LINUX Unplugged - 538: Surprisingly Smooth Transition

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

PipeWire hits 1.0, and Wim Taymans joins us to reflect on the smooth success of PipeWire. Plus the details on the first NixCon North America, and more. Special Guests: Wim Taymans and Zach Mitchell.

Hey, did you hear the good news? Fish, our beloved shell, is finally making the move to rest. But are they going to change the name to Crab Shell then? Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen.

Well, we really have a banger of a show today. We have two special guests joining us. One to celebrate a major milestone, Pipewire 1.0, and give us the inside scoop, and the other to announce a very important first for the Knicks community. And then we'll round it out with some picks, some boosts, and more supposed picks. We'll see. We'll see when we get there. But before we go any further, I want to say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale is a Mesh VPN you can get going in just minutes,

protected by... Wild God. Our buddy Alex just did a new video over on the Tailscale channel, too, talking about how you can get it going real quick. It's great. We love it. It'll change your networking game. I got no more inbound ports on any of my firewalls anywhere.

You got a long heart and a hack after that. Yep. So go say good morning, support the show, and try it for free on 100 devices when you go to tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. And of course,

a big hearty time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Aloha. Hello, Wes. That's a good-looking group.

Nice to see you. Hello, and shout-out to everybody up there in the quiet listening, too. It's very nice to have you all along for an exciting episode. A couple of things I want to cover. Of course, the Tuxes voting continues for a little bit longer.

Please go cast your vote at Tuxes.party and nominate your favorite projects. Using that term loosely here for 2023. We're doing pretty good on responses so far. Yeah, 1,849 as we record. What do you think? Can we break 2K? I think we might need to if we want to have the sort of statistical authority we're going for with the Tuxes. We could use your help.

Tuxes.party. It'll take you like two, three minutes. And then we also have a special forum there you can follow if we miss something and you want to get on our radar for future Tuxes or maybe even a special shout out on that upcoming episode. We'll put links to all of that in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 538. 538. Wow. Wow, I can almost... 550. It's coming up. Yeah. You smell that? Make me sweat a little.

Alright, so some pretty exciting news came out this week. The very first NixCon North America has been announced, and we are joined by a very special guest. Well, this is really exciting. Zach Mitchell, he's an engineer at Phlox, is joining us to chat about the first ever

NixCon North America. Zach, welcome to Linux Unplugged. Thanks. I'm glad to be here, and I appreciate the opportunity to come talk about it and spread the word. This was, I mean, everybody started messaging me. This was the news of the week in our little circle. When NixCon North America came out, it looks like it's going to

be March 14th and 15th, and it's going to be co-located at scale. So if you're going to go to scale, NixCon now is going to be something you can attend. What happened? Where did this come from? I mean, this seems like a dream. I've always had to travel so far if I ever thought about attending any kind of Nix event. It kind of came out of NixCon in Germany. It just happened in September. So like you mentioned, I'm an engineer at Phlox and we're building stuff on top of Nix. As part of that, we go to NixCon every year. And our company is also pretty involved in helping to organize that event. And so after, you know, we had a good time, everybody learned stuff,

et cetera, et cetera. And so afterwards, we kind of, we wanted to float the idea of maybe doing one of these in America, because, or at least in North America, because the Nix community has really taken off in the last five years, which means that on any given day, if you think about it, the number of new Nix users or Nix beginners is the biggest that it's ever been. And a large fraction of those happen to be in North America. So after having a good time at NixCon in Germany, we kind of sat down and said, we want to make this available to people on the other side of the pond. And so we started out by

our CEO, Ron, who's on the Nixos Foundation board. He made a post on discourse basically saying, hey, is this something that people want to happen? And kind of informally gauging interest that way. And the response was basically an enthusiastic thumbs up, as you can imagine. So after that, we decided to do kind of like a more quantitative way to like gauge interest and feasibility. So there was a survey that went out and we got a pretty healthy number of responses in a relatively short timeframe. And so that was a pretty clear indicator that there was an appetite for something like this. And so we just said, all right,

let's do the thing and started planning. Yeah. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. So I, I stepped up to start working on kind of like a schedule for the conference and some of the programming for it.

And we started looking for venues and stuff like that. And I'm not sure who reached out to who exactly. But at some point, we got in touch with some of the organizers from scale, and they offered us some space there, which was kind of a godsend, because it meant that we no longer had to figure out what city to go to and in what venue to do it in. And there's folks that are already going to be there as well. Exactly. It's a huge built-in audience. You know, we already have a bunch of Linux enthusiasts or Linux nerds like me who are going to be there and may even just like stumble in the door and find themselves learning about

Nix. And yeah, that's great. So that took a huge load off our plate that, you know, that's in March, which is not a long timeframe to plan a conference. that took a huge load off our plate that, you know, that's in March, which is not a long time frame to plan a conference. So we all kind of went like, oh boy, and started putting things together. So I put together the call for proposals for talks and submissions with help from a few other people in the Knicks community. And that went out just this last week, along with the announcement for the conference. So that's open. If it got lost in the noise the news yeah from uh thanksgiving we'll put a link

in the show notes too to make it easier for people to find yeah yeah much appreciated so that i think closes on december 31st okay just to give give us enough time to review them and then also notify anybody who's going to be a speaker right uh so they have you know adequate time to review them and then also notify anybody who's going to be a speaker. Right. So that they have adequate time to put their talk together. Since it is March, yeah. I'm curious, what can we expect? Is this going to feel, you know, you said co-located.

Is it going to feel kind of like a parallel track at scale or is it going to feel a little more separate in its own thing? That's a good question. So I think at scale there is is a like reproducible and immutable software track. And so normally people would, you know, go talk there about Nix. And I think there probably will still be some Nix talks there. But we kind of want NixCon to be its own thing. Yeah, I mean, it'll probably be some kind of kind of blend, like it's kind of hard to be entirely separate when you're at the same location. Yeah, you're kind of trying to build a community here, right? You're trying to start something that maybe rolls into something larger. Yeah, exactly. So we like internally, we've kind of talked about this as kind of like

a beta test for NixCon. Ah, okay. Like we want NixCon North America to have, you know, its own identity and be its own thing. And so I don't know if every year it will be co-located at scale. This year was just like particularly convenient for us because we're doing it for the first time. This is really ground floor stuff here. Yeah, exactly. So with that, it sounds like the ticket situation to get into NixCon is not totally clear, but we do know some information at this point.

I know for a fact that if you buy a scale pass, that will also get you into NixCon just, you know, because this is around Thanksgiving time, it's kind of hard to get ahold of people. I don't have a whole lot more information than that. Most people are not, are not working or doing anything resembling work on Thanksgiving. It's just kind of crazy people like me who are, let's say, particularly energetic that are doing stuff around Thanksgiving. This is exciting. Yeah. Right.

