noteworthy, and I'm glad you pointed it out, Wes, because often Ubuntu, above all, had some of the best fonts. Yeah. Yeah. And so when they make a change, it is notable. Shows they're thinking about it. Linode.com slash unplugged.

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and you can see how Linode, now Akamai, will scale applications for individuals, businesses, from the edge to the cloud. That's linode.com slash unplugged. to the cloud. That's linode.com slash unplugged. Now I decided this time to take Ubuntu 23.10 for a little spin in a VM. I didn't throw it on some crazy hardware that Alex left for me this time around. We did touch on a lot of what I did like. I mentioned the tiling was like refreshing and actually worked really well for me and was a beautiful implementation. Workspace indicator we mentioned as well.

That sort of stood out to me as like kind of a neat little tiny feature. Nice to have. A nice to have. Yeah, I did also already mention that I had a couple applications sort of stutter when I first tried to launch them. But after that, they were super speedy and really behaved well, I gotta say. Now, I did kind of leave things idle there while I was chatting with you boys, and Canome 45 just like crashed on me, just sitting there, doing nothing with almost nothing open. This morning, actually, while we were prepping for

the show, right? I was so surprised. Like, it took me aback a little bit. I was like, this hasn't happened in a long time. Wasn't there like something to do with clutter in the error message too or something? You know, I admit to not having dove completely into the error message, but it just kind of like took the entire, at least the user experience of the system down. It just took a log out, log back in to kind of get things back up and running. So it wasn't, you know, catastrophic in that sense. You didn't lose data. I mean, I didn't really have any data in there, so. Just our chat. Yeah, right. But it was surprising. And I guess, you know, I, of course, sent the report and stuff like that.

But other than that, I just actually got back to that feeling of thinking, huh, Gnome's getting features that I think maybe I should try again. It's been a while that I've given it a spin for a while. And so I'm going to keep an eye on it, I think, in the next couple of months, find some stability and who knows, maybe it'll get me back on there. See if some updates fix it. Yeah, it is new. What was the most, let's say, noteworthy elephant in the room, maybe is the other thing to say is I struggled to find an ISO that I wanted to run. I wanted to try the new installer like you two boys you guys got in there early and got to try some things that uh

i didn't get to try and the reason for that is it's so unfortunate but there was some issues with the isos that canonical put out and uh there was some melissa's user translations that happened and so they quickly pulled the ISOs and it has been a few days and we didn't see those ISOs get replaced. And I'm curious to know what's going on there. It feels like, unfortunately, maybe they're losing a little bit of their like excitement because, you know, they just put out this release a few days ago and then all of a sudden they had to pull things. I know you guys got some beta ISOs, but did you look at the website since?

Jeff, I know you went to download and there's just a gray bar that it doesn't even allow you to download. If you know where you're looking, you can find some legacy ISOs, which is what I used and it worked perfectly fine. It's what we're used to in the past. So it just doesn't have the modern installer, the Flutter-based installer.

But, Jeff, how was that experience? Was that a little, like, challenging? A little, yeah. I also couldn't find, like, the live installers or just the live desktops because I wanted to run it on my laptop on the hardware via USB 3 instead of doing a full install and wiping my system as well. And couldn't find the live anywhere for anything. I found, like, ARM64 and a couple things and the server installs, install and wipe in my system as well and couldn't find the live anywhere for anything i found like

arm 64 and a couple things and the server installs um but not the live but i did find them of course the cd image.ubuntu.com where they have the whole list of all of the releases and right the nightly the daily or the daily the you know full 2310 version everything most of it's there there are still like the main ubuntu 2310 is still missing uh just a desktop release yeah makes me wonder did they not think it would take this long either um you know they did put some stuff it's not like the you know it is grayed out as you said but it was this long you think yeah you wonder if you maybe would make that legacy a little more prominent well and how are those translations not in every release? That kind of set me aback.

I mean... It's because it was translations just for the new installer. Oh, I see. Okay, I missed that part. I was surprised that it took... Well, as we record, it's not actually fixed yet. When I heard about it, I thought, oh, this will be a few hours just based on their previous track record.

I thought about trying to build my own ISO. I mean, I still had the beta and stuff, so it was fine. I could still play with the new installer. But just going around for the various levels of instructions, it seemed like a lot of them were all, I wasn't convinced that it would include the new stuff just from those old instructions. So it makes me wonder, like, are there bits here where the new installer version isn't as tied into everything? And maybe there are still manual actions to, like, you know, you could rebuild the legacy iso easily but it's still some steps to get to the new one yeah my positive spin on it is that you know the canonical leadership looked at this they said this

is a problem but the legacy isos are available we don't need to have our staff work through the weekend we'll fix it on monday if it was an lts maybe they'd have a different take but you know it's an interim release it gets downloaded by you know a percent of the ltsTS, maybe they'd have a different take. But, you know, it's an interim release. It gets downloaded by, you know, a percent of the LTS users. So maybe they just decided to let their staff actually have a weekend. And if that's the case, I'm all for it. Makes me wonder what, if anything, will change in the process for the LTS. Because, I mean, this would be worse for sure if it was the LTS release.

I'll tell you what impressed me. I'll tell you what. So, like Wes, I had an ISO from days ago before this whole thing was discovered. So I decided to do one more install over the weekend so I could try out ZFS on root and all that kind of good stuff. And when I got up and running, I was connected over Ethernet. So I had an internet connection from the beginning. But when I chose my language and my keyboard layout, the next screen in the new installer is typically would you like the minimal install, which is the new default, or would you like to do the full install with everything? Instead of getting that screen, I got your installer's out of date.

