LINUX Unplugged - 542: 2023 Tuxies

Episode Date: December 24, 2023

It’s the fourth annual Unplugged Tuxies; our community votes on the best projects, distros, and desktops of 2023.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Yes, it is the fourth annual Tuxes, as voted by our community. And those votes? Well, they've been coming in for weeks, and today

it's time to reveal the results. Some of them are going to surprise you. And then we'll wrap it all up with a brand new segment, the 2023 Boosties. And with the goal of radical transparency, we'll share the year two experiment of boosts. And those results, they might blow you away.

So first, let's say good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Go to tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged to try it for free on 100 devices. What is it? Well, Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private, it's secure, and it's fantastic. It's fast, like really fast. And I have no inbound ports anymore. I have one flat network all protected by?

Oh, my God. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Great way to support the show and try it for free on 100 devices. I mean it. It's great. We do have a little bit of housekeeping, including a reminder that the 32-bit challenge is underway. We kicked it off a couple of weeks ago, and it runs until January 7th. Still time to participate, I think, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can do it over the holidays. If you want the details, you can just find them all posted at linuxonplug.com slash 32-bit. We'd love to have you join us. It's been pretty fun. We'll soup in a little bit of a strug sesh. I'll tell you more about that. We'd love it if you boost along and tell us how it's going for you,

or you can also join our 32-bit challenge matrix chat room. And then if you have a free Sunday on the 7th, you're absolutely welcome to join us in the mumble room and tell us how it went. And Brent, you wanted to advocate for those that don't have 32-bit hardware but still want to participate. You know, I was thinking, since we struggled so much to find hardware and usable hardware and hardware that'll fit in our homes. Chris, I saw your laptop. It's a chonker.

About the size of a VW. Or three frameworks. I thought maybe some folks would just, you know, not have the time or the resources to go try to, you know, scour the world to find something that's reasonable. But there are ways of doing this. I think QEMU has a way of doing it where you can limit it to having, you know, just a 32-bit VM. So at least then you can play with the software sources and maybe a new distro that might tickle your fancy. Yeah, and perhaps that gets you at least some of the experience of what stuff still supports 32-bit and what doesn't, which is part of the experience, I think. Yeah, you won't get the full hardware flavor, which is really what we're going for, trying to answer the question, are these viable systems in 2024?

But you will definitely get a sense of the software availability and situation, which is a real aspect of this. I would say you should probably, in the spirit of the challenge, also limit that VM as much as you can, you know, for RAM. Yeah, a few gigs, maybe a couple gigs. Yeah. Yeah. Don't be too generous.

Oh, and then just a little kind of good news. If you have been busy this holiday season and you haven't had a chance, but you want to participate in Texas Linux Fest, their call for papers has been extended. The deadline is now December 30th, 2023, 5 a.m. UTC. So basically get it in December 29th. We're going to be there. We're going to really make we're going to try as hard as we can to be at Texas Linux Fest. And we may have more news on that soon. And we'd love to see you there. And I think Texas Linux Fest should be blasted with Nix discussions, self-hosting, sovereignty discussions,

and Ansible, like anything that's just really making and taking Linux and bringing it to a whole new generation of people that want to do all these kinds of determined and programmable systems, I feel like why not introduce some of them to some of the capabilities down there? Texas Linux Fest is ripe for that kind of stuff. We need more of it at all these events. We'll put links to it in the show notes, and we also are hosting on our Matrix server a Texas Linux Fest Matrix chat. So if you have questions about the event, Carl's in there. We'll be in there.

Come hang out. You know, I'm really looking forward to Wes's talk. Oh, yeah? Yeah. What's it going to be on? I am trying to get him to do a talk. I have a great idea for a talk, but I don't want to spoil it.

But I think he should do it. What's your talk, Chris? My talk would be on what to do with co-hosts who try to sabotage you live on a show. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would like to fund this research. All right, well, we'll let you know how that goes. We have played with doing some live shows,

and I wonder if Texas Linux Fest might be just the right venue for that. I mean, it requires us to do a lot of work, prep, playing with new equipment and stuff. But it's the right size for kind of a test yeah yeah we could push ourselves geez that's a really good idea we should follow follow up on that when we're not doing the show oh you know because we're gonna forget about that right okay but i do i do like that a lot does that make up for my sabotage you know about 90 if we pull it off yeah now we have to do it though so. So maybe not, actually.