So we know you'll have to get a scale pass. I mean, you know, we weren't clear on what we were going to do as a team because scale kind of lands between two other events for us. Plus Brent has some travel for work and it's like, there's a lot going on in that timeframe. Hot little spring. And we weren't quite sure if scale was on the agenda, but man, I'll tell you what, Zach, when we saw that NixCon North America was going to be at scale, literally all of us started messing each other. Well, I guess we're going to scale now. It was like decision instantly made. Whether we wanted it or not. We love to hear that. When it comes to

ground floor stuff, that's actually kind of one of the focuses of the conference. So NixCon in Europe is particularly interesting because that's where a lot of the core maintainers and stuff live. And so you get a lot of really technical, cutting edge content of what's the weird stuff that people are doing? What's the next steps for Nix itself? That kind of stuff. But for this conference, we want to be very intentional about making it beginner-friendly. Because like I said earlier, on any given day, the number of

Nix beginners is bigger than it's ever been, right? So the conference will be two days, and the majority of the first day is dedicated entirely to workshops, where you're going to get hands-on experience doing various N know, various Nixie things. So the exact workshops themselves will kind of depend on what submissions we get. But I know, like, for instance, one thing that we definitely want to do is like an install fest. Ah, yeah, sure. So everybody, you know, gather around the table, grab your favorite VM, and let's install NixOS in a VM so that you kind of get some experience just

setting it up and playing with it so that, you know, if you decide to install it on like actual hardware someday, you have some like reasonable confidence that it won't catch on fire. And so, yeah, like I said, the other workshops will be, well, kind of depend on what the submissions are, but. Sure. Yeah. Makes sense. So my Knicks learning experience was pretty different from probably most people's. So I only started learning Knicks in about January and I joined Phlox in May and there's a, there's a ton of people at Phlox who are like Knicks maintainers in one form or another. And so I have very easy access to essentially an adult when I need help. It's very easy to go say, hey, I don't know what I'm doing and have somebody say, no, no, no,

don't do that. Do this. And so having that kind of like hands-on both experience and help from an experienced Nix user early on in your kind of learning journey is kind of a game changer. And so we want to provide that in the form of these workshops to kind of get people who are even like Nick's curious, like get a foot in the door. I like that a lot. And I think that's going to be really appealing. And I could see that appealing to a lot of people that are going to attend scale already too. Well, Zach, we'll help spread the word as we can, and you can count on us being there. So thank you so much for coming on and telling us about this and also, and relay to everybody else, thank you so much for coming on and telling us about this. And also, and relay to everybody else,

thank you so much for organizing this. This is extremely exciting to see this come to North America. Yeah, thank you so much for letting me come on. I just want to say, if anybody would like to volunteer, we're always looking for more volunteers to help organize,

especially if you live in the Los Angeles area. Having kind of boots on the ground in some sense is really helpful just to make sure that there's as few surprises as possible when it comes time to put the event on. We have a matrix channel on the NixOS matrix. I can send you a link to that that you can put in your show notes. I know that I'm in particular looking for anywhere from like one to three more people to help review submissions so that we can get those turned around as quickly as possible. But yeah, so I appreciate you guys letting me come

on and talk. Absolutely. And I would imagine looking at proposals and reviewing some of that, that could be done from anywhere. They don't have to be in Los Angeles for that. Exactly. Yeah. That just needs a computer. Yep. Very good. All right. Well, we're excited and we'll be keeping an eye on things and report back. Thanks for joining us. All right. Thank you. I wasn't kidding when I said we're all excited about scale. And we've kind of been discussing viable routes and how to get to scale. It's going to be in March of 2024, and I expect ad revenue to be even less.

So I don't think JB can do it at cost like we might have in years past. So we're going to try to reach some milestones and kind of scale our scale coverage. We're going to go one way or another. We have to at this point. We've had some great boosts, and those boosts have appreciated in value a bit. And so we can take some of that and we can probably just get down there with no support. I would imagine there's going to be a way we can put gas in a car, bomb down there, spend a day down there and bomb back. We'll be exhausted. But if we could get support from the audience, and this is going to be a big one, because I've done the math on gas for a small car, hotels staying down there possibly,

and then an Airbnb that would fit Brent, Wes, and I, Alex potentially, maybe another crew member, and also our production gear. It's about $3,000 cost all in. California is an expensive place. That's around 8 million sats. That's a big lift and it's a very ambitious goal. But we'll scale our coverage. Ultimately, what I'd love if we can raise the full $3,000, and we'll also have a link in the notes to do it with Fiat using our memberful platform with a one-time set your own price donation, so you don't have to use Sats. But if we can get to the full $3,000 milestone, then we'll bring the gear and we'll do a live show down there from California.

Hopefully from scale if we can, but definitely from down there. And we'll kind of make it a special event. We've got a special live stream that we can use, and there's a lot of things behind the scenes we've been working on that we can actually kind of take advantage of for this. So we can make a big production out of it if the support scales but either way we're going to try to make it because like we said earlier this is a ground zero event we really want to be there for this first one and we were on the fence just because

scale is great but we just weren't quite sure if we could make it work i mean there's texas linux fast whatever's going to happen with linux fast northwest there's just there's a lot of events around there it's a lot to plan and a lot to pay for but I think we've got to make it if we can, so what I'm asking is if you would like to help support our production in getting down there we would love that, either through a boost

by boosting the show to try to get us to that 8 million sat milestone or by becoming a member with a set your own price or by a one time donation through the link we'll have in the show notes. This is something that traditionally, I suppose, in an advertising boom economy, we could probably turn to a sponsor and say,

hey, could you help us cover a $3,000 event? And then we'd say, hey, this event's been brought to you by Ting. You know, Ting does this. We'll tell you about Ting as we talk about the event. And that would pay for it. And then we wouldn't even have to come to you with an ask, which is probably my preference because I don't like coming out with an ask a lot.

But there is also an argument to be made that perhaps we should build the pipeline to do this without having to go to a commercial interest and make it commercially viable for them every time we want to go cover a small-scale Linux community event. Linux community event. One thing that's kind of neat about if you do choose to support with Boost is you might be able to also maybe suggest to us like stuff you want to see as part of our coverage of the event. Yeah. Oh, that'd be really great. Or things we could do in California or things you didn't like from previous event coverage that we could have coverage we've done because we're always trying to refine that. It's tricky. It is. So it's an 8 million sat bounty we're trying to get to.

Of course, we'll read out your messages as well and give you a shout out. Or there's the fiat fund link in the show notes if you want to do a one time. Or you could also consider becoming a member. That kind of grays the line because it's not exactly lumped in with this, which these funds will be used implicitly for this trip. But it would help with the overall revenue to help cover costs. So that's ultimately perhaps not a bad way to go either, is the membership. I would also say, I'm sure we're going to have a meetup of some sort, of some description, in some location, at some point. So keep an eye out for details about that coming up in the next couple of months here. Yeah, I suppose I hadn't gotten that far, but you're right. That is what comes next, right? Is a meetup. Yeah. That'd be another argument for being able to stay for more than a couple of days.