Would you like to update the installer? I got that too. It's interesting. It is. And so I said, all right, let's see how this goes. This is probably going to break. Go ahead. Update my installer. Sure. And I hit the button and it, I don't know, pulled down some stuff in the background. And a few minutes later, it restarted itself and it was fine. This is another case of the, you know, I think this is something that maybe they wouldn't have been as confident or would be enabled so easy if it wasn't a new Snap delivered app. Yeah.

I think it's just a Snap upgrade in the background. Right. So, you know, you can roll back. You know, you've got the guarantees new Snap delivered app. Yeah, I think it's just a Snap upgrade in the background. Right, so you know you can roll back. You know you've got the guarantees that Snap systems provide. But I do kind of also agree with your take, Brent, that it's a little unfortunate that it comes out on a Friday or Thursday, whatever it was. You know, Linux, you just want to play with it over the weekend.

Yeah, and we want to try the new installer. And it's like the perfect window of opportunity to try this. And unfortunately, you can't get the ISO right now. So it kind of kills that hype roll a little bit. Which is just unfortunate for them, because I feel like the last couple of releases, they've been on a roll getting some cool new features out. And it's just, yeah, just bad timing. I'm sure it'll get fixed this week there. But stay tuned, I guess. Just bad timing. I'm sure it'll get fixed this week there, but stay tuned, I guess. Now, with every Ubuntu release, there's always the flavors, you know, the traditional flavors. And Jeff, you decided to just give a quick look at Budgie this week. And I was just kind of, you know, peeping, looking over your shoulder.

And it's a pretty fine looking default desktop. I thought, did he customize this? And I realized that was your fresh install. Yeah, I haven't really touched anything. I haven't used Budgie since Solus was on everybody's mind. Oh, yeah. Way back when. Same, same. And I mean, at least, hey, now I can choose my desktop wallpaper.

That was something I could not do back on Solus when playing with it. And it's been a long time, clearly. And I am not a Budgiegie person but i wanted to play with this i want something completely different completely new i quite like it it's very fast that was the first thing i thought and i'm running on usb it's usb3 but everything's been very fast including the firefox snap i verified that is the same that didn't even notice until you guys mentioned it um many of the features and things you were all talking about that are in Genome, some of them are here because it's still GTK, and some of them are not.

I am not on Wayland, for example. I am on X11 still. What's your graphics? It's AMD. So I don't know if that's just for the installer. It could be. I'm on live. I's just for the installer. It could be. Oh, the live session, yes. I am on live.

Okay. Yeah. So possibly if I did the full install, I'd be on Wayland because I expected to have touch swipes, three-finger swipes, stuff like that to get around the desktop environment. That's so nice. Yeah. Yeah. And I got that on X11 with Plasma, so I kind of expected it here, especially on Budgie, but possibly not just on the X11 system. Right.

Otherwise, it's been fine. I fixed my watch with it. That was something I ran into. Right, which you couldn't do on Arch. Correct, yeah. Oh, what? Ubuntu do what Arch can't, I guess. I suppose this time around.

Yeah, I tend to run into issues. Of course, everybody runs into issues with Arch, but it's my go-to. That's the point. Yeah, that is the point. You know, everything has to be a point release ahead of everything else. And the Android tool, specifically Fastboot, was something wrong with it. And I was just trying to reflash my watch with Asteroid again and couldn't do it. Reached out to the team.

They're like, oh, yep, you're probably on Archer, aren't you? I said, yeah, by the way, I am, of course. So I had actually a good reason to plug in a drive, load up a live distro, and the timing worked out great. A little older version on the Ubuntu? It must be. I didn't look at the numbers, but it worked. I didn't have to fuss with anything.

Just plugged it in, went to Fastboot, won two commands. I'm running Astro to us. Yeah. That is the quintessential Ubuntu experience when they nail that is you just want to do something. You don't want to spend a lot of time researching how to make it work. And it just kind of works out of the box. That's what's always so exciting about the fresh release and just seeing how it advances because, you know, the things you got used to only on your rolling system suddenly show up in this otherwise very stable environment where things have been ironed out, maybe patched if they need to be. And, you know, once that gets a little more popularity, all those guides out there for whatever random thing you suddenly want to do on a whim, they'll probably work with it too.

I hope. I hope so. Especially when the LTS lands. Because the stuff that they're baking into this, it's going to be really nice in an LTS. So I'm curious, Wes, what your experiences were on kicking the tires and trying to get the ISOs and all of the above with 2310. Oh, actually, I really enjoyed the installer. I didn't have any problems with it. I probably have done three or four installs now because I wanted to play with the encryption stuff. I wanted to play with ZFS. It seemed like the ZFS setup, it's nice to see it back yes just for starters yes um just worked it seems like it's a simpler setup than how they had before i think now they just we have still have a boot pool and a root pool but i didn't see the kind of the

complicated layout that we'd seen in the previous iteration for better or for worse i haven't put it through any paces or anything but for the the ZFS lovers out there, which includes me, nice to see. Overall, you know, we talked a bit about the TPM stuff. There seems like there's some interesting desires on Canonical's part to like include more automation and sort of like sameness with the server side in the desktop. And as someone who still thinks an Ubuntu server

can be a really great option, it's nice seeing that. Like they've added NetPlan in here, which I think a lot of people are kind of rolling their eyes about, and maybe you have mixed feelings on NetPlan. But at a high level, it's some YAML you can write to configure your network, and then NetPlan has renderers, which includes systemd networkd, but also includes NetworkManager. So when you install it, the NetPlan conf is super simple for the desktop. It just hey use network manager and the network manager uses it's you know whatever the thing yeah it does its thing so it so it's not getting in the way but if you are used to using that plan from your ubuntu server experience you've now got an easy way to apply that on the desktop um they're

also now playing more with auto install support so you can like more directly install with the new generation of installers like just sort of pre-configure how you want your os to be installed always nice and they're adding more support for cloud init which is used a ton in cloud and virtual environments so you can kind of specify a cloud init file and on the first boot of your new machine it'll run that and apply a bunch of stuff so you could have it configured to be the spin or variant that you want. You know, it could turn into Ubuntu for you. Could be great on a VPS.