You might be more in the hole. I think Wes is right. You're probably more in the hole now. Uh-oh. We have a clip for this. That's right. It is the fourth annual Linux Unplugged Tuxes. And once again, we put the vote to our audience to determine the best of the best.

Your favorite Linux distro. The best desktop environment. The server distro that beat them all. And the best self-hosted app of the year. And more. Friends, it is the 2023 Tuxes from the world's largest Linux podcast as voted on by our community. Year four begins now. Like we do, we're going to start off with the best text editor of the year because why not? Now we'll give you the top three from last year, then we'll give you the

top three from this year and see who our winner is. We may Hall of Fame them. From time to time, that does happen. You can have an application or a desktop environment win so many times that we Hall of Fame them for one year now. It's a new policy we implemented last year. We'll explain it as we get there. We had how many responses, Mr. Payne? 2,372. Ooh!

All right, then. The 2023 Best Text Editor of the Year category kicks off with the winners from last year. Coming in at number three, Kate narrowly beat Emacs. Number two, Nano, as I like to see. And we had a tie at number one for Vim and VS Codium. And you guys remember what we had to do here make a hard decision we did we decided that vim had won enough times and that it was time to hall of fame vim for one year now this is kind of tricky we're doing this right off the top but what this means

is that vim is in the hall of fame it's already kind of an automatic winner and so it is not actually a candidate for this year but we wanted to still get the metrics our end results have a bit of a shake-up as a result of this kate still the number three nano still the number two it's incredible It's so good. But coming in now at the number one spot with 30% of the boats, you ready for this? VS Code. The number one text editor for 2023. All right. VS Code's been nipping at Vim. I think if Vim could have been a candidate, it would have narrowly beat out VS Code. Can you believe Microsoft now, after just a couple of years, has managed to reach

the top of our list over and over again, and this year becomes the winner? I mean, it feels appropriate to me because as I was preparing the groundwork behind the boosties, I was doing it in VS Code. That did not influence the results. I love it.

Yeah, of course not. No. No, but it is how the audience voted. We included, for those of you wondering, yes, we included VS Codium in this count as well. So it's VS Code proper and VS Codium Freedom Edition, Freedom Eagle Edition. Coming in at number one. Now, do they have to win again next year before they get Hall of Fame? I think that's kind of how it works.

Yeah, one time is probably not enough. Yeah, yeah. So they have to do it twice. I remember you were using it a fair bit. Are you still? Oh, yeah, every day. I basically have a VS Code window running every day. You, Brent?

No, actually. But I keep seeing it it like uh in action um there's some cool ai plugins happening that i think geez i probably should jump on this bang wagon alex keeps showing me every couple months like hey there's this new cool thing um but i have a curiosity there as well because while I was in Berlin, someone really tried to get me onto Vim as well, especially with the Vim game and stuff. Wes, how would you say that those two compare? Like, can Vim do all the things a VS Code can do? And like, you're probably going to say it depends, right?

Well, yeah, of course. By and large, yes. I mean, Vim has a fantastic number of plugins and different plugin systems and different plugin managers. Plus, there's NeoVim out there as well, which has, I think, Lua-based plugins. So, yeah, you can make it like pretty much a full-on IDE. VS Code isn't quite to where, you know, something like the IntelliJ or the JetBrains sort of things. But you can make it almost that as well. It's just like a lot more of a graphical experience first, right?

Like, you're in the terminal the entire time. There's a ginormous community of extension developers for VS Code right now that are very active. So like with Vim, you're going to have to decide like what plugin manager am I using, get that installed, and then use it on the command line to install plugins, and then sort of configure those plugins and then get them in VS Code code it's probably going to be more like you search for the common extension for the thing you want to do like oh i'm doing python or oh i need to edit a yaml file and then you just enable the most popular extension you know do your normal sanity checking of it doesn't seem like a garbage

untrustworthy extension but you know there's people out there that make it work yeah but by and large like that just works and so i think that's one of the reasons it's so popular is because kind of like with GNOME, you know, like, you can get really far without having to do a lot of configuration. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right. This next category is the one that I was actually probably the most interested in this year. It is the best desktop Linux distribution, not environment distribution, of 2023. Now, the reason why I was interested is Nix came out of nowhere last year into our second spot. It went from absolutely not registering in the votes to the number two spot for 2022.

Fedora was Hall of Famed, so it wasn't a contender last year. It's back this year as a potential winner. And our number one last year was Pop! OS with 19% of the votes. Oh, that's right. I was kind of surprised. Yeah, me too. Didn't see that coming. So, let's take a look at how the results turned out for 2023. Let's take a look at how the results turned out for 2023. In our third place, a massive upset and a significant triumph and return. After falling two years straight in the ranks, Ubuntu is back in the number three position.