Yeah, more flexibility to hang out with the audience. Yeah, I'd love to be able to stay long enough to record LUP and maybe even code her down there, do meetups, go to the NixCon, go to scale. It's not a small task. And $3,000 is just covering gas and boarding. Essentials, yeah. Yeah, we're still paying for everything else, but it's just we can, you know, that's something that seems manageable,

and this is at least what we could do. Do they have an underground tour that we can take? Oh, I'm sure there's plenty of tourist things we could do. So it's a big ask, but this is a pretty important moment, I think, for the Knicks community, and I think it's also really great to get JB back at scale. So please boost in with as much as you would like or click the links in the show notes if you'd like to support.

And if it's not your bag or you just don't care about scale, totally understand that too. We're going to make it work however we can. We're going to scale to scale. That's our plan. Linode.com slash unplugged. Head on over there to support the show and get $100 in 60-day credit so you can check out Linode.com slash unplugged. Head on over there to support the show and get $100 in 60-day credit so you can check out Linode, now part of Akamai. All the tools like the cloud manager that's beautifully designed, the API that's well documented, and the command line client that we use to take snapshots and back things up and deploy resources on demand,

interface with our S3-compatible object storage, all that's still there. The things I love, like I just really, really appreciate the fact that it was super simple to get started with a Minecraft server on Linode using one of their one-click deployments, and now I'm like months into using it, just had to do some updates for the kids, make a few changes. It's totally maintainable.

It totally makes sense. I really like their deployment options for the one-clicks or if you want to build it up from the ground. And now Linode's combined with the power and reach of Akamai. And as a result, they're investing more in cloud computing resources and tools while still giving us that reliable, affordable, and scalable solution for all of us. I decided to up the RAM a little bit. So now I think I'm like at 16 gigs of RAM just because, you know, they're maniacs with all the texture packs and stuff like that.

Our matrix server over the years, we've scaled it way, way up, scaled it back down a little bit. That kind of flexibility is super powerful, and they're combining that now with even more data centers. So it's just getting better. It makes it even faster, you know, lower latency, faster connection speeds too,

if you can put something closer to your end users or your project, whatever it might be. Because Linodeode will work for an enterprise it'll work for an open source project it'll work for like your resume site and it's high quality good stuff that's sticking around linode's just getting better while a lot of the other places are reducing their services and offering so why wait go experience the power of linode now akamai go to linode.com slash unplug to learn how lin Linode, now Akamai, will help scale your application from the cloud to the edge for an individual or for the enterprise. That's linode.com slash unplugged. Get that $100 and support the show. Linode.com slash unplugged.

Well, it's a happy time here at Linux Unplugged Corporate Headquarters because as we record today, Pipewire 1.0, the El Presidente release, has just dropped. Now, we're big Pipewire users and advocates here, so we're really pleased to be joined by none other than Wim Tamens, founder and lead developer of Pipewire. Wim, welcome back to the Unplugged program. I believe this is your third visit to the show. How have you been? Very good, very good, very busy. Good to be back.

I bet. Well, we're gathered here because Pipewire is about to hit a big milestone. I was doing some Wikipedia diving. They have you on there as kind of starting the very first what would become Pipewire were kind of in 2015. I don't know if that's accurate. Does that sound right? And that sounds about right.

Yeah. It's been a while. Wow. Seven years. Yeah. Yeah. Fedora 34 became the first Linux distribution to ship pipe wire in April of 2021 by default.

the first Linux distribution to ship Pipewire in April of 2021 by default. So we've been running on the 3.x series for quite a long time, and we're jumping to version 1.0, which comes out, I guess, pretty soon? Yes, very soon. When you release your show, there will be 1.0. Ah, well, that's a nice little treat. I wonder if we could start. You know, I'm just kind of curious, what is it about now That will be 1.0. Ah, well, that's a nice little treat. I wonder if we could start, you know, I'm just kind of curious, what is it about now and the changes and the status of the project that make it the right time to have a 1.0?

Well, first of all, people keep asking, why don't you have 1.0? Right, so perceived public stability, that makes sense. It's been in, well, pretty much every distribution as it has the default sound server these days people are using it they're happy with it i hear that people are happy so i will make a 1.0 release so the idea was to just switch the version number at some arbitrary point and but i did have some goals in mind to be able to do that, which was scheduling as good as Jack, at least.

And yeah, we managed to do that. So that was the switch for me to switch. Is scheduling, is that another way to say, like the latency that the pro applications expect from Jack? Yeah, so Jack has a very specific way of using the ALSA device. So with interrupts and all of that and linking the devices together. So it was a matter of trying to implement that and then get the same latency as Jack has. And then try to integrate it in a way that sort of makes sense for Pipewire.

Was that driven by demand? Were there folks out there who wanted to switch to Pipewire, but were kind of waiting for it to really fully meet the capabilities of Jack before they were able to switch? I just ask because, you know, shamefully, we're still using proper Jack in our studio to record,

but switching to Pipewire is on our upcoming list of things to do. There still are blockers for people. There are still things that don't work quite the same as Jack. But it's a matter of fixing those up. Do you have a release cadence kind of planned now that 1.0, will there be a 1.1 in six months, or is it just kind of feature-based?

I think we'll do small bug fixes on 0.1 releases and then work our way up to a 1.1. I kind of wanted to reflect a little bit on the adoption of Pipewire. I think it's been, I mean, kind of remarkable if you look at the adoption rate of other technologies that are kind of significant changes over time. And I was kind of attributing it in my mind to maybe three things, and I wanted you to reflect on this with me. Probably the API compatibility with Pulse Audio and Jack is a huge, huge aspect to it. Pulse Audio might not have been universally loved at the

time Pipewire was announced. But Wim, I wonder if you think another aspect that really accelerated Pipewire's adoption was it kind of went really well with Wayland and Flatpak adoption. Like they all just kind of went together. It started out as the screen sharing for Wayland. It really only did that at some point using GStream elements. And then later on, there was a rewrite and tried to do audio stuff. I think it's also a little bit more building on existing things. So it was built on, for example, the IPCs based on Wayland,

the proxies and the events and stuff. We used the Jack and the Pulse Audio APIs. There was some experimentation of how this should be done. But in a sense, you have a clear guide of what is supposed to work and you have your existing applications and if they work, you have success. So it's not like a big change like Wayland.

We have to rewrite all applications. Everything needs to be redone. You've kind of got a clear goal that you're aiming for here, right? You don't have to design the whole new world. You just have to make the old world work with your new world. Yeah, exactly. And also because it's based on existing work, like, for example, it's using the same scheduling like Jack.