Yeah, or it could get Nix pre-installed, whatever sort of customizations you need to like turn it into the machine that you want. And maybe that includes sort of, you know, a layer of customizability or parameterization based on, you know, which machines get which cloud in it. Super popular in those environments. And now again, looks like there's going to be more support for that on the desktop, which, okay, maybe your average desktop user isn't going to like, but I think it's

neat to see, especially if you're going to be deploying a lot of this stuff. And, you know, flavors and respins can use that stuff to provide standardized experiences that are more consistent now and using the upstream tooling, which is good. I was also just really pleased as a, um, I don't know, you're good at

playing a lot with the genome extensions. I mean, I like it too, but I gotta push all the buttons, yeah. When I end up using genome for any length of time, it tends to be on systems that I'm not daily driving, you know, or I'm coming back to, I just want something simple. You usually

daily drive Plasma. Yeah, at least at the moment. So I like knowing that I can have a really easy base that just works. And to be clear, you know, these days stock genome does that for me too. But just the little bits, the built in tiling, some of the little layers that 2310 has. The dock, whatever they call their launcher. It's nice. It works. It's functional. Yes. I would would have no qualms i'd be quite pleased about walking up to a random machine i needed to use and having it be 2310 totally i agree um i really found this to be an enlightening experience because i came directly from windows 11 right guys it has been a long time since i've made that switch and And I did it on the XPS. That's great.

So I could A-B it. It's like your very first switch. Yeah. And my goodness is desktop Linux, especially Ubuntu's desktop Linux, a breath of fresh air after that experience. You know, like no upsells and just it runs a lot better. It's cleaner. It's immediately more functional. It runs a lot better.

It's cleaner. It's immediately more functional. It is the installer, compared to the Windows 11 installer, is modern, smooth, clean, easy to understand. I like that minimum is the new default. Yes, it's been a long time coming. Yes, yes. I think that's a good move. You can change it if you like, but I like minimal being the default.

I like that ZFS is back, baby. That was great to see. And coming from the Windows 11 experience, not that I really minded Windows 11. It was a lot better than I expected. Yeah. But it took me back to a sensation I haven't had in a long time where it's like, oh, these guys have done it better. They've figured it out and they're doing it better. And you combine that with Genome 45.

It is such a good release. It is so refined. The quick settings menu has really come into its own. The tail scale extension now integrates into the quick settings menu. Oh, fancy. Oh, yeah, guys. It was really, really nice. And so it was a different bar for me to judge it by. And coming from the commercial side to Ubuntu 23. Oh, yeah, guys. It was really, really nice. And so it was a different bar for me to judge it by.

And coming from the commercial side to Ubuntu 23.10, it was just exceptionally cleaner and smoother and felt more modern. And I like now that they come up light, dark, and choose your accent color. And it works well. They got some interesting backgrounds in there. And my overall kind of impressions were pretty solid on that. It felt like a nice middle point between going with a really kind of enthusiast, maybe like an Arch install with i3 or even Pop!OS with the Tiling extension. It felt like a middle point between what was commercial Windows and how far you could go with desktop Linux. And I feel like it's a new Ubuntu in a way. This it harkens back to some of the older releases of Ubuntu where they're pushing a couple of things that the other distros aren't doing.

So there's a little bit of difference here and they've taken the extra time to make it a little nicer and bundle a few things in there. And they've nailed some of the core experiences again and it it's like the desktop team from five years ago made this version of ubuntu it has to be one of the best desktop releases i've ever seen in my opinion and it's in part the heavy lift here is gnome 45 But I think it's also the refinement and improvement with the snaps. It's their custom applications coming together. It's Linux 6.5. That's a big part of it too.

And the new Mesa and all of that really presenting a fluid, smooth, well-refined system that if you kind of just put aside like what it's using to launch the applications and if Flutter is being used to run it, if you just judge it based on if it's functional and the experience is good, I felt like it checked all the boxes. And I'm really, really, really looking forward now to the LTS because if they just take this winning recipe and rev everything and they don't have to do anything new And they don't have to do anything new.

They don't have to do anything wild. There doesn't have to be any crazy new experimental feature. Right, just bug fix, polish. That's going to be a great LTS. That's going to be one of the best desktop LTSs in years. I'm feeling sort of refreshed, and it's nice, and I didn't quite expect it, but even if I'm not going to be daily driving Ubuntu anytime soon,

it's just nice to feel excited and feel like, yes, they are doing things I care about as a Linux desktop user and are good for the general ecosystem. Yeah. And now the question is, will we see the effect that we saw years ago? Kind of everybody else upping their game, just one more level, just everybody keeping at it, trying to bring the best experience and learning from each other and kind of doing that natural result of competition,

kind of doing that hard work to kind of get things finished that weren't necessarily finished before. Maybe we'll see that here. Maybe not, but either way, I think it's definitely worth a try. I think it's worth a download, especially if you're an Ubuntu user, get an idea of where they're going. And could be one of those things where you use it for a while and you discover things aren't working great.