Zubuntu, Kubuntu, Bungie, Ubuntu Mate, all of the different flavors combined came in with 18% of the votes this year. That's remarkable regain. That's huge. It seems appropriate, though. I mean, there's been some really solid releases this year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No, they've definitely been trying to shape up the desktop. And I think maybe some of the gains show there. In the number two position this year, Arch, and that includes Endeavor, Manjaro, Gruta, and others, comes in at 19%. So Arch, just 1% above Ubuntu. And for the first time

ever, the big winner in our number one best desktop distribution of 2023, Nix OS. That's crazy. What? How did it go from barely, never showing up,

and last year it shows up in the charts, and now this year it's the number one? I mean, I know we talk about it a lot, but we didn't vote. No. I was just going to say, how many times did you vote? I didn't vote. Search for Control-F Nix. Okay, vote. No. I was just going to say, how many times did you vote? I didn't vote. Search for Control-F, next.

Okay, vote. No. I've got to think that the versions of us that founded the tuxes would not have expected this. No. No. When we started this four years ago, it wasn't even on our radar. And then it wasn't until last year that it even showed up in the votes by the audience where it showed up where we could even mention it on air. And then, wow.

Wow. I knew this was going to be an interesting category this year, but I don't know. That really is something. I would say this reflects some of the feedback I've been getting at meetups all over the world. Can I say that? I guess I could. Next just gets mentioned over and over, like, that people are just discovering it and get kind of giddy and excited about the prospects. And there's a learning curve, as everybody knows.

I mean, for us, but also for a bunch of listeners, it just created this spark that is so attractive. So this tracks what I've been experiencing. Yeah, it attracts our feedback. Definitely does. And that Nix nerd room, nerds room in the Matrix. It is popping. It's always going. All right, guys. Yeah, it attracts our feedback. Definitely does. And that Nick's nerd room, nerds room in the Matrix. It is popping. It's always going.

All right, guys. Now it's time to talk about the desktop environment of 2023. Last year, GNOME was Hall of Famed, so it wasn't in the running. Coming in at number three in 2022 was Sway. And XFCE. They were actually tied for third spot. The second place winner for desktop environment of the year in 2023 was Cosmic Desktop at number two. And the number one desktop last year with a pretty good margin, KDE Plasma.

Not too surprising there. I mean, a fantastic desktop, of course. This year, Sway comes in at number three for 2023 at 7%. Congratulations, Sway. Cosmic Desktop, again, coming in strong, claiming the number two spot for the second year in a row with 10% of the vote this year. Cosmic is really sitting well with some people. To hang at the number two spot like this,

that's something. And then, ladies and gentlemen, coming in at the number one spot, KDE Plasma with 43%. Oh! The people have spoken. They have. They have.

We have now, I think, officially conducted Plasma to the Hall of Fame. So I have to remember to take plasma off. Or you can maybe, I like to still see where it registers. It's a funny one, right? Yeah. Maybe we mark that it's Hall of Fame? I don't know. But then you've got to vote for one.

Yeah, right. Maybe we mark that it's Hall of Fame? I don't know. But then you've got to vote for one. Yeah, right. What's interesting as well is that I guess that takes Gnome off the Hall of Fame this year. Yeah, Gnome's back now in the voting. So Gnome will be back in the voting.

So it's interesting. That's not too surprising. They're going to oscillate back and forth like that. Until there's an upset. Until there's an upset. I mean, the number two could. What's interesting in the statistics of the votes for this one that got my attention is 8% of voters didn't give a response at all, which was actually the number three position. Yeah. So I'm curious why that is. Gnome, maybe, because Gnome was in the Hall of Fame, potentially.

Could be. Or maybe they are primarily server users. users yeah and they don't have a desktop so that's fine too or maybe they're primarily mac users and they're using uh you know the server side so i'm curious if you didn't vote please write in and let us know why should we have put like wsl as an option oh you know what we should add – note that down. We should add WSL to one of these categories. Wes, I'm curious what you think. But I believe this was – out of all the categories, this was the one that had the most no responses, right, for the like multiple choice categories. Yeah, I think you're right about that. So I would like to know too why if you did pass over the desktop environment, why? Boost in and tell us. Maybe it's one of Brent's theories.