It can use the same protocols, pulse audio. It's more like a well-defined part to mark on. So the goal isn't long-term to kind of unify all that with a singular Pipewire API and kind of, because it seems in some perhaps perspectives, it looks like what's

kind of a mess because you've got ALSA in here, you got Pulse in here, you got Jack in here, and everybody's still writing all of that, but it's really Pipewire under the hood. And you could see an argument for we should clean all of this up and just make one Pipewire API. So there is one Pipewire API because the other ones are implemented with it. It's a bit like toolkits. So you have specific use cases like a generic API,

like the one there is for Pipewire. It's very generic and it is perhaps not very user-friendly for people that want to do like pulse audio kind of things. Like more like a jack, it's a synchronous API. It's more easy to use than an asynchronous API that pipewires. So it's kind of like, yeah, people don't really want super API that does everything, but they want more like a specific API tailored to what they're actually doing. Can't you just write one unifying toolkit for everything in the world probably not

it also sounds like maybe the subject of an xkcd comic so yeah even if you make it are they gonna use it or still want something on their own i don't know yeah exactly yeah so the official message for from pipewire is there isn't a universal pipewire API, but we do not recommend to use that because it's very generic and low level. And you're better off using the existing APIs because it has all the documentation and everything. People know how to use it. One thing I'm curious about, you know, now that Pipewire is, I think, pretty successful, it's out there, it's got a lot of deployments and users. Has there been any deployments or use cases that have surprised the team, surprised you? Things you didn't think Pipewire would be used for or just cases where Pipewire really helped improve the status quo?

I mean, it's been used in embedded devices. For example, it's used in cameras now to capture audio, like security cameras. There's people working on guitar effects, pedals. Do you know how large the automotive use case is at this point for it? I'm not particularly involved in that. I know there are some plans to move from pulse audio to pipe wire in some setups, but I no details really well we're gonna have one here you know another place where we've actually been using it with some success now more recently has been obs just to see all that come together you know our our main streaming rig now is wayland with

with obs running on there and pipe wire bringing in some of the capture and some of the audio stuff it's it's really working very well now. So it feels like a bright future and 1.0 is a great milestone, Wim. So congratulations to you and everybody's been working on it and thank you for coming on and chatting with us about it. Very excited. I'm sure we'll be deploying it soon

and we'll keep an eye on those future releases. So keep us in the loop. Okay, great. Collide.com slash unplugged. This is so great for those of you in IT dealing with security as well, especially in the era of personal devices. You really can't guarantee the state of an end user system. You look at phishing attacks and data breaches. And a lot of times it's not because of malicious intent by the end user. It's because they were tricked into it. Maybe their software was a little out of date, et cetera. I mean, the list goes on and on. I have been there and it's kind of an endless problem

with new dynamics kind of cropping up with every new device or gadget that gets announced. And it's sort of rinse and repeat. For me, it was exhausting. And Collide is the solution to this challenge. So for those of you that are in IT, maybe you're in the security element specifically, you got Okta, Collide ensures that only secure devices can access your cloud apps.

So you don't have to worry about phished credentials or maybe they don't have the antivirus installed or maybe they're using passwords that are just way out of date. You can make sure they're compliant before they connect. Then you get a dashboard where you can check everything. Windows, Mac, and Linux, it's all on this dashboard. So you can generate those reports that you might need to pass along just to make sure everything's great. And Collide will work with end users to help them resolve some of this low-hanging fruit directly so they

don't have to go create a ticket and interface with it it really is pretty magical i mean it feels like it's one of those things that could really have extended my reach in it and i think it's going to be a great solution for a lot of you out there so go check it out they got a demo they put together at collide.com that's k-o-l-i-d-e.com slash unplugged go check out the demo visiting that landing page is a great way to support the show and see what kind of operation they got over there. Because it could solve some burnout problems out there. So go check it out. Collide.com slash unplugged. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged.

Now, Chris, pretty much every episode we've gotten a little update on our little 32-bit challenge. Do you have one this week for us? We have a big one this week, actually. Spazzy C has put together two identical laptops. He says, I sent them in the post Tuesday night, and it looks like they'll be here sometime this week as we record. We have two laptops with two power adapters. One of them, I think, is running with four gigs. And the other, like one of the slots went bad, so it might only be two gigs.

That's clearly Wes's lap. All right, all right. I'll take the challenge. He says, I bought them in April of 2006 with one gig of RAM each, running Windows XP Media Center Edition. They're around $2,000 Canadian each, which was also the biggest single purchase of our IT department, tiny IT department. It was meant to start our laptop fleet

for loaning out for trade shows and the like. We got good use out of them. Then like most equipment, they're replaced and they've just been sitting on shelves. We needed the space back. So I was lucky enough to get to take them home. I upgraded them as best I could. They've been loaned out to some cousins who didn't have any devices for homeschooling when the pandemic hit,

and now they're back, and they've just been sitting quietly in the corner waiting for a use. So he sent them our way, and he tried them out with Debian as well. Oh, pre-tested even? Okay. Yeah, to make sure they're actually functional and all that. So thank you, Spazzy C. We'll be keeping an eye out for that. We actually got so many really nice offers for sending us hardware, including some really cool server-grade gear. But Spazzy C, just how perfect is it that we've got two essentially identical laptops that are 32-bit?

That's all we could ask for. And Brent's got a laptop, too, that's 32-bit. And your brothers, I think, that you're going to be able to use? It's actually a friend of ours who asked me to pull some data off of it because they thought it was totally broken. And just by chance, I like, you know, I tried to do that with a quick little live boot up and it complained it was the wrong architecture. And I was like, Oh, this is exciting. Good news. So, uh, so I, I asked, well, I gave the data back, you know, I pulled the data off. That was really easy. Uh, once I got things going, but, um, then I was like, can I keep this

little laptop for a bit? And they were like, I haven't used it in 10 years. Like, sure. So I've got my hardware secured. Yeah, good. This is coming together. It's coming together. Also, we had an email from Squishy.io that I wanted to read because I thought maybe it might resonate with some listeners out there that are getting sick and tired of all the Knicks talk. He says, this is going to be a bit cliche. I was going to write in about Knicks OS being too much. You guys are over the top with it. But I figured, what the heck?

I got a silver box machine. I'll throw Knicks on here before, you know, I give these guys a hard time. He's like, it's mind-blowingly cool. And he writes this in all caps. Knicks OS is what I wanted from Silverblue, and I suspect the average Joe doesn't know it, but this is what anybody wants from an operating system, not just a desktop operating system.

And he goes on to talk a bit about, you know, the things he likes about it, being able to build VMs and things like that. He's like, you should give it a try out there if you're a listener who's been kind of annoyed by the Nix coverage. I like Silverblue, and I think Fedora's still great, but you should try giving it a go.

He's thinking about moving primarily from Silverblue or at least putting Nix on Silverblue. Oh, it's fun to get an update, you know, just from migrations in the already immutable world. So thanks for sharing. Yeah, I like that he was like, oh, I'm sick and tired of this. He's like, oh, now I get it.

I thought that was pretty great. And then, Brentley, we had one from Binary Creations on reliable systems. You know, every once in a while in our Linux unplugged feedback room on Matrix, we get some just amazing stuff in there. And I thought I'd pull this one. Binary says, regarding running a reliable system, I'd hazard a guess the best way to keep a system reliable is probably to follow some of the protocols that nasa uses for some of the linux based copter devices or space station bits the other part of keeping a system reliable is probably also having redundant hardware where possible to enable backups and snapshots and all those good

things if i had to do it i'd probably run something like Spiral Linux, which is a Debian-based system with ButterFS snapshots pre-configured via Snapper from Grub as well. Or run Debian and just configure all that myself. You know, guys, when I saw this, I thought, yeah, space is probably a good place to start for reliability. I mean, they've been doing updates, what, like 600 million kilometers away from the devices that they're working on. So we can learn a thing or two there.