Maybe we do discover something there. So if somebody out there runs into those issues, let us know. I don't know. Maybe there's something we didn't catch. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. I'm going to keep it installed, though, on the XPS. So I'll dual boot. I'm going to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu 23.10,

and then I'll try to upgrade it to the LTS. We'll see how that goes. Excellent. Okay. This should be a fun little field report. Collide.com slash unplug. If you're in security or IT, listen up. Because if you've got Okta, I've got something for you.

I know I was always looking for a better way to do things, automate and solve problems and reduce burden on IT and just cut down on the amount of inbound tickets. And you'll also notice a lot of the things that you have to deal with, especially things that run up with maybe your audit or compliance issues. A lot of times that comes from end user machines. Maybe their system got compromised, their credentials got phished, something maybe they didn't even realize happened. And it's a lot of low hanging fruit that just soaks up time and honestly is a bit of a risk. That's an issue.

So this is where Collide comes in. It's a solution to this challenge that has plagued IT since the very beginning of networking and moving around things on Sneakernet. So for those of you in security or IT that work with Okta, what Collide does is it ensures that only the secure devices can connect to your apps. So they're checked before they're connected. You can make sure they're compliant. And Collide has a dashboard that lets you monitor your entire fleet, Windows, Linux, or Mac in one spot. But the best part is, is a lot of this stuff, the employees can solve themselves with just a little bit of help and a little bit of communication.

And the Collide system manages that too without putting the burden on IT. So you can go experience this. They got a demo over there and it's a great way to support the show. You go to collide.com slash unplugged. Check it out. It's pretty seamless. I wish I had this when I was in IT. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Support the show and check it out.

Collide.com slash unplugged. Now in podcast land, there are a few exciting things happening and Fountain is one of them. Chris, I think the 1.0 is coming soon. Can you fill us in? It is nigh. It is. This is really neat to see because the Fountain app has just had rapid pace development and the dev team is getting close to 1.0 and they have reached out and they're asking for the unplugged audience to boost in with a killer feature or improvement they want to see in Fountain 1.0. We got a little bit longer in the release cycle. And so the dev team is going to watch the boost. Oh, fun. And they'll look for suggestions so you can support the show and give the fountain team your feedback on if you like if you left Fountain for some reason, let them know why.

You know, be nice about it some reason let them know why you know be nice about it but let them know why they'll be monitoring the this episode's boost and maybe next week's episodes boost specifically to see your feedback because we have a real chance here to get this thing into a real nice 1.0 polish it that could be pretty great so please let us know what you think and speaking of boosts boost to gray we do have some boosts, and Chip84 came in with 372,093 sets, making him our baller. Coming in with the Fountain app, saying, here's a little value for the recent hard work and what would have been my gas money for Linux Ness Northwest. I know. I wish I could have made it to the meetups, but I hope to meet you guys in the spring.

I really enjoyed the Windows Challenge episodes. I've been full-timing desktop Linux for years, but I appreciate the check-in from a Linux user's perspective. If you guys had to give up Linux, knowing what you now know, would you pick Windows or the Mac?

Alright, so hypothetical. Well, we haven't done the Mac Challenge yet, the Mac? All right, so hypothetical. Hypothetical. Well, we haven't done the Mac challenge yet, have we? Oh, that's interesting. That's a little more expensive. I'm okay to lease one for a week or two. Yeah, maybe that would be the way to do it, right, is to lease it because that's the problem is you got to have Mac hardware or Hackintosh it. What about you, Wes?

Would you go to Windows 11 and WSL it up? Would you do the Mac? And why? And what, which and why? Honestly, I might have both. If, you know, if I didn't have a, if I wasn't a Linux user, I think I'd probably have Windows at home.

I'd probably, you know, I'd probably have a gaming rig set up. I'd probably be using Windows. I'd probably figured out how to be a, more of a Windows power user, especially because I'd have a lot more like pure Linux stuff available to me now. But I think I'd still remain really darn tempted to have mobile Mac hardware.

Just because, like, what machine could I get to compete with some of those Apple ones? Both is a good hedge. I hadn't thought of both. I might be cheating. What about you, Jeff? What would you, Windows or Mac, if you couldn't use Linux? That is absolutely cheating, Wes. I'd have to go with Windows. It's what I use Linux. That is absolutely cheating, Wes.

I'd have to go with Windows. It's what I started on. That was my computer journey. I can't stand the DE anymore, even though I use Windows-esque Plasma. But, oh, gosh, I use it every day at work. I mean, I at least know it well enough, and I can still, you know, bulldoze through it. Yeah. Okay, Brentley, what about you? If you could only use one, which one would you pick?

Is BSD an option? That was going to be my choice. Right? That's what I was thinking, yeah. I think I would choose Mac for, I think, at least two reasons. One, hardware. Like, it just seems like they're way ahead in hardware. But if we're talking strictly software,

then I feel like many more users that are like-minded to us seem to flock over there. And so a lot of, you know, package managers and such that are third party just feel super comfortable over there. You know, Nix, for instance, you can use Nix over there pretty easily. And it just, to me, feels like that's where you would, if everyone all of a sudden tomorrow was forced to make that choice, I think we'd find our people over there more so than on the

Windows side. But that's just a hunch. I was trying to debate, like, what feels more locked down and which one's going in a direction I like more or less. That's what kind of makes me a little nervous about Mac OS. You know know it's like i could get a whole i could have a vm or a wsl environment have full linux or as brent's saying you know nix does work well yeah but i feel like uh i i like docker on mac os less than i like the docker even if you're still using docker desktop hooked up to w. And I feel like, again, you have more options.

So I'm a little torn. If I were picking probably on software, I would probably pick macOS. But unlike you boys, I don't think I'd end up with the Mac because of the hardware. I think I would end up with a Windows workstation with a PC tower that I could have seven disks and I could have a GPU or two and I could have some PCI cards. And I would just – because, you know, you could make that setup work with Windows, right? Like I could put Windows on my NIC station upstairs and it would work. I couldn't put macOS on there. And ultimately, I can live with window management shortcomings.

I can get third-party utilities. I can adapt my workflow, but what I can't solve for is you can only buy a handful of Macs, and if they don't offer what you want, then you're SOL, and I can't solve for that. So I think I'd be forced to use Windows, and then I would just use the crap out of WSL and stuff like that, assuming it existed in this world. Can we go back to Linux now? Yeah, I'm ready to go back, Chip. That was rough, but thank you very much for the baller boost this week.

We really appreciate the support and the value. The episode, you know, it had its people loved it, people hated it, so I appreciate the people that liked it stepping up. T Morgan 497 boosts in with 65,109 cents. I hoard that which your kind covet. Hello from the manufacturing world, where we are pretty much locked into using Windows because our CAD software only works with Windows.

But I dabble with Linux at home and love listening to the show. Here's a zip code boost for you. Ah, the CAD thing's a, that's a common thing we hear from, Morgan. That is, yes, that is a problem. Now, what do you got there, Wes, on the old map? 65109 appears to be a postal code in Cole County, Missouri, including the city of Jefferson City. Well, hello, Jefferson City, Missouri, or Cole County, at least. Thank you for boosting in. Appreciate it. OP1984 boosted in with 50 000 sats from fountain as well heyo finally getting caught up after not being able to listen for a

few days seriously one good-hearted ribbing about saying something nice about windows and you take it to the extreme and actually run this garbage os i may be a bit bitter about windows it tends to make my work life a nightmare sometimes. Well, in recognition of your suffering for an entire week, masochism much, I'm sending the majority of my stack as a thanks. May these meager sats bring you comfort during your recovery. Aw, thank you, Oppie.

Now that right there is the value for value system in work. Oppie started that ball rolling, and he came back with the follow-up when we executed on it. Thank you, sir. It was actually kind of fun. Kerasia comes in with 22,666 apps using Podverse. I actually run Jellyfin and Plex at the same time, mostly because I'm in transition and still need that local download enough to struggle bus through Plex. I also run it on a 9th Gen 1-liter PC from Lenovo.

Cost me about $75 with 16 gigs of RAM. Wow, that's a great deal. Nice. All right. Yes, yeah. Sorry, Raspberry Pi, that shortage went on for too long, and these used 1-liter PCs are better for around the same price and better for the environment.

You know, thank you for making me feel like I'm not the only one running Jellyfin and Plex at the same time. I feel a little less weird now. No, I mean, it's great. They work well together. You can point them at the same library. Exactly. And I think like, you know, be a purist if you want, but you don't have to be. And maybe it's still useful to have Plex in your ecosystem for that one weird tv that has better support or for family and friends uh i feel like i i feel less bad about that or less

worried about the sort of lock-in and where they're gonna go if you know you at least have jellyfin ready to go as a backup if you need it that's true that's true it is moon and i boost in with 5 000 cents just says boost to win yeah thank you, Moon Knight, for the boost. We appreciate it. Show mascot the golden dragon comes in with a row of ducks. Here's an idea for no corporation tax. Merry Nixmas. Maybe give Debian thanks. Arch the penguin sings. Oh, dragon.

Let's get a singing penguin. You know what, though, dragon? The one theme I'm seeing across all these boosts, have you guys noticed the one theme that keeps coming up over and over again? No. Debian. Oh, yeah, you're right. You're right. They always mention Debian.

Everybody keeps saying we need to do something with Debian. What? Boost didn't tell us what. You know, it's like you go to a really well-built house and you tour the well-built house, but there's like nothing in there. So you're just like walking around. You're like, so this is the great foundation. This is the walls. They're great, aren't they?

Kitchen. You know, like it's good. It's good. But what do we dig our teeth into? What do you dig your teeth into? Everybody's been to the Debian Park. So what do we tell people about? That Garage Notes PC needs an operating system.

I was thinking next, but Debian would, you know, you know. Sounds like Jeff just signed himself up for another task. It's not on the list. Plus, if there's anything Debian's known for, right, it's you installed and it just works and then you never update it. And then you'll get to find like a you know 10 year old debian pc and we'll play with it you know later in the show i didn't even mention in the 2310 review absolutely gave it a spin on the atari vcs oh good eric sent in and it worked great i i need to put a bigger disc in there to really take it seriously but 2310 is rocking on the Atari VCS right now. So I'm happy.

I'm happy. So Golden Dragon, looking forward to seeing you at the Minifest next weekend. I bet, you know what? I wouldn't be surprised if Golden Dragon's in studio for the next episode of the show. Ooh, that's exciting. Here's hoping.

I mean, let's hope I'm in the studio for next episode too, right? My God. We got a boost from Sir Alex Gates, 5,000 sats. Podman on Windows is so much better than docker desktop it's baffling this is good to hear yeah that was suggested to me when i was struggling with you know when i was mentioning my docker issues i feel like that was a bit of a miss from us so maybe we'll have to follow up on that oh windows homework you know i do still have

it installed well it's chris's then. Get to it, Chris. And Podman is pretty great. PegDot came in with 3,333 sats, and he said, Damn you, Chris. I just can't listen to Take My Breath Away without substituting breath with Brent. Take my Brent

away. Oh my goodness. Okay, well, remix coming, right? AI remix, of course. Forward humor boosts in with 6,666 sets, which are actually three duck rows. Oh, okay. Well, let's do it then. I'm always, you know, looking for an excuse to bust the ducks out. Bust the ducks. I've been listening for a while and just want to know, where the heck are the Razor ads? You know your listeners have hair trimming needs as well. Where's my flip and razor discount code?

Geeks Razors, guys. Go to geeks.com slash, I don't know. Neckbeards don't shave. Yeah, right. I think that's what it is, is we encourage not shaving amongst our audience. Next duck. The right vendor partnerships and incentives could bring something

like WSL to Linux. A Windows runtime for Linux, that is. I was asking about that next week if anybody thought it was possible. Microsoft just has to see a value proposition for that dev labor investment and support. If they aren't seeing it via one-time fees or premium subscriptions, they need to see it via big vendor partnerships

that have monetary value to them. It would be interesting for sure. Equally reasonable would just be applying the embedded Windows license key from BIOS so common these days. You know what? That is one of the smartest damn boosts in a minute. You're right. Microsoft would have to have some sort of monetary incentive, of course. Now, what's the monetary incentive for VS Code being on Linux? Could it be that same rationale? Because I'm imagining a scenario, I suppose, the most likely, which seems far-fetched now that I say it out loud, is that they're reducing investment in the legacy Windows code base. Because what is Windows 11, if not really just a continuation of the NT code base from the 90s. And at some point, right, you have to figure there's going to be a breakaway.

Mac OS did it with 10. There's going to have to be a breakaway. And if they did that breakaway, perhaps the way you maintain compatibility with whatever transition you go through is by creating that Windows subsystem that maybe you publish it on the new version of Windows and you also publish it for desktop Linux, perhaps. But that's pretty far fetched now that I say it out loud, and I agree that the monetary incentive or a big partner would be the much more logical reason. Well, Forward Humor had a question as well.

Hey guys, I remember hearing you talk a few times about upgrading your production machine to NixOS. I'm curious if you've done this yet. If so, what are you using for a remote UI connection to it? Chris, I know you've talked about using RDP for this in the past. Is that still your solution on Nix? I've struggled to make this work in Nix and would love any feedback. We did play with RDP for a minute.

And, you know, it really came down to the client. Although I think Romania may be one to try again. But the clients were really hit and miss. And so it was not deemed reliable enough for like, we're remote. We got to operate the stream. We want to be flawless. So we're going to use X solution. And nothing really came down to like the perfect solution.

However, we did pick up a Pi KVM. And one of our projects, if we get to it this week, is to implement the Pi KVM on the OBS machine. Yeah. And you can get them off eBay for a pretty good price. And I think maybe that is the ultimate solution because if the system wasn't booting, I would want to see the console screen and that kind of thing. So I think a system is important to that. And if you're in Texas and you're trying to do a show or something, you want to be able to just see what's going on. And so Pi KVM, I believe, will be our solution there. But what are you thinking, you know, in Texas and you're trying to do a show or something, like you want to be able to just see what's going on. And so PyKVM, I believe, will be our solution there.

But what are you thinking, Jeff? I would just recommend for basic desktop, remote desktop stuff, Sunshine. Just use the gaming streaming platform, Sunshine or Sunlight? Moonlight. Moonlight. Well, Moonlight's the client and I believe Sunshine is the server. Also, Rust Desk has improved Wayland support now and they just did another post-Wayland release.

So Rust Desk could be another possible solution. Gosh, this last bit, you know, forward notes. We've not had any luck making it work in the Knicks nerds group. I've never seen them stump before, huh? I think we'll just have to play with it because now I'm curious. Yeah. Yeah. You could bypass it with a PyKVM, could take a look at Rust Desk, or Sunshine and Moonlight.

Let us know what works. Ren came in with 3,521 sats, simply saying, hey, Dutch zip code boost. Go podcasting! And greetings from Utrecht. Coming in hot with the boost! You know, I travel to the Netherlands. Well, yeah, there's not much work for me. Yeah, it kind of gives it away, doesn't it? There's not much work here. It's, yeah.

Brent, would you say the name of the city again? Utrecht. Yeah, it's that in the Netherlands. Hello, Utrecht, Netherlands. Thank you for boosting in. Appreciate that. And the opportunity to learn about a new place. We love it.

We do. I love the locations. Vectron comes in with 9,000 and one set from Podverse. Hi from Cologne. Am I saying that right? Is it Cologne? You don't know? I would say ask your resident friend.

Cologna. Hello from Cologna. No, you had it the first time, Chris. Well, because it is spelled like cologne. All right. Let me see. Yep. They write, hi from cologne.

No, Nick's November was mostly a joke, referring to no, not November. I've also heard about sober October and, you know, there's all these kinds of things. You're right, though. Immutable systems are very interesting right now. I'm planning to check out Nix and try it on a secondary machine soon. But I've landed a new job that involves Linux rather than Windows last year, and I was kind of motivated by listening to Jupyter Broadcasting for so many years. So thanks for that.

Well, Vectron, thank you for the boost and the value back. We really do appreciate it. Each boost is not only a great motivational note, because we're always sharing them back and forth. We're like, yeah. But also, you know, it all together really adds up to genuine support of each production. Gene Bean boosts in with 4,444 sats across two ducks. Hello, Gene.

Thank you for boosting in. Let's give him a row. Just wanted you all to know that Chocolaty has always been a business. The website has, for sure, gotten more corporate over the years, but I think that's because they needed a way to make users aware of the bits that they had beyond the community edition. The commercial bits are pretty cool, actually, and something I think y'all would appreciate. Rob Reynolds started and runs Chocolaty, and I'd be happy to make an introduction if you'd like to talk to him more. I know it's not Linux, but there's some really nice stuff there,

including bits the self-hosting community might benefit from. Introduction has been made, and I introduced myself and offered him to come on the show for a quick interview and just thought, you know, well, let's talk about it from a Linux user's perspective. What is it like building a package manager for Windows, maintaining that huge repo? And, you know, something we're not really familiar with is how do you commercialize a package manager? So if they want to take us up on that,

we'll definitely do that. Wonderful. Thanks, Bain. Second, Doug, here, if you do the no corporate November or something like it, maybe that's when y'all could do the Gen 2 install that's been talked about off and on. All right. That's been done two or three times. You know, with one hand, Gene Bean, you know, gives us some great –

Coming in with the Gen 2. You know, like, how do you even make that interesting, Gene? Tell me that. How do you make that interesting? However, are you boys feeling like the no corporate November pressure now coming? I guess. It's being brought up a lot. We might have to do this now. I feel like we're on the precipice. We're on the precipice. If we get a good, solid idea or one more good, solid boost suggestion, I think we're going to do it. We've played around with the Gen 2 thing over the years on and off. I think we've done some live streams.

I have some horrible memories. thing over the years on and off. I think we've done some live streams. I have some horrible memories. Yeah. What I was wondering is like distro speed racing. Like distro install speed racing. Okay. With the end goal of like a desktop that's doing XYZ.

Maybe it's like on your tail net and you've got something installed and ready to go. Like a speed race would be kind of fun. But again, it's a pretty visual thing. So we'd have to think about it a little bit. Well, Gene once came in with three Rosa Ducks and created to go. Like a speed race would be kind of fun, but again, it's a pretty visual thing. So we'd have to think about it a little bit. Well, Gene once came in with three Rosa ducks and created a problem, but Dexbot this week came in with six, six, six, six Satoshis.

And that was, I think, on purpose. A spooky Halloween boost. Saying, okay, but y'all got a link to that cool Windows sound remix that you had last week. A lot of your experiences mirror mine with Windows. I use Linux and macOS at home, and I'm a Mac main in a Windows world at work. Thanks for that absolute oddball of a LUP episode. I'm glad to hear people liked it.

I've heard a lot of, I considered skipping it, and then I checked it out, and I really enjoyed it. I've heard a lot of that, too. Like, oh, a Windows episode. It's just called the Windows XP Remix. I don't actually know. You can go on YouTube, and there's a lot of bad ones. And that was the best one I could find. We also, Chris, you sent me a soundboard of a ton of historical clips and stuff.

That was very fun to go through. Some of them, actually, I hadn't heard before. Those are on archive.org. A lot of the Windows versions' sounds are all archived. So I was able to just go to archive.org and find a lot of them. Pretty convenient, actually. All right, moving right along. Thank you very much, DX.

We appreciate it. Kmog came in with 12,345 sats. He says the Windows challenge... Yuck. Skip. Just kidding. Spaceballs boost! So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! I love this is becoming a thing. VT52 boosts in with 13,334 sats. Well, I've gone and done it. Still twiddling knobs, but have the wise terminal up and running. And then looks like we've got a little link to a Proton URL, which I'm hoping is a picture. Yeah, it's as awesome as you could possibly imagine. It is a classic 4x3 CRT terminal screen with green and white display. And he has on there, oh, notes.jupyterbroadcasting.com.

Wow, notes.jupyterbroadcasting.com renders on this Wyze terminal's amazing and it's got that glow to it that those old displays had this would be such an incredible note system if you could somehow run obsidian really one of my favorite boosts of the week i shared it with the boys the moment it came in we all get them in our albie extension but then like some of them we also share via chat and this was when i was like we have the best audience ever because it is just completely nonsensical it is totally a waste of time and yet love that he did this and it's exactly the kind of project i'd like to do and look at these deets that vt passed along uh hard one advice for anyone going this route resist the urge to turn on all the features and max out line speed like good barbecue start low and slow

vt 100 9600 bot and some useful tools for troubleshooting minicom set serial stat serial and vt test and then there's a little bonus here vt sends us to a teeny tiny esp based board that pretends to be a modem connected to your serial port and lets you dial in to remote TCP endpoints. This is so great. We'll have a link in the show notes. Listener, you have to go look at this if you like these ESP devices.

The parallel port's the biggest part. It's a big old standard parallel port and then hanging off the back of that is a little ESP board with a little connector on the other end for a wire. And it just apparently supports between 300 and like 115 baud speeds.

It emulates as a Hays modem and it accepts the classic AT commands that you could do for a modem. Is there anything better in the whole world than an ESP that's pretending to be a classic modem on a parallel port? Does it come with a speaker? What noises? Oh, yeah, that'd be great.

You know, even if it's just like an MP3 that it's playing, that would be... Oh, wow. Thank you, VT. Caspian boosted in 3,690 sats from Fountain. I was afraid of the Windows show, but after all the CLI stories, I don't feel as dirty listening now. That's true. Wes did save us with some good command line geekery.

I really do appreciate that. I try. The facial hair comes in with 3,300 and sats, and he said, I know I missed the privacy and security episode, but I wanted to bring up that it's been a year and a change since the release of the flipper zero oh yeah those look fun have you changed your opinion on the device you i have been hearing really good things about the flippers or i don't really have a strong opinion either way i'd really appreciate feedback from the

audience jeff have you played with the flipper you've seen the flipper seen plenty of videos on it yeah um what didn't uh someone in the mobile room have one and got to play with one okay yes yeah yep yeah but do you want to give us an update on your thoughts on it well it is mainly the firmware and the programs that people write for it that makes it so versatile uh it's just a platform where they unlocked almost everything for it, keeping it legal. There are some people that created some firmwares to fully unlock it. And yeah, the possibilities are endless with it. It's really an interesting thing.

There you go. And you've had it for six months? More? Longer? You've had it for a year almost? A bit longer, yeah. Yeah. Well, there you go. Bearded Tech comes in with 10 000 sats and uh

this one's a live boost live boost during 532 i'm currently typing to you from windows 11 using wsl2 for managing my servers right i run vs code via wsl2 and via code server i stick around on windows to play fortnite with the kids but dual boot the Lizard OS Tumbleweed when I feel all Windowsed out. Right, I know that feeling. Yeah, we all do. Thank you, Bearded Tech. Appreciate the live boost.

Ghost Mode also came in below the 2000 cutoff, but just said, I'm also running Plex and Jellyfin, but I'm the only one using Jellyfin. Hey, we've got a club going. So we had 20 total boosters this episode and we brought in 621,612 sats. That's a fantastic one. Thank you everybody for supporting this production of the show.

We really could go on really the entire episode about what it means to us and about how it's helping us make plans for the future. But I'll save you the long winded speech and just say it makes a big difference. And we really appreciate everybody who has the time and the means to support via Value for Value, either time, talent, or treasure. If you'd like to boost in, it's really fun. We love those. You can get a new podcast app at podcastapps.com. Like I mentioned, Fountain's really close to 1.0. Also, app at podcastapps.com. Like I mentioned, Fountain's really close to 1.0.

Also, I don't know if you boys have heard, lead Podverse developer has just gone full-time for the next three months. They're taking a three-month hiatus from work to go full-time on Podverse. That is very exciting. Things are going to be cooking, and Podfans is just around the corner. It's a progressive web app that is just loaded with

cool features. So many good things going on. New podcast app or podcastapps.com you can boost directly in or you boost in with the web if you don't want to switch podcast apps. You can do it with fountain.fm or the podcast index. We'll have links in the show notes. And a tremendous thank you to our members. We're really focused on trying to provide extra value to our members to unplugcore.com where you can support all the shows at jupiter.party.

We don't mention it very often but i will say if you haven't become a member yet it's worth subscribing and just getting the last few bootleg versions of the live stream because there's a lot of content in there that i think is pretty good and it's stuff that we've worked hard to include for you news stories discussions you know we talked about today about uh you know one day gnOME eventually switching to Wayland by default and what the impact of that would be. There's some conversation in there that's available for our members that we put in there as a thank you at

unpluggedcore.com or jupiter.party. Today's pick was inspired by a little troubleshooting. You know, you're trying out a new distro, there's always things you just kind of want to keep an eye on, see if there's any errors in the log when you've got a new install, and that's where tags comes in. Now, you're trying out a new distro. There's always things you just kind of want to keep an eye on, see if there's any errors in the log when you got a new install. And that's where tags comes in.

Now, you could install tags lots of ways. It's also available as a flat pack. And it is a simple log viewer that lets you color code the things you're looking for. And you can set multiple different colors and tags and different schemes. And then as they go by in the log file, they stand out really clear. So if you're looking for something, like maybe you want to plug in a USB device and see the output in dMessage specifically, and you're looking for that particular device, you can define the device you're looking for, the name, like, you know, USB HID, whatever, whatever

it might be. You put that in there, and then when it shows up in the log, it gives a nice highlighted color for you. Okay. This looks pretty darn handy. Lean, mean, GTK4, I believe. It's a Vala app. Oh.

We don't have a soundboard for that, but maybe we should. What would that be? Boost in and let us know. Yeah, Vala Vala. Vala Vala Vala? No, that's not it. That's definitely not it. Anyways, you can get it on GitHub or you can get it on Flathub.

We have a link in the show notes for tags. Nice and simple. It was just something one of these earlier this week. I'm like, you know what? I should tell people about this. This has been a handy little app. So we put it in there. I hope to get an opportunity to shake some hands at Linux Fest Northwest mini meetup this week. If you're going to make it, make sure you do rsvp at meetup.com slash linuxfestnorthwest. We'll try to capture the essence for those of you who can't make it, which would be most of you. So we'll try to do a good job doing that.

And you're always welcome to join us. Next week is sure to be a banger of a live event. We'll probably have a lot of guests in studio. And our virtual mumble room will be open and available. You can join our mumble room when we're live at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern at jblive.tv and the details

for Mumble are at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. Easy peasy. It is really easy. Anything else? Anything else in there, Wes? Is that it? I think that's the show. We got it? We got it. Now it's time for fast prep. Yeah, that's true. Now we just got to get Brent packed up and head it out here,

I guess, right? The drone we sent for him should be about there. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station. Indeed. Indeed. And links to what we talked about today, well, those are over at linuxunplugged.com slash 532. You can get our RSS feed over there, our contact form. We love your feedback. And listen to the Bat Catalog there. I hate to say it. Our many years of episodes. Go listen to us in a younger, chipper state, before we've been hardened by the world.

I don't know about that, actually. All of it over at LinuxUnplugged.com and a bunch of great shows over at JupiterBroadcasting.com. Hey, we really appreciate you listening. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you.