I'm not sure how big of a deal it is, but maybe the other little story here is the XFCE falling a little bit to Sway. Last year they were neck and neck, and now. That is interesting. Now XFCE is a little bit further behind. Mm-hmm. Mm. And Sway, yeah, yeah. People looking for new, maybe, yeah.

Hmm. The real tell will be how it trends next year. Now, it wasn't a huge fall. XFCE still came in with 6%. Yeah. The real tell will be next year, won't it? If it's like 5% or 4%. Oh, and if you're out there thinking I use XFCE and I didn't vote, well, it needed you. It needed you.

It did. All right. Moving on. It is time for the best Linux server distro of the year. Who really had a great year as far as a server distro goes in 2023? Well, it won't surprise you. In 2022, NixOS came in third. Debian came in second. And Ubuntu came in in our number one spot in 2022, last year, and we entered it into the Hall of Fame as a result. So now it's time to review the 2023 results. And our audience voted number three for the best Linux server distro, AlmaLinux with 7%.

AlmaLinux, congratulations. linux with seven percent alma linux congratulations in the number two position good old debian at 17 percent and ladies and gentlemen the number one spot the big upset this year as voted by our The best Linux server distro of 2023 is NixOS. It's some sort of a mini sweep. It is. Let's give them another one. It is a mini sweep for sure. I think this just shows you, really, that both on the desktop and on the server, we are seeing significant interest increase over the last year. are seeing significant interest increase over the last year.

I think it is a little bit more notable than it seems on the surface because we have watched this in the past with different distros, but they don't generally trend up the server and the desktop charts. They'll dominate one, but not both typically. But here we see NixOS climbing both at the same time, same trend over last year and this year too. You know, I was going to challenge these and say, well, it's our audience, so there's bias or whatever. But for instance, in this category, like that's 426 people voted for NixOS.

And that's crazy. Yeah. That's really crazy. Yeah. That's more than just the three people in this room. Yeah. I think what's going to be more telling is Ubuntu is back out of the Hall of Fame for the 2024 Tuxy. So when you vote in the holiday season next year, it's going to be NixOS versus Ubuntu.

Now, which one really claims the server distro? That. I mean, if Nix beats Ubuntu, mind-blowing. That's going to be absolutely mind-blowing. But congratulations to AllMalinux, Debian, and NixOS. Those are fantastic server distros. Indeed. Linode.com slash unplug.

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Go to linode.com slash unplug, get that $100, kick the tires, and see what I've been talking about. See how Linode, now Akamai, will help scale your applications from the cloud to the edge. That's linode.com slash unplugged. And now it's time for the best self-hosted app of the year. In 2022, in the number three position, Home Assistant came in strong. In the number two position, Jellyfin. And in the number one position last year, it was indeed NextCloud. NextCloud.

Now in 2023, What's changed? Home Assistant maintains in the third position. Not bad. Very good project. Very, very, very, very good project. 18%. I would have liked to have seen them pull up a little bit because the year of voice, they crushed it. They crushed it.

Piper, Whisper, and Open WakeWord are all three separate open source projects, plus the Wyoming Protocol, a fourth open source project that make local dictation possible. And it really would take somebody with a little bit of Docker experience and a little bit of Electron or Flutter or whatever to bang together a self-hosted local voice dictation app or assistant thing. It's just, it's awesome. Yeah, what does that mean? Like it's more likely in 2024? Like now that work was done in 2023, it sets the stage for more actual adoption? I'd love to see them move up. I think the reason why they didn't, though, is not because of anything they did, but because of what Plex did.

Because Jellyfin in 2022 came in at the number two spot, and it came in the number two spot this year as well for 2023. 20%. Yeah. And I think the reason why Jellyfin was able to maintain that is, A, good project with some solid updates this year. Really good updates this year, actually. But also, Plex really just crapped the bed this year a couple times. Repeatedly.

Yeah. And so I think Jellyfin benefited from that. People continue to appreciate Jellyfin, so it was able to secure the second place position again in 2023. And this one, this one is undeniable. Coming in with 28% of the votes. Our number one best self-hosted app of the year for 2023 is Nextcloud. 28% of the votes, which means Nextcloud winning two years in a row. Hall of Fame time.

Well deserved. I mean, it's been a rock for us for quite some time. Yeah. Really. Our Nextcloud instance has been, I mean, years now. Years. Just update, didn't it? We should look at how long ago we installed that.

Has it been since Linux Academy? Yeah. At some point during that, I think updated it. We should look at how long ago we installed that. Has it been since Linux Academy? Yeah. At some point during that, I think. Yeah. Mine is about six years old. So this, I think, I think we started this at about the same time. Notable that all three top positions are the exact same as last year, but I think for different reasons this year. I'd be curious to see what happens next year. I mean, high up on the list is Image as well, which people have been loving this year. We've heard a lot of great, great news around Image. Taking NextCloud out of the running for one year

and giving the others a shot, I think is really going to open it up. It's anybody's game with Jellyfin and Home Assistant. That's going to be a fun one. I'm already kind of struggling to wait for the next. I know. I think that might be my favorite category next year. We shall see.

But in the meantime, we should continue on because we have more categories. And this next one is a new category that we launched. So we don't have data for the year before. But this year, we wanted to know what you considered to be the best community chat platform. You know, looking at the different options that are out there for projects, for individuals, self-hosted, whatnot. And I think the results are not going to be too surprising. Number three for 2023 is Telegram. 5%.

Okay, that's a little surprising, I think. I think I would have expected that to be at number two. Because these don't have to be open source, necessarily. Coming in, though, at number two, Discord at 10%. Okay. There's a lot of projects on Discord. Yeah, there are. Yeah, there are.

And, you know, I mean, hey, I am glad Discord runs on Linux just fine. Yeah, well, as well as it does anywhere. And then in the number one position, not too surprising, but it is great to see, ladies and gentlemen, as voted by 26% of our audience, it's Element. Although this was another high no response category. I got to say, I don't think this was a winner of a category this year. I think maybe we might scratch this one. We wanted to see, honestly, I was curious to know if SimpleX would show up. I'll say maybe the category name is a little uncertain.

You said community chat platform. Yeah, what does that mean exactly? Yeah, if you're thinking like, what do projects use? Scratch it. Do you have a scratch soundboard? I just... There you go. I mean, so for your answer, IRC beat out

SimpleX. Alright. Good to know. I guess that one didn't stick. That's too bad because I think that was one of the best app finds we had of the year and didn't seem to really resonate much. Sometimes these chat apps take a while to gain some traction, though. Yeah, they need their market fit. I wonder if we burnt down on chat apps right now.

Yeah, and I think we're either going to have to get burned by Telegram or Signal and then people will start looking again. And then I can get on a soapbox and be like, I told you so. So that'll be nice. That won't be so bad. Is that a prediction? All right. Moving right along. The best Linux hardware of 2023.

This is always a fascinating category. In the last year, in the number three position, the Framework laptop. Number two, the HP Dev 1. And in the number one position, the Steam Deck, of course, because it was the big Steam Deck year with 59% of the vote in 2022. Not too surprising there. So how do things stack up in 2023? Yeah, a little bit different. The Dev 1 slides from the second place position to the third place position with 6%.

A meager 6%. Framework moves up from third place to second place with 19%. A respectable 19%. Good year for Framework. Really good year. Not a good year for the dev one. So not too surprising there, and I think the Framework is the clear winner there.

I don't think there's any disputing that. We finally got to see Brent's new framework. Looking sharp. Yeah, it's a nice piece of kit. Yeah, I think that's a clear winner. And then, in the number one spot this year, the best Linux hardware of 2023 as voted by the Linux Unplugs audiences, is the Steam Deck again. Yes, the Steam Deck. deck with 50 of the vote i guess maybe this is a lot of people getting their steam decks actually receiving the inventory and it's

continuing to get better i mean it's been you know no big huge mistakes or glitches you know what's interesting with my steam deck usage is about six months ago i kind of stopped picking it up i just wasn't playing as much games all of a sudden and it was maybe because the newness had worn off or something like that but then i went on amazon i got myself like a less than 20 little usbc pass-through dock hooked it up to the old tv skis brought in a couple of controllers and started getting games a little more optimized for like playing with people on the tv or whatnot and now every weekend weekend we're back on it. And it's been hooked up to the TV like that entire time. I don't think I've had the Nintendo hooked up since. And it's

a solid piece of gear. But winning twice in a row, you know what that means? Hall of Fame! That's right. The Steam Deck is officially... Hall of Famed. Congratulations to Valve. And I think that probably, I don't, I don't think that's going to matter much. We're not going to see probably a new Steam Deck before the next Tuxes. I wonder if this coming year we'll see some new Linux hardware because it feels like this category, I don't know, was a little stagnant this year.

Yeah. I'd like to see it. I'd like to see that ThinkPad, that 14-inch AMD ThinkPad get over here and get some fixes. We shall see. We shall see. All right. The best open source project for 2023? Well, last year in 2022, number three was Proton, which included Wine and others. Mastodon came in at number two. And Home Assistant came in as the best open source project overall. Yeah, well, there you go. Number two, and Home Assistant came in as the best open source project overall. Yeah, well, there you go. In the number one position. So what are our winners for 2023?

Well, guess what, boys? There are indeed some upsets. In the number three position for 2023, we have Image, the photo backup software that came out last year but really got its user base this year and is fantastic. We had the dev on self-hosted this year. Number two is NextCloud. And in the number one, I think a well-deserved home assistant. The audience said home assistant this year. It finally gets its due.

That means it won last year. It won this year in this category. So it's Hall of Fame now. I know. I'm a little sad to see it go, but I think it deserves it. Home Assistant at a killer year. You are now entered into the Hall of Fame. You know, what's interesting in this category as well is NextCloud didn't even register on the top three last year and yet took the number two spot.

So I'm curious why that is. Somebody boost it and tell us. Why did you vote as the best overall open source project this year when maybe it didn't even register last year? That said, NextCloud had a pretty big year. Yeah, lots of releases and lots of features. Really on the front of the self-hosted AI stuff in there. You know, in this category too, we also saw Bitwarden got pretty well represented.

Asahi Linux, Firefox, and Graphene OS also got pretty well represented. Tailscale comes in here as well as Headscale. And Podverse, a little bit further down on the list, but people also voted Podverse. Sync thing got some love. Photoprism. Stable Diffusion, which got a lot more votes last year, actually still got seven votes this year. Not too bad. And then six people voted for the Linux kernel.

Yeah. That is pretty important. That one should always get an honorary. Here you go. We're grateful for you. I mean, the whole show is powered by Linux. Yeah. So it gets an honorary mention. Honorary taxi, I think.

And then we have one more category, gentlemen. Are you ready? It is the best newcomer of 2023. Now, this is an interesting one because last year, Umbral came in in the third spot position. Stable Diffusion came in in number two. And Asahi Linux came in number one. This has been completely rearranged for 2023. There's one contender that remains on the list. Asahi falls down from number one to the number two position.

Umbral falls off the top three, and in its place, Hyperland moves up as the best newcomer. Yeah. Congratulations, Hyperland. And in the number one best newcomer project, as voted by our audience for 2023, it is Image. I think that's a very, very well-deserved one. Congratulations, Image.

Very good app. Using it on iOS and Android to back up all of my photos. Using Duplicati to take those off-site, encrypted, putting them on storage still. S-T-O-R-J. Don't recommend it, but I'm still using it. Some other good stuff in here, though, like Stable Diffusion coming in at number four, Pipewire, number five, Tailscale at number six. Yeah, and Umbral, still there at number seven.

Still actually on the top ten list. Kind of cool to see. I think that's a nice little app platform. Really nice to see DistroBox in there, too. And every one of these, you've got Nix in there, of course. Oh, Audiobookshelf. Audiobookshelf. Nice to see that in there. Only four votes, got Nix in there, of course. Oh, audiobook shelf. Audiobook shelf. Nice to see that in there.

Only four votes, but it's in there. I see Incus. Isn't that the Fork of Lexty? Ah, okay. That's neat. That's pretty high up, six. Wow. That's kind of surprising, actually.

This category could, the best newcomer category, you always get interesting stuff submitted. And it's got a long tail, but there's good stuff in there. What's interesting about this category to me is you can calculate it two different ways. Like newcomer project would be like, well, what came out in the last maybe year or two, right? Image is a good example of that. But you can also see it as like newcomer as in newly discovered by our audience. Because NixOS, you know, is in there. So is, what, NextCloud as well?

And those are old projects, really, when you look at them. Yeah, true. Very good point. AlmaLinux as well. They've been around for more, but that's like they discovered. And I still think that's an interesting data point, and it's not going to make them win, but it's still interesting to see what shows up. Nostra's in there even.

I don't know if I would have expected that either. That's a good list of projects, actually. I agree with a lot of those. OS, you have an honorable mention. Well, now that the tuxes have come to an end, there's still time to give us feedback. What can we do better next time? We always want to learn from these things.

While the tuxes was a lot of fun, I think there's more interesting data we can learn from our fascinating audience. And, you know, there might be some questions to retire, some questions to add, and maybe some technical improvements to be made here and there. So we've got a link and a feedback form, which we'd love to hear anything, any ideas you might have. and a feedback form, which we'd love to hear anything, any ideas you might have. Collide.com slash unplugged. If you're in IT, if you manage security, you have to hear this. We all know that user devices, albeit great that they're more powerful and more functional,

are also a bigger and bigger vector for assaults on your network and for compromises. Sometimes it's just phishing credentials. It's not device specific. Sometimes it is. It's things are out of date. Maybe they don't have the right software to be compliant with your requirements. These types of things, like they just plague IT and they have now for a decade or more and it could be better. Why not catch that stuff before the devices get on the network? Why not just do a before the devices get on the network? Why not just do a double check of everything, make sure it's all copacetic and in-compliant with your policies before they're allowed to log into your cloud apps? And why not have all that behind one dashboard for Mac, Linux, and Windows? Well, friends, let me introduce you to Collide.

It is the solution to this challenge. For those of you that work in IT, if you deal with Okta and man, is it integrate suite if you do, collide ensures that only secure devices can access your cloud apps. So you don't have to worry about phish credentials or them not having all their softwares up to dates if they're on a Mac or if they're on Windows. And then the other brilliant thing that it does is collide empowers employees directly through your messaging platform of choice to help them sort this out following your policies, procedures, and guides. So that way they can just take care of it, you know, get the antivirus installed before they try to connect

to the cloud app. That way they don't have to ping support for help. So that saves on IT. And that just makes everybody happy. So you got to go experience the solution firsthand. If you're in IT, maybe you could recommend this to your company. Have them go to collide.com slash unplug. They got a demo up there so you can see how seamless all this is. This is what really IT has needed forever. If they had this 10 years ago, more plus whatever it's been now, I'd probably still be in IT. Looks like it's just like, I don't know, like a nice glass of ice water in a desert to me. That's how I look at this. You know, if you've been there, you know what I'm talking about.

Go try it out. Maybe recommend it up the ladder in your company. Go to KOLIDE, that's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Get the demo, support the show. KOLIDE dot com slash unplugged. And now for the very first time, it's the 2023 boosties. Our way to say thank you to those who have supported our various productions this year through boosts. Get ready for this, guys. We're going to get real with the data.

This year, we received 166,371 boosts just to this show alone. Now, I should be clear. Those are like technically those are the invoices. So that includes streams and boosts. You don't have to nuance. I have a question. You know how we do splits. Yeah.

So each boost is really like six invoices. Is that the deal? No, because it's only one invoice to the wallet we're using for the database. Which is 1.4 gigabytes of data now, just tracking the boost messages. We have our top three boost clients castomatic comes in at number three with 26 295 boosts podverse comes in at number two with 30 918 boosts and fountain a staggering 105 867 boosts And then there's quite the tale. 433 from the podcast index,

over 3,000 from Breeze, Podfriend. Wow, Podfriend and Podfans in there, and they're pretty new. Boosie Alive 14. That's actually not a bad showing, yeah. Right. Now, what really blew me away

was the streamed sats. So we often talk about the boost, but another option is just to stream Sats as you this year from 377 unique streamers for a grand total of 1.6 million SATs. Wow. Just, you know, finding their way to us every so often as you're listening. That's so cool. Yeah. to us every so often as you're listening. That's so cool. Yeah, and for us, those are always such a neat experience because you'll see it come in and you're like, oh, somebody's listening right now. And that's just not a signal we've ever had before.

We don't really always know who it is. Sometimes you do, depending on what they decide to show you. But pretty incredible. So if you put all that together, it moves the needle. The sat streaming moves the needle. That's really neat to see. It's fascinating to look at it in this way because in my dashboard, for instance, I see like two SATs. Oh, there's another six SATs.

There's another two SATs. And so you don't really get the sense of the, I don't know, the weight of it all. But, man, this is impressive. Thank you, everybody who has boosted. Let's get to our top boosters. But first, let's acknowledge those streamers. Forward Humor came in with 143,910 sats. Via stream, HalfPint, 108,600 sats.

And MrCostPeland, 94,381 in the third position. That's fantastic. Thank you, everybody there. You know, that would make you a baller in any one of our individual episodes. So we really appreciate that. And now the category I think everybody is wondering. Who sent the most sats? Who boosted the most in 2023?

It's an interesting category and one that we've been looking forward to. And deleted comes in at number three. and one that we've been looking forward to, and Deleted comes in at number three. Over 16 different times he boosted in with a total of 1.2 million sats. Thank you, Deleted. Wow. Yeah.

Wow. The dude abides, no doubt, helped by his boosting from last episode. Boosted us six times and comes in at 1.6 million sats. And our number one position for the sats most sent by a listener goes to hybrid sarcasm with 1.7 million sats wow thank you uh there's a lot of a lot of recognizable names on there i see rotted mood i see dj hunter eric names on there. I see Rotted Mood. I see DJ Hunter. Eric is on there.

Our podcast is on there. Wood Carver. Tech Geek. VT 52, of course. Danny 42 File Selector is on there as well. Look at Enigma making the over one million board with only a single boost. Yep, yep. One boost.

One boost made it to the million sats. That's a binary boost. One zero zero one, one boost. One boost made it to the million sats. That's a binary boost. One, zero, zero, one, one, zero, zero. That's a cool little number that stands out on the charts there. Thank you, everybody, who is helping us with this experiment and sent that in. We do have one more category for you, and that is, who out there sent the most boosts? I like this one because, of course, we appreciate the sats, but the interaction, the conversation is just as important. Absolutely. Absolutely. So who did we hear from the most in 2023?

Well, Gene Bean came in 91 times, 91 boosts, and sent a total of 378,065 sats. That's incredible. Yep. Love you, Bean. That's pretty great. That's pretty great. The show's mascot, the Golden Dragon, came in at number two most boosts sent at 53

and he sent 166,575 sats. Thank you, Dragon. Appreciate you, mascot. And then Faraday Fedora comes in with most boosts sent at 28 boosts, 92,014 sats. So Gene Bean with 91 boosts.

The Golden Dragon with 53 boosts. Faraday Fedora, 28. Sir Alex Gates, though, chomping at the fourth position with 18 boosts. Sack Attack, fifth with 18 as well. Hey, there's our buddy. There's Jeff. There's Jeff with 17 and Magnolia Mayhem. Yeah. Oh, and Oppie1984, True Grits, deleted's our buddy. There's Jeff. There's Jeff with 17 and Magnolia Mayhem. Yeah.

Oh, and Oppie1984, True Grits, deleted in there too, Rotted Mood VT, some good names in there. Those are the most boosts sent. Thank you, everybody, who sent those in. You get yourself an award. We hope to hear from all of you in 2024. I hope so. I hope we can grow that. I hope we have even better numbers to report.

And maybe we'll even have some friends out there that try to get in on the fun, too, because I think it's working really well for us. We really appreciate everybody's support. And, of course, this goes without saying, but our members are absolute rock stars. We are going into prerecorded mode. No live shows, nothing on the peer tube, nothing for mumblers. We're still making sure we have very special recordings just for our members.

Or you can opt to get the ad-free version. Not going to be as useful in the future, but it's still there. It's a little tighter. It's still got all of Drew's nice touches as well. So you get the bootlegs or you get the ad-free. So thank you to everybody who boosts or thank you to our members, unpluggedcore.com.

If you do want to boost, I'm recommending the most simplest method right now is get the Strike app. Not only does it now just work with Fountain automatically, which is fantastic, it's available in 36 countries. They're expanding. You never even have to hold the sats if you don't want to. And you can just boost from a QR code on Fountain's website. And they have a little web form. You can fill out a message. It's really easy. No extra app needed. If you're ready to really experience the podcasting 2.0 revolution, get a new podcast app at

podcastapps.com. There's some really good ones out there. Fountain, Podverse, Castomatic. You can't go wrong. Solid, solid choices. Thank you everybody who boosts in. We really appreciate it. You might say it whips the llama's ass. Before we leave, though,

I just want to let you know that our predictions are coming up next week. So if you're subscribed, be sure to listen to that before the year goes on because you want to know what's coming up before it happens. So our pro tip for the Unplugged audience

is listen to our 2023 predictions the day it comes out so then you'll know before everybody else. Yeah. Get ahead of the game. Maybe make some wild and wacky investments. Yeah. Make some big bets.

And our track record is like, Oh good. Yeah. Well, you know, we will score ourselves. We'll score and see how we did. So I guess everybody can listen and make up their own minds.

Cause, uh, I'm actually not feeling super great. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. So we won't be live next week, but we'll be back on the 7th, and we'll be talking 32-bit challenge.

So I hope you've had a chance to try that. And of course, links to everything we do end up talking about will be at linuxunplugged.com. We have our RSS feed, our contact form, all those goodies over there. I think that's it, guys. Thank you, everybody, for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we'll see you right back here next week. Thank you.