And luckily, we have learned some things with our JPL trip. So that's a good reminder. But Spiral Linux, this caught my attention. You know, we've been talking about Debian for the last several months. People keep challenging us to give it a spin. Ha, see what I did there? I've always been a little bit hesitant because I didn't quite know how to approach it. But this pre-configuration that Spiral Linux is doing with Butterfest snapshots, rollbacks, that's always been what I've wanted on Ubuntu

and Debian-based systems. And what attracted me, if you remember, to OpenSUSE's Tumbleweed, you know, all that's just kind of built in with Snapper. So this inspired me earlier this week. And I kind of dove in and thought I would do some experimentation and see if I can build this myself. So I didn't install Spiral Linux. I just thought, hey,

I'm going to look at the tools that they're using and try to build something here. So I did. I did an install of Ubuntu on a machine that, well, my old X250. Remember that guy? Oh, yeah. I mean, it was sitting on the shelf doing nothing for the last two years. I figured at least I'd throw something at it.

And so the projects that are under the hood here are Grub-ButterFS, which adds Grub menu entries for your butterfs snapshots which is kind of cool another tool that we know well timeshift which does system restores using either rsync or butterfs file system which is cool but there's another tool called timeshift autosnap apt and we'll link to all these so you don't have to try to remember what I'm saying. But this does what we're used to with NexOS, for instance, where whenever you're installing a new application or doing updates, it just does another snapshot for you. And I know that sounds simple to us who are used to some of these immutable systems or something like Tumbleweed, but it's what I've wanted with Ubuntu-based systems.

So I thought I would try all of this. And it was super fun to do, like one of those experiments you do on a Saturday. And it failed miserably. I didn't get it to work at all. What? But I really enjoyed it. I know. I went through the whole process.

I was like, yeah, I'm doing amazingly well. I did some updates and saw the new entries and snapshots. And I was super jazzed. And then I went to reboot and just it ran FS prompt. And it didn't work, but I still totally enjoyed myself. So I would say, man, okay. Dig into that if you want to learn a bit more about the tooling, but probably Spiral Linux is solving all this for you. So you should probably just go there, but I'll try again. I mean, I had a lot of fun with it. So yeah, there'll be some good links if you want to look at some of these tools. I like, I like the idea of looking at what a distro is doing

that's really unique and saying, okay, how can I apply this to my existing setup? The tool's out there. Just got to get them installed and configured. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. I'm sure it's me. If you guys have been following at all, it's me.

Thank you, everybody, who went over to linuxonplug.com slash contact and sent in some feedback. And now it is time for the boost. Another great way to send in feedback and send a little value back to the show is, of course, the boost. And deleted came in this week as our baller booster with 350,000 saps. Hey, rich lobster! Hey, rich lifestyle!

Using Fountain to boost in and says, as you may have seen in Matrix, I've started my own at-home game for this 32-bit challenge. This is great. Yeah, playing along at home. Brilliant. He continues, so far, failure has been everywhere. See, this is what I was worried about. That's the theme this week.

It's great. I was worried we were going to spend a lot of time getting hardware working, which is why I really appreciate Spazzy got Debian on there, so then we at least know it's great. I was worried we were going to spend a lot of time getting hardware working, which is why I really appreciate Spazzy got Debian on there, so then we at least know it's us. He says, when I first suggested this challenge, I was curious what distro JB would choose because Nix isn't available. It appears

I was wrong in that assumption. I'd be shocked if you don't incorporate it somehow. Please don't let the Loch Ness Monster know I gave you a free Fitty. That's so great. Thank you. Thank you, Deleted.

I also love that you're playing along now that you've kicked this whole thing off. And I think we're getting really close. Very much looking forward to this. I want to know. Like one of my personal goals is can you make a usable system out of this today? You know, you've got to dial your expectations back on the whiz-bang features. Right, but let's say you wanted it as a notes PC, something simple you're not going crazy with.

Because I feel like that changes the argument around supporting 32-bit, depending on which direction that goes. Can we make some predictions? Like on, I don't know how close we are to getting this going, but it feels close. So I feel like we should start making predictions or at least some rule sets. All right. Give me one. You got a prediction? Like, sounds like you must have one. I'm a little further ahead on this one. So I think we're, last time we talked about this, we were going to do a one week test, right? See if we can use this device maybe as close to our primary device for about a week.

I think that's still a good goal. Yeah. I predict that you guys are going to have some hardware issues. I think it's still tested, but— Not you, though. Not you. I already have a little bit of time on mine, so, you know. Ah, he's pre-gaming this.

I know, he's pre-gaming. Because I feel like you might throw something at it that wasn't tested yet. Oh, that's very likely. That hardware, I think, has been way more used than what I've got in my hands. You know, it's got quite a history there. So I wonder if you might run into something. Yeah. Like we're getting the car rental car.

Boots up once, never again. Yeah. But actually, I'm here for it. I'm here for the challenge. I think it's going to be great. Friar Tech boosts in from the podcast index with 100,000 cents. Coming in hot with the boost. I've been a happy Arch Linux user now for five years, but have been loving the deep dive into NixOS.

Probably going to replace my servers and my workplace desktop OS with Nix in 2024. But of course, I'm still behind you guys on my learning of it. What I'm not behind on though? My ham radio journey. Oh, sadly true. Just recently passed my exam for upgrading my technician license to my general license, which opens up all the frequency bands to me. Now to spend some more money on equipment. Just wanted to give you all an update and just saying, loving the journey. Friar Tech, thank you for that very generous boost. We're going to put that towards our scale bounty. And you absolutely are 100% valid in jabbing us about our ham radio.

Yes, yes. It is one of those things like, yes, we want to do it. I'm still thinking software-defined radio with a device hanging off my laptop is probably more of my entry point. But we'll let you know. Maybe 2024 is the year of the ham for us. Took us two years to get around to Knicks. Yeah.

Maybe. Thank you for the boost. Maybe. Thank you for the boost. Jono or Distro Stew came in with two boosts totaling 94,707. Chris, you got a sound clip for that? Boy, I don't know. You know, first of all, Distro Stew, that's a winner. Yeah.

God, that's one of those where you think, I can't believe I didn't think of that. Because obviously it's a play on Disco Stew. That's, God, That feels really good. That's good. I wish I— I am programmed in multiple techniques. Well done, Jono. Well done. As a follow-up to my boost some weeks back, SyncThing is a Swiss Army knife.

I'm regularly finding new ways to use it to sync up photos from my phone and getting them available on my desktop right away. Obsidian notes the whole shebang. If you're worried, though, about managing links, there's very mature link managers. Gno Stu comes to mind. But they're generally overcomplicated for my setup. You can always make a little bash script if you'd like. Of course, though, I use Nix now

since you guys would not shut up about it. All my sim links are automated in the config so no need for creating them manually. You know, Distro Stew, I want a plus one, your sync thing, real quick. I was using it these last couple of days. I've created on my now

Jellyfin server again an ambience folder. And it's just like, you know those long 10 hour YouTube videos of stuff? And the whole bunch just came out for the holidays. Of course, yeah. Different mixes of classic music or just background sounds. Yep, yep. Star Trek

ones, let's be honest. But they're like 4 plus gig files. And if you're on an LTE connection or you're on Starlink, it's going to fluctuate a lot. It's going to take forever to download. So I log into my Linode where I have SyncThing running and I download it using YouTube DLP in like 10 seconds because they have super great internet. And then I just feed it back to the RV with SyncThing, just trickle feed it. And it just comes in nice and smooth.

It never really impacts the internet connection. And then, you know, a few hours later, boom, there it is on my Jellyfin server. It's so great, too. Like, SyncThing is good now and has been consistently good for a long time now. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, it really stuck with it. Distro Stew continues here with a bit of a PSA, but first says, happy to double boost.

I've been listening since the beginning of the Linux Action Show. Hey-o! Hey, Duplicati is super flexible and easy to administer. I've been listening since the beginning of the Linux Action Show. Heyo! Hey, Duplicati is super flexible and easy to administer. I've run it on all my family's machines. When something goes wrong, I can easily fix it remotely since it has a web interface. But years ago, I started writing some automations to test restores. Then I found out that by default, after a backup is completed, some files are selected for verification on the remote backend.

Digging into this assuaged my fears. Side note, every six months I spend about 10 minutes doing a manual check on things on my network, and one of them involves restoring some random files from my backups to see if those work. Also, add my boost together to find me. Oh, you know, Distro Stu, I appreciate your boots on the ground report on duplicati because it's what I use presently for my backups. Like my image uploads, I use duplicati and all my configs and application data is all going off site using duplicati right now. Boy, you're really looking nicely done, sir. using Duplicati right now. Boy, you're really looking nicely done, sir. But the reason why I'm kind of hesitant to recommend it is I have heard some people

sometimes have a hard time restoring. You've got to get the entire application up and running again. But I really like hearing reports of how it's worked for people because it's what I'm using. So I'm a little, I'm always a little trepidatious

when I hear people had trouble restoring. So it sounds like you have done some testing around that, and it's good to hear. I should do more testing myself. But this default gets me thinking. Like it says, after a backup is completed, some files are selected for verification on the remote backend. But, like, shouldn't it be all files?

Shouldn't every single file be checked to make sure that it's the right thing that you're expecting? You know, just to make sure network issues and stuff aren't affecting things. Yeah, but at scale, does that can you every time? You know, if you've got terabytes of files and it's going to take another week to verify that, then you're going to start another batch? Each verification is another network call, and if it's in an encrypted volume, that's tricky. Can you do local checksums or something?

I don't know. It just feels like best case. That's what would be happening, no? I actually would like to put a call out for more feedback on Duplicati from the audience. Did you manage to? You got a little trapped in the map there, but I'm out now. And assuming my boost script is accurate, which added this for me together already. Oh, really cool.

It is 94707, which is a postal code in California near Berkeley. Hello, California. Berkeley. Well, Distro Stu, you got to come say hi if we make it to scale. That would be really cool. Let's get a burger together. Dan Johanson comes in with 50,000 sats. Hey, Rich Lobster!

I've chosen to run Arch on my home server. It's been running for almost a year at this point, and I've had zero issues with it. Nicely done. As you can tell, we're arch admin experts over here on the show. Kind of our bread and butter. Yeah, we recommend going about 364 days between updates. For stability.

Yeah. He writes, it's been set up with ButterFS on root and the data drives. I love it on root because then I have snapshots I can roll back to if needed, although it hasn't been needed yet. My update cadence is about once per week to keep the containers updated and the OS. So I update it every week with a reboot after the update just to make sure everything's running smooth. My home server has been Arch-based for at least five years at this point,

and I feel like it's been more stable than when I was running Ubuntu or Debian. So I'm glad to hear the old Arch server survived the update. Great work. The boost amount is a little bit of help to get you to scale. Keep it up. Look at Dan. Dan bought it already, Dan. Very nice.

That was a boost that came in hot. Coming in hot with the boost. Thank you, Dan. Dan's always in the mumble, too. Always great to have you in there. I think that's a nice example too. Maybe an arch server doesn't do as well if you don't have time to just occasionally poke on and do those updates. But if you do keep it up, then yeah, you skip ever having to do those big LTS jumps.

The tradeoff is if you just update it every week, which might work for some people. It's taking your medicine like once a month, once a week in Dan's case versus, you know, every three years in this big lump sum where you're getting all shot in your butt at once. Nev Boosen from Fountain with 45,895 sats. Hello, Nev. Thank you, sir. Boost! This is a repeat zip code that you actually missed the hint on. Oh, whoops.

Who, us? Yeah. Okay, so it looks like Nev's just telling us because clearly we couldn't get it on. Oh, whoops. Who, us? Yeah. Okay, so it looks like Nev's just telling us because clearly we couldn't get it right. No, thank you, Nev. It's for Wapakoneta, Ohio. That's a fun one. Yeah. Wapakoneta?

I think you did really good on that, Wes. Wapakoneta? Maybe it's Wapakoneta? I don't know. W-A-P-A-K-O-N-E-T-A. Either way, it's fun to say. Yeah. A-K-O-N-E-T-A.

Either way, it's fun to say. Yeah. And, wow, it's the birthplace of Neil Armstrong and the location of the Armstrong Air and Space Museum. Also, since you asked, I did mess around with my Nix config a little bit too much and it would generate a huge amount of old generations on top of automatic daily updates that took place at 4 a.m. That was removed in an earlier commit.

Anyways, I'm off the Nix train now because there's a few business apps I need to run that Nix can't. Good luck. Have fun. That is pretty great. I'm looking at the Armstrong Air and Space Museum right now. Looks like they got camping and hotels nearby. We'll have to pay it a visit someday. One day.

One day. You never know. You never know. West, does your map have bookmarks? That'd be nice. Good idea. Mixy B came in with 25,000 sats from Casamatic with not a real message, just saying keep up the great work. B-O-O-S-T.

Thank you. We'll try. Yeah. We also got a row of ducks from Jordan Bravo. Thank you. Things are looking up for all but duck since my last boost didn't contain the link to my next config here it is for you also about keeping distros around as long as possible i'll run the experiment for you in my

newly acquired work think pad with ubuntu 2204 i'm not going to use any apt for anything. Rather, all software will be installed with the Nix package manager, and Flatpaks and DistroBox will be my escape hatches if necessary. Oh, this is fun. Yeah, that's a great combo. The DistroBox, Flatpak combo. Yeah, oh, man. Let us know how it goes. Thanks for trying it.

Definitely. That is an experiment I feel like that should be followed up on. But I feel that makes me nervous because I've not heard this setup used to keep the actual distribution up to date. So how is that going to work? I think you're going to have to do some base updates, right? Like your core packages that got installed by the installer are going to have to be updated by apt. But you don't have to worry about it so much because it's really just the core OS.

The rest is all going to be elsewhere. Yeah, it's a very simple problem set, theoretically. So Jordan's done something pretty cool with his Nix config there. You see how he's got it broken out for his laptop that runs Nix, then he's got a MacBook M1 that he's also got Nix configured on, and then he's got another work laptop, and then he's got a shared config that he can use across multiple hosts. So like his basic stuff

that he wants across all his systems. It's a really nice way to break it out like this. I've been trying to kind of wrap my noodle around how to manage this across three or four hosts for just personal workstations. And Jordan has got a great example here. We'll put a link to this in the show notes. Yeah, it's one of those things

that's like a good and bad problem. With Nix, it's so flexible that you can kind like a good and bad problem. Nix is so flexible that you can kind of tackle these problems in a whole bunch of different ways. So it's neat to have folks that have already sort of, you know, tried out some of the various paths for us. Yeah. I love putting these in the show notes too because we had people message

me with a question like, oh, go check the links here. You can see how they did it. You can figure it out. I like the to-do list here as well. My NeoVim configuration is currently not managed by Nix. Plan to add that. And add HyperLen to the Linux hosts. Yeah, yeah. Sounds like some playing around is going there.

Soltros comes in with 20,000 sats using the index. He says, have you guys heard of Ladder? It's a self-hostable paywall bypass tool. I recently installed it on my server, and it's nice to be able to just bypass something from a news website that wants $15 to read an article. Yeah, this is something that I've always kind of chewed on because you can imagine when we're looking at links and stuff for the show, I hit the paywall limits probably within a day or two. Oh, yeah. And a fresh month rolls around. Yeah.

You can access and then you're like, oh. It's tricky. Oh, yeah. And a fresh month rolls around. You can access and then you're like, oh. It's tricky. And so I'm always like checking archive.org or I'm looking to see if maybe it went on the AP wires or somebody else covered it and they just have a copy of it. Like I'm always doing all this stuff and I'm constantly debating if I should bypass these or not because, you know,

obviously as a content creator I have some. We want to support the stuff that we rely on to help us with the show. But it's really something else, man. I wish I could just say in lb stream you know 50 sats every minute i'm reading this website just streaming 50 sats and then when i'm done you stop streaming them the sats they get their value they don't have to show me any ads or creepy pop-ups and things like that i wish we lived in that world right now yeah i'll see it's like a you're really seeing this cat and mouse game on YouTube. Oh, yeah.

YouTube is really cracking down on ad blockers because ad apocalypse is happening right now. It is ad winter. Revenue is down. That's how they pay the creators is with a revenue share. And since they can't really get more advertisers and they can't get the advertisers to pay more, YouTube's only other choice is to get more desperate and try to raise the view rates up. So that's why they're going after ad blockers is because they need more people on the platform to view the ads so that way they make more money from their existing ad base because they can't add to the existing ad base because of the adpocalypse. So they need to get more value out of the existing ads and the way they do that is with an ad blocker. Just like the way these guys do this with the paywall on the websites for the new stuff. And it's just a cat and mouse game because then you just have like the uBlock folks or the ad block folks out there just make a tool that gets around that.

And they go around and around again. This ladder looks neat though, right? Self-hosted. It's got an API. It's got a Docker container. You can, you know, all kinds of neat stuff in here. Yeah, but thank you for the boost. And that's a good question and I think it's a good conversation for us to have.

And I'd like to hear other people listening out there. I'd like to hear their thoughts on that particular topic on the paywall bypass stuff. And Sultros, we appreciate your support. Davrilin boosts in with 10,000 sats across two boosts from Castomatic. Hey-o! Regarding LTS, it's kind of hilarious to hear you describe the rationale behind using Debian

without mentioning Debian at all. Fair. As I mentioned before, do a challenge where you upgrade a system from old, old stable to the recent one.

All your issues have been solved by Debian for years already. And then in the follow-up boost, so, in case you didn't know it, Debian still has a 32-bit distro. I am kind of seriously thinking that's the way we go it might be a nice way to sort of mesh those together uh-huh that's what i'm feeling like i'm feeling like you know the call for us to give debian some love has been strong recently they're feeling a little left out we got this

hardware we need a 32-bit distro it's sort of like turkey and stuffing, just going together. Noodles send in a boost. One, two, three, four, five. Satoshi, you know what that means, Chris. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. We need more people to do a Spaceballs boost because we've got a 1-2 combo clip now. And I don't get to use it unless we get two of them in a row.

We'll come up with three if we need to. I'll always die on the hill that applications should not be using as much RAM as they do. Not only is the larger RAM usage a result of poor memory management of the developer, it's also a performance problem. With how fast processors are now, we should be recalculating results rather than caching them into RAM, since it's usually faster to calculate them than to access RAM. Anyways, love the show. That's a pretty respectable hill, actually. So we're asking the audience to send in the hills that they'll die on from like a tech argument standpoint. One of mine, I really shouldn't let this bother me. But guys, it just drives me crazy when regular users refer to their cellular signal as their Wi-Fi.

I'm not normally this guy, but I have to be like, actually, what you're referring to as Wi-Fi is actually LTE from your cellular provider. And it's a very different thing. That's one of my hills. So if you've got a hill out there like Noodles and I do, please boost in and tell us what it is. Because I think there's important ones out there.

Green Early comes in with 4,500 sats using Fountain. He writes, take my Fountain sats for the cheese moj, please. But just stop saying these words. I had to chuckle through my whole 20-minute commute. It was funny hearing Chris when he tries to read names. Well, that's I see now why

you've got the challenging username there, Green Early. Or perhaps it's Green Earl? Green Early? You'll have to let us know. Thank you for the boost, though. That's making me smile. Not the one comes in with 2,000 cents. With regards to the 32-bit challenge, have you thought

of contacting Jill from Destination Linux? She has thousands of old rigs. Yeah, definitely. That's a great idea. Get some old hardware tips from Jill because, yeah, she's got like a library, an archive. A museum. Yeah. Ryan came in with a row of ducks from Castomatic.

Keep up the good work. Well, thank you, Ryan. Oh, we got another Spaceballs boost. Well, look at this, gentlemen. How exciting is this? Anonymous comes in with one, two, three, four, five sets. One, two, three, four, five. Yes.

That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. See, it works better when they're back-to-back, so we'll have to catch that next time, but that's great. Using Podverse, the GPL cross-platform podcasting 2.0 app, anonymous rights. By the way, I use Arch. My install is actually from 2016. Updated every few months.

The only issues I've had with it was outdated certs due to a very long, over a year without an update. And, of course, I've had some abandoned AUR packages that have conflicted with new libraries. But all in all. Yeah, it sounds like it's working nicely. If you think about it, from 2016, if you've had, like, three manual interventions... Not so bad. ...that are kind of, like, less difficult than just doing an install, that's not really that bad. Yeah.

Thank you, Anonymous, for the Spaceballs boost. Oat boosts in with 10,000 cents. Hey, Oat. Also via Podverse. Oat boosts in with 10,000 cents. Hey, Oat. Also via Podverse. In episode 537, that was last episode, Chris asked which hills we were willing to die on.

Yeah, here we go. I'll die on the hill of not using proprietary closed networks like Discord, Twitter, and GitHub in order to participate in Libra software development. Hmm. Owning our social networks and infrastructure is every bit as important as owning our desktops with Linux and our money with Bitcoin. Yeah, there is a sovereignty aspect to that. The GitHub one seems really hard in modern society. I'm wondering, Oat, how you managed to avoid the GitHub one. Yeah, you got any tips? Like Twitter? Yeah, that's probably good for you. Discord? I got an account, but I'm not really there much myself either. I'd rather focus on Matrix and things like that. But GitHub, like they got such a stranglehold on the community.

I think that's a good hill though. I really respect that. I don't know if I could participate at that level. I could probably get rid of X. I could probably get rid of Discord. I respect that. That's a hill that I can respect. Thank you for sending that in.

I'd like to hear other people's hills as well. We got some other great boosts that came in just below the 2,000-sat cutoff I'm reading through. Vectron, of course, has been sucked in by our NixOS propaganda. That's great to see. We had 21 total boosters this week across 23 boosts. And we stacked 766,587,000 sets. Winner. It really whips the llama's ass.

That, that poor, poor llama. Thank you everybody. That is a really, really great to see. And if we can keep that momentum up, I'm excited about our potential for scale as well.

And thank you everybody who also just streams those sets. You know, we don't see a message from you, who also just streams those sats. You know, we don't see a message from you, but we do see those sats streaming in and I just cannot convey how fricking cool it is to bring up that dashboard and see folks Monday morning or Tuesday morning, whatever it is, listening in and seeing those sats come in as they listen. So it's very awesome. And we see you. If you'd like to boost in podcast apps.com is the place to go get a new podcast app that supports Podcasting 2.0. A couple of features that I think you're really going to like.

Near instant updates when episodes publish. Within about 90 seconds of one of our episodes getting published, it'll be in your Podcasting 2.0 app. If we go to scale, we have plans for live streams. There are going to be some really cool features that are going to be Podcasting 2.0. So live streams is something that's in those 2.0 apps that is really great. Plus you get your links that are in there. You get your chapters. You get all kinds of other features like transcripts that lots of podcasts in

that ecosystem now support. So that's newpodcastapps.com, and you also get value for value, and you can boost in there. But if you really love your podcast app and you want to keep it, I understand, just get Albie, getalbie.com. You can top that off using Strike now all around the world. It's available in 36 countries. If you're in the U.S., the Cash app's really great.

You can also top it off directly inside Albi because it's on the Lightning Network, which is like SMTP for money. So anybody that just is on the Lightning Network, you can get Sats and send it to Albi. Then head over to the Podcast Index or Podverse. We have a player embedded on our website. Fountain also has the ability you can boost from the web. We'll links to that in the show notes it's really easy to find and then you can send a message in and help us get to scale and support the show and uh we really do appreciate it it means a lot to us it's a it's a big part of what we do now and as the ad winter approaches

being able to focus on this sort of pipeline that has no middleman, nobody in between, nobody's going to screw anything up, nobody that's going to move the payment processor to Ireland and then have a bunch of payments get rejected without us having any say in the matter, like that kind of stuff just doesn't happen. And we really appreciate that about the Boost because it's completely self-hosted infrastructure running entirely on free software.

And we got a pretty neat pick this week. It's called Whisper. No, it doesn't have anything to do with the AI Whisper. This Whisper is a tool for Pipewire. Now, one of the cool things about Pipewire is, you know, it can just be a normal background element of your Linux desktop, much like Pulse Audio was, but it also has a bunch of fancy professional audio features. But those can be a little bit hard to use. You might need to install something like, say, Helvum, which is a graphical patch bay for Pipewire. And this kind of exposes all the devices, you know, that you have on your system, and you can draw lines between them to connect them.

But if you're not used to that kind of interface, it can be a little complicated to get started with, especially if you've got multiple devices or multiple apps playing audio already with a bunch of connections. Yeah, and if you're not trying to do anything complicated, you don't really need some of those tools. Yeah, exactly. So, Whisper tries to do more or less the same thing that Helvem does, but with a nice, clean, simple UI. Basically, one of the primary use cases and why it's named Whisper is, let's say you're getting ready to record something, do a presentation, or come call, or get on a podcast. Whisper allows you to easily listen to your microphone through your speakers or headphones,

which is useful for testing your mic or just for listening to your voice. Seeing how it sounds. Exactly. This is a nice little way to just pipe your own audio into your own headphones or speakers. And it's packaged on Flathub, so it's pretty easy to install, and you probably already have Pipewire, so there you go. Whisper. And not to be confused with the transcription whisper,

but more like Whisper. And not to be confused with the transcription whisper, but more like whisper to hear yourself. And it really does have a really nice clean UI. So that's a good pick. We'll put a link to that in the show notes and it is available on the Flathub as well. Well, thank you everybody for tuning in this week. We hope you enjoyed hearing from both the Pipewire Project and the first NixCon in North America. Please do remember we want to try to get to 2,000 votes in those tuxes too. Tuxes.party, just take you a couple of minutes. And then if you, like me,

switched to Graphene OS recently, I just hit my one year anniversary on Graphene OS. If you switched within the last few months or in that year, tell us how it's been going. Boost in or write us an email. How has your Graphene OS experience? Did you stick with it?

Did you end up going back? Why or why not? We'd love to hear that feedback. Hitting that one-year mark on the transition to Graphene OS. And Brent just got himself a Pixel 7, and he's going to be loading up with Graphene OS. We talked about that in the member special. I mean, I'm pretty sure Brent's going to load up with Giraffe OS,

but we'll give you a pass because it's your anniversary. Right. No, you're right. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, we get into all of that in the members feed, which is also a nice little perk that we give to our members. Unpluggedcore.com or jupiter.party to support the entire network. You get an ad-free version of the show. Or I think probably the more popular option these days is to get the bootleg version. Right now, clocking in at two hours and six minutes of content. You get to hear like when our guests

join us and we chat with them and kind of get set up. You get to hear Brent's story about installing Graphene OS over the holiday weekend. Drafting all of that. Drafting, right. Sorry. So, always a big thank you to our members as well and everybody who shares the show, participates in our community like the Mumble Room and our chat rooms

too. We're really thankful for that. It's a really fantastic community out there. And one of the reasons we're really excited about getting down to scale is just to get to see folks, too. I think that's everything, though, right? I think that's the show. I think so. So links to what we talked about today will be on our website, LinuxUnplugged.com or JupyterBroadcasting.com. And, of course, you can always join us live Sundays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. You can always join that Mumble at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. You can always join that mumble room, chat with us in there, and get a low-latency Opus feed. Powered by free software. Yeah, from top to bottom. Linux on the mixer, Linux on the computer, and, of course, it runs on Linux. There's always more, though.

I could always just go on and on, so I'll just leave it with this one simple thing. We're really thankful and appreciative that you listen. We're always really thankful when you share the show. We hope you had a great holiday weekend, if you celebrate it, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday. Thank you.