LINUX Unplugged - 546: What You’re Missing about NixOS

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Trying NixOS can be fraught with complexity, half-completed guides, and boring videos. Even if you never plan to switch to NixOS, we invite you to come along for a hype-free ride that digs into one of the most rapidly developing areas of Linux.

We might get into this more today, but I was just thinking about all the angles and things that people talk about with NixOS and the rise of its popularity. I still think there's, well, there's a few aspects that have been underappreciated, and it has nothing to do with the Nix package manager. I think it's kind of remarkable, and Wes, you were talking about this the other day too. Nix is creating something that's enterprise-grade, but there isn't some giant red hat or canonical behind it. Yeah, are we witnessing the rise of the next great non-corporate distro? And obviously there's pluses and minuses to that. You don't get the benefit of the budgets, but you also don't get those budgets disappearing.

Does that mean that Nix, much like things like Debian have been, something we can build things upon and we'll be able to trust it in the future? Or does it mean the commercial interests start rushing in? Well, hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen.

Well, coming up on the show today, we're going to try out Snowflake OS, a NixOS-based Linux distribution that focuses on beginner friendliness and ease of use. And then we're going to answer some of the top questions and concerns that have been sent into the show about trying or switching out NixOS. But don't worry. Even if you plan to never switch to NixOS, we invite you to come along on a hype-free ride that will dig into one of the most rapidly developing areas of Linux just so you can be informed on what's going on.

And then, as always, we'll round it out with some great boosts, picks, and more. So before we get into that, let's say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Get 100 devices for free on your account. It's say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash Linux unplugged. Get 100 devices for free on your account. It's programmable networking. It's private and secure, protected by Wagon. That's right, the noise protocol. I have no inbound ports, but also now

when I launch new apps and services, I just put them directly on my tailnet and all my devices on my tailnet can access them. It's magic and uses magic DNS. Zero config, no fuss, get up and running in minutes on any device you like for 100 devices at tailscale.com slash linux

unplugged. And a big time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hey, Chris. Hello, Brent. Hello. Hello. Hello. Thank you for joining us. Good looking crew. Got some quiet listening too to big quiet listening today.

Big, big energy in that quiet listening room. Add low latency, opus audio in a free software package called Mumble. You can join it too. Details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. You know, every one of them helps. It's like they're here right with us in the studio. Almost. We took that free software experience and packaged it up.

And we call it mumble you can find it at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble few events and dates to remind you all about we have been of course talking about scale coming up in like less than 60 days march 14th and the 15th, going on in Pasadena, California, Scale Linux Expo 19. And if you're going to be there and you'd like to register and take 50% off, JBFTW is your promo code to take 50% off a scale ticket. There's a lot going on. It's the 14th through the 17th for scale itself. And then we got NixCon North America coming in there for the first couple of days of scale. So you could do a combo deal where you then we got NixCon North America coming in there for the first couple of days of scale. So you could do a combo deal where you can go to NixCon

and you can go to scale and hang out with us because I think we're going to make some announcements next week about our plans. So stay tuned for that. It's actually happening. It really is.

I think we're getting pretty close to that milestone. We have been attempting to raise 8 million sats to pay for lodging and travel and to make the coverage possible. And what we're doing, I realized we're building a new model, one that other podcasts could implement as well. And it's a big deal from my perspective, having been doing this since 2008. What we're doing is divorcing free software coverage from the big tech marketing machine. And this is a new model that shifts the entire trajectory of the coverage.

Think about it from our end. We go from the old model, which was, how do we make a trip mutually beneficial for JB and the sponsor and something the audience could enjoy still? Right? That's really it. Because you're asking them to get the checkbook out and write a big old like $5,000 plus check. And that's like minimum cost. JB makes no profit.

Hey, we want to go to an event that isn't actually about you, but we think we can justify why it's relevant to your interest. That's the conversation. It's how good can Chris sell that is what it comes down to. And that's fine, but I don't think that's really how you want to start something like this, especially something that's in the free software realm. With this new model, the audience decides, is that an event that's worth covering? They fund it. It takes the guesswork out for us.

It keeps us focused on the content, on the event, on the coverage. Yeah, we're not trying to add in to make sure we have enough focus on the folks paying for it because the focus is reporting on the conference. Sometimes you can do it right, man. But sometimes it's a big distraction. And if just personal side, you guys know this, but it always means like five months of meetings for me, five, at least six weeks of meetings, every, you know, getting in there and it's so much overhead versus this, which is focused and it's razor thin, which is great because

we need to keep the margins. Then we got to keep costs down. I see it as an investment in a more sustainable way to cover Linux and free software. You've got to realize we've been doing this since 2008, so we've got a pretty good track record too. So it's not like you're just throwing your sats away here. We're going to go do great free software coverage, and you're helping us build that. So we're 53 days away. We're under 60 days.

It's getting close. We have set that goal to 8 million sats to get gas, lodging, some food. We're going to total up today at the end of the boost to see where we're at. We're getting really close. So your next boost could be the one that puts us over the top. That could be. And we may be able to get to that by next episode. Also my birthday episode. So if you want to put by next episode. Also my birthday episode.

So if you want to put it over the top on my birthday episode, I wouldn't mind that at all. And then we should also have some announcements around that. Oh, it's all coming together. I think it's really great. I mean, we can't do this for every event. We can't do it 100 times a year. But every now and then when there's an event that's worth covering, the audience can get behind. This is a model that's going to work, I think. We'll see. I think we're really close. And

Brentley, there is some mentions you wanted to make about upcoming meetups that are just shortly around the corner as well. Yeah, one of the biggest free software conferences, FOSDEM, is happening in a couple of weeks in Europe. If you want to get connected with some JB folks, we do have a dedicated matrix room for FOSDEM called the FOSDEM meetup matrix room. We have a link to that in the show notes. I unfortunately wanted to be there. I don't think that's going to happen unless some kind of multi miracles happen to get me there. But I think you should do a self-meetup, the JB crew, and tell us how it goes. Send us photographs and stories and just generally meet up.

It would be really, really great if somebody wanted to go and then pop in the mumble room and give us a boots on the ground report. Oh, we'd take that for sure. Details in the show notes, as well as a link to that matrix room that Brent mentioned.

So you've decided or are considering taking the NixOS quest. This is an interesting step, and I wonder if you guys agree, but in a way, I think at least right now, NixOS is kind of the final boss fight in Linux. And when you conquer NixOS, you're kind of done with other Linux distros because it changes the way you look at Linux and the way you manage a system. It really, it's not that tough.

I don't mean to make it sound like it's like the end battle of a video game, but it is more challenging than a typical distro. I mean, it undoes a lot of the stuff that, you know, right? I mean, there's no app, there's no t-baggage, there's no DNF. Everything's immutable. The way that the system is built is radically different. I think it's probably maybe harder if you are an experienced Linux user because

there's all that unlearning to do and anything not everything, but a lot of the stuff you might have in your bag of tricks isn't going to work the same. And you absolutely could warm up by installing the Nix Package Manager on your distro of choice. It is just a package manager. It just happens to be a great package manager they describe it as a cross-platform package manager that uses a deployment model where software is installed

into unique directories generated through cryptographic hashes that is true and it just also happens to make a banger of an os when you use that system. And so I've definitely seen a trend with the questions that come into the show via Matrix, via Boost, via email. They're never ever about running the Nix package manager on their distro. I mean, I shouldn't say ever.

