LINUX Unplugged - 552: Plasma's Perfect Play

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Plasma 6 is out, and we've been giving it a go. What's new, our thoughts, and the lessons other desktops should learn.

Sometimes Linux users just can't get a break. Sometimes we don't get to enjoy features like, oh, I don't know, your fancy 4K screen at 120 hertz. Or maybe you're like Wes over there with your 5K 240 hertz over there. You don't know? Well, we've been left out because Linux users haven't had HDMI 2.1 for years due to limitations that have been set, not at a technical level, but at a policy level by the HDMI form. And the good folks over at amd have tried to find a solution for the open source driver and they worked on a proposal submitted to the form and the form rejected their efforts yeah all that despite amd engineers spending actual months

trying to figure out if there was any possibly right way to do this and having the code even working internally, it had just come down to the forum actually stamping it and giving their approval. Working code internally. Yeah, it's not a technical issue, right? It just needs this group to say, yeah, sure. Now, Michael Arable added some background context in his coverage. He noted, in the early days of the open source AMD driver efforts, there were concerns around exposing GPU video acceleration in the open source driver as to not potentially compromise HDCP digital video restrictions with MPEG-LA and the likes. So the bad old days of blocking Linux features out of piracy concerns are alive and well. It seems so. Yeah, you can't have that because you might steal a movie.

Well, so be it, boys. Arr! You know, the pirates were the first to discover the gold. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen.

Coming up on the show today, we've all been kicking the tires of Plasma 6, the brand new release that's been over a year in development. We'll tell you our thoughts, our reactions, and maybe why it's the runway they need for the future. And then we'll round out the show with some picks, some boosts, and a lot more. So let's say a good, hearty, time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room!

Good morning! Hello, Wes! Hey, Wes, and hello, Brent. And afternoon, and evening. Yes, hello up there in the quiet listening as well. Thank you, everybody, for joining the Mumble Room. We've been chatting and hanging out on the livestream for about an hour, 25-ish minutes or so. It's been a good time. Also, a good hearty good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Go to

tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. This is programmable networking that is private and secure by default. It really is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other, wherever they are, securely and remotely, protected by... Quagga. That's right. Using the noise protocol to intuitively, connectively put all of your things together across the internet in a VPS, in a VM, in a Docker container, in an app. Easy to deploy.

Zero config. You can use it at scale at your enterprise, replace old appliances, try it for free on 100 devices and support the show at tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Let's start with a couple of quality of life upgrade stories for Linux users

that came out this week. One that we've been following very closely now for a long time is the open source NVIDIA driver, NVK. And a blog post over on Calabra says, and I quote, NVK is now ready for primetime. It is now Vulkan 1.3 conformant. It also has a bunch of other features that they need. It has DVK running out of the box on upstream Mesa right now, though not all Direct3D 11 games are playing perfectly, but out of the box on Upstream Mesa is a huge deal, and work is underway to get D312 emulation working with Proton.

It's not fully functional, but it's actually already in progress. Ooh, this is exciting. Now, Wes, it feels like it's been what? I don't know. Both like five years and one year at the same time. Yeah, I think NVK was kind of announced, It's been what? I don't know. Both like five years and one year at the same time. Yeah, I think NVK was kind of announced, at least when we started paying attention to it back in October of 2022,

working on a brand new open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa called NVK. I didn't expect it to come then. I'm a little surprised how fast it's moved now. They're really doing the people's work over there. I know this is also the result of work from Red Hat and I would imagine NVIDIA as well and of course Collabra. But we are getting so, so close. It'll be part of Mesa 24.1, which they're hoping means it will land in the spring or fall releases probably more likely of Linux distros. So that's how tangible we're talking about here. It's close.

That is really exciting. And it could mean for a lot of us trouble-free NVIDIA for at least a basic Linux desktop experience. I imagine there's going to be edges of gaming, AI workload and CUDA workloads and things like that, that you're not going to be happy. But for those of us that just want a stable desktop with Wayland, I'm very excited about that. We'll keep an eye on it.

And then one other story we want to just kind of make you aware of, because I think it's going to make your desktop or laptop experience so much better, and this is really a desktop-focused episode. I never thought I'd say these words. Fuse pