LINUX Unplugged - 550: Ready Player Linux

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

Chris spends the week in a VR desktop, revealing the glitches, gains, and VR's open-source future.

Chris, it feels like the world's got a new, renewed interest in VR, but you've been looking at this for a little while, right? I mean, I first took it really seriously back in mid-February of 2022. We were researching for Linux Action News the Simula VR. Remember this, Wes? I do. Yeah, the little, I mean, I think it's an i7 maybe, so I shouldn't call it little. No, yeah. The Strapa Intel CPU to your face for for Linux-powered, Linux-first VR setup?

Yeah, using Sway, Wayland, and Nix. So you'd think this would be perfect, right? I was really hoping by the time we sat down to do this type of episode, this thing would have shipped. Because it, I mean, again, we covered this back in February 2022. They were way ahead of Apple on this. They were already focusing on productivity sort of applications, right? Like getting work done on your Linux desktop. And making sure that the screens were really high resolution so the text was crisp.

Right. At the time they announced, they were leading edge, just way out there on the screen res. But unfortunately, you know, these projects, they're tricky and they're expensive, right? So there's been delays. So it's supposed to ship maybe this quarter, but it could slip all the way into the end of this year. They say just due to capital constraints. And the headset itself, like even like the mid-tier is around $2,700. So not cheap.

Cheaper than the Vision Pro, but not – I mean it's – yeah. Well, I guess it's a full computer. Oh, and you remember the other cool thing about this is that you could detach it from the faceplate and you could, in theory, I don't know if they ever made this yet, but you could put it in a dock. Oh. And then use it as a docked computer and the desktop environment is still supposed to work on a monitor. That's compelling. Right? I mean, you imagine where this gets to a point where it's really usable, maybe it's a thousand bucks.

So the dream of convergence is happening, but it's in VR? Right. Totally. Yeah. 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. Yeah, well, coming up on the show today, we're going to deep dive into my recent VR desktop experience.

There were glitches. There were some definite gains. And there does appear to be an open source future. We'll get into all of that and how it was using Linux in the immersive VR realm and what some roadblocks might be that you need to know about and what hardware you should probably get. And then after that, we'll round it out with some boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before we go there, let's say good morning to our mumble room.

Time-appropriate greetings, virtual love. Hello, everybody. A couple up there in the quiet listening as well. We've got great showing there in the on-air room. That's pretty awesome. Nice to have you. It is. Also, shout out to our friends over at Tailscale.

Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. That's where you go to support the show and try it out for 100 devices. Woo! Yes, yes, yes. That's a lot of devices. You really got to try hard to hit that. I might get there one day because I put my applications on Tailscale. I put

all my mobile devices. I put my set-top boxes are on Tailscale. I can take my set-top boxes and plug them in anywhere and boom they'll still connect to all my media. I do my networking over Tailscale right now and it's all protected by the noise protocol which WireGuard uses.

Yeah, I know. You can get up and running in just minutes. It is really great. It'll change your networking game. 100 devices support the show. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Before we get into the show, though, I have big news that I'm really excited to share with you. Fountain FM reached out and they wanted to talk to me because they noticed something about the show.

They noticed that we are not a Bitcoin specific podcast, but we've been getting tremendous support from our audience via boost. But not only that, they're good quality boosts like good messages, clearly an intelligent community. And they want to work with us to implement a feature or fix a bug between now and every week leading up to our departure to scale. So if you've tried Fountain.fm before or if you haven't tried it yet, give it a try and boost in with what you would like to see fixed or done differently or a feature that you'd like to see added that's preventing you from switching the fountain fm team will be reviewing boosts and i have a standing weekly meeting every thursday to sit down with nick and go over your suggestions track progress and all of that we're also building and improving on the live stream support both on our end and their end so here in JBHQ, we're working on getting the LEP feed podcasting 2.0 compatible by the time we leave for scale.

They're working on building us a live page where you'll be able to watch and boost and participate regardless if it's audio, video, mobile, whatever it is. You can do it in the app or on the web. And I think if it works really well, we'll probably use the same system for texas linux fest when we hit the road for that but it's really neat because the boosts have been great for support too but we've also it's put us on the top of those charts so we've we've been able to hit numbers that we've never even thought possible for a linux podcast and reach people who are just beginning to start their journey and they're starting from the standpoint of ai or they're standing from the standpoint of Nix or whatever it might be. Or maybe they're Bitcoiners and they want to learn more about open source.

They're finding us on Fountain and people are noticing. And now as a community, we have an opportunity to impact multiple apps. You know, I've had conversations with Podverse developer frequently, Mitch, and our community has made an impact on the direction of that player. And now we have an opportunity as a community to make Fountain FM better. And the more we improve these podcasting 2.0 podcasts, the more we keep podcasting decentralized. We keep it away from Spotify and Apple, and we give people more choices and more options. Yeah, we can build out the tools that we need, right? It's very exciting.

There are four Sundays until we hit the road. So that means there's four weeks for us to get your suggestions in, and I'll be working with the Fountain team weekly to see how those are going and keep everything on track. And then once we hit the road, we are going to have one, two, three, four, maybe even five live streams on the road that will all be in the podcast app. So try Fountain out, give us your feedback, and then keep it around for our trip to scale because we'll be live in those apps while we're on the road and while we're at scale. There's a lot coming up.

And then don't forget we also have that meetup during scale for lunch. Yeah, I'd love to see you there if you can make it. Saturday the 16th. Details at meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting. All right, let me tell you what I was trying to accomplish. So there's a lot of hype around the Apple Vision Pro, as expected there would be. And as Linux users, this is often a time where you just have to knuckle down and just let the hype train pass. I didn't want a VR system anyway. No. And I thought, well, is there something here? Because I tried this once with the Quest 2, and the screen resolution just wasn't there.

There's kind of a screen door effect. It makes it hard to read the text unless you went, like, ginormous and filled your entire screen, which is just not practical. But there is, I think, a real use case here. If you're looking for multi-monitors in a scenario where you cannot have multiple monitors, I thought there could be something to this. And I, for example, at home have a laptop and it has a 14-inch screen. And wouldn't it be wonderful if I could replicate my workflow with multiple monitors like I have at the studio? Because there's been times where I'm working at home and I'm like, oh, forget it. And I pack up and I drive into the studio just so I can work with a couple of screens.

Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, it can be, it doesn't matter for all workflows, but for certain tasks, you got a lot of data you're manipulating, you got multiple things going on. Yeah. You're just so much more productive in that. Doing research and notes and chats and, you know, and especially like if we're working on something together, it's nice to have that going in one window and um that's just not practical

when you live in an rv or a small space at all or maybe you just don't want to invest in a bunch of monitors so i i thought let's see if the quest 3 which is about seven times cheaper than the apple vision pro you could buy like five nice Quest with accessories for the cost of one Apple Vision Pro. So the price to performance ratio seems pretty solid. The Apple Vision Pro has higher resolution screens, but the Quest, I think, has a higher refresh rate and a wider aperture or point of view. So there's pros and minuses to both.

But the Quest allows you to sideload Android apps. That's what really was a breakthrough moment for me, when I realized if I could bring my Linux desktop into a VR and have multiple screens and run a couple of Android apps, like maybe Element and Telegram, a couple of other things, email app, things like that, maybe we have something here. Yeah, I wonder, is it worth reviewing sort of the setup of the Quest 3 for folks? Because you're saying it's not like an Intel PC, it's more like an Android system.

Yeah, yeah. It's essentially a very high-end Android phone with multiple screens on your face. And then a bunch of sensors and a bunch of pass-through cameras. And the Quest 3 does pass-through pretty well. It's not as good as the Apple one, but it does pretty well. And it is their UI on top of Android. Now, there is obviously the concession here that you have to have a meta account. Yeah, how onerous is that in practice?

Not much. I mean, you have to have an account. You could sign in with a couple of other OAuth providers as well. I just opted to create a burner meta account for this because this is really a proof of concept. It's not like how I'm going to work for the next five years. And they have an app store and all of that. So if you want access to that, you need a meta account. So I went ahead and created that for this

because I've had a Facebook account, so I was just able to link that. And you can have a separate identity or link it or have them, you know, or combine them. It's your choice. All that's pretty straightforward. The ability, though, to put the thing in developer mode and then install, like, third-party launchers

and install third-party apps, man, that's really something. And in this sense, it's like, it's not like a super foreign platform. Obviously, there's VR-specific stuff you got to do if you're a VR app, but otherwise, it's an Android phone. It's any APK you can get your hands on.

There's sites like PureAPK and whatnot where you can just download anything. It doesn't have the Play API, but there's ways around that for a lot of things too. So I have F to write on there. So right now the Quest has a limit of three simultaneous 2D applications. They're going to change this so you can have floating apps like you do in the Apple Vision Pro. a limit of three simultaneous 2D applications. They're going to change this so you can have floating apps like you do in the Apple Vision Pro. But so you can run three in a kind of a snap grid side by side. And they also have a built-in pull-in-your-work-environment monitor

using their software, but I believe it only works on Windows and the Mac. I had to have something that worked on Linux, obviously. So accepting that the Quest 3 kind of is in the sweet spot for price to quality, they have two models, and the cheap one is perfectly functional if you just want this one capability. And then they have a 512 gig one that you might want if you want to load a few apps on there. And when you're looking at the price differential here, it's just obvious that the Quest is a better value right now, but it doesn't natively do screen pass-through for Linux. That's where an app called Immersed comes in. I get the sense it's kind of a small team over there, but they have built something extremely clever. I don't know if anybody else has thought about working in a virtual environment as much as these guys have.

They, by default, allow you to bring in Windows, Mac, or Linux. They distribute multiple ways for Linux, but one of the ways they distribute is via an app image. That's so nice to see. It's also packaged in the Nix repo. It's called Immersed VR in there. And it also will encourage you and suggest that you install video for Linux loopback and other couple of – it also will encourage NVIDIA GPUs, but it's not required. Sounds like some really Linux users in their little community, huh? Yeah.

I mean the support is surprisingly good. And when you first set up, it will only bring in on Linux – and this is an important thing to understand, your main screen, your actual monitors. It will only bring in your physical monitors on Linux. Now, you and I were looking around. There are some like X-Render shenanigans you found that we could do to create virtual screens. Yeah, right. Yeah, it does seem like there are some options to do it all digitally, but you're going to have to futz around a little lower level than consumer products. That's not really what I wanted to do. That wasn't for me. So what I ended up picking up,

and this will depend on your video card, but my video card has like four display ports. So I ended up picking up a couple of dummy display port adapters and you pop those suckers in the back of your video card. And yes, you do have to deal with the virtual monitor stuff, but you pop those suckers in there and they will immediately come through into the immersed environment as full screens. And because they're all, the system thinks they're hardware, you get full acceleration. It was easy to watch video and all of that. It's, it worked really, really well on Linux. And it was a very straightforward way. Didn't have to mess around with XRand or didn't have to screw around with any of that stuff. I just got a three pack of these DisplayPort dummy adapters

off of Amazon, popped them in the back, and I had all the screens I needed. I had a system like that once where it wouldn't get past the post without a display plugged in. So same thing, because I was using it as a server.

Once you're in, you can set a virtual environment that could be like a space station that's orbiting Earth. You can be in different kinds of offices. It creates a VR world that is really, really tames the ADD beast

and lets you focus. And that was another thing I found very appealing. Or you can set a 360-degree photo of your own, which uses less resources than a virtual environment. So you're kind of starting with a whitewash, so you blank out the room you're in and then lay your stuff on top. Yeah, and you pull in your screens and you pull in your webcam using VL4 loopback. Right.

So you get a virtual webcam in the immersed environments. You can participate in video calls. It's a little cartoony avatar, but it works. I've participated in multiple meetings now in this environment. How fun. I've participated in multiple meetings now in this environment. And you can move the VR webcam in your VR space and it moves everything around and like you're really in that space on the other end of the camera. The other thing I think that Immerse has thought about that is critical in these kinds of environments is they have this technology called portals. And these are boxes that you draw that use the front-facing cameras on the headset to punch reality through in these spaces. So I draw a portal over my keyboard, and I draw a

portal over my door, and I draw a portal over the mixer. And so I can see those things come through in this virtual reality. So I can always find my keyboard. I can always see if somebody's at the door. And with the Quest, if you double tap the side of the headset, it'll drop the VR and go back to pass-through. So it's a quick way to, like, somebody walks in, you just double tap, hey, what's up? And then when they're gone, you double tap, and boom, your virtual environment comes back. I really have found this to, in the sense of helping me focus, it has been tremendous. You combine it with noise-canceling earbuds, and you're really off to the races. Immersed will also route your audio to the headset. So if you want, you can just use the

speakers on the headset for playback. Oh, nice. It's a really well-done application. I think they're a growing team over there, because I've noticed the support can be a little slow. But what they've built is so far beyond what even the technology today is capable of that they really could just keep doing what they're doing. And the people will just start finding the app more and more useful as the screen resolutions get better. So what's the performance like? Because you're, I mean, you're having to send stuff over to your headset, right? And there's some agent running on your Linux system.

Yeah. It is all, I think this is one of the downsides, is it is all running in user space. And depending on how you have it configured, like by default, it's running over the network. Right. So the headset's on Wi-Fi. So you need to have pretty fast 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi.

Or you need to hook up over USB. If you hook up over USB, you don't get to use developer mode on the headset, which is how you install side-loaded APK. So there's a little bit of give and take depending on how you want to do it. So now you've got to buy two. Yeah.

So I think the biggest disadvantage is it will put a load on your PC, especially if you're not using video acceleration. But I didn't try it on any super high-end systems, and I didn't find it to be a big problem. And I never really had an issue with the Wi-Fi performance for most use cases, which was web browsing,

maybe watching a YouTube video or participating in like a Google Meet. You had the YouTube video playback go. Smooth, great, great. All of that, really good. I never actually had any performance issues with uh wi-fi mode wow i never needed to hook up usb i'm on the same floor as the five gigahertz router though so that probably helps and then the pc i'm connected to is on ethernet um so i think that helps too with performance i notice in your notes that you've shared with us here something about a

whiteboard yeah i love this so you So you can pull up on demand. So with the Quest, you have controllers. And with these controllers, when you rotate them, you get a series of virtual commands in your environment that you can call up. Like I can invite you into the virtual world so you could hang out in my office with me. Or one of them is you can summon a whiteboard. And then when you summon the whiteboard, your other hand turns into a marker. And then you can just really quickly. you summon the whiteboard your other hand turns into a marker and then you can just really quickly so it's this action where you you turn your wrist you tap and then you're you got a marker and you

just nod you just note it down really quick okay and then what was like did you could you write clearly was i mean what was the like i mean at first it was sort of jokey and i was trying to draw inappropriate things and then as i practiced trying those inappropriate things i got better at it there is really good i don't know what Matt is using, but there is really good voice-to-text on this thing. The microphone isn't fantastic, but yet it manages to nail the transcription. So you might be able to do that. I haven't tried that. But you've got to remember, in this world, I'm bringing in three or four of my computer screens.

So I almost always have notes up on my computer screen too. Yeah. I'm wondering, what about like diagramming or, you know? Oh, yeah, for sure. Laying stuff out on a nice digital whiteboard. So I almost always have notes up on my computer screen too. Yeah. I'm wondering, what about like diagramming or, you know? Oh yeah, for sure. Laying stuff out on a nice digital whiteboard. Oh, I love the idea too for some sort of like group meeting where we're planning something. I could really see that working where we could have diagrams and we could bring stuff in from our screens.

There's really unique things about it that give you kind of this, oh, this is so neat kind of sensation. But as time goes on, what I found the most useful about it was this ability to just immediately pop the VR headset on, screens come back, I resume work, I deal with something, either using one of the native Android apps or in the immersed environment, because immersed is just an app that resumes immediately. And then when I take the headset off, it's all gone. like whatever i was just dealing with the whole like the whole my office it's gone and it's like a for somebody who has a hard time with context shifts sometimes it is it's like it is the definition of a context shift because you're shifting into this different

reality pulling the strap off your face then you yeah then you rip it off your face and you're you shift it again. It works. It really works for somebody like for me that has a hard time with context shifts where moving between work and home and dealing with something can really be a costly time transition for me. It's been hugely helpful for that. So, Chris, I know you've been trying this from like an office work perspective. But have you been thinking about how this kind of setup might apply in a train or a plane or a travel setup? Do you think it would be as flexible or as easy to use? Yeah, I know some people have had trouble in moving environments with gyroscopes and stuff.

But I think so. I definitely want to try it on a road trip. That always to me has been the obvious use case is somebody who has one small screen imagine now imagine we're one generation down one more generation and the head screens are even better if you could gen if you if you truly know you could have a small headset or a medium-sized headset that you could put on your face and within a few seconds virtual screens show up why would you ever buy anything but the smallest laptop possible? Right. Because if you need more screen real estate, you just put the headset on and then you stop buying monitors.

Every few years you buy one of these headsets. And I do mean every few because I think these are going to be the kind of devices that we only see updated every few years because they're so at the cutting edge of what the screen technology is capable of and what these processors and sensors are capable of and cameras, which is just cutting edge stuff, that it takes years for actual improvements. There's a lot of refinement that has to happen before you get a next increment. So I think it's going to be a bit. And I felt like the Quest 3 was at that price point where you could get it used for around

a couple hundred, 300 bucks and jump in and try something like this. And Immersed works with Linux. They're working on their own goggles. There's several different vendors out there that are specializing. So you're going to have goggles like Visor that are really focused on work and productivity. And maybe they even have permanent pass-through, like actual optical pass-through. And they're not really focused on gaming And you know immersive VR They're focused on multiple monitors

And then you're going to have visors that are Just really built for gaming right That are completely optimized for gaming Then you'll have ones like the Apple Vision Pro That are trying to optimize for as many Things as possible and they're going to be really expensive But by Apple setting the Bar at $3,500

Now anything that comes out cheaper Than that seems kind of like a good deal. Right. We've all been primed by that. And now there is going to be a range of products in that space that address different aspects of the market. And I think the next phase we're really going to see is use case specific headsets that do really nail it. They don't nail it for everything, but they nail it for that one thing really well. And we're going to go through a generation of that for a bit. And then you'll still have your Apple vision pros that are trying to do it all.

Right. Right. Yeah. It makes sense. It's a hard problem, right? So if you can kind of limit the focus of what you're trying to solve. Yeah.

Chris, can you, because I think you did a deep dive this week after we got so much positive feedback on this topic, but I'm curious about like the ergonomics for you. Was it easy to type, for instance? Did you find any fatigue once you had this? How long could you keep this thing on your, you know, your face hugger on?

That's a good question. Better than I expected. I, you know, I don't really like heavy glasses on my face. I think the head straps make a big difference. I'll touch on that in a little bit. And I think taking breaks, the battery lasts about two hours. And I think that's just about as long as you probably want to use it. But that's also not unreasonable to take a break from work every couple of hours.

Yeah. Or maybe every hour or whatever. You know, you could kind of see how you could. You could probably be doing that anyway. You could almost Pomodoro this thing, right? Just use it during stretches. So I think everybody's different, but everybody that tried it in the family, as long as they got everything right with the straps,

which takes a little bit to figure out, they found it pretty comfortable. Just a little side note before we move on. Then we talk about the state of open source VR. The nice thing about the Quest platform is that it's sideloading, in my opinion. And there is the SideQuest community, which is a community app store. There's a culture around sideloading with the Quest headset. Did you see that Zuckerberg released a video where he compared the Quest to the Vision Pro? In there, he makes an interesting comparison,

which I don't know if it's really true, but the comparison he said is that the Quest is the open platform and that the Vision Pro is going to be the closed platform and that they're going to bet on the open platform. And he kind of implied that we're going to see more things that make it open. But I think what he was talking about when he talked about it being an open platform is you can sideload apps. And that has absolutely been a quintessential aspect for me.

A little more tinker maker, play friendly than the very closed walled garden of our Apple buddies. And it works because I've been able to load the apps I need. And it's not pretty, but I have a custom launcher now that I like a lot. I'll try to find a link for it and I'll put it in the show notes. My absolute favorite find has been a 3DS ROM emulator. The 3DS had a 3D screen on it. So how would you ever replicate that experience on your computer? You can't. But VR, oh, it's great. It's fantastic. And it's a huge screen. And I never really got to play the Mario 3DS games

just the timing when it came out. And now I'm playing them and they're fantastic. And I took the Atari VCS controller, the Bluetooth Atari VCS controller, which just shows up as a generic Bluetooth controller to Linux, paired immediately to the Quest 3 headset. So I'm playing Mario 3DS with a Quest or an Atari 3 Bluetooth game controller paired to the Quest headset. It's a wild, wild, like, you know, different mesh of technologies, but you just couldn't have that experience on the Apple hardware. Collide.com slash unplugged. Collide ensures that if a device isn't secure, it can't access your apps. And yeah, it works on Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS, isn't secure. It can't access your apps. And yeah, it works on Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android,

one single dashboard for IT. And it solves a problem that was really the bane of my IT existence. And it's this friction that exists between end users and IT. It's often just low-hanging fruit stuff that just saps IT time and energy, and it gives users a bad experience. And you've probably noticed a reoccurring pattern. A lot of the issues we see today, like ransomware and just software out of date, it all kind of comes from users' devices, not intentionally. Maybe they just have something unpatched. Maybe some data's on their system and they ran an app they shouldn't have. Compromised credentials could just be a phished thing that happened a year ago they don't even know about.

It's not an intentional thing, but man, does it happen. Collide tries to solve that problem while giving end users the tooling to solve it themselves so that way they don't have to go to IT for every little thing every time they can't get connected and don't have the right app installed. This is where Collide is a brand new solution to this challenge. It's like a cup of cold water in the desert for IT. Collide ensures that only secure devices can access your cloud apps. So say goodbye to problems around phished credentials because it's checking that and making sure they're not trying to authenticate

with something that's known to be phished. They're making sure that your OS is up to date, you've got the things that you need to be in compliance with your policies, and it communicates with them directly to help them solve the issues using your tooling and your language and your communication. It empowers employees to solve these problems themselves. It takes that burden away from IT. It's really the best way to do zero trust,

and you can solve these problems before the devices get connected, and it supports Linux. Go see the demo they've set up for you at collide.com slash unplugged. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. That's a great way to support the show. And you can see that demo and just get insights into how seamless all of this is. It could really solve some problems for you.

It's helped a lot of listeners. Collide.com slash unplugged. Well, besides your hands-on experience, we also got some great feedback around VR and open source software, which triggered a whole other round of research. There is way more going on than I think either one of us realized. Yeah. And in some ways, a couple of areas, it might even be ahead of the commercial stuff. All of it, though, very much seems like, as we look over it it a very much roll your own depending on what you

want to get done like if you want a game you go one route if you want to do productivity you have to kind of go a different route use a different stack one resource that was sent in to me that just seems like the best is a linux vr adventures wiki which we'll have a link to in the notes extensive documentation for this area and when you read, you can really tell most of this stuff is using steam VR. That makes sense. Steam VR is a little buggy on Linux. So the other mountain people are trying to climb is building something that replaces steam VR.

And there's a couple of those out there. We'll link to those in the show notes too, like Monando and open composite, I think might be them and a couple of others that are trying to, trying to build us, build something that takes care of all ofite, I think, might be them, and a couple of others that are trying to build something that takes care of all of the APIs and the tech and the rendering for you. Implements Kronos OpenXR. Yeah, yeah.

But it's funny watching through this, just doing the research and chatting with folks in the Matrix chat room, like SoFi, shout out to SoFi, just in the last 30 days, stuff is moving very, very, very fast. Like we will have in the notes, we'll have linked a totally smooth VR experience for Linux desktop. You bring it, you're bringing in multiple windows. So instead of immersed where it's an app and I'm pulling in virtual screens and I have, I'm just essentially doing a large virtual monitor array. What they're working on is the virtual environment is the desktop.

And then you just have screens everywhere. Yes. In a 3D space. All right. Yeah. Yeah. That's a little bit different of approach. But it's one I think that's more direct.

And it's way cooler. But it's going to take a lot longer to make that work right. It's more like how the simula is doing. Yeah. So there's like an impressive amount of work happening. What is a little tricky about this and why I realized we haven't really been hip to it, unfortunately, a lot of this work is happening in Discord. And so there's just not a lot of ways to capture that publicly. If you're not hanging out in those rooms. Right. Right. When you jump in there

you're blown away at the work that's getting done. But outside that Discord community it's crickets. And you don't really know what's happening. Until you see like somebody post something on Reddit. Like here's a video. Where did that come from? It's all happening in these Discord chat rooms. They have some of it mirrored to Matrix.

So I will link to that if we have that handy. So that is good. You can kind of do a read-only version. So that's how I've been kind of following along. Oh, nice. I do appreciate them bridging that. And then speaking of SoFi, he's packaging this stuff up

so when it's kind of ready to try out, it should be pretty approachable for the Nix community. He's creating essentially a module that you'll be able to just install VR, you know, enable VR mode. Oh, that'll be slick. And it's going to pull all this in and configure your system for you, your Nix desktop, to work in VR. It's early, but these things are coming along.

And when you look at, I think, your best route route today I think it's going to be a quest three with immersed but I think when you're looking for the best route in three years maybe two years I think it's actually going to be this open source route with something like open composite or monando or maybe even steam vr gets better I'm not exactly sure which one materializes or you know and maybe um maybe the Simula VR ships. That'd be nice. What headsets are out there? What software will be out there? Yeah. I think there's

just, there's so much, but if you want to be in on it and see if it works for you, the Quest is a good way to kind of get your toes in there. And the nice thing is, is that it does have the most comprehensive gaming library. It's very much a gaming-first device. So if you don't end up using it for the productivity, you will use it for the gaming because the gaming is really good.

The gaming has gotten to the point now where it makes regular games seem lame. They seem really boring. So there's still usefulness there. I don't know beyond that. I know the immersed folks are working on $400 goggles that are more like sunglasses. So we're getting really close. But that stuff won't necessarily work with the open source tech at first. There are certain standards and whatnot they have to.

So my final thoughts are on this is if you prefer not to be tethered to a laptop, then something like the Simula is going to be the way to go because that's a full computer. The Quest can run Android apps. But to really get the immersed virtual screens, you need to actually pull in a desktop or a laptop. So now you're powering that, you're powering this thing. Yeah. I'm going to have a laptop anyway, so it's not a big deal for me, but it doesn't replace the laptop yet.

It's like additional screens for the laptop. You can do sideloading on things like the Quest, so you can put some work apps on there so you don't always require pulling in your monitors. So that is something to consider. You can probably use it for about as long as the battery is going to last right now. They get warm.

The screens are not perfect still. I think we're not there for all-day use. You're not going to put this thing on in the morning and then kind of forget you have it on during the day. Yeah. I think the next round of headsets probably will be there um we're getting like with the with the quest you can do accessories like the put in little fans and stuff that make it easier on you and reduce the weight on your face like they're really close they're really really close and the screens are very good they're just not perfect yet so i think we are one

generational the quest for will i think undoubtedly be there um but it's close enough that if you just They're really, really close. And the screens are very good. They're just not perfect yet. So I think we are one generational. The Quest 4 will, I think, undoubtedly be there. But it's close enough that if you just want something for a couple of hours to get multiple screens when you're working from home or you want a clear delineation from home and work, it's there for that. And then the open source stuff, I think that's more like give it six months, and then you'll be able to just plug your Quest in, the Quest 3 into your PC with the open source stuff, and you'll be able to use the Quest. So you'll still get to use it with the open source stuff when it's ready.

So to me, it seems like the most solid bet, even though you've got to deal with that meta account. Yeah, they might just push it over. I'd love to know if people know of other options, other hardware that might just connect to Linux and work with the open source stack. It's something that's reasonable because this is the thing I like the least. And when I think about getting one for family,

I don't want to set up one for Hadiyah. I don't want to make her have to have a meta account connected. I don't want to do any of that. So for me, that's one of the weaker points of it. But if we could have something that didn't require an account, that wasn't tied to an online service, but worked as a display with an app over the network or connected directly, I would definitely endorse that. It seems like a really solid product. Although, I'm keeping it.

I'm going to keep doing it. So it's not just something I'm going to just do for the review. I don't think I'll use it much at the studio, but I think I will be using it quite a bit at home. That makes sense. I mean, that's where you're the most space constrained. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, I actually, I don't know.

Did you use it much around your wife? Yeah. Yeah, a bit. What was the sort of? That's a good question. How weird was it? I know sometimes you're using it to try to not be distracted, but I imagine sometimes you'd be sort of in a mixed state where you're trying to get work done but still chatting. Yeah, so I think that's a really good question because obviously you feel a little awkward and a little silly.

Right. But I told her ahead of time what I was doing to like, you know, here's what I'm thinking. And, you know, went on and on about it probably longer than she wanted me to. So that way she was fully up to speed. And then because I could do the portals. So the first night, the first night I used it, I'm sitting within like talking distance to her. And I created a portal so I could see her the whole time. She didn't seem to mind that I had the face computer on.

But when she gets home and I have it on, I generally take it off to say hi to her. And I just, you know, I feel like it's weird, even though I can see her with the pass-through. Probably help if, you know, if more headsets adopt a better version of what the Vision Pro is doing with the eye pass-through kind of thing. Yeah, some sort of signal that says, yes, I can see you. I'm paying attention. I thought it might help if you like glue some googly eyes

on the front of it. That would be hilarious and something I would like to do actually. The other thing that's an interesting experience and very frustrating is sharing a VR headset because it's a very new experience and nobody knows how to manage it if they'd never been in VR before. And, you know, using the controllers and commanding the UI, it's all new. And so you can't see it, and they've never done it. So walking them through things can be the epitome of frustrating. They do have the ability to cast to, like, a Chromecast device and stuff like that.

Like mirror the output. But you're getting a cropped version of what they see. Like what you get, what I see is what you see in the screencast that I send you guys. It is not the full thing, and there's parts of the UI that don't always fit in the screencast that I send you guys. It is not the full thing. And there's parts of the UI that don't always fit in the screencast. Of course. And so that is really frustrating because everybody's very excited to try it.

And they all want to try Dad's headset. And I have to go through all of this every time with them. I would imagine just from an ergonomics point of view, too, like have it, they'll the straps and everything adjusted for your particular noggin. And then someone else goes and puts it on and they adjust everything and you go to, you know, you just want to sit down and get some work done. Yeah.

Yeah. So, and then the other thing is like every now and then like you trigger something and it's making a lot of noise and there's a lot of activity and you're in that environment. And then somebody is talking to you and like somebody's at the door and there's a lot going on. It can be very stimulating.

And it's like, yep, just taking this thing off for a minute. Just whoop, I'm out. I'm out. Let's just figure out what's going on in the real world for a minute. I've had those moments a couple of times where I was hoping it would completely isolate me from all of those. It's like you're getting a little stressed because you're more isolated. Yeah, it's more input.

And I can't quite see what's going on. I suspect that that's just learning to use it when there's not a lot of family running around versus, you know. Right. When do you use it? When do you not? Yeah. Yeah. Am I on a road trip for a month to Texas and back and it's just me and Hadiyah in the RV and I just want to bring my screens with me?

Yeah, I might work for that. If the kids are over with their friends and the dog's barking and all that kind of stuff, maybe I'll just use the laptop screen. Yeah, that's probably where I draw the line. Warp.dev slash Linux dash terminal. Warp, that's a modern Rust-based terminal with AI built in. And little birdies tell us it's coming to Linux soon and you'll be the first to know when you go to warp.dev slash linux-terminal. You'll sign up for the launch party there, and there's also going to be some sweet warp swag when this thing goes down.

Now, if you're not familiar, I've been following this for a while, but if you haven't been, it's a modern command line terminal that has AI prompts built in. AI prompts that might help you remember what a specific command is for that thing you're trying to do on that one thing that you only use about twice a year. Yeah, it's great for that. And you know we love it's built in Rust. It's super fast, very performant. You're not waiting for an entire Chrome browser to load before this thing starts up. It is snappy. And they built in a modern text editor that does syntax highlighting. You can run the commands directly in there. You can grab blocks of config and code at a time. It just makes sense to have

that kind of thing built in. If you've never tried it, you at least got to experience that. And if you forget a command, you just hit the hashtag, boom, pound sign, and you can bring up Warp AI and they'll start suggesting the right command for you. And of course, you can customize the whole UI. They have a collaboration feature. You can create your own prompts that you can recall. It's just a great experience overall. It's something that I've heard about for years from Coder Radio developers who love it. And I know a lot of engineers use it on the Mac. And now it's coming to Linux.

So go to warp.dev slash Linux dash terminal to sign up and you'll find out when it comes out. And then you're going to have that launch party too. I'm so excited about this. Check it out. It's finally something that's built in Rust natively on Linux. It's so fantastic to see it. warp.dev slash linux dash terminal. The warp terminal might just be coming to Linux,

and you'll be the first to find out, because, you know, it is, at warp.dev slash linux dash terminal. Now, it sounds like this LinuxFest is going to be a great one. So the LinuxFest Northwest schedule is live. Encourage you to check that out and maybe even register if you'd like. Now we did get a bunch of feedback this week on a variety of topics. I want to say thank you for that. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact if you want to send us a note. And Brandon did. He says, contact if you want to send us a note and brandon did he says following the touch on ipfs podcasting a few episodes ago i decided to dive down the rabbit hole i updated an unmaintained container

for umbral and made it available for all users not just those using umbral and an unread template in case others want to use it as well. Now that's just one way myself and a part of the community can help the V for V and decentralized podcasting community. You did link to IPFS podcasting node on GitHub, which seems like a pretty cool project. A node providing decentralized podcast distribution over IPFS, crowd hosting podcast episodes with storage and bandwidth provided by volunteer nodes. And if you click a few links that we'll include in the show notes,

there are 135 IPFS nodes currently hosting 45,998 episodes from 479 feeds worldwide. So isn't that incredible? episodes from 479 feeds worldwide. So isn't that incredible? Yeah. The IPFS podcasting is something I definitely want to get back to this year. The idea is so dang cool. And then the fact that we can put them on our splits and help them, you know,

cover their storage costs seems just absolutely brilliant. And I love seeing this brand and I really appreciate you taking the time to get that all in a nice working manner for everybody. I'm really tempted. Maybe after summer, maybe after we get through some of these events. Something to explore. Yeah, I feel like it will. I feel like it will be.

We'll have links though in the show notes if you want to play around with IPFS podcasting. The idea is really neat. Some podcast clients in the podcasting 2.0 community will just be able to pull it natively. Those that can't can use an HTTP redirect. So it still pulls it from IPFS as the storage backend, but it uses one of those gateways out there like on Cloudflare or something. Yeah, if you're not hip to the new protocol. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now. And now it is time for Le Boost. We got a bunch of boosts about the virtual Linux desktop stuff. And so I wanted to kind of put them all together in one spot and answer those since they're all on a theme. We got a bunch of boosts about the virtual Linux desktop stuff, and so I wanted to kind of put them all together in one spot and answer those since they're all on a theme. And Lando came in with 88,042 sats. Well, thank you, sir. Is he our baller this week?

I believe so. He's up there if he's either way. Yeah, top baller indeed. All right. Well, thank you. There you go. there if he's either way yeah top baller indeed all right well thank you there you go and lando writes i'd love to hear more about your vr productivity setup and experience getting linux desktop in vr other than the vision pro most of the coverage is about has been about gaming but to me the value of having the virtual environment to work and while traveling in a small space seems to be real uh he says, give MB a try.

I know your qualms about the lifetime pass, but it's a polished version of Jellyfin. Hmm. You know, I thought they were pretty similar. I didn't realize MB may have more polish than Jellyfin. That's interesting. So on specifics to getting the Linux desktop in there, I did run into some problems trying to get it to work on NixOS, as I seem to recall. Do you remember what they were, Wes? Because I know it was like after last week's episode. So it was...

No, I mean, eventually we got it. We had to get the V4L2 loopback module going. Yes, right. I had to get the module set up, but that wasn't too bad. No, and we did. And I think we got to the point where it looked like everything should have been working, but wasn't. So I don't know if there was just something we were missing or... Yeah, when I tried it with the app image on my KDE Neon setup here, it just worked immediately. It did complain about not having an NVIDIA card, but still worked fine. I think if you're not trying to do the virtual screens and if you actually have a hardware dongle, I think it would work a little bit better, Lando.

So what I've been thinking I would do for my travel setup is my ThinkPad has an HDMI port and I picked up a dummy dongle for the ThinkPad. And I think I'm just going to put that in there, and I'll have two screens when I travel. Still pretty good. Yeah. It is – on the Mac, it is very simple to create the virtual screens. It'll just – it'll create, I think, up to four. You have to pay for immersed after a certain point, though.

So if you want more than three screens, you have to pay for that. And then on the Mac, it will dim your actual monitor. But what I do is I just hit the dim button so that way people can't see my screen. And then it's really private, and that's really nice. There's something kind of just one less thing that's distracting if nobody can see my screen. There's just something I like about it. Yeah, no one has to see your weird idea for the podcast. Oh my gosh, they're so weird.

Red 5D boosts in with 28,025 sats. Long time listener since about 2011. Whoa. First time booster. I love it. I love hearing from the long timers. I'd definitely be interested in hearing more of your experience using the Linux desktop in VR. Since I've tried that a bit myself with the Immersed app on the Quest 2.

And P.S., this is a zip code boost. Oh, you brought the map. Good. Of course. Good, good. It's a VR map this time. Okay, 28025, that's a postal code in North Carolina, the city of Concord or thereabouts. Concord?

How do you say it down there? Hello, Concord, North Carolina. I know there's a Concord or Concord near Boston, but I don't know if you say it the same. Concord? Kind of like that. In Cabarrus County. Concord. So, Red, since you've tried this on the Quest 2 like I did, I'd say the biggest difference is on the Quest 2, you really had such lower screen quality that you'd have to make the screen so large that they were readable that it never worked out to be practical for me.

What I liked about Immersed is I could create a virtual workspace. I had a cabin with a fireplace that was up on a hill with windows that were looking over a lake and it was raining. And then the way they positioned it is it looked like I was sitting on a hill with windows that were looking over a lake and it was raining. And then the way they positioned it is it looked like I was sitting in a couch. So I was sitting in my computer chair. But visually, I was sitting on a couch, a big red couch in front of a fireplace. And then I had my screens out in front of the fireplace. Very, very chill.

But the Quest 2 couldn't quite chop it on the screen res, where that has not been as much of an issue with the Quest 3. I'd say it's a very solid upgrade. In fact, the Quest 3 screens are better than the Quest Pro screens even, and the Quest Pro is a $1,000 device. Yeah, Meta is pushing it hard. I think the Apple Vision Pro takes it even one notch further, and I don't know if any of them are quite there for eight-hour use. know if any of them are quite there for for eight hour use um you're talking to a guy who has used computer screens since they were like black and white or green so for me i've lived with a large range of quality that if i have to step a little bit back to have multiple screens i'll take that trade but you're not going to today you're not going to go into a

VR environment and get an upgrade in fidelity. You're going to get, you're going to have a better time with your actual real screens. But like in the use case of traveling, it's just, then there's not even an option. And I still think it's totally usable. Thank you for the boost. Bobby pin boosted in through fountain 4000 sets. I'd love to see how to use the quest with Linux as well. I've been looking at it since you mentioned it in C Fountain, 4,000 sets. I'd love to see how to use the Quest with Linux as well. I've been looking at it since you mentioned it in Coder a while ago, but I'm hesitant about the reliance on meta and seemingly Windows. I'd love to see a FOSS alternative,

but for now, the Quest may be the next best bet. Yeah, I think that's it, Bobby, is the Quest, unfortunately, is the best bet for what you can do today. And I think it's likely going to be one of the best bets for what open source can do in the near future. Like the index seems to be well supported. There's a couple of VR devices that because they just have a large user base

seem to be well supported. And I think the Quest is sort of the top of that list. Do you think we're going to see some of these like face hugger type devices from the likes of Pine and those manufacturers who are relying on community support to make it all work. I mean, that's probably a few years down the road, but do you think that'll be a thing? Pine VR.

I do. Yeah, I do think so. I had the realization when I tried the Quest 2 and it became obvious to me that this is an Android device on my face that is like, of course, Apple was going to create one. Anybody that, you know, is making a mobile device today that, you know, has relationships with ARM and knows how to do power management and screen resolutions and stuff like that is really kind of a candidate for making a facehugger. I could definitely see them getting into it. And, you know, again, I bet they would focus on a particular use case, and it would probably be really good at that use case,

but maybe not great at, say, gaming or something. I'd love to try it, though. Faraday Fedora came in with a row of ducks with a VR question. He says, I know it's a niche subject, but so is desktop Linux. So let's hear about it. He also was talking about restoring Windows. He says, I've done this on my desktop because of anti-cheat and flight sims.

The anti-cheat stuff is killing the gaming on Linux for a couple of games. It's really a bummer. But he says that's pretty much only for some games. What I hope to do one day is make a headless Windows machine and then connect from a smaller Linux desktop.

Hey, there you go. So I was playing with Steam Link. Right, yeah. In the Quest. That works. So I did Steam Link from my deck, from my Steam Deck, to the Quest,

using the Atari VCS Xbox-compatible controller. The latency was fine. Did you play like a VR game, or was it just a normal game that presented like a screen? Yeah, I tried to launch a VR game and I don't know if Steam Link supports VR because I just got like a blank screen because that was my thought. Right. Chris, it sounds to me like there's so many layers of like abstraction and like, oh, I need a dongle to pretend that this works and I'm going to, you know, cheat it to make it do the thing I want to. How was your, like, time fiddling versus your time actually just doing the thing you were intending? It's pretty quick because it's all just Android APKs.

Like, you know, the Steam link is an APK I got from, like, Pure APK. I download that. I install it using the Amaze file manager. So once you have a file manager, it's pretty quick. Yeah, it probably took about a couple hours to get like all the basics set up. And then it's just download APK, install APK, run APK. And Steam Link, it auto detects your other Steam devices.

So you just connect on it and I was in. That was one of the smoother ones. Very impressed with that setup. And, you know, I had my Steam Deck in a cupboard up above the TV closed and I'm sitting there in a VR environment playing from it. And it's just an app I just launched and it like, the

Steam Deck woke up. Like, Valve's nailed some of this stuff really well. You also can get the Xbox streaming gaming service inside the Quest. I haven't tried that though. You know, you pair that with the sort of privacy aspect you mentioned. Yeah. I'm working. Don't disturb that, though. You know, you pair that with the sort of privacy aspect you mentioned. Yeah.

I'm working. Don't disturb me. All right. You know what I'm doing. Well, why are you using a game controller? It's a spreadsheet. It's complicated. It's complicated. Lego Feet comes in with $12,345. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life.

Well, it sounds like Lego is kind of mirroring your experience here, Chris. I bought the Quest 2 for productivity, and the screen resolution wasn't even close to good enough. I don't care about games or anything. I just want to know if I can sit on my own little planet with a few screens, nerd out, write some emails, and read some documents. Hooray. Lego, if you're a screen queen, maybe not.

If you're, it is way better than the Quest 2, right? Because my daughter has the Quest 2 still. So I popped the old Quest 2 on and I was like, oh, honey. Oh, honey, child. Oh, honey. Don't look at, don't look through mine. And then she put mine on and she's like, dad, this is so much better. So there's like a noticeable improvement. But it's not like – if you're spending big money, like for me, if I were going to buy, say, a $3,700 headset, I'd want it to be beyond what I could get anywhere on a computer monitor. We're not there yet. But at $600, when you get the 512 gigabyte version,

$600, yeah. I mean, I think it's kind of there if you go in with the expectation that you're still going to be a little disappointed, but it's nowhere near as bad as the Quest 2. So to continue here

with the baller boosters, True Grits boosted in two boosts with a total of 77,067 Satoshis. Hey, rich lobster! For the first one, I've been having some difficulties boosting from the upgraded members live feed in Fountain specifically. Has anyone else had this issue? Uh-oh. Not that I know of, but now we'll be on the lookout.

And on the second boost, it seems like it's a zip code boost. 72067 from True's parents' place. I don't know. Maybe you could avoid doxing yourself, but then you end up

doxing your parents. Is that how it works? The zip code's a pretty large region, though. Yeah, well, Gritz's wonderful folks seem to live in Arkansas. maybe somewhere near Whispering Springs. Hello, True Gritz's parents.

Thanks for True Gritz. Pseudospice comes in with 56,222 stats. That feels probably like a McDuck. Quacka quacka, it's a treasure. Yippee! Looking forward to meeting you guys at Texas Linux Fest. Did you catch that the Linux kernel team has been now given their own power to issue their own CVEs directly? LWN covered this. I don't follow it, but the Linux kernel team has always taken issue with the CVE process.

They say all issues are bugs, etc. Do you think it's possible that there could be a situation now where there's a vulnerability, but the colonel team doesn't want to acknowledge it officially or maybe disagrees with the severity so a CVE number doesn't get assigned? So CVE shenanigans. The colonel team now issuing their own CVEs called a CNA. Now, he is right. There has been murmurs from the kernel team on several occasions, well, all security issues are actually just bugs.

And if you were to assign a CVE to every bug in the Linux kernel, you would overwhelm the CVE system, a point which Greg has made on the mailing list before. He has joked about, well, we'll just assign CVEs to everything and burn the system down. So there's a little bit of hostility there. It's interesting, too. You know, the free NGINX fork that folks

have been talking about, seems like some of the disagreements there at least stemmed from CVE assignment, what should count and what shouldn't count. So, hot topic these days. Yeah. I do think it's worth pointing out there could be, maybe now, a bias towards not issuing them, but yeah, to your point, it could be maybe it just fixes a bias the other direction that we have been suffering from.

The folks who are closest to it get to decide. You know who I'd like to hear feedback from? Is anybody out there that's an open source maintainer that this would somehow impact them? Like are you following CVEs, release for the Linux kernel, to update downstream packages? Does this change any of that? I don't have a clear understanding of how that would impact the rest of the community. It is fascinating to see a group that's been a little anti-CVE become their own CVE issuer. But maybe that's what it takes to sort things out.

It'd be interesting to see, you know, in a year, in three years, how do the statistics around CVEs and the kernel change if they do. Yeah. Thank you, PseudoSpice, for your boost. Hybrid sarcasm boosts in with 42,000 sats. Hey, Hybrid. Forgot to report on my next cloud solution, the Linux Server I.O. container, because of the Cron add-on,

coupled with MariaDB and Redis containers. I use traffic to provide TLS. I also deployed RealOrange's DB backup as a container for a nightly DB backup. Nice. What is that again? RealOrange's DB backup. Ah, the RealOrange one.

Okay, yeah. Okay, great. Finally, the files themselves are on a ZFS dataset, which is duplicated to another host in the house and are synced to B2. Never had any upgrade issues, but fingers crossed. Nice setup. I like that you're getting to B2. Never had any upgrade issues, but fingers crossed. Nice setup.

I like that you're getting into B2. Yeah, mix of lots of fun tech in there. I feel like we should be talking about backups a little bit more on this show, but I haven't really locked into what that is. I'd like to get, I'm always looking to hear your backup solutions, so if you're looking for an excuse to boost in, tell us how you're doing backups. We want to know.

I think March sometime is World Backup Day, too. We should probably, you know, look at the calendar. Sir Alex Gates boosted in with 10,000 Satoshis. Podcasting 2.0 consultant. I just use the NextCloud Helm chart. It's pretty hands-off aside from major database upgrades. Not a Nix config, but it's still deployed with configuration files. Nix versus Kubernetes feels like a big debate to me.

Yeah, so you can use Nix as the host OS, but I use Linode K8s, so it doesn't really matter. The experience directly translates to job experience as well. Yeah, that's a fair point. Things that help build out the old resume. You can also have NixOS in the container if you want. So like if there's something that the project doesn't provide, a great container, you don't like it,

you can always have a project or make your own container that runs NixOS with the NixOS service, which packages it nicely. Linux Teamster comes in with 5,000 sats. At the end of the members feed, you mentioned trying to decide whether to start a fresh or migrate to a new Nextcloud instance. Yeah, our new one that we built last episode. Teamster says, well, a nice middle ground is the user account export app. I've successfully used it to export my user data, including calendars and files and everything, to a new instance. You just need to install the app on the new Nextcloud app from the new Nextcloud app store.

That does sound like a nice middle ground. Yeah, that is. So he says that it's called the account export app. And that really does seem like just the perfect solution for me. I don't need to migrate everything, but accounts and user data, that sounds ideal. Thank you, Teamster. Appreciate that. Gene Bean comes in with a row of ducks. I'd like to see you Nexify the OwnTracks recorder and the OwnTracks frontend,

along with the HTTP interface to own tracks instead of mqtt a little challenge from the bean oh you know beans got a this is a good one because we're gonna be on the road we're gonna be on the road hmm yeah that's true this would be great for the texas one where i'm gonna be on the road for a while gene bean i like this we're gonna put that on the list where's my list i think it's on your thigh, right? Oh, I should. It should be. Just pull up your VR whiteboard. Yeah. Vroom. All right, Gene Bean. OwnTracks,

by the way, if you don't know what OwnTracks is, it's like your own self-hosted FindMy or Location or Life360. Yeah, you run the server, and then you get some sort of client that pings with your location every so often. And then it's got a handy-dandy interface to show you. Thank you, Gene Bain. Tom's dad was kind enough to boost in 10,000 sets.

Coming in hot with the boost! Here's an interesting project composed to Nix, which will convert a Docker-composed file to a Nix config using OCI containers and Systemd services. I'm playing with make files that convert Docker-composed YAML files to Nix configs.

Not sure how I feel about all the systemd services that it creates, but it does work. He has a link here to compose to Nix on GitHub. What do you think? We have been sniffing around this a little bit. Yeah, it's on my list to play with. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I have yet to have the opportunity to take advantage of something like this, but the idea being, right, you take your Docker Compose file,

you throw it through this son of a gun, and what you get is essentially the Nix config you'd need to do the same thing running on your Nix box. Seems like a nice sort of hybrid, too, of the way a lot of folks run Podman setups, you know, where you just have systemd services that start your Podman containers, and then you just slap on a layer of Nix to make that even more declarative. Could be really nice. Also could be yet another way

to kind of figure out how to do things. You're like, well, I know how to do it in Docker Compose. Right. You can still have it on your Nix system, but you don't have to go sort of quote-unquote full Nix. Yeah. Abhi1984 comes in with 4,000 sats. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Fountain is finally allowing me to boost again. Hey, I agree. I have no idea what was wrong. Well, they'll be looking into it. The TLDR, though, is... Here I have no idea what was wrong. Well, they'll be looking into it. The TLDR though is, here's what I tried to send before. I said, thanks for linking to my post. I saw a nice little spike in traffic.

I've also set up the podcast section of Audio Bookshelf and put two podcasts in there. Oh, so he's stacking podcasts he's not listening to now, but archiving them in there for later. That's nice. Yeah, that's a great idea. Then you don't have to fill up the space on your phone. It says the settings default to not downloading, so they're just basically in the quote-unquote

cloud, his own cloud, until they're ready to listen to. I thought I'd just share an alternative use case. Nice. That is, you know, you could download a whole series, throw it on your audiobook shelf. It's just waiting there for you when you're ready for it. That's such a great idea. That could be great for a road trip. Exception comes in with another row of ducks. Hey, look at him go. Why free and open source software, you ask? Yeah, why? Well, a customer asked why Ansible

didn't complete a reboot, although the server was up and SSH-able. To answer, well, I just cloned the Ansible source code repository, examined the code for the reboot module, I just clone the Ansible source code repository, examine the code for the reboot module, and explain the reason. That is the why. And by the way, it was because Ansible waits an exponentially increasing time after every check attempt per design. It's better to wait than time out and fail. Fair. Yeah, it is nice to be able to just look at it and go, okay, what is going on? It's like to your point earlier, it's like we have the code.

Yeah, right. Yeah, even if you can't change it, you're not going to build it. Just being able to introspect it and figure things out where the docs are lacking or you really need to see the implementation specifics. Crucial. VT52 came in with three boosts, all totaling a row of ducks. This is a little bit of feedback on Arian,

which we mentioned last episode at Docker Compose Abstraction Project. He says, I've been using Arian on NixOS for a while now. I didn't like having the messy deployment and definition of Docker Compose services sitting outside of my carefully tended NixOS garden. We're such nerds. I totally understand, but it's such a nerdy thing. I also love that for some folks, that's what they want. They want the separate system. Other people want it all.

And you can do, there's a whole range of options. And some of my systems, I feel like the production systems are all going to be separated out. But my casual day-to-day daily drivers, all one big old file body. One big one. It continues. I've been using areas. You can integrate NixOS

config details into your service definitions such as passing net ITF names declaratively, and use the same secrets management for both. Agent Nix, for instance. You can use Arian to make and deploy custom NixOS images, but you can also deploy images from your favorite image registry. Yeah, that's a great point. I think, you know, Arian seems super flexible in that sense. You can use it just like you do with Docker Compose, where it's like you just clone it in a separate repo

and it lives in a folder somewhere, or you can have it all spelled out in your NixOS config because it talks Nix. Hey, look at this too. He wrote in about the BBS at pebcac.lol, you know, a problem which exists

between keyboard and chair. pebcac.lol. He's got a collection of old ANSI art that folks might find fun to browse. And I'm going to go check it out right now. Have you been there yet? I'm just checking it out right now. There's a dark mode.

There's a button that says connect via Telnet. Oh, look at that. It's an embedded BBS. Wow. You know, I saw a comment go by in Matrix and thought, oh, yeah, that'll be neat. Wow. Wow.

It's way better than I expected. That is so cool. Go check out pebcac..lo we'll put a link to that in the show notes too because that's that is so neat it's nice to have you back thank you vt appreciate that boost there's a lot a lot coming in there a lot of good value thank you everybody that boosted in uh we do have the 2000 set cut off but we really uh we really read them all because there's so many of them. And there's some guy in there named Chris Lass boosted in. He's testing out Fountain. How incestuous.

How weird. How weird. We had 21 boosters this week. Well, 20 because one of them was me doing a test. And so we stacked 362,375 sats. It's over 9,000! Appreciate everybody who finds value in this podcast uh that is a two-way conversation there so if you have any questions about what we covered or you want more details

about a specific thing you can boost in or if you have experience you'd like to share with the rest of the community one of the great things is that message does get in front of the community and remember the fountain fm devs and i will be reading your feedback about fountain fm and incorporating that each week into our calls to see if we can't knock out as many of those as possible before we head out to scale. And also a big shout out to everybody out there who sat streams, just streaming as you listen. We see you come in on our dashboard all day long. It's always, always appreciated.

So thanks, everybody out there who's been supporting the shows. That is our Value for Value segment. You can boost with a new podcast app. Go to podcastapps.com to find that. And check out fountain.fm to give them some feedback or podverse.fm if you'd like an open source client. Four score and seven boosts to go. Now, we have kind of a different pick this week. So it's not a full pick.

It's more like a book club. Yeah, it's a read. This is a really great performance comparison of the various popular Mesh VPNs. It's written by the folks over at Define Networking who make Nebula, but Nebula doesn't necessarily

come in as the champion in some of these benchmarks. I think it's really fair. Yeah, it's written by Ryan Huber, who's been a past guest on this show. And as a lot of folks know, benchmarking is a difficult, finicky game. And you can tell reading this that Ryan and the team really put in some thoughts, try to how to actually do this and how do you try to do it in a fair, meaningful way that, you know, respects all the contentence. And measures aspects of Mesh VPN performance I hadn't considered,

like CPU and memory impact and overall with throughput as well. And then talks about how some of these Mesh VPNs are achieving that throughput and why others aren't. I mean, I'm really impressed. It must have taken forever

to put that together. So in lieu of a software pick this week, I wanted to put that in there so you guys could, I don't know, if you want to nerd out on it, we'll have a link in the show notes. Now Chris has some conclusions with the VR on Linux topic.

I'm wondering, is this going to stick around for you long term? And if so, do you have any tips for us? I think I will use it long term, mostly at home. You know, I kind of implied that I think the ideal solution is where you don't have a bunch of screens. Upstairs and here in the studio, I already got the monitors. I already bought the monitors. I've got the monitors. They're good screens. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to put a headset on if you've already got three or four screens in front of you. That's just sort of silly. In retrospect, it seems obvious, but one of the first things I tried to do is I sat down at my

desk here and I thought, well, I like having screens. Let's just have more of them. In reality, things I tried to do is I sat down at my desk here and I thought, well, I like having screens. Let's just have more of them. In reality, the OS is better at real physical monitors. The window management tools are better at that. Everything's just, you know, we have years of momentum around that. So if you've got three or four screens already, I don't think you're going to see a big gain. If you're like me with a situation at home where I've got a 13-inch laptop, then it's much more obvious. And it's kind of been my go-to. I think I'm going to end up having to get a bag for it. I have a couple of links to the head straps that made it easier for me.

The real trick is what they call the triangle method. You want the weight distributed on your head like a triangle. You don't want all the weight on the back of the head and you don't want all the weight on the front of the head. You want it kind of equally distributed across three points. And I found like a $30 headset that works fantastic. And then there's – remember when I mentioned there's some really nerdy ones? Bobo VR S3 Pro has a cooling fan on the head strap, a dial so you can turn up the fan or not. You can dial it up or down.

A dial so you can turn up the fan or not. You can dial it up or down. But then my favorite ridiculous part is it has a removable battery pack that's magnetically attached. So you can just, with the headset, blindly reach behind you and just sort of drop the battery on the back of the headset. And it'll magnetically snap into place and gives you 10,000 milliamps extra battery. And then you can buy a dock, which has more batteries, and then you can just always be hot charging a battery, and then you can just swap them, because the Quest has a built-in battery too, so you can just hot swap these removable batteries and just keep going all day long.

I don't think the screens are there yet, but when the screens are there, this kind of stuff is going to be killer. And this is an example where this is the highest of the high-end head straps. It's $90. Okay. The one I'm using right now is a $30 head strap. It's perfectly serviceable. These are going to be $200, $300 for the Apple Vision Pro.

These are going to be $300, $400 headset accessories for the Apple Vision Pro. And so we're already seeing the difference even in the accessories. It's very much kind of like an extreme example of the iOS ecosystem and the Android ecosystem. And Bobo VR seems to be making the highest of the high-end head straps where you get the little fan and you get the, you know, slap on the battery packs. But the one I'll link to as well, the one I'm actually using, I've had now since the 12th, and it's called the Desk Comfort Headstrap, D-E-S-T-E-K, Comfort Headstrap.

And $35 on Amazon, but they have a 40% promo code going right now. Hey. So it's really good. I think these guys are trying to sell before the Bobo VR ships because it's pre-sale right now. So for under a grand, you can really have a pretty nice setup. Yes. With these head straps, it really takes away any of the strain.

It's very comfortable once you get them dialed in. And the thing is that they add, which is brilliant, is they add this little flip-up capability, like a 90-degree flip-up. So when people walk in, you can just flip them up like a pair of welding goggles or something. So that's great. So if you don't have multiple screens already and you're willing to play around with accessories to dial it in just right, you can kind of be on a bleeding hedge.

Probably only useful for those of you who genuinely suffer from ADD or just genuinely want more screens. But yeah, in those scenarios, it's sticking around. So embarrassingly, I think I'm bringing this thing to scale with me. Okay, what do you think about a quick little off-the-books prediction when we do our predictions roundup for next year? Will I still be using it? Yeah.

I'm going to say no because I'll be done traveling by then. You think you'll fall back into your old ways? Maybe, unless it really sticks at home. What might make it stick, actually, surprisingly, which I didn't expect, is the gaming. Because when I look at it, I'm like, well, I could play a game. Because the games are really something special. Those are really where it's at. That's an experience you can only get in VR.

And they've done such a good job. Now, like one of the just stupid demos, tech demos, is a pass-through one where an alien ship crashes through the roof of your house and it blows the roof of your house open. I hate when that happens. And it comes through and it's in the middle of your room. And then creatures start coming through the walls and they bust open the wall. And so they superimpose like an outside world, and they make it look like your wall's been cracked open. And it's three-dimensional, so you can shoot through the hole and shoot guys out there,

and more guys will crawl through the holes they make, and it just sort of destroys your home as time goes on. And you can't. There's just no other way to experience that. And then to be able to just close that app and then launch the Immersed app and wirelessly connect to your machine, there's your screens. I mean, there were several times this week where I just quickly replied to something you guys said just by doing exactly that, just switching over back into my VR environment. Oh yeah. Brent got back to me. Okay. Respond to that. Boom. Then just close that app again. It's like my workplace is just an app for good or for worse.

So I'd say it's a 50, 50 shot that by the end of the year I'm still using it. The Immersed app, if it continues to improve on Linux, is probably going to get me. I can get it working on my next desktop, so that's probably going to be another notch. You can have multiple machines in the Immersed app, so you can have multiple different setups

in there, connect to different computers. So you can just install the Immersed app on all your machines and then all your machines could have multiple monitors. If you want to mess with the X-Render or the dummy stuff. Or if you're on a commercial desktop, you don't have to worry about it. Yeah. It's exciting. It feels new

and not recommended for everybody. But if you're a weird nerd like me. Or you live in a tiny home. Yeah. Could be just perfect. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yeah, that's right. Or you live in a tiny home. Yeah, could be just perfect. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yeah, that's right. Shows live on a Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.

You can catch us over at JBLive.tv and soon in a podcasting 2.0 app right in there. Links to what we talked about today, that's at LinuxUnplugged.com slash 550, including the apps, accessories, deets, all that, all linked over there. You can see the demo, a quick demo of what it's kind of like. Kind of? The motion isn't quite right, and the scale

isn't quite right, but I posted over at jupyter.to a video walkthrough of my Plasma desktops being pulled into VR. If you'd like to see a visual of it, we'll have it over there at jupiter.tv. Thanks so much for joining us, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday! Thank you.