We've seen some feedback about it. But the vast, vast majority is people just going straight into NixOS all the way. That's where the questions seem to be. Not so much around just trying Nix out on Fedora. Yeah, I wonder how much is that a lack of interest? I suppose it's, you know, if you're well-served by Flatpaks,

and Fedora's got a lot of great applications, and if you're not a developer trying to package or run your own apps, maybe we haven't made a pitch that's been that great. Or do you think that kind of just works for folks and NixOS is where more of the mysteries lie? It might be a lack of understanding because it's not normal that you can just take a package manager from a distro and just install it on another distro or on macOS. That's not a normal thing. And so I don't know if the benefits are inherently obvious. Right. It also kind of like it doesn't, it's not like it forces itself with a bunch of hooks deep into your system. So yeah, it's kind of unique, maybe not totally unique, but yeah, a rare tool that can so lightly sit and also add so many packages to your system. But the reason why I think there is a market for it just on other distros is because the AUR is popular.

And there are entire groups of people that adopt Arch for the AUR. So imagine you could have the AUR or the depth of the AUR but on any distro you want. Even some old Debian install. Or Slackware, I think. I've never tried it on Slackware, but I imagine you could probably get it working on Slackware. Yeah, I mean, it brings so much power to bear and just having a build system and you know how many things have been solved if you can get nicks working

then you can get a lot of stuff working does it feel like a bit of a miss at the AUR didn't take this approach hmm no I think I mean I don't know what you think Wes but it feels like you had to have the AUR before you could have this perhaps well yeah and it's also like you know part of the power and what makes it a little

tricky is Nix is going back and, you know, redoing things from so many different layers. And I think where, you know, AUR fits more into the sort of Arch version of simplicity, which is, you know, take the tools we have now and just make them work in a very simple, clear way. And that's one of the nice things about Arch, right? The AUR is you don't have a ton of fancy tooling, but also, you know, the files to manage it are just really simple to get started with. I think, too, there's some use cases

for Nix OS itself that are very compelling that I'd like to touch on for a moment. I think if you have multiple systems, having a central config that you can move between your systems and just modify slightly for each box and maybe even manage it through GitHub or just copy a text file over a thumb drive, however you like to do it, is so super nice. It's kind of unquantifiable how many ways it improves your life. And then additionally, when you're managing computers for family,

like I got three kids, each one of them has a laptop. We're all Nix now. We're all Nix on all of their systems because it is essentially the same computer for all three of them with slight modifications of their user experience. And when you solve a problem in Nix, that problem is generally solved forever. And in every distro, I've had this problem with Dylan's hybrid graphics. He has an AMD graphics card built in with an NVIDIA dedicated card. The more common scenario is Intel built in NVIDIA hybrid graphics. But this is a Ryzen system. So it's AMD GPU, NVIDIA GPU. A lot of distros break on that. Fedora has broken multiple times for me on that. On NixOS, it's three config lines and it's solved forever. And then if I ever get another system

that has that same setup, I copy those three lines and I paste it on my other computer and it's solved. That's a massive time saver for me. Even if I had to learn that syntax once, which I did, I now have it in like a repository of my Nix configs and I can just go grab that whenever I need it and it's a solved problem going forward. That saves me time long term and I feel like I'm investing in a set of skills that gives me more power and more capabilities as time goes on to have more management, more control over my systems and to make them more exactly what I expect and rock solid.

There's also something to having, you know, sort of one spot to look, both in terms of the config file, but also just like what you can do, right? Like, obviously you can push Nix and do all kinds of stuff, but if you're just using it as a, you know, as a user of NixOS, you've got, you know, online and a list of packages and a list of services.

So you, you know, instead of having to wonder, what can I do with this box? It's kind of presented to you in the manual and in other places of like, look, you have all of these options that all you got to do is check yes. What I appreciate as well is that you can share those configs with other folks. Like Chris, that's one thing you've been enjoying the most recently is our listeners sending in their configs, and you can learn quite quickly what someone's system looks like

and feels like and what features they have just from a few lines of text. And that's powerful. Yeah. Or that's how you solved that, right? Oh, that's how you did that is the other one that's nice about it. Oh, okay. I'll grab that. And you can actually try it, right? Like you can pop down stuff from their configure, their whole config, rebuild your system and try it out and then go back to your config. So here's some common questions. We've broken them down into a couple that seem to be the most frequently repeated.

And one was, is NixOS really only for people who like to tinker? Sounds like when we talk about it, because I guess we make it sound like it's a tinkerer's thing. Is NixOS only for people who like to tinker? No, I don't think so. I mean, if you're going to get the most, if you're going to dive in, if you're going to get the most, if you're going to dive in,

if you're going to learn about Nix and the Nix language and, you know, all these things, then, I mean, you probably got to be a computer user interested in understanding those things. But in some sense, the power of NixOS

is that it kind of just presents you with the one config file. And, you know, that can be managed graphically. We'll talk about that. But in some sense, it's just like, here's a fancy JSON file that you can play with be managed graphically we'll talk about that but um in some sense it's just like here's a fancy json file that you can play with to mess with your thing and you don't have to tinker there's not a lot of options you only get the options exposed by the next

us modules if you don't do anything custom so no i don't think so well i've used it in both cases i've used it in like an appliance machine case where you just want it to work and to work as expected. And that has been fabulous. But also I think it's a tinkering enabler if you want it to be, because let's say you want to try a new desktop environment. Well, you just switch that line in your config and boom, you've got it. And rolling back those changes is just as trivial. So in a way, I've felt much safer tinkering on this system than I have with previous classic Linux distributions because it felt like those changes were less permanent. And I think that's a real enabler too. You don't have to be a tinkerer, but maybe you become one because it's just easier and safer. Yeah, I'll echo that.

I think I've seen both. My home server, I change very little. It is very much an appliance. About once a month I update it. And that's about it. It works. It's fine. Same with our OBS machine here in the studio.

Nix OS running Plasma. We change it very little. It has one job. Every now and then, though, we decide to go a little crazy. And like, I don't know, three months ago or something, we decided, let's try out Wayland. Let's try out Pipewire. Let's try out Plasma 6. Like we could just do all these different things and replumb the whole system. Something we've never done when it was an Ubuntu based system because it was so fragile. We literally knew we were going to put this thing into a broken state,

one of our primary recording broadcasting machines. We knew we were going to be breaking it. Yeah, one of the updates we did ended up when you rebooted that it totally busted graphics acceleration, so the mouse was just like slow lagging across the screen. Like three frames a second. And we were able to do the testing that we wanted, check to see what had changed, see if that feature was there that we needed.

And then we rebooted, selected the old instance. It was like we'd never done any of that. So it can enable tinkering. But what I have found in my personal experience is it starts with tinkering and then you kind of once you're done, you've solved it. You don't really adjust it anymore. And so as time goes on, there's nothing really to tinker with anymore because you've solved it. It becomes a lot less. NixOS, it breaks this dichotomy we generally think about with Linux distros, where you have your stable distros, like your Santos's, or maybe Debian, and your Mint's out there for desktops. And then you have your more cutting edge, leading edge, like Fedora and Arch.

And you generally got to pick in somewhere in this gradient. And that's how you decide what, you know, kind of software update cadence you're going to have and risk tolerance that you have, et cetera. Stable and slow. Stable or slow. Stable or slow. That's not Nix.

With Nix, you could have appliance level stability. You could go with an LTS kernel. You could pin certain versions. If something doesn't work, you you reboot you select a previous state your your system config changes updates they sanity check before the system will build or execute them i don't think most people are getting their heads around this yet this whole problem of do i go cutting edge or super stable gone do i go rolling do i go release gone it's gone and you know the other thing that's gone is that cruft that builds up with these old systems yeah no kidding right all the extra files that end up scattered around etsy and slash user bar somewhere you try things

install things sometimes things have build dependencies. Right. You end up, yeah, you've added things and then you go to update and, oh, right, that PPA, it's broken now. Yeah. But I was using that dependency when I got this other thing. Yeah, like this install in front of us here is from 2017. There's a lot of stuff on this. I mean, it's still running, but every about twice a year, actually, app completely breaks on it now.

I've got to go in and go into single user mode and fix things. That is also gone. It's gone. You can just say goodbye to it. You can switch. You can switch desktop environments. You can be a Plasma user one day and a GNOME user the next day. And it was like it was never installed.

It's so clean. I think it's just a massive improvement because it clears out all this technical debt that accumulates on your install over time. And so the install always feels sort of fresh. I mean, my home directory gets to be a mess over time because that's me. Right, but you even have like Nix impermanence options. If you want, you can go whole hog on this. The system though, and I've got multiple now that have been installed for a while, feels just as clean and pure as it did the day I installed it.

I think that's a large part a consequence of the immutability and the sort of building from the bottom up design, right? Like on a regular Linux system, on an Ubuntu box, you're mutating everything in place, right? You're banging against your one install. You're messing with stuff. You can't really undo it in a clean way. You just have to, you know, you hope that everything gets in place, right? You're banging against your one install. You're messing with stuff. Yes. You can't really undo it in a clean way.

You just have to, you know, you hope that everything gets removed and, you know, you didn't lose anything. But with Nix, everything's in the Nix door and the system is composed up like a tree from that. So if it's no longer referenced by anything, Nix knows they can just collect that garbage for you. Another question we get is,

what is the software experience like? You know, set up an installation, how hard is that? And how big is the repo? Is it deep compared to Ubuntu? What is setting up things like? The answer there is, you know, you can go hard mode

and do the command line, or you can download their graphical installer for GNOME Plasma x86 and I think ARM64. Definitely not 32-bit though. Womp womp. Or you could, you know, you could try something like Snowflake, which we're going to talk about in a moment. It is, I think ARM64. Definitely not 32-bit, though. Womp, womp. Or you could, you know, you could try something like Snowflake, which we're going to talk about in a moment.

It is, I think, you know, if you're someone that's done an Arch installer comfortable on the command line, the process is relatively, you know, there's only a couple of commands. The main part of that is you're going to have to have a configuration file, and that's a whole thing to learn out of itself.

But if you have a config file and you're trying to install a system from it, real simple. It is very, yeah,. But if you have a config file and you're trying to install a system from it, real simple. It is very, yeah, it could be a pretty basic config file. I would say it's substantially easier than Gen 2 and noticeably quicker and easier than Arch from the command line.

You know, if you're going with other command line installation options. As far as the depth of the software repository, probably one of the deepest because it doesn't have that, doesn't have these different universe and the main repo and the AUR. It doesn't have these different differences. It's just the

Nix repository. I think it's, what, like 80,000 packages or something. It does have its own quirks, right? Sometimes there'll be some lag in versions, usually not a ton, but if it's a frequently updated project, it might be a couple point releases. Often for those things, you can, you know,

there's ways out if you want to be able to build it yourself or reference some binary file or use it in a container or something. And then also, you know, it is, to some extent, there are releases, but it's like there's also Unstable, which is like a rolling, and you don't really get

quite the, like if you're going from Ubuntu LTS experience, you don't get, well, you might in practice have that stability if you're concerned about version numbers. Changing and whatnot, updating. Yeah, you're not going to get that. Unless you do some tomfoolery to pin to a specific version or something like that. And that's, for those types of workloads where you're concerned about specific versions. That's where I really think we've moved to containers or VMs. And then you run a host NIC system. I want to talk about running some services on NICs, though, because this is also where it's just so damn sweet.

I decided to set up SyncThing on a NICs server we have running here in the studio. Again, it's probably about five lines of code that get added to the Nix config. When I say code, it's easy to understand YAML, basically. Easy to read. You could have never read it before in your life, and if you've ever seen a config file and you read it, you'd understand what it's doing instantly. It's the same as a lot, right?

Like, you have keys and values for things, and you have lists of stuff, and just some combinations of that. And it's easy to kind of understand, okay, if somebody put that, I should replace it with my path, and it's really easy. So I put SyncThing in there, and what's nice about this method in Nix is when you install SyncThing, you are doing everything at once. You're telling the system, I want SyncThing.

I want the service enabled. I want it to set up a systemd unit file. I want it to start that for me. I want to open a port in my firewall if you have one. file. I want it to start that for me. I want to open a port in my firewall if you have one. I want it to make sure it's running as this user. And all of that is just in these like four or five lines. And then you save it and you build that config. And when the config is initialized, sync thing starts and you now have a sync thing server. It's really easy because every update you do now, that's incorporated.

So installing something like Tailscale is one line in the config. It's like, turn the service on, and Nix knows that, well, if I'm turning on this Tailscale service, well, then I probably got to figure out everything that that depends on, which means I need to install Tailscale, and it just does everything from there. And it makes it so simple. I set up a SyncThing server running on Tailscale in 15 minutes just so I could start syncing data off of our server here that's dying. And I thought, I'll do it over sync thing. Why not?

It's quick. And it was. And it's really nice to do that one little like, yeah, I want it running as this user. Okay, build again. Yeah, I've done that to just run Jellyfin on Nix before. You know, just stand it up real quick, you know? Yeah.

Give guests access, and away you go. The other neat part is, you know, we were doing the 32-bit challenge. With Nix, you've got binary caches, so Tailscale just installs real quick and easy. Yes. But if you need to, Nix is ready to go build the whole thing, including building the Go toolchain for you. So you can rely on it as long as you've got the time, but you can also have your own binary cache if you have a bunch of stuff that you need.

So there's a lot of escape hatches. Before we get to Snowflake, our last question, Hybrid Sarcasm asked on Matrix, what are some great resources you guys recommend? I want to remind everybody that listener Olympia Mike wrote a Getting Started with NixOS blog post and a couple other in that series.

We'll link to that in the show notes. There's the Zero to Nix series as well. And then a little tip that's been really popular in our community for people that are trying out NixOS. Install DistroBox. If you can't figure out – if you're trying something on Nix and you can't figure out how to get it to work on Nix. You have a little escape hatch with DistroBox. You could have an Arch environment or a Fedora environment or an Ubuntu environment, whatever it is, Debian, whatever, that you can open up in your terminal. And it's a familiar environment that will have everything you expect and everything your applications expect. And you can get the job done. And this has been one of the go-to cheat codes when people are fighting the final Nix boss is they use Distrobox

as an escape hatch for a bit to do what they need and then get back on their main system. So do consider Distrobox. We've talked about it before on the show, but I think it does make transitioning to NixOS a little simpler, a little easier to have that optionality. You also might consider just trying it out in a virtual machine before you go onto a system. I think like having, you know, installed it once and then looked at the configuration file and maybe tried to change a couple of things, but, you know, just in a nice environment where you can easily reboot it or restore it. That'll give you a lot more confidence when you go to say install on your laptop or run a VPS or something. Collide.com slash unplugged. If you're in IT, if you deal with the security aspect of IT,

particularly listen to this. I think this would have been a fantastic tool back in my day. When I was in IT, this has been a bit now, but bring your own device was really just starting with the iPhone. Hadn't really moved to devices like laptops and cloud services weren't as prominent as they are today. Now, there's a lot of different things out there that can impact the end user that they don't even realize is happening. It's not necessarily their fault, but phished credentials are definitely a problem. Maybe outdated software. Maybe their machines config or build just isn't compliant with your policies.

Now, how do you deal with that in a scalable way that doesn't drain resources in IT? It's Collide. Collide.com slash unplugged. Go check this out. Collide is the answer to all of this. You can say goodbye to phished credentials and non-compliant devices because Collide will help analyze and make sure a system is compliant, up to date, and working and secure before it connects to your apps and your network. How about that? And it gives you a single pane of glass to manage the different OSs your users might have, Windows, Linux, and macOS and their mobile devices all in one place where you can run reports, do the auditing that you need to do.

And here's another bit. And this is why I think you should go to collide.com slash unplugged and see the demo because here's another bit that I think is so great. Collide engages directly with the end users to help them resolve the issue. to help them resolve the issue. You know, if it's like you need a new version of antivirus or you have to have a better password, why have that go in as a ticket and take 20, 30, 45 minutes when somebody's done the whole complete cycle of somebody else's time just to resolve that one problem when the user would be happy to fix it?

They could fix it quick. And it de-escalates that edge that can happen between end users and IT because we're empowering users now to solve these problems themselves right away using your existing policies and resources and the messaging platform you'd like. That's what Collide does. I think you've got to go see this demo because it really feels like it could just take out

some of the low-hanging fruit, make everybody a little happier, a little more secure, and make sure everything is proper before it gets connected. Go experience it firsthand. It really is great. Go discover it.

Collide.com. That's K-O-L-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Get a demo and support the show. Collide.com slash unplugged. Well, Chris, you brought to our attention Snowflake OS, which is touted as NixOS for starters. It's supposed to make things nice and simple. And I will say there are some nice things about it. I know you used it for most of the week. How did it go? I was pretty impressed. Snowflake OS definitely is designed at the

beginner, but it does provide some nice advanced options too. So it's kind of funny. We'll get into that. And I think we'll also get into the question of is this appropriate for NixOS as well. But we can save that for a moment, boys. Let's just get into some of the basics that I observed. They've booted right into a nice GNOME desktop, and they have something called the iSickle installer that is very nice. It's similar.

It's not too, it's not too unsimilar to just other distro installers that you're used to, but it's pretty quick. I don't, I don't think it's anything. I liked that it launched a G parted for me to do my, Oh yeah. That was nice.

Partition. Cause I'm just going to do that anyway. And I don't think it's written anything offensive. It's GTK4 and Libidwadia. So it looks good. Rust under the hood. Oh, it is.

Yeah. There's a lot of rust in Snowflake OS. It seems GTK4 in Libidwedia, so it looks good. Rust under the hood. Oh, it is. Yeah, there's a lot of rust in Snowflake OS, it seems. Boom, boom, pow! Nice. You got three options in your old install. And by the way, you're going to need more than 20 gigs free. Not just 20 gigs, but more than 20 gigs.

You can't get around that. I only had 20 gigs because I was doing one of my VMs and RAM things, right? You just got to do the custom partitioning. It won't actually stop you. Yeah, if you do the auto partitioner, it will. But if you have like 21 gigs, it'll do it. There's three

options, basic, expert, or try live. And with basic, you set your language, your time, you know, you select the disk, just basic entire disk if you want. You could kick out to gparted still. Boy, advanced though is the way to go. The advanced installs, it's the same at first, but then like, you know, you can set your host name, your root password. You can do extra package managers like flat pack or app image. Although app image caused my install not to work. So I had to go back and only choose flat pack.

And you also, which I think is really great for workstation use cases. The installer lets you choose between the long-term support kernel, the absolute latest kernel, or maybe you just want to go all Libre, get your RMS on, or the Zen kernel, if you still want to do that. And I thought that was really nice in the advanced mode. And then it appears as it's installing, everything's a flake. It's not setting up channels. It's not using Nix environment. It's flakes. And yeah, GNOME by default.

I got caught by the Flakes setup because I got this installed and went to just like, hey, I wonder what they have in their Nix config. So I went like, you know, nano, because obviously, nano at ZNixOS, you know, config. As one does. And it's

basically empty. And at first I kind of freaked out slightly about that. I was like, oh, no, no, right, right, right, right. They're doing this a little differently. Yeah, I think on the installed system there's just a flake.nix in the NXOS. Ooh, it's wild. It's a wild place, my friends.

It's a wild place, but it gets you access to a lot of software and they set it up for you, so it's done right. It's definitely in a sort of like kitchen sink style, seemingly, right? It's installing a lot sort of like kitchen sink style seemingly, right? It's installing a lot of packages, which is why it needs all that disk space. But you do have stuff like a podcast client already installed and ready to go, so that might be nice for some setups.

Yeah, I mean, just to get this out of the way, because I know this is going to be one of the number one things we're going to hear from people. Yes, it does take longer to install Nix this way than just doing it from the command line. Yes, it does take longer to install Nix this way than just doing it from the command line. Yes. The point is we need something that is available to folks that were never going to do it on the command line. Yeah, and if they're okay with

hitting Nix a couple times and then walking away, checking on it. I think distributions like Manjaro, not to make a comparison, or Endeavor OS, again not comparing, or Entergros, they brought Arch to a totally new audience of user. And I think Arch benefited from that. And I believe Snowflake is going to do the same thing for NixOS.

Even though NixOS has its own graphical installer, it's really not that hard. There's some good defaults here. There are. I mean, there is a lot of stuff for install, but there's some good stuff in here. A lot of it's just how I would have set it up and done anyways. Yeah, no, it feels like a super usable system, sort of, right out of the gate, which is really nice. I'm curious what you gentlemen think, because I ended up with mixed emotions about how to install software. Because my first look was like, oh, if I'm going to install NixOS for my father, like, he just wants to install software with a GUI, right?

OS for my father. Like he just wants to install software with a GUI, right? And so they have the NixOS software center here, which is actually really nice and speedy and like has some cool options to even just run the software, you know, temporarily in the Nix kind of fashions, just as a little dropdown. Yeah, that's another Rust app there. Oh, Wes is counting them. That's two at least right now. But that got me thinking about what's happening under the hood, because the GUI there makes things super, super, super easy and nice and really friendly and discoverable. But then if you're installing this as a bit of a NixOS beginner and tinkerer, then with all the flakes underneath, I'm not sure if it's actually that beginner friendly. If you want to get away from the gooey a little bit and start to poke around in the system itself i mean i think there

might just be a certain amount of essential complexity if you do want to get out of the out of the gooey out of the easy path and start playing with it um is that where you go into tinkering mode i'm not like if you haven't NICs, I'm not sure if flakes would necessarily be that much more confusing. That's my thought. If you're going to start from zero anyways, you're just learning this path instead of the path where we put it in the config file. And then you do a rebuild. So I'm outdated is what you're saying.

You're already an old man that fast. Can you believe it? It's only been a year now. Like, for instance, by default here, if I go to install GNOME Terminal, because you get the new one with the console app by default. By default, it'll install it into your Nix profile,

just like running Nix space profile on the command line. And so if you're already doing that with the Flake version of Nixenv, basically, then it would be the place you expect. I don't really think the end user that's trying out Snowflake needs to worry about any of this complexity because to Brent's point, the Software Center,

it works just like GNOME Software Center. You would have no idea what it's doing under the hood other than it just installs app and work. I installed Mumble. I installed Audacity. I installed a couple of things just through this. And the only way I really knew what it was doing was by investigating under the hood. There was no outward decision I had to make or technical aspect to NixOS I needed to understand to get those applications. It's the first time I've ever used a graphical application to install a Nix app.

And I like it. I like it because it's useful for discovery, just like the same reason I like Flathub. I find out about stuff by using applications or services or websites like this. And the fact that it's not doing some weird strange like Debian repository add and importing

GPG keys that you know this HTTP endpoint is going to be available for three years and it's going to go away. I don't have to worry about any of that to get access to a giant repository software. So I think in terms of integrating applications like the software center for Nix, they nailed it. They have a couple other tools that they want to integrate in there too. I love – and Brent noticed this that in the Nix software center, because it's powered by Nix, it also gives you the option to run without installing um you know because one way or another just has to get into the next door you don't have to make it permanent i love that about nix um that's one of the one of the people

when people ask like what's so great about it i'm like well you ever wanted to just install an app for a few minutes or for one job and then blow it away when you're done you can do that you say like when does that come up well i had to like convert some file format the other day or no it was a compression it was a compression format i had to uncompress something that was like a file format i never compression format i never get in i don't need that tool installed regularly so i just installed it for that session i think you can even if you kind of take it a little farther use it changes a little bit how you think about the software on your system

because it's like, I've been running VS Code this way. The fact that it just ends up cached, and for the most part I just run it off my system, is sort of a secondary implementation optimization detail. And I think about, like, I'm just running this next package's hash VS Code. You have this almost full path to specifying this application that you want to run. It's not some state on your system. It's like a abstract universal thing.

Any system you can just refer to. I want to run Nix packages X and Nix will summon it forth for you. And now you have it. So there's also, so I guess takeaway with Snowflake OS, kind of a compelling idea. Seems like, you know, I think it's been around for a couple of years now. Started in 2022, I think. Don't think it's a huge team, but I like what they're doing.

You know, there's some interesting tools they're trying to build. They've got several different wrappers. There's a snow program that sits on top. They've got some tooling to make flakes easier to work with.

They're also part of this, and I don't quite understand the Snowfall organization over at snowfall.org, which seems to be trying to come up with like a unified set of configuration and ideas and packages and flakes and command line tools that just kind of can be common across all different NICs. Yeah, some of that I saw was sort of like programmable hooks into the NICs configuration. So like in the software center, one option is to install into your Nix profile as a user. But if you want to install for the system, you know, so everyone has access

to it, that's going to have to update your configuration.nix. And they've got hooks under in the system, you know, in some Rust libraries and tools that have sort of built abstractions on top of that so it can programmatically modify your configuration for you. They also ship a graphical configuration editor. Did you try that? Oh, no, I did not get to try that. That was on my list of things to try, but I did not end up I could not get mine to install. And it was because of

the virtual environment I was using, which I'm embarrassed about. That was neat. I mean, it's a GTK sort of app to edit your configuration.nix. I did want to try that. It's not in the, I don't think it's in the live session. Ah, that makes sense, I suppose.

It did work. I mostly was using it as a viewer. I tried to edit one thing. I was trying to, I was doing it in a VM as well in QEMU and I had a Spice session going. Yeah. So I was trying to enable the Spice agent. Sure.

It enables like better acceleration and flexible window size. Which is much nicer when you're using them. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's for sure. Uh, so I wanted to enable that.

And what was nice about it is it was sort of a fast index to all the options that exist in the configuration, right? Like you can go look at that in the next search online, like a reference manual, right? I could just see. So it told me,

I was like, how do you, is it spice dash? But you know, what's the exact name of it? And that was right there. That's sweet. It almost let me flip it to told me. I was like, is it spice-? What's the exact name of it? And that was right there. That's sweet. It almost let me flip it to true.

It would be like.enabled equals true. That didn't work. I was writing it back out, and I got some sort of invalid thing. I went and went, now knowing exactly what to type in, updated the file myself, updated the system. Totally worked, and then I could then see that change in the app. So I don't know. Some bugs. This is all definitely in the file myself, updated the system, totally worked. And then I could then see that change in the app. So I don't know. Some bugs.

This is all definitely in the alpha stage, but I like where this is going. It really could be the noobs introduction to NixOS to make it approachable to a whole new set of people where they can benefit from the immutable rollbacks, the software selection, the stability, the options in the different kernels there. And they don't have to necessarily immediately learn an entire new way to like write a syntax config for a Linux system.

You know, I have a pet peeve for you guys that I ran into that turned out to be a success story, I think. Oh. If you go to the Snowflake OS website, which is actually really nice looking and nice and simple and easy to find what you need, basically the giant download button, it leads you to SourceForge to download their ISO. And that's where my pet peeve comes in. I'm not a huge fan of that, mostly because I've run into just really slow download speeds and not to blame my space internet or anything.

Yeah, you're right. No, you're right. I'm not getting great speeds either at the moment. So I kicked off the download and realized it was, well, it was reporting back that it was going to take three to four hours for me, which I can't explain why that was. But I decided that it was easier to just build the Snowflake OS ISO myself using NixCache and from the repository for the Snowflake OS ISO. It's super easy. It's like one command if you've got Nix installed already.

So I went that route and that downloaded and built way faster than it did to download from SourceForge. So that would be a little tip if you're thinking of trying this out and you are growing impatient like I did. I would invite folks to boost in. Let us know. Are you interested in an Integros-like solution for NixOS that makes it more approachable to try out? I think my takeaway is I'd use it sometimes. Yeah, I'm curious.

I could see maybe like for one of my folks' machine. You know, obviously I could set one of those up myself with Nix and have it very similar. But, you know, you only have so much admin time with some of those machines. And if you could just, you know, here's the thing. Snowflake's a good base. I can make a couple of tweaks programmatically on top. That could be nice. I don't know if it's not quite ready there yet. I think it's still quite new, but it could get there pretty quick.

You know, I'm quite tempted to keep using this i didn't run into any like game changer alpha breaking you know changes i i don't think either of you did either uh but man this solves a problem that i've been looking for ever since we started discovering nixos the kind of just set it up and it's good to go and you can use your old paradigms to install software via GUI if you want and then learn it as you go. That's really approachable. And like I said, a NixOS that's nice and easy for my folks or for little appliance machines here and there, tempting.

So yeah, I think I might keep this in my back pocket. I'm going to give it a recommend. I like the aesthetic of the project as well. I think they've got a good look going. I'm encouraged by what feels like a bit of a Nix ecosystem between the tooling, these Rust apps

that Wes mentioned, and others that are kind of all coming together to form like a like a Nix union. What I was thinking about too is I feel like this might be a project to look at as some best practices as well. I don't know if anyone has any opinions on how they're implementing some of these features and I'd be interested to hear what the community thinks of that but if you're learning NixOS just having a peek under the sheets here of what's going on is, I think, maybe kind of a neat way to learn this as well. So I was looking at it from that perspective. And now it is time for the boost. So if you've been wondering,

how are we going to take the boost and then book a place to stay or get gasoline in our vehicles? Well, that's been a problem that we've solved using various tools over the years in different ways. But I have a solution that really, really worked for us. And I wanted to tell you guys about it. And this is not a paid sponsorship. This is I am a customer and I did make I did contact them and get an affiliate link because I liked them. They're called the Bitcoin Company. And it is a really deep library of gift certificates and online services that you can purchase with sats over Lightning or on-chain. And there's a lot of ways to solve this problem, like to spend your sats,

but I don't know if I like all these different companies out there, but I like the Bitcoin company. First of all, it's important to me they do support Lightning. Anybody that's boosted into the shows know once you're on Lightning, it's nice to just stay on the Lightning network. It's cheap. It's fast. It's magic. That's actually how I came across the Bitcoin company because I wanted – when we're on the road, I wanted us to be able to buy these things using Lightning and not have to wait for on-chain confirmations. And so they have this huge, huge library, which is where I ended up getting our Airbnb gift cards.

And after that, I contacted them about our trip and just said, hey, I just want you to know we're a Linux podcast supported by Boost. And we're doing this road trip and we're going to be using your company services to do that and justin wrote back to me get this he's a fedora using graphing os loving subscriber to the value for value economics guy and uh so we got in you can imagine a very nerdy conversation and the timing and all this worked out perfect with our trip to scale and texas linux fest so what we're doing is we're going to have an affiliate code link or you can use the referral code unplugged. And you'll get $5 of in-app credit once you spend over $21. Like you get spend $30 on a gift card. You'll get $5 in-app credit and a 1,000 SAP bonus.

And our road trip account will get a 10% rewards kickback from what you buy. It doesn't cost you any more. We'll just get some SATs to put towards a scale in Texas Linux Fest in that account. Oh, that's neat. So we'll put it in there. It's the bitcoincompany.com. Referral code unplugged. We'll have a link in the show notes. They got a web app. That's what I

use. They got a mobile app too. And Wes, they got an API. Ooh. Yeah, I think that'd be fun. That would be really interesting to see if we could build our own They got a mobile app too. And Wes, they got an API. Yeah, I think that'd be fun. That would be really interesting to see if we could build our own little tools to like, boom, just buy a gas card. Yeah. Like through the API. I don't know.

We'll see. It's pretty neat. Now you can spend your sats and you can keep the show on the road at the same time. You earn Bitcoin with every – you can get the gift cards. You can get – they have like the Visa and MasterCard prepaid cards that you can buy. You can get eSIMs for your cellular phone, any of that kind of stuff. You can do shopping through them and then kick back a little bit to the show. If you use the referral code unplugged or our link, when you sign up with your account, it's the bitcoincompany.com. And I like them a lot. So that's the mechanism we'll be using on our road trip. That's why it's nice to get that kickback,

because it'll help go towards the gas purchases and whatnot. And also something else I want to mention, I'll be mentioning for a couple more episodes, if you're looking for an easy way to move your on-chain sats into Lightning, we've got bolts.exchange. It's pretty great. We've used it before. Yeah, quick, easy to use. So smooth. It's really impressive how good all this stuff's getting, too before. Yeah, quick, easy to use. So smooth.

It's really impressive how good all this stuff's getting, too. Thank you, everybody who does Boost. And let's start with the Boost, gentlemen. Let's get into it. Let me load up my things over here because this one's a big one. It's coming in. Deleted Boost in across two Boosts with one million sacks. Hey, Richard Lobster!

Like a quadrupled Wallaby? I don't even know. Talk about moving the needle. Really, really appreciate that. Using Fountain and, oh, here we go. I like, you know, Delete shows up with the sats when he drops the challenges. You know, I respect that. And it also makes it hard for us not to take it quite seriously.

He writes, I've got a new challenge for the LUP team if you're up for it. Binary free month. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Make it a month without downloading or installing any compiled apps or OS, excluding firmwares and the drivers, you know, or any blobs. Everything comes from source. Set up your own server to compile your OS, updates and apps, and compile it on your own computer. OS ISOs can only be used to bootstrap.

Are we finally doing Gentoo? Is that what this is? I'm trying to think through the mechanisms of this a little bit. You could really do this with almost any distro, although Gentoo and Nix are kind of, you could do it by default. Yeah, but they make it easier probably. Yeah. I mean, we could do one build. Okay, I'm wondering, could we do one build server, like on Linode. Yeah. I mean, we could do one build. Okay, I'm wondering.

Could we do one build server? Like on Linode? Oh. I'd share. So like if I build a package, does that count? Or do we have to do it independently? Could you pull down my binary? And should we do Linux from scratch?

Oh, God, Wes. Wes. It's not a two or five million sound boost. Come on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right. I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. No, I'm very grateful. Okay. We'll talk about this more. We'll put it on thes. Come on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, I'm very grateful. Okay. We'll talk about this more. We'll put it on the board. Deleted. Put it – okay. So also I'd love to know the audience's ideas if you want to jump in on this idea, how we could make this fun.

Binary free month. I think we'd each have to bill. We couldn't share binaries. Yeah. That's probably cheating. We have to each pay the cost. Yeah. Wow. Wow. That's – they also send in a boost to say have a great show that's okay yeah that was a that was a live boost today oh wow really uh-huh deleted that's also that's just so great thank you talk about coming in just under the wire

i'm curious what we would gain from this challenge. Because I know 32-bit challenge, we had some ideas about what we would learn, which is, you know, is it still viable, et cetera. But what is it about this that we would, you know, what are the takeaways we would try to reach for here? I think one thing you'd probably immediately start to appreciate is how much build time these things take and how much work is, how much of a lift the package maintainers are doing. But I wonder, I feel like if I were building these, wouldn't, why not, you know, try to optimize for the best build possible,

right? Like if you're going to spend the time to compile your own software, throw some flags in there. Okay. Throw a flag in there. I don't know. Just throw a flag in there. What's the big deal?

Yeah. Why am I building for this ancient architecture? Why got this fancy CPU? So there's something to that. That could be the other challenge, the other area that I think would be really interesting is maybe on my ARM64 install on the M1 Max.

That could be an interesting angle. Yeah. That's a whole other area where you really need a lot more. And, you know, maybe it'd be okay. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. We'll get, the wheels are already turning deleted. Thank you very much for that generous boost. I really appreciate that. And, well, we're going to start thinking about it.

Indeed. Listener Jeff comes in with 133,456 cents. Hey, Rich Lobster! We're going to have to go right to Ludicrous Speed! Nice. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you. From the podcast index. Yeah, with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

sets. And the first one finally got some sets into Albie with Bolts. Now I get to help you guys to scale. And that's just so sweet. Right on. And Jeff, you're gonna join us at scale, right? You're gonna be there. You're gonna make it. That's just so sweet. Right on. And, Jeff, you're going to join us at scale, right? You're going to be there. You're going to make it. That's the plan.

Yeah. Oh, look at you live boosting, too, with another 10,000 sats. We can boost live now? Had to test this. Double giraffe. Nice. Double giraffe. Thank you, sir.

No, Joe's came in with 77,840 sats from Podverse. I hoard that which your kind covet. I say scale up and a zip code boost. I won't see you in California, but I hope to get to meet you in Texas. Oh, that'd be great. Yeah, see you there. Heck yes. Zip code boost?

Uh-oh, Wes. Uh, 77840. Looks like a zip code in College Station, Texas. Hello, College Station, Texas. Which is sort of halfway between Austin and Houston, except then also north a bit. Yeah, Texas is big. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah. Gives you a vague idea, but you're still... There's a lot of space. Five hours probably between. Yeah. No, Joe, it's nice to hear from you. Thank you very much.

I'm curious to know what you think about Podverse. Eric D. comes in with 50,000 sats. He's using the podcast index. He writes, my goal for 2024 is to boost this show at least once a month. A kind of value for value membership. All right. Thank you, sir. Says I didn't participate in the 32-bit challenge.

However, I did work on a Linux project of my own. I have a 2019-era 15-inch MacBook Pro. It's my old work laptop, but it's still a pretty good laptop by today's standards. I wondered if I could install something from Linux on it. After some research, I found T2 Linux at t2linux.org. They have built pre-ISOs for various distros that have the T2 Mac drivers

built in. Oh! Wow. Eric, that's huge. He goes on to say, I've tried their NixOS ISO, but it wouldn't boot. Well, good try, good try.

But the Ubuntu 2310 ISO did. So now I'm running Ubuntu 2310 on a MacBook Pro, and even the touch bar works. The only issue is suspend doesn't work. But I'm okay with that. Cheers. Wow, that is a wonderful success story. That's a great boots-on-the-ground report too, Eric. That's a valuable boost and a valuable bit of insight.

And we will try to put a link to T2. That's the number 2 Linux.org in the show notes. Hmm. Hybrid sarcasm boosts in with 42,000 zats. The answer to the ultimate question. Question. Why didn't the skeleton cross the road? Hmm.

Because he wasn't. No, I don't know why. He didn't have the guts. Oh. Sarcasm. Good one. Thank you very much for the boost. Appreciate you.

McLang came in with 32,768 Satoshis. Coming in hot with the boost. It was great to hear you talking with Kent Overstreet in episode 545. I can't wait to start using BcashFS when it lands on my system and to check how using it compares to ZFS. By the way, what a coincidence that a letter from Hans Reiser got published just the other week. Have you checked it out? It's a good read, I think. We talked about it a little bit in our members feed today.

We kind of went through some of the points. It was a very fascinating read i think we should try to put a link in the in the actual publisher if we can people want to check it out mclang continues as for your question about ext4 extended for i think there are better options available in almost every case i use it almost rarely if i set up a default ubuntu for my family for instance otherwise it's either Butterfess, ZFS, or, well, ZFS all the way. Good for you. McClang, I know exactly how you like it.

Why anything less, right? Would you want anything less for your friends and family? MaxPower comes in with 30,345 sats using Fountain. Hey, guys. I love the show. I've been listening to JB for almost 10 years Wow Last week I heard a zip code boost from my state and I figured I should do the same for my boost

So the first two numbers are letters and the last three numbers are Unico characters Then disregard all the shenanigans and just use the five numbers and you can get my zip code. Okay. That's a little easy.

Oh, brilliant. Okay. So 30345. That's a postal code in DeKalb County, Georgia. Hello, Georgia. With cities like Shambly and Tucker. Oh, that sounds nice. Sounds nice down there.

Thanks, Max Power. Thank you for listening for so long. That's amazing. That's very, 10 years. How many people out there at the 10-year mark have passed? That's, wow. Ian clearly comes in with a row of McDucks, 22,222 sats. Using the verse.

Things are looking up for old McDuck. Looking forward to your NixCon North America coverage. Cheers and thanks for all the great shows. Thank you, Ian. Thank you very much. Also, I see some emoji in there. Snowflake, globe, and up. Any guesses?

I'm thinking NixOS takes over the world. Oh, I like that. Seems right. Ryan boosts in with 12 345 satoshis so the combination is one two three four five that's the stupidest combination i ever heard in my life coming in via castomatic ryan just says scale eight lines of shimmering cement running from here to pasadena well thank you ryan appreciate that now todd who's Northern VA, sent in a row of sticks, 11,111 satoshis. Anyone else cringe every time they hear the name BcashFS?

The name collides with Bitcoin Cash, a.k.a. Bcash, which is an altcoin that forked from Bitcoin during the block size wars at around 2017. Unsurprisingly, Bcash doesn't have the highest reputation within the Bitcoin community. Blah, I don't like that association. Gross. I hadn't thought of that. No, because I think, you know, a Bcash and all that, it's Btree, all that's such an established file system lingo that I hadn't really made that connection.

Let's not make that connection. Let's not make that connection. Let's not. Todd, I don't want to make it, but that's a good point. How about what if we called it the do you got another name for Bcache? Is there another way to pronounce Bcache? Bcache? Bcache.

Bcachery. We need you to come up with one of your... If I was going to look at it the first time, I'd say it's Bkeesh FS. Bkeesh FS. um the cashery um yeah we need you to come up with one of your yeah really let's see if i was going to look at it the first time i'd say it's a bakish fs bakish fs no no because the see if i could be catchy the catchy fs that's good maybe one of those will stick gene bean comes in with a whole flock of ducks uh he writes i wanted to do 32-bit challenge but i need to replace a drive and a little netbook that I had. Here's hoping the plan

isn't lost to procrastination. We know how that goes. He did enjoy the file system stuff. He says, I'm looking forward to when you all decide it's time to migrate from CFS to BcacheFS and how you do it. Yeah, we're probably going to do it. We'll probably do it way too early, too, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, Gene Bean says, y'all weren't the only Yellow Dog Linux users. I had

a little bitty iBook G3, and he loved putting Linux on there. Mac on Linux.net, they still have the best logo ever. Mac on Linux. Okay, yeah, that logo is pretty great. Oh, it's like a little penguin. Oh, you can't see it on the screen, but it's a little penguin that's hugging an apple. Yeah, that's pretty adorable. That's pretty adorable, Gene.

That's pretty adorable. He says, Extended 4 just works. It's rock solid. That said, so long as there That's pretty adorable. He says extended four just works. It's rock solid. That said, so long as there is something that doesn't require a science degree to administer, well, he might be down for it. He says, I absolutely think it's time to get a replacement. That's very reasonable. I think I came across as like, rah, rip it out.

Yeah. It's not so much that. I would like consensus that we're going to move into a direction. I mean, it's nice that we've got it. It takes time. It'll take even more time to get trusted and into production in many places, but we've got to start that journey sometime. Former Gen

Tour comes in with 5,432 sets via Fountain. About Extended 4. Back in 2006, I heard claims by people I respected that XFS was indestructible by power outages or by bad USB cables. Well, I switched to XFS back then, and I never looked back. Using EXT4 nowadays feels super old, and I'm quote-unquote taking a risk with ButterFS on my silver-blue daily driver. I'm still sufficiently comfortable with XFS on LVM and MDRAID, RAID 10 if needed,

but I'm dying to trade this triad for BcashFS. MDRAID does a very smart RAID 10 with odd-numbered drives. I hope BcashFS will too. Yeah, former Gentour, I agree with you on that XFS on LVM stack being pretty solid. That's what I'm using on my old workstation from upstairs, also about a 2017 era build. And I've got, I want to say, four disks in what I call my scary raid using LVM and XFS just to stripe them all together so I could have as fast as possible on large spinning rust. And it feels like that would be a perfect swap over to BcashFS one day. But in the meantime, as much as we talk about ButterFS and ZFS, I've been using XFS on that array forever.

And it has been absolutely solid. And I have moved to the other nice thing about XFS. I mean, at least a dozen different installs, probably a lot more I have moved. I've moved on that machine, and that RAID array is always with LVM and XFS. Every time it's reconnected perfectly. You know, for a second there,

it almost sounded like you were describing Stratus. Now, I'm curious for former Gentour, you're a former Gentour, but which destroy you on now? Let us know. Podbun came in with 5,000 Satoshis on Fountain. Honestly, I can understand the confusion with companies offering 4G Wi-Fi routers. And I know several people that run everything off their hotspot. I feel like the line between mobile data and Wi-Fi is being blurred.

Yeah. I definitely feel that. T-Mobile came rolling through the neighborhood about a year ago and moved several of our neighbors off of their cable connection to their 5G home service. It's not as good. I mean, you know, it's just not as good as a wired connection, but it's like $30 less a month. you know, it's just not as good as a wired connection,

but it's like $30 less a month. Wow. Even though I think they just raised the rates. And they have no idea. None of these users have any idea. They just move around. What they've switched, right? Yeah. They've just moved from a copper line to a cellular connection.

But for them, it works. And I think T-Mobile does optimizations on the network that I would prefer they don't do them, but I think they generally do work for most users. I mean, her use case is when I load up the streaming service, does it work? Or my other neighbor, like, they just want Zoom to work. That's what they use the internet for. And I'm like, so is it okay? I think it's been fine. I suppose it's simpler from an admin standpoint too, right?

Like the thing doesn't work. You just get like a new router LTE box and there's no wires to check or mess with. Seriously, it's got one cord. Right. It's got the power cord and then it does the Wi-Fi and the LTE from one little cylinder thing. And one neighbor that's on the other end of the block, he's working from home now and he's working from home all day long off this thing. So you're right, man. It is definitely getting blurred.

I don't think they have any concept of the difference between Wi-Fi and LTE pod. But thank you for the boost. Kirinbug comes in with one, two, three, four, five sets. One, two, three, four, five. Yes. That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. No message, but we still appreciate the support.

Eponymous Moose comes in with 11,900 cents by uponverse. First boost here, I usually stream. Hey, I like that name too. It's good. It's got me going. But wanted to share some old hardware glory. All right. First Linux install was RH9 just before Fedora Core 1.

I remember. I overwrote entire Windows installs, burned CDRs to backup files. Still surprised when sound works in a fresh install. That was too easy, so switched to Gentoo. Only had the one computer, though, of course, so I printed the install guide and used Linux 2 to pinch the command line browser. A few years later in grad school, I borked my Gen 2 install hard enough to need a full redo. Yeah, sure. But the

CD-ROM drive in my office computer was broken, so I tried to find a distro that could fit on a three and a half inch floppy. I think they existed, but no luck, so I swapped the drive with another in the office. Thanks for self-hosted and making it feel less crazy to care about privacy.

You bet, Moose. You know, I've definitely been in that situation where the CD-ROM drive, generally what I would do, right, is I would end up disconnecting the CD-ROM drive because I'd want another disc inevitably. And then I would sometime need the CD-ROM, so I'd always try to concoct some sort of like network CD-ROM solution. It's never really worked very well. But yeah, that's definitely a thing. Thank you everybody who boosted in.

That was a great batch. And we have a few that were under the 2,000-sat cutoff, but we still read all of them and put them in our show notes. It was 18 boosts total. And brace yourselves, because we've had another banger, you all. We need a whole new

set of sound effects here. But we have, once again, made incredible progress towards our goal to get to scale. We raised, across 18 boosts, 1,456,367 sats. Winner. It really whips the llama's ass. From 18 boosters across 24 boosts. Yeah, that's really incredible. And so, let's

run the totals on that, because we're trying to run 8 million out. We're taking these stats and we're putting them right towards our goal to go to scale, which is a little scary, but it's what we're committed to and we're doing it. And it seemed ridiculous when we started, but I feel like we're getting real close, Wes. Have you tabulated?

Yes, well, the total raised so far is And it seemed ridiculous when we started, but I feel like we're getting real close, Wes. Have you tabulated? Yes. Well, the total raise so far is 110%. Nice. Nice. 8,780,918 sales. That's incredible. Wow. Thank you, everyone.

And I've already booked the Airbnb. Actually, we've booked a couple of them. We've booked an Airbnb while we're in Pasadena, and we booked an Airbnb on the way down and one on the way back up. And that was really nice because we needed to lock that in kind of sooner than later because I guess like flights and maybe hotels, the closer you get, the Airbnb prices go up because they were higher than when we looked the first time. And so what we had budgeted for wasn't quite enough. And so the fact that we went over a little bit kind of makes up for the fact that the Airbnb expenses turned out to be just a bit more than we were planning for, but it's all kind of working out. It's extremely, extremely grateful, everybody.

And it's all going to scale. We would still absolutely take those stats to help us get there because the cost can come up surprisingly. And also, you know, we can put some of that towards the actual production of the show now because we've been really focused on scale. And this is all set. I have this in a – I've put this already aside in a wallet.

And we're using that to book those things and we're going to have it on the trip down there. We'll be loaded up and ready to go and really it's kind of amazing. Thank you everybody who also streamed Sats to help us get to this goal. We really appreciate that as well. We see you out there and it's neat from us. It's neat for us from a

user experience standpoint because we get to pull these up in real time and see them coming in. Yeah, look, Forward Humor is out there streaming just earlier today. Yeah. Hey, buddy. Hey there, Forward Humor. Thanks for streaming in. Appreciate you.

Thank you, everybody, who boosted in. And thank you, everybody, who helped contribute to our goal to get to scale. And NixCon North America, we can't wait to bring you that coverage. And as a thank you, we have two great picks this week because they're both of a theme. And I'm going to encourage you to tune in to next week's episode because we're going to talk about an application you can deploy on your Linux system that is a life changer. This week, we're focusing on the music. Would you like to listen to your Spotify's or your Apple music, but you don't want to use a crappy electron app or their damn web service? Wait, that's even possible?

It is. We've got, I guess, Spotube? Spotube! Spotube, which is an open-source client that doesn't require premium on Spotify, doesn't use Electron. It's available both on the desktop and on Android. S-P-O-T-U-B-E.

We'll have a link to that in the show notes. And on the Apple Music side, Cider. C-I-D-T-U-B-E. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. And on the Apple Music side, Cider. C-I-D-E-R. This is available also as a flat pack. And I think maybe an Android app? But again, this is a cross platform Apple Music experience. This one is

Electron, but I've never really noticed. I've actually not noticed. Claims to have been written from scratch with performance in mind. Definitely. I mean, it kind of seems like it performs better than the native Apple Music client. I guess that's the test, right? So this is nice if you, like for me, I have the Apple One subscription for the family that's still all on iPhones.

So Apple Music's just bundled in with that. So I don't want to pay for Spotify and Apple Music, but the Apple Music experience sucks on Linux until Cider came around. And now you can have a better Spotify experience too if you still do that. So we'll have links to that in the show notes. Those are two great finds. Do

remember we want your boost. We still want to raise funds for the show production. It is sort of a lean and mean ad winter right now. And your support is more critical than ever. If you'd like to send in a birthday boost for no specific reason, 42,000 sets could be, you know,

the perfect amount for a birthday boost. I don't know why 42, but there it is. And we'll read those on the air next week. And then join us live. If you'd like the mumble rooms, great. I'll give a low keykey plug here, too,

for that Mumble Room. They've always been hanging out with us. Just great, solid companions on the live stream make for good conversation. And that conversation gets captured and delivered to our members at unpluggedcore.com who support this show. They can choose between an ad-free version

or the bootleg that includes all our screw-ups, plus about double the show content. Sometimes we have to start the show over, so you get like take one and take two. That would never happen. What are you talking about? Never. Links to what we talked about today, that's on our website at linuxunplugged.com slash 546, and you can join us live.

We will be live potentially maybe at a different time, though. Next week will be up in the air. So keep an eye on the calendar at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Or if you subscribe to the Jupiter Station feed, you'll get it automatically updated there as well. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Maybe. I mean, it always comes out in the RSS feed.

It is the same station. That's true. it always comes out in the RSS feed. It is the same station. That's true. Yeah, which we call an RSS feed. And if you're on that feed, the live time doesn't really matter at all. So it's not even really worth mentioning. Just probably should stop talking about it right now. I don't know why we talk about it at all. I think I'm going to stop.

From this moment forward, right now, I'm not talking about the live stream anymore over at jblive.tv, which will probably not be on Sunday next week. I'm not talking about the live stream anymore over at jblive.tv, which will probably not be on Sunday next week. I'm not going to talk about it anymore. Because we've got the RSS feed at linuxunplugged.com slash RSS. Could be getting some fancy features soon, too. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. It is your Linux Tuesday. And we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you. you