LINUX Unplugged - 541: Out with a Bang

Episode Date: December 17, 2023

The stories that kept us talking all year, and are only getting hotter! Plus the big flops we're still sore about. Special Guest: Kenji Berthold.

It's kind of exciting. It's our last live show of the year, and there's still a lot of work to do the remainder of the year. We have a couple of big episodes coming up. Brent's way behind, I noticed, on shining the tuxes. I think some of them are arrested. They're on the wrong continent, it seems. Or I am. I'm not sure.

I tried to tell you to bring them with you to Berlin. I told you, dude, you got to bring the tuxes with you because somebody's got to polish them. Not enough suitcases. It used to be Wes's job, but it's always newest guy on the show. You know? It's always newest guy on the show has to it's always newest guy on the show to shine the tuxes can we get a new new guy also while you're at it you better start working on your predictions are you guys working on your oh no oh yeah i'm bringing the a-game boys oh no you watch out i'm coming. Hello, gentlemen, coming up on the show. Well, if you skip the news this year, we got you covered. And if you've been following the Linux news, well, we'll get you updated. It's our top stories and follow-ups for 2023.

And then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and more. So say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale by going to tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. And you can try it with a free account up to 100 devices for as long as you like, and it's protected by WireGuard. That's right, WireGuard. Connect your machines on your own private network and support the show at Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged and get it for free for up to 100 devices.

And a big-time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris. Hey, Wes, and hello, Chris. Hi, Wes. And hello, Wes. Hey, guys. You know what?

Not a bad little showing in the on-air for a Saturday. Yeah. Weird time. Weird time, weird day. It's not the same bad time, and it's not the same bad channel. And we have a couple people up there in the quiet listening as well, so thank you for coming in. And then we have an extra special guest joining us on the line in Birdland. It's listener Kenji.

Hello, Kenji. Welcome to the Unplugged program. Hello. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. Jump in as you feel fit. The Tuxes are next week. It will be our special annual event,

episode 542. We've been running the numbers. Wes always whips together a nice script to massage all the data for us. You're already looking at it, aren't you? Of course. Been watching stuff. We got a good showing this year.

Happy about that. And I'm very excited to go through and announce our winners. And what it really is, this is, and I think the community nailed it in the Matrix chat room, this is the vote this year that really counts. Your vote in the tuxes really mattered.

And actually, as you're listening, I guess we could keep it going for a couple days. Because we could pull the numbers towards the end of next week as we release. So I suppose you'll have a few more days. And then last but not least, we have launched officially the 32-bit challenge. And the details are available on our website to just make it easy. If you go to linuxunplugged.com slash 32-bit, it kicked off last week. It runs until January 7th. And we'd love it if you wanted to join us.

It's been a lot of fun. It's been nostalgic for me. It's been challenging more than I expected. We'd love it if you boosted as you went along so we can update everybody listening and ourselves. Of course, you can also participate in our 32-bit chat room. We'll have a link in the show notes. And if you can, join us on Sunday the 7th when we wrap up the challenge either in our chat room or in the Matrix room and tell us how it went and give us the full report. But there are a couple of things you have to do.

There is also a bailout punishment if you choose to participate. And there's more details again at Linux unplugged.com slash three, two bit. There's something really pleasing about the idea of 32 bit machines sending boosts in, you know, interesting. Yeah.

So you got until January 7th. The gotcha is those, you do have to run this system with your day-to-day workflow for five consecutive days. So that, you know, when you consider the holidays and whatnot, that's going to sneak up on you pretty quick, I think. Start the new year in the last decade. And I already got mine up and running. So I will easily, I think, we'll see unless something goes wrong. I don't know. I didn't think I – Would you stash that thing again? I don't think I want to – I don't think I'm going to tell you, boys, but I do think I'm going to make an abrupt kind of pivot.

No, really. I can't wait to hear all about this. Yeah, I'll have to tell you about it. And then last but not least, we just wanted to make sure you knew that the very first NixCon North America, it's been an experiment, but they're kicking it off. It's going to run alongside Scale March 14th through the 15th, and Scale runs until the 17th. And that's going to be in Pasadena, California. And I'm very excited about covering this.

I mean, what other show is really going to be able to cover this, right? What other show? You know, this is like an event built for us. Yeah, we'd sure be missing out if we couldn't make it. Really? Well, I think we're trying to raise 8 million sats to cover the cost of driving the crew down there, renting an Airbnb, and doing some productions,

and then driving back. And you know what? Gosh darn it, if we aren't doing so bad, we're at 41% of our goal so far. We have raised 3,238,000 sats so far. We'll be putting3,238,000 so far. We'll be putting that towards the trip. Not bad, right? Not bad at all.

I need to do another round of the fiat fund donations. I didn't do that, so we couldn't get that number updated because that's just a manual process. But we should put a link to that. If you do want to do a one-time fiat fund donation as well and you don't want to do the sat thing, we'll have a link for that. But we're getting there. We are getting there. I'm very excited about this because this is direct support by the audience

and it just keeps us a little weird you know and i like that i like doing it our own way all right and with that let's get into the news of the year boys the, the big stories. We went through and looked at our show notes for the year. We looked at the RSS feeds and what the various sites were covering. And then for fun, didn't really use it much, but for fun, I also threw Pharonix, LWN, 9to5Google, OMG Ubuntu, The Register. That's a good little list. And the one that was just an RSS feed, but I forget which one, all into a large language

model and kind of asked it and kind of interviewed it about the year's stories, which ultimately wasn't super useful, but was good for jogging my memory of some of the details. So I'm not going to say it was worthless, but it was an interesting process to prepare for this episode. And one of

the things that I got through this conversation that I'd kind of forgotten about is this is the year that Ubuntu rolled out their new installer. We really saw this Flutter installer come out. It debuted in 2304 in Lunar Lobster in April. And we weren't sure if they would ZFS or not, and there was all those questions in there. and we weren't sure if they would ZFS or not, and there was all those questions in there. But ultimately, I think people were pretty happy with the 23.04 and 23.10 releases this year, both of them.

Yeah, it seems like the new installers, I think, so far, are a success. And I wonder, too, is it a good... I mean, there's other apps out there, obviously, the App Store, et cetera, et cetera, that are using this new sort of canonical Flutter push. But at installers, you know, for nerds out there installing Ubuntu, it's kind of the first thing you see. And I wonder if it's a bastion of more of this to come.

And it's not something that Distro redoes very often. Even if they should. Especially Ubuntu. I feel like we haven't really heard anyone complain about it. So I think that's actually, you know, the silence is a good sign in this case. It's been out for many months. Remember in the 2310 release, though, there was that language issue. Yeah, there was a little hiccup

around the rollout, but, you know, at this point that's all fixed. Yeah. And so that kind of was sort of unfortunate with the new installer, and if you used the old installer, you didn't have that problem, and they had to pull the ISOs and that kind of stuff. I feel like there was another really interesting development in january maybe not specific to linux but it sure

hits you chris uh stadia shut down near the end of january and man yeah did that wasn't that one of your predictions yeah unfortunately i think we all saw it coming what stinks is now looking back it shut down on january 28th they gave us a heads up right but looking back it's not so great boiling steam.com had a really great kind of retrospective and did an interview and also looked at some documents that were leaked from Google around Project Stadia and kind of put all the pieces together and paints a picture where the Linux compatibility was a sore point for developers. And it did lead to delayed adoption by developers on the Stadia platform. And it was Google's internal analysis that a large library of games was going to be necessary for this platform to be successful and that they were already at a pretty distinct disadvantage because EA and Steam and Microsoft Xbox all have their own libraries locked up behind their own walls and couldn't be on stadia so then they had that issue combined with developers were resistant

to porting to linux and vulcan and it did become more of an issue than i think uh well some of us hoped and now you look at valve's approach with proton and you i think it kind of validates their approach with the steam deck and and that just whole runtime environment. Yeah, it's a shame because Stadia was the best tech. Of all of the game streaming platforms, Stadia had the best get-up-and-go experience. It had the best tech. It was the fastest. Yeah, it was pretty nice.

I mean, I used it a little bit back in the heyday. You know, you're just touching on it there, but last january wine 8.0 released and wine's been playing a huge role in all that fun gaming we've been doing yeah yep wine.8 was a good release there was a bunch of stuff their work on the conversion to the pe format for a bunch of the modules in wine also added a special syscall dispatcher to avoid the overhead of a full nt system call. They were also chasing this work with some WoW 64 upgrades, where eventually it could be fully possible to run 32-bit apps without needing 32-bit libraries.

There's just so much cool low-level work going on in Wine that we gloss over and you just get the new update and more of your game's work. Yeah, and they started the year with 8.0. Yeah. We're about to end the year with 9.0. And I remember covering 1.0. No way. The project's not young, so that's pretty great. It's pretty great to see that.

It's kind of fascinating, too, because I feel like there was a while where I was using Wine, but it was kind of like, I don't know, you could get the odd installer to work. You could kind of get the really basic Windows apps to work, but maybe an older version of Word or something. But you weren't really relying on it. And these days I feel like wine is, you know,

there's plenty of apps that just don't work. But for the ones that do work, it's... Yeah, and it's more often it does now. Yeah. And then you can combine it with bottles and other tools like Crossover and PlayOn that allow you to manage wine environments. You can isolate them. Got all the extra side features, proton stuff, all the different acceleration shims.

It's pretty wild. A little bit moving forward now. In February, XFCE announced they were going to begin the hard work of going to Wayland after years of community speculation if they would embrace the Wayland future? We got the announcement that yes, just it'll take us a while. I've been appreciating XFCE actually a lot lately because I've been on my work Mac. I've got a little VM going

that I'm using to run Docker containers and do other things. And I put XFCE on X, you know, just running in there. And it's been great as a little RDP target to jump in when I need XFCE on X, you know, just running in there, and it's been great as a little RDP target to jump in when I need to do the very occasional, you know, it's mostly command line working there, but very occasionally it's nice to be able to do a

Linux graphical app, and it's so lightweight and just works. It's great for remote desktops. It is. I mean, so is Mate and some of the others, but XFCE is really great for that. I have definitely noticed that, yeah. And we saw 4.20, which was a big release, big noteworthy release. Asahi, obviously a big year for them.

But in February is when we saw the special interest group over at Fedora begin to form. Now, we hadn't gotten the proclamation that this was the official Asahi distribution yet. But we did see a special interest group. We start to see it make possible to get Fedora and Asahi distribution yet. But we did see a special interest group. We start to see it make possible to get Fedora and Asahi working together. It was around this time you and I switched my MacBook Max over to Fedora Asahi. So it's been running for months and months, just fine. Of course, news would come later that they were the official distro.

Canonical went real. Ah, yes, they announced the general availability of real-time Ubuntu with 2204. Sort of promoted that to general availability in February, which I think just sort of pre-ran a pretty good year for the real-time, trying to get the last stuff, the last final patches over the line for the real-time kernel work that's been, I don't know, a decade in the making. But a lot of the stuff has already been merged, and I don't think there's... I know there was stuff about, like, the

kernel printing that needed to be properly threaded now to make it work, and I don't know if that's quite finished, but it's getting really close. It felt like we... Well, you and I, even with audio production and stuff, have never really personally felt the need for real-time. We spent the last year and a half or two hearing use cases for real-time Linux. So it's good to see.

Well, we also saw Plasma 527, which I got to say was one of my favorite versions of Plasma. Super stable, had tons of features coming out, if you remember that. And, man, I ran that thing for a long, long time. This is the release we're kind of waiting and seeing, see where Plasma 6 goes. I think we're kind of still in that phase, but remember this is where we got KWin tiling in here and the multi-monitor overhaul.

I think they really worked hard as a project to make this a very special release. So I thought it was worth a mention in here. And, yeah, I'm running it. It's great. It's great. I don't really have much to say, but it was just really nice to see the team give us such a solid release while they worked on 6 for a while. Yeah, you're right.

It's a nice way to end the 5 series. Yeah. Also, FFMPEG had a fantastic, fantastic year. 6.0 was released in March. And then just a couple of weeks ago, maybe a week ago as we record, FFmpeg's command line client now has multithreading merged. This is exciting. Massive. Massive.

So, Neil, I haven't even had a chance to try it. I don't know if you know this, but multicore processors have been around for a little while. This 32-bit challenge is making me acutely aware of that. So it's really good to see this. I hope you understand. This really, you know, I mean, FFmpeg, absolutely one of the all-star projects. If we could give a Tuxy to just like honorable Tuxy every year, go to FFmpeg. We should each spend one day just worshiping FFmpeg per year.

We need to have an FFMPEG shrine here at the studio. With LEDs instead of candles, though. Well, this was also the time that we got wind that Docker was deleting open source organizations. Womp, womp. The continued descent

of Docker. Yeah. This was like the community reaction was fire over this yeah and they had like walk stuff back and there was really no you know it turned out not to be quite as bad as it first seemed but the communication was just terrible throughout and i think you know that and some other recent missteps have meant that whatever trust was kind of left there is probably gone. I think this is one of the biggest PR in the tech space,

PR blunders of the year. I mean, I think maybe Red Hat has one of the other ones, but we'll get there. I feel like this really went bad, as bad as it possibly could. Because remember, there was also the concern about namespace squatting, and that was a major concern for free software projects. There was this really strange language about like really arbitrary decisions on what made a commercial project versus yeah they're like well we'll send you to this new program we got which they really hadn't finished

setting up or like had made clear what how you could apply or what the what the details were right they didn't even have that done before they made like that would have been step one dude is make that program ready to go with everything figured out over there and then announce this. This has got to be up there. Maybe the top three, along with OpenAI and Red Hat. But, yeah, yeah, what a mess that was. You know, I kind of broadly remember that Ubuntu Cinnamon, a flavor, was announced. And I got to say, I haven't heard anything since.

Did anyone try it in the last few months or give this a go? I remember I gave it a quick glance when it became official flavor status. Cinnamon is another great desktop. I have given Cinnamon a recent go. And so I think I'm, you know, I'm not probably the target audience for Ubuntu Cinnamon, but I do think it's interesting to see it integrated as a new flavor. We also got ourselves some GNOME 44, which was nice to see that, along with Plasma 5.27.

We've got GNOME 44. We've got an Ubuntu Cinnamon flavor. The first half of the year was really nice for desktop Linux, I think. And then as we move into April, we get Plasma 6 early builds. We start to get Linux kernel releases with more and more Apple component support, including M2 component support. And we start getting more and more ButterFS improvements throughout the year landing around this point. Thanks to patches from an engineer at Seuss and other places, we start seeing a lot of that land. Yeah, we also got two big distro releases in April, right?

It's Fedora Linux 38 and Ubuntu 23.04. Yeah. Yeah, those are big ones. We also discovered that Red Hat would be cutting hundreds of jobs. And we're still processing that one as well. A little more positive side with Linux kernel 6.3 dropped. It also shipped a bunch of those ButterFS fixes, Steam Deck fixes, better enablement, big TCP support for IPv4. Yeah, a good kernel.

New Flathub website hit us too in that month. And how's it feeling now? Since, you know, it just, I mean, to me, I kind of forgot that happened. It feels so smooth. Yeah, right. That's when they promoted the beta they had. Yeah, I've totally gotten used to it now. I forgot about the old, I forgot about the old Flathub UI entirely.

I'll tell you one thing I miss from the old Flathub UI is they have the install and run commands exposed right here, which I realize is very nerdy. But now I got to do like this stupid drop-down thing. I was just noticing that myself. Yeah. It's such a small thing. But I miss it. I just used the command line, okay? I know.

I know. Me too. And it's just so much easier there. But overall, I thought this was a real nice redesign of the Flathub website. I think it just took it to the next level. On the dropdown of the Flathub website, I somehow always copy the wrong command. When I want to install, I copy run. When I want to run, I copy install.

For some reason. It's because the commands look so much the same, I think, and it was just easier when they were just on the page. Even if they just tucked them down below, that'd be fine. I could scroll. I could scroll. Now, in May, we had Red Hat's HDR Hackfest wrap-up where they started collaborating with System76, AMD, Collabra, Canonical, NVIDIA, Intel, Google, and others.

Yeah, I think earlier in that year, we'd seen some good updates from Valve. KDE started sort of signaling they were interested in getting HDR to work better. Also in May, we start seeing BcacheFS potentially getting, you know, that kernel tease. It goes out for review. Now, that was, in May, it was, I'm getting real close. Let's give it a real good look. And remember, I think Linus had a very kind of harsh response to this initial.

Yeah, right. It hadn't gone into Linux Next yet. I think this was kind of one of the first. And he's like, you're going outside the process. Linus wasn't happy with that. Yeah. That was a big hoopla there for a second. It's obviously a huge year for BcacheFS, but it kind of starts a little rocky.

And, you know, it's a little dance to get where it ends up. It was, indeed. The Red Hat hits continue in May as well. The Fedora Program Manager gets laid off. Which, uh... That still stings. It's all part of the Red Hat cuts, but where Red Hat taketh, they giveth,

and we get Podman Desktop 1.0. Yeah. Perhaps even more important in light of what we were just talking about with Docker. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, later on, we got 1.5. It was a really good year for Podman Desktop. It continued.

And then here's one last one for me. Other than I thought it was noteworthy that CodeWeavers, which has been a rock in the wine community, went into an employee ownership trust. I thought that was interesting and noteworthy this year. Also, we saw the rename of CBL Mariner, Microsoft's Linux distro, into, quote, Azure Linux. Got a rename.

And a new release. Hopefully that means it's around for a while. Oh my god, I hope. I hope. In June, we saw Plasma 6 just declare that it was going to be Weyland only. So no X11 for Plasma 6. Yeah. We saw this confirmed later in the year, too, as well.

But it became almost conclusive when Fedora said, with both the Fedora KDE spin and the Kenite spin, we're just doing Weyland. And when that gauntlet was thrown down, you knew that was probably going to be the way it is everywhere else. And then the KDE developers kind of made the decision. Yeah, it wasn't around this time, too, that we kind of got people became more aware that there were plans for RHEL 9 to mark Xorg server as deprecated. I think we also got some news that Red Hat was going to stop shipping LibreOffice in future RHEL releases, limiting Fedora's involvement there. Yeah, and basically the answer there was use a flatpack. And so when you do the math, when you look at their deprecating X11, their removing, packaging LibreOffice, it's like this is the direction they're going as a Wayland flatpack future. Well, speaking of those kind of packaged apps, this was also around the time that we got some first inklings about Ubuntu Core as an immutable Linux desktop base with some blog posts over by Canonical.

That's been fun to follow. You know, taking the Ubuntu Core, the Snap managed system and making that work all the way up to the desktop level is a fun engineering challenge, I think. Well, and not only that, Wes, but I felt like this was when we kind of started to get a little inkling that Canonical seems like they're getting excited about the desktop again. Yeah, right. And it was like, oh, they got like a real serious desktop initiative. We've got a new installer. We've got shiny desktop things. Got this Steam Snap thing they're doing. Right.

You combine this. And they also, in there, they talked a lot about the value of the desktop and trying to nail that just right. So that, to me, and again, this is June, it was really like this moment. It was sort of the middle of the year. We were like, ooh, here we go. Here we go.

And you combine that with the two Ubuntu summits as well. They're getting really serious about this, and it's really good to see it. And while we're talking about Ubuntu, it's probably worth mentioning that in june debian 12 bookworm was also released which was a big update 11 000 new packages for a total count of 64 419 packages whoa 43 of which were updated just for that release really a. Really a lot of underpinnings over there in the old Debian project. Keeping a lot of the ecosystem alive.

Yeah. Linode.com slash unplugged. Head on over there and see why we have been a fan for more than three years and get $100 to really kick the tires and find out all about the exciting news. Linode, now part of Akamai. Yeah, that Akamai. All the tools that we love, like the cloud manager, the API, the command line client, you know,

the stuff that helps you build, deploy, and scale in the cloud, that's all there, but now it's combined with the power and reach of Akamai, and they're expanding their services to offer more cloud computing resources and tooling. While still giving us that affordable, reliable, and scalable classic service that we're used to, we love for businesses and enterprises and community projects of all sizes. Even my son's Minecraft server. And as part of Akamai's global network of offerings, data centers are expanding worldwide. Yep, more.

I like more data centers. You like more data centers. Thank you. Linode.com slash unplugged and learn how Linode is now Akamai and how you can still and even better than ever scale your applications from the cloud to the edge. It's Linode.com slash unplugged. Well, lastly, in June, we also saw some red hat news. And I think this kind of started to hit hard. We had some major changes. Oh, right. This was the change to the source code. This was like where they changed the deal that the downstream clones were using to actually produce their end result.

And the source RPMs went away. And then we saw the reaction by Rocky Linux and Alma Linux. We really saw the two projects kind of show who they were. Yeah, right, having to figure out, okay, what's our plan? Are we going to keep this sort of ABI bug-for-bug compatibility, or are we going to become our own thing? What's the future of these projects? And since this might be my last chance to get on this soapbox,

if you gentlemen will allow me to get my box out here. Okay. This premium soap. Yeah. me to get my box out here okay there's premium soap yeah i think it's remarkable that the public and user base of rocky linux have allowed the rocky linux folks in my opinion to get a get by this long without implicitly defining and outlining how they're building their open source distribution right this is supposed to be a free and open source distribution that they are running on critical enterprise infrastructure, and they don't even know how it's being built. They don't even know how it's being sourced. I cannot believe this is

being allowed in everyday enterprise environments. This is potentially, who knows, a massive vector for a hostile actor to get involved in the creation of an enterprise software platform. And y'all are just installing it with no idea how it's being built, completely forfeiting one of the absolute benefits of free and open source software. And nobody's saying anything about it. And they're just going on like it's a regular old business. And I cannot believe it. And everybody's cool with it. And they'll just buy up some contracts. Who cares how it's a regular old business. And I cannot believe it. And everybody's cool with it. And they'll just buy up some contracts. Who cares how it's built? Who cares? Right? Who cares? I

guess we don't really care about free software. We don't actually care about being able to see the code. We don't actually care about that stuff. We just want to make sure our crappy, old, expensive enterprise software works. And that's what's really revealing about the Rocky situation, I think. Yeah, that was such a big story that it sort of just spilled right on over into July. We saw a bit of Rocky kind of talking about how some of their options that they were going to pursue,

but then they definitely left it vague as to you know, if those, once those dried up, where would they be going? We also saw Canonical make some moves with the LexD project, sort of taking that in-house, changing how the development works a little bit. Oh, yeah. That's been a story that's sort of continued to play out.

I think there's now a fork of LexD that's being continued by one of the original authors. Mm-hmm. Is it under a CLA now, too, as well? Yeah, I believe so, right? Yeah, that sounds right. In August, we saw the official announcement of Fedora Asahi Remix and Fedora becoming the official flagship distro for Asahi Linux, which is great. Kind of a nice meeting of the minds there with something that's being developed very fast and something that's very leading edge kind of coming together, but still providing maybe a little bit more consistent base to target than, say, a rolling distro does. We also got our first conformant M1 GPU driver.

We got some work in OpenGL ES 3.1 on Linux on the M1 hardware. The M1 hardware, I think, became daily drivable in August of this year. It's not 100% issues sometimes with Wi-Fi. I don't have speakers still. I don't have a webcam. And I don't have a working microphone that's built in. But sleep is working. The desktop feels absolutely

performant and accelerated. Applications launch just fine. I don't really hear the fans kick up. The battery life is perfectly acceptable. So in a lot of ways, it's really quite drivable. The Wi-Fi generally does work. And at this point, it feels better than, say,

it did when I ran Linux on a PowerPC Mac or an Intel Mac. Like they've basically, I think, crossed the threshold of getting to better support than the Intel Macs did

for almost everything. So that's incredible. And I think that really landed in August, which is great to see. And it's just only gotten better as the year has gone on. Well, in September,

we also got a nice little blog post from the Ubuntu desktop, just continuing that discussion about the desktop and how important it is charting a course for the new future, as they say. But right on the heels of that, I remember that Leap replacement discussion in the OpenSUSE community. Do you remember this one and just the confusion that seemed to follow? community. Remember this one and just the confusion that seemed to follow. I felt like this just happened and it came out of nowhere because I don't closely follow

this community. Yeah, it was a post over on the OpenSUSE mailing list from Richard Brown, sort of trying to figure out what should replace Leap. And at this time, there were two very different distribution sort of proposals.

One would be like a regular old-fashioned release desktop distribution. And a different one would be a derivative of Tumbleweed built automatically as much as possible. I have an honest question. Did anybody consider just not replacing it? Like just, you know, use Tumbleweed. And if there's not a customer base for Leap, let it be. You know, focus more on Tumbleweed. Focus more on desktop integration. Focus more on the build service.

I don't know. Take that time and enjoy an afternoon off. But maybe we don't need Leap. I mean, maybe we don't. I really don't know. I'm not a daily SUSE user, but I'd be curious to know what people think about that. Maybe it's fine not to have another distro. Imagine if more people were willing to sunset their distros.

You could help everybody out, perhaps, by having one less distro. That's my feeling about it. Linux market share on Steam got higher than macOS in September as well. And the next Cloud Hub 6 launched, which really brought in a bunch of AI features and stuff like that that was poof. Well, I mean, NextCloud has had a crazy year. Brent started working over at NextCloud this year.

That's been pretty wild. He's in Berlin right now because they're doing another release. Yeah, I have had a lot of fun, guys. I mean, I showed up, what, here in Berlin for the first time, what country? Was it March, I think? Was it the first time. What country was it? March, I think. Was it the first time this year?

Yeah. Wow. I think now I've been here like four or five times since. Amazing. But joining the Nextcloud team, yeah, was for sure a highlight for my year. And this particular release, Hub6, was one that I was quite involved in. release, Hub 6, was one that I was quite involved in. And man, the team just with the local AI assistant that was released was really, really fun to see the inner workings of a team like this and how it all happens in the background.

And very, very exciting. I hope you guys are excited as I am. And I hope my excitement translates as well. We've been keeping, I think we well. You can tell we're excited because we're finally keeping up to date. We're finally keeping our next cloud instance up to date. Oh yeah, we've got some homework after this show. Well, we just got a new one, so make sure

to update. October. Hard time to be an x86 user, you know? Because not only did we get news Intel was killing off its NUC line of adorable little mini PCs, but the raspberry pi 5 dropped yeah with its new much faster cpu and gpu so fast west we don't need hardware accelerated video the cpu's got it the cpu's got it bro it's got it but you know i think you

people were excited about the five it was maybe finally was maybe finally in a power level that it could be more of a desktop replacement, more of a challenger for traditional x86 roles. Yeah. It also has a distinction, I think, of the first Pi release that none of us have bought. It was a different release, yeah. That was a few months ago that you said you weren't really excited about. I wondered if things have changed in the last two months. The one-liter PCs have gotten only cheaper.

I mean, during Black Friday, I saw a full one-liter i5. Maybe 8 gigs of RAM, so maybe you could have used a RAM upgrade, but you could have made it work. That's easy enough. I mean, when you're talking a Pi, you're talking 4 or 8 gigs, right? 90 bucks. Now, that's more technically than a Raspberry Pi. It would have made it work. That's easy enough. I mean when you're talking a Pi, you're talking four 8 gigs, right? $90. Now that's more technically than a Raspberry Pi. But when you add a case, a power supply, and all those kinds of accessories, well, then an x86 PC that has a greater range of compatibility already comes in a case,

has more ports and I.O., it's just a no-brainer. Or something like the Odroid, if you're willing to spend a little bit more, you get something even more modern, uses less power. I like the idea you're being a little snob about, computer doesn't come in a case. I really have no problem with it, but it is nice. Because the problem is, if it doesn't come in a case, guess who's

not putting it in a case? This guy. It's just going into production without a case. And that's the truth. Unfortunately, I have a lot of things in production. Now they're in a case. This guy. It's just going into production without a case. And that's the truth. Unfortunately, I have a lot of things in production. Now they're in a booth attached to the wall. It's just like a big case. Yeah, it's a big booth case, right? I am very happy, though, that they

actually are finally getting to it. They seem to have the supply issue mostly resolved. People are getting their Raspberry Pi 5s. That's happening, of course. So that's good to see. We have the new Ubuntu, of course, 2310, which we mentioned. Linux Mint announces they're beginning to work on Wayland support. That was pretty exciting.

I'm not using Mint a bunch, but I value that it's part of the distro ecosystem. You know what's funny, Wes? And I wonder, Brent, if you have this sensation too, is it felt like it took forever to find out what XFCE or Linux Mint were going to do about Wayland. But now here we are in December looking back at it in a compressed form.

It feels like it's all coming together around the same time. Yeah, I'm really glad they made that decision. It feels like everybody's headed in the same direction, so there will be some cohesion in the world of Linux desktop, which feels just right for the end of the year. Yeah, there was one version of the future where like, I mean, obviously, you know, Noam, it's so hard to say that. Noam and KDE continue, right? But like, did we have this sort of die off of the X generation and then maybe a springing up of the replacements in the Wayland. We still will.

Yeah, right. We still will. Maybe it's a bit less than we thought. But yeah, it's like who's in that X graveyard versus the bright Wayland future. You know, I'm curious maybe this should be the start of one of my predictions, but I'm curious if we're going to get X specific distros that just try to keep it along

for as long as possible. Oh, for sure sure last year's linux and you you know you really you combine it i mean this is clearly the path forward for dev one you combine it with without systemd so you get an x11 system with no systemd and you know some old package manager no doubt and you're happy you're happy as a clam and you're running your XFCE or whatever it is for another 20 years. Can you use the Slackware quote-unquote package manager on other distros? Somebody should say Nix for this point. Also, it's just worth mentioning that the XFS file system had their main maintainer step down and had a new maintainer step up who then begun just like working like crazy on improving online repair.

But put out the word and I don't know how much they got in terms of response but put the word out and said, the previous maintainer was doing like five jobs and I only want to do one job. So I'd love to have somebody help me do community management, have somebody do document – do all these different things. I don't know if they've got a lot of bites on that offer. Something we should follow up on. Yeah. It's been a wild year for XFS. Improvements, regressions, bugs, more improvements.

I went through this looking at how ButterFS, Extended4, ZFS, and XFS did. Rough year for all of them. No file system comes out looking like a champ this year. 2023, mind your backups. XFS, Extended 4, ZFS, and XFS did. Rough year for all of them. No file system comes out looking like a champ this year. 2023, mind your backups. Now, in my opinion, ButterFS and ZFS did all right. Extended 4, almost. Almost made it.

Almost, yeah. We just found a bug, and it's a data loss bug. And XFS had a data corruption bug. ZFS had a data corruption bug. ButterFS had a massive performance regression. I don't know if any data loss was a result of it, but they're kind of like 98% fixed. They haven't even fully fixed the performance regression. So they get docked. It wasn't a great year for our file systems. So hopefully 2024 goes a lot smoother. Hopefully we get BcacheFS. I was going to say, does that make BcashFS look even better or what? Well, it's going to be a rough start.

You know, I mean, it's new. I'm excited. I'm definitely playing more with it in 2024. Oh, yeah. In November, we had Element announce they're going AGPL, also doing a CLA. Yeah, just like LexD, relicensed the AGPL with a CLA. And I don't know, man. I'm just really uncomfortable with what's going on with the Synapse server.

I'm uncomfortable with what's going on with all of this right now. The more I hear about it. There's a lot happening behind the scenes, it seems. Sounds like they're shutting down some of their hosting EMS services over there, too, and kicking some customers out. Not looking good. It would be a genuine loss if we lost the space. Because the other alternatives here like Slack and Discord and maybe Mattermost, but it's really Discord. And that is bad, man.

We do want all these free software projects on a centralized commercial chat platform that's all locked behind an Electron app that lives and dies at the behest of some corporation that's more interested in brand friendly gaming. We've built something kind of special with our Matrix community right now. Then, you know, we'll see. We'll see where it goes. We'll see where it goes. Fedora had to also delay their new installer. They were going to roll out a new installer.

I'm still excited for it. It's a web. It's a web installer. I mean, that's going to be pretty handy. But no, we didn't quite get it with Fedora 39. But soon. But soon. That'll do. And, you know, we got Fedora Workstation 39.

I'm not complaining. Gnome 45 also came out, which didn't get me that excited. But, Chris, I remember you got super excited about this one. I love all these big updates we've been getting from the desktop environments these days. It's really getting to the point now where it's all just frosting. But there was one little thing that I still even to this day love is they changed the activities indicator. It is both brilliant and simple at the same time it's just this little pill animation that moves around that indicates what desktop your environment on and it's a button you

can click it's such a small thing but it's so smooth and well done and it takes care of something that i used to always install an extension on which was to tell me what desktop i was on i never really you know could keep track of it. And with this release, I feel like the quick features, the little quick settings they have up in the corner finally came into its own and the extensions that I do have installed now support it. So things like caffeine to keep my screen awake now show up in the quick settings menu, which is just absolutely great. They've just refined the UI too. Things like the Files app is just looking so good now. I mean, I just am really, really impressed.

It's remarkable that I just can almost run stock GNOME with the stock theme. I used to have to change all that stuff. I guess that's my question for your end of year, Chris. How many plugins do you have left? Are they ticking them off? It seems lots of those got ticked off this year for you. Yeah, a lot of them are optional now. I'm probably still running with six or seven plugins,

but a couple of them I could probably just turn off. I remember when it used to be a dozen for you. Oh, yeah, or 15, man. It was a time, dude. There was a time. There was definitely a time when it was that many. Yeah, it's really nice to see. Are you still running the App Indic no no longer um because a lot of that stuff now is in quick settings yeah so that's been nice to see yeah uh you know what else we got pipewire 1.0

right at the end of november we got the official 1.0 release. Wim joined us on the show to talk about it. That was a big day for us because we also announced NixCon North America, which is the first. And it's the Pipewire 1.0 is the El Presidente release. And you get some Bluetooth codec improvements. But the big thing here was getting that performance compatibility with real-time jack for pro application use. That was the big deal for Pipewire. And it was such a smooth upgrade.

You know, I've got to say, I still remember when we interviewed Wim for just when Pipewire was starting to become the default. And it just, from a user's perspective, has felt so smooth. And the number of problems has been minimal, really, in my experience, which is, I mean, that's saying something. So just a huge kudos to the Pipewire project and everyone working there. It's been amazing. Thank goodness. Out of the areas that Red Hat has had to pull back, they did not pull back in Pipewire.

Yeah, amen. Woof! Collide.com slash unplugged. has had to pull back. They did not pull back in Pipewire. Yeah, amen. Oof. Collide.com slash unplugged. If you're in IT, if you deal with security, you've got to hear about Collide. It's solving the problem that drove me crazy, that was just beginning to get bad, but it's gotten so much worse with BYOD and just more modern devices.

I mean, there's a lot of upside to it, but the downside is employees are often playing a role in a compromise, even if it's not intentionally. You know, phished credentials, out-of-date software. Maybe they don't have the appropriate anti-malware software installed or whatever it might be that you have as a process or a priority or a procedure or a requirement. You can't guarantee they're following it.

And wouldn't it be nice if you could just make sure they don't connect to any of your cloud apps until they pass a certain check? And if they have any problems, the user could resolve them on their own without having to burden IT? Well, you know I'm about to tell you Collide does that because that's true.

That's what Collide does. That's their special sauce. Say goodbye to compromised credentials. You're not going to worry about that because that stuff's going to get checked. they don't have the right antivirus installed they're not connecting until they do and collide will work them through the process with simple clear messaging that follows your process and your procedures and uses your recommended software and all that and integrates with your authentication infrastructure. It's really slick. I think you should go see the demo.

Support the show. Visit collide.com. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplug. Get a demo and get some insights into this. And when you're at work and you're trying to solve this problem, think of Collide. Support the show and solve your problem.

Get one beautiful dashboard that covers your Windows box, your Linux boxes, and even your Macs. And then help users solve their own problems proactively it's really nice collide.com slash unplugged now many many stories happen this year and we thanks to chris's sleuthing uh have all of those in the show notes. So if you want to dive in a little deeper, please click around, have some fun. And for feedback this week, we're actually going to keep those in the bag.

We've got a few pre-records coming up. We're going to save some of your great feedback for those episodes. So thanks for sending it in. But as usual, we do have some boosts. And now it is time for the boost. Look at Mixip coming in once again in the baller slot with 50,000 sats. Hello, sir. No message.

Just boosting. Love you all. That's technically a message. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah, see, unlike an anonymous found user who's on us 5100 sets, but actually a totally empty message. Don't worry, though. Gene Bean came in with a row of ducks.

Hey-o, we got ourselves our first row of ducks. There was that one time I removed all persistent volumes from our prod K8's cluster. Is that resource type? Is it namespaced? Fortunately, they won't actually delete until they're not in use. We had to go find each underlying disk in GKE, snapshot it, clone the snapshot, then do some other black magic I've since forgotten to let the original actually delete, and then replace it with the snapshot. It was gut-wrenching.

Oh, gosh. Thanks for sharing, Bean. Ugh, woof. I am so sorry to hear that. Your pain is our mild entertainment, but mostly self-suffering. I have definitely felt that pain before. Appreciate the boost, Gene.

Hey, while we're talking about rows of ducks, did you know just 20 minutes ago, the dude abides just sent in a row of ducks? I missed that. Yep. Live boost while we are on the air. Thank you, the dude. Appreciate that.

Now, Greeno boosted in with a total of 16,065 sats. But the very first one is a 1, 2, five satoshi boost oh good catch bruntley so the combination is one two three four five that's the stupidest combination i ever heard in my life they say i gotta love those space balls clips hello again my favorite linux aficionados i've been meaning to send in this tip for a while and hearing Chris mention Giraffine OS and tracking a few episodes back reminded me. I've jumped on the non-stock Android bandwagon a few years ago and sorely missed the Google location sharing my wife and I made great use of. Long story pretty short, this own tracks guide got me up and running and we've

been happy using it ever since. It's a little loose around the edges, no way to force the location update for other parties, but it does allow us to see where each other is when needed, and even has an old device in the car with this running as a cheap tracker. I can neither confirm nor deny that I am the author of said guide, after many months of headache getting it working. I that I am the author of said guide after many months of headache getting it working. Anyways, thought Chris might want to put it through its paces until something more turnkey comes along. You know, OwnTracks is a really solid recommendation.

I like this one. We used OwnTracks a couple of years back when we did a road trip to Denver. Yeah. The Linode on the road trip. And we had an embedded live tracker of Lady Jupes. And that was done by OwnTracks. And I brought a Pyzelle 3 with me. That's right.

That ran that connected to a Linode that updated our location in real time. And then we would embed it on the website. It worked pretty well. It does work pretty well. And, you know, if you're looking for like a find my replacement or a Google location kind of replacement thing, that's definitely something to consider. I will say if you don't really have the energy to do it and you already have Home Assistant in the companion settings on the Home Assistant app, you can turn up the precision of location and update frequency. It will use a more battery life but you know you're also not installing a particular dedicated tracking app and the home assistant dashboard

can you can embed a map of entities live location and so you could create a location dashboard in home assistant it's not as good as own tracks because own tracks you have parameters in there where you can be like when the motion sensor, you know, like whatever in the phone, accelerometer or whatever it might be, detects a certain amount of movement, start updating, right? That's not how home assistant is going to be. More like major movement events. So sometimes it will be a few minutes before it's updated. But it's generally like if, you know, you're okay getting the general idea where they're at, home assistant could do that for you one of those trade-offs where do you need the dedicated tool with all the options or can you get by with a sort of generic functionality now that grino did send

in a second boost 3720 sets hey me again i came across the hand solo never tell me the odds clip from empire strikes back and thought it could make another nice boost clip for three seven two zero sets wish i'd remembered it before the 32-bit challenge started as it would make a nice challenge theme boost for our star wars clip band among star trek circles no i mean i think we're all i think we're all star wars friendly right we're a star wars friendly group oh? We're a Star Wars friendly group. Oh, yeah, for sure. I feel like, yeah. All nerdery is welcome here.

Yeah, definitely. Never tell me the odds. There you go. Never tell me the odds. Well, and he finishes up with, here's to you guys getting to scale with Bank to Spare. Hey-oh, I hope so. Wouldn't that be great if we could do some sat steaks again? Yeah, those are tasty.

Can we do some, like, sat sushi or something? Oh, yeah, we could totally do something different. We could do some sat fish. We could do some sat veg. We've got to get the good stuff. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Come on, come on. User 89 came in with a Spaceballs boost.

One, two, three, four, five sats. One, two, three, four, five. Yes. One, two, three, four, five. Yes. That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. This is Hive from Dublin, Ireland. A small contribution for the scale trip. I just tried Nix for the first time.

Well, I love the idea of it. What does that mean? Does that mean it didn't go well, but you like the idea of it? Tell us more. I mean, maybe it means, you know, they've just sort of installed it, read some of the you know the guide okay i like it yeah but probably not it's not battle test it could mean that it's sort of like you know we went out to dinner we saw a movie we went back to my place yada yada they went home okay well what's the yada yada part he left out the yada yada part the most important parts just saying you're requesting a follow-up yeah

now i'm curious kenji uh what would you suggest for someone who's just like, it sounds like, dipped their toe and kind of likes it? Yeah, this is the hardest part. You really want to kind of just decide, decide on something, but you just need to do something that is a problem because you can do so much. Whatever interests you, for for example if it's the package manager itself try to figure out which component it actually is so it's not nix packages like the repo or nix os the distribution it's the package manager itself so

visualize which component in the whole stack you're looking at, try to start, I would say, with the official documentation, with the manual. Not read through it, but get an overview to just see what's available, to get a map of the space. Then maybe when you know what you want to do, you know where to look and what the terminology is. Because the terminology is different from most things.

I love that. I mean, especially when you're, like, if you start with something like NixOS, you know, you update a couple lines in your config, and you run a command, and all this stuff happens.

It can be pretty daunting to figure out, like, okay, what are all the pieces behind the scenes that are actually making this magic happen? Yes. Yeah, for sure. Wolfman 2G1 boosts in

with 15,000 cents. A wolfman, huh? I wonder if... I'm picturing a big beard. Big beard. A little holiday bonus boost. I've been hearing Chris talk about using IPFS for distribution. What about good old Varnish?

An engine Xbox that points to your object storage for Origin and a Varnish Box or two strategically placed on the nodes that serve as your CDN. You can get a very high cache hit rate since a given asset only chains once a week. You can have the same FQDN and use GOIP from a DNS provider to route to the closest cache. BGP Anycast would be better, but that adds complexity. I like the way Wolfman thinks.

Yeah. Fun ideas. So now in this setup, this is an interesting setup, right? Because the idea I think that Wolfman is trying to get at is reduce the amount of transfer from the object storage, which is where the cost is going to get you, right? If every download originated from the object storage, that would actually add up pretty quickly. But you still end up paying at the Varnish side. Like wherever that Varnish CDN sits, you still end up – Still having to pay for the bandwidth there.

Yeah. Kind of has to figure out where your costs are and which providers and which rates. Right. You know, I've kind of cooled a bit on the IPFS podcasting to a degree. I'm actually still very, very excited about what they're working on. We just released a brand new Office Hours. A banger, by the way, the last one of the year, if you want to check it out, officehours.hair. And that, when you download it, is distributed via IPFS.

Even if your client doesn't talk IPFS, it's distributed via IPFS. Even if your client doesn't talk IPFS, it's distributed via IPFS. It's very cool. Every now and then, though, and why I'm waiting to see where it goes is sometimes there can be a delay before the play starts. It's going through a single redirect at the moment that could go out, that kind of stuff.

So something like this, I think, would be a little more robust, what Wolfman is suggesting, than where IPFS podcasting is today. Yeah, and I think this is a nice option, too, if you want to really keep everything in-house. The IPFS is great, but you're also sort of ceding control over to the decentralized community. The flip side of that is anything that's ceded from the IPFS network, you don't pay a dime for. And so when you think about distribution for a podcast, you really pay more the more successful your podcast is.

distribution for a podcast, you really pay more the more successful your podcast is. So to have a solution that kind of addresses that is interesting, I think, to watch and see where it goes. Well, especially as you mentioned, like the space of just folks getting started, right? It's one thing when you're a big established podcast, you really care about that performance and

how quickly does your MP3 start when you hit play and all that. But if you're just trying to get started in the thing, yeah, this could be a great option. Golden Dragon boosted in 10,000 sats. Oh, hey, Dragon. Boost! Hey, here's the value back for the sticker orders that we

received. Our small business got three orders with about 100 to 200 glances at our two shops. So thank you, JB. And there will be more stickers to come. Of course, folks can always boost into the show or hit up the Golden Dragon on Matrix with new sticker ideas. Hey, well, congrats, Dragon.

Maybe next time around we'll get more than a couple of sales there, but thanks for kicking us back a little bit. Still appreciate that. You know, I didn't get any stickers. I should still order. Can I still order some? That's the thing is we didn't time it right. Because it takes a couple of weeks for you to go do the order.

So maybe some other time in the future. I love stickers, though. Heck yeah. And it'd be great to have some stickers to put on this 32-bit laptop. When I saw Brent's framework, I immediately had to ask him what kind of sticker he put on his framework. Yeah, there's this. And it makes me smile every single time I go to open my laptop there, Golden Dragon.

There's this, could you call it custom, limited order, very specifically made for us JB crew who are at LinuxFest Northwest. The Dragon made a sticker that's a RoveDux, of course, right beside a JB rocket.

And I slapped that thing on my framework at the JB studio during LinuxFest Northwest where we got to meet the Golden Dragon, which was a really special time. So every single time I peel this laptop open, I have a look at that sticker and it makes me smile. So thanks, Golden Dragon. I have one of his right here in the studio.

It says, does your podcast have a mascot? Amazing. And it's so good. If you've got an idea for a Linux Unplugged sticker, you can reach out to the Golden Dragon. He is in the Matrix chat room, and he's often in the Mumble room. And, you know, you can always boost in your suggestion as well. He's always listening. Dark Eyre Elite comes in also with another space balls boost we're gonna have

to go right to ludicrous speed i think it's true it's amazing i got the same combination on my ssh keys yes dude yes one two three four five yes that's amazing i've got the same combination on my luggage well uh karen bug moves in with one more one two three four five one million space bucks a million just with the simple message scale gentlemen thank you thank you very much karen and thank you very much dark ire we are stacking them stats for scale. The future of 2024 feels very uncertain, but having sort of like this sort of almost guaranteed event starting to solidify, we're not there yet, but almost guaranteed event to solidify

is like this goalpost in which I know if we can survive, we can make it to something that we've funded and is going to happen. And when everything else is looking like it's up in the air, that feels really great. is going to happen. And when everything else is looking like it's up in the air, that feels really great. Very much appreciate that. And coming in at the last minute as we finish up the boost segment, live, the dude abides comes in with another baller boost.

He sends in, when you add it all up, a very special Spaceballs combo. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yes. That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. Smoke if you got him. With an extremely baller boost of $1,294,567 sacks.

Winner. It really whips the llama's ass. That is amazing, the Dude Abides, and we are stacking that right into our scale trip funds. That is absolutely a smoke them if you got them Spaceballs boost. Smoke if you got them. And he comes in across multiple apps, but the first of a batch he starts with, I hope this speeds us up on the way to the 8 million sat milestone a bit.

By the way, I recently installed NixOS Plasma on my X260, which used to run Arch. But I'm a new convert. The Nix propaganda worked on me. NixOS with its config reminded me of the old rc.conf days. I'm glad he said it. I wasn't going to say it, but I'm glad he said it. He says, one thing I miss, though, is the documentation, which I think is unfortunately kind of poor. That is the number one thing I think I hear back from the audience is that the NixOS documentation is thick and patchy.

I don't know if you agree, Wes. You probably don't completely agree, but I kind of tend to agree. I mean, there's just a lot of it. There's a lot of guides. And I think, as a lot of folks have mentioned, there's a bunch of flake stuff out there now, too. So depending on what task you're actually going for, it can maybe be a little hard to figure out exactly where to start. I agree there is a lot to be improved upon in certain aspects, but I think it has gotten better, a lot better. And I would encourage everybody that has problems with the documentation, look at the official documentation first. Go to nixos.org.

Now is the actual hard part where you have to wrap your head around. There are three manuals, one for Nix, one for the Nix packages, and one for NixOS. But those are the official manuals, and they give a great overview of the concept. They explain everything or every concept at least. Some good advice. The dude abides, continues abiding. I've been following you since the Linux Action Show days around 2016, so this is my tiny appreciation of all you do. I've also been an Unplugged core contributor from August 2020 and a Jupiter Party member after that.

Wow, thank you, sir. I just wanted to say that the intro and outro of LUP are so distinct, the great Ronald Jenkins, that they're almost my favorite part of the show. Specifically when Chris used to shout, see you back next Tuesday. For that reason, I vote that Chris brings back him shouting the outro.

I was somehow lost when you changed the recording day from Tuesday to Sunday. See you next Sunday! Alright, we'll see. Dude, you tell me if you can abide by this. We'll have your final sign. I think you We'll see. Dude, you tell me if you can abide by this. We'll have your final sign. I think you definitely have earned this request.

So tell me if this is approved. All right. And we'll see if we get it. We'll see you back here next Sunday. All right. How was that? Nailed it. And I feel the exact same way.

I missed that transition. I thought, oh, it's going to be a few months until you get used to the new reign and the bounce of things. And for a couple episodes there, you did. You were nailing it. But I agree. It's just the thing I get so much criticism about, so I just kind of let it fade. But you know what? For the dude, I could bring him back. Just have to remind me.

But I'll bring him back. And on the last message here, the dude writes, I wanted to send 1,234,567 sats in total. Therefore, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. But using Albi with the podcast index creates different confirmation pop-ups with the amount split among them. I really thought I made a mistake at first with the amount of sats, so I canceled the very first transaction, which happened to be Brent's cut, sending you again some extra sats to complete the saga. I don't remember the exact amount

anymore, so here's an approximation. You don't have to read this message, but when you read the others, could you just make it sound like I sent 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 sats? Thanks. Then why did we read the message? I guess if he's going to send the value, we're going to read the message, I guess. Thank you, dude. You came in at the last minute there with those boos, and you really put us over into something that's really going to make a difference on our effort to get to scale.

So we had 14 boosters. I can say it. Not everybody was above the 2,000-sat cutoff, so we had 14 boosters. I can say it. Not everybody was above the 2,000-sat cutoff, so we always read all those messages. And I did want to get VT52's make good in here. He sent in an elite set of stats to let us know that he did get the new Podverse update. It is fixed now.

And that Dark Helmet's IT department just told me that his 12345 password was too weak and that he needs to change it. Smoke if you got him. I say change it to smoke it if you got him. He says he's surrounded by jerks. Yeah, they won't let you use that password. Just add an exclamation mark. It's fine.

It'll be fine. So we had 14 total boosters, and we stacked 1,433,990 sats. Wow. That's definitely. Get that. It really whips the llama's ass. It's not a llama anymore. It's a goat.

That's a goat right there is what that is. Thank you, everybody, who boosted in. We really appreciate that. But, Wes, you know, we've been also looking at those sat streamers, shouting out to our sat streamers out there who just put it on auto stream, and we got some fantastic results. It's actually kind of unbelievable what we had just coming in over streamed Sats this week. Yeah, 45,626 Sats. We've got seven different streamers who sent us over to KSats with

ActiveShadow at the top with 113 streams. Whoa! ActiveShadow, you have been slamming the shows. Thank you. That's 11,412 total sets. But, you know, up on the board, we've also got our pal Gene Bean. Hey, Gene. Mofata. Hello, Mofata.

Iced Vovo. Oh, 81 streams, Vovo. Davrilin. Nice. Caspeland. And Taco Strange. Thank you, everybody who also just streams those sets. You might not be sending us a message all the time,

but we're getting that value and we're tracking that. And we really do appreciate that very much. We had a brand new boost soundboard clip that was submitted into the show. Did you guys see this? Oh yeah, right at the last minute. Yeah, we have a brand new boost. You have to send in the Sega amount,

which is $19,571. Sega! And there's a whole math around it. So if you want to get a Sega boost, $19,571. And you, too, can get the Sega boost. Thank you, everybody, who takes the time to, A, figure out how to do the boost. I know it's a hill. We really appreciate it. And thank you, everybody, who takes the time to actually write a little message and the boosts i know it's a hill we really appreciate it and thank you

everybody who takes the time to actually write a little message and send it in or send us some value this is a value for value production and we're really leaning into this because the more i watch the landscape evolve the more it's my personal conviction that podcasting is a very unique and important media in comparison to everything else. It is a group of distributed shows over RSS, totally decentralized. And the few things that were centralizing it were advertising and distribution platforms. And with Value for Value and with Boost, there's no middleman, there's no company involved. We are taking that last piece and decentralizing that as well.

And when you look at the mainstream media, when you look at what YouTube does to creators with their stupid thumbnails and the little games they have to play for algorithms, and the same thing happens on the other sides, on the other platforms like Rumble, and you look at the way people behave on social media for engagement, these are all incentives brought to them by the platforms they're using. And in order to succeed on those platforms, you have to adopt those incentives and use them correctly. And the people that succeed at this, like Mr. Beast, become the top of the platform and the people who fight it, they suffer with a couple of hundred views. And we all know people out there that have been grinding away for decades with a couple of hundred views on YouTube because they don't play those games. Well, they might have their moral standards, but they don't have anything else. And podcasting is a truly decentralized system with no middleman, no curator, no AI that's labeling content and no

algorithm that's trying to juice what you see to get your blood pressure up. And I think one of the ways we keep it that way is by enabling direct support by the audience. So that way the audience becomes the big customer. And if we can use a system that's free software based peer to peer and has no middleman, then we have nobody that gets in there and starts gaining control and influencing the platform. And that means you're going to have some stinkers, but it also means you're going to have fantastic, unique niche media. And last but not least, one of the things we're learning more so than ever as we go into 2024 is that advertising is a very cyclical business. Podcasters didn't really realize it because for the last decade, we've had a pretty

good market, especially for the last few years. And it just seemed like it was always going to go that way. It always seemed like there'd be advertising available. Advertisers are not interested in podcasts right now. I am talking obviously in general generalities. There are some, and we are very appreciative of those, that still get it. Those are the savvy businesses. But on a whole, the unsavvy media buyers, which unfortunately represents the vast majority, are not interested in podcasts anymore as a medium. Specifically, they're not interested in Linux podcasts. Trust me. I've been doing this for 18 years. I'm getting that answer over and over again. It's the unfortunate reality that

advertising is a cyclical economy-connected business. It dives before the economy and it recovers after the economy. And for podcasts to become something that is a very long-term medium, that is more than just a 20-year medium, but more like a 100-year medium like radio can be today, it has to find a model that is outside of, attached to that cyclical economic system, or else it ultimately will just become radio.

It's like the way, it's just, if you look at it, that's just how it works out. You'll get dynamic ads on everything. You will be going to commercial breaks that honestly represent almost 30, 40% of the show. It just, that's the direction it goes. We're working to change that and pioneer a model that others can adopt. They can see something that works, they can see us experiment and test it, and then they can implement it in their own shows or for their own software projects. So when you contribute either through a membership at unpluggedcore.com or you boost into the

show, you're contributing to something that's a lot larger than just the individual production. But we're trying to build out a model that'll be applicable and hopefully, hopefully a guide for others to follow one day. And we're doing it with radical transparency, both in the amounts and in the splits. Everything is in the RSS feed. And we really, really appreciate everybody who contributes. As we go into the holidays, we'll be stacking your messages. The next two episodes, we'll not have them, but then when we come back in the new year, we'll lean in hard and get right back into it. So please do continue to boost in. Send us your predictions along with the Sega boost.

We also have a 2024 predictions boost, which is two balls and a 24, 88, 24. Double crystal balls predictions for 2024, 88, 24 sets with your 2024 predictions or holiday messages or of course your 32-bit challenge updates. We always like to see those as well. Now gentlemen, what do you say we do a pick before we get out of here? And again, thank you everybody who did boost in.

We appreciate you. Oh yes, please. I think you've got a good one this time around. I was inspired by Brent's networking troubles that he had last week. This one is obviously going to be useful when I'm traveling as well. good one this time around. I was inspired by Brent's networking troubles that he had last week. This one is obviously going to be useful when I'm traveling as well. It's called Trippy. And it combines the functionality of TraceRoute and Ping. And it's designed to kind of just assist you identify and track down weird networking problems.

And as you know, it's got a GUI for the command line. I guess if you can call it that, an Ancursus-style GUI that I just always love. Oh yeah, this is a slick-looking app. You've got a little graph down here showing the samples. They've got like a frequency histogram in the bottom corner. Obviously, you've got your regular sort of like trace route output where you've got the loss and the sent and the received and the ping times and latency on there. And a handy-dandy header up top. I haven't even really played with this, but it's got keyboard shortcuts. Good set of them.

It's got settings you can tweak. I think it's written in Rust, and it's packaged in Nix. How about that? Brent, did you get a chance to try this at all, by any chance? I got to say, I took this week really easy this week and hung out at not my hotel. I hardly was at my place. Even overnight, I was hanging out with listeners and missed trains. It turns out the train system doesn't run all night.

And so I... Listen to this guy. Getting fed, getting free drink. I see how it is. Yeah. So I got to say, I happily spent little time on my laptop. But the name here is perfect. Trippy?

Because that's exactly how it felt on last episode of Linux Unplugged when Chris and I were trying to figure out what the heck was going on with my network. So I think I got homework here. I got to go home and try this. It could be handy. It could be handy. It could come up. You know, I'm seeing just ping on our awesome community website.

We've got some packet lost on our way. Thanks, Comcast. Oh. You know, I was having packet loss yesterday during a call. I was having some unfortunate packet loss. I don't know what's going on. Maybe it's time to go reboot stuff.

I actually just rebooted stuff recently. I finally have all the networking gear on EPSs. Brent hasn't even visited lately. I know. Well, what if it's like, you know, when he's here, he breaks stuff, and when he's gone for too long, he breaks stuff. I leave some, like, delayed pixies that

go to work when I'm, you know, gone for about three months. That sounds about right. I don't know exactly how that works, but we'll have a link to Trippi in the show notes. Those are at. We got a note saying we don't tell people where the show notes are at anymore. I actually do every episode,

but I don't do it till the end, but they're at linuxunplugged.com slash 541. All the links there, or of course at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Indeed. And most podcast apps, but not all. It'll be right there in your podcast app this is our last live show so

thank you Mumble Room thank you everybody watching live it was it's always nice to do a show live because it gives us that special live energy but we'll be now going into our holiday recording schedule where we'll have for you on our regular release well maybe even a little

early uh the tuxes and our 2024 predictions two annual powerhouses of the unplugged program you don't want to miss them you don't i'm we'll be talking about them the rest of the next year it's funny you know the tuxes really always does very well and um i've been chatting with people all week long about the tuxes. I'm very I'm getting very excited just because I can tell the audience is excited about it. That Matrix Room 2 at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash matrix.

Don't forget, we want to know how that 32-bit challenge is going for you. So you can always write in about the 32-bit challenge or please do boost in and we can share it with absolutely everybody. We also just this week for you keeners put out a new episode of office hours. You can check that out and office hours dot hair. And we got special guest Moritz Kaminsky of the Albie project joining us.

So if you want to learn more about value for value podcasting, I'd say jump right into that one. Yeah. Albie is a very interesting company in the space and Moritz is a very thoughtful individual. And it's always nice to just hang out with Brent a little bit more. That's in there, too. Yeah. And some network news, some goss, some hot

goss, all that kind of stuff. Now our next live show will be on January 7th, but like I said, if you subscribe, you'll just get our next couple of special holiday releases as they come out. But when we do come back, we'd love to have you in our mumble room. We have all those details at linuxunplugged.com and at jupiterbroadcasting.com.

But it's really nice. It's like an extra little hangout sesh. You get a low-latency opus stream of the show. And of course, you can always contribute back in real time. And that's it, everybody. Thank you so much. We'll get out of your hair now, I guess. I guess. I feel like I don't want to leave.

I don't like being the last regular show. It's like a... It's both really nice and a relief, and at the same time it's like, I really enjoy hanging out with you guys. And I'm going to miss it. Yeah, do meet us in the new year, though, won't you? Absolutely. Absolutely. We'll be a mess if you don't show up.

We'll just be a mess. Alright, thanks so much for hanging out with us on this technically Saturday on a Tuesday. And we'll be right back here next week. Thank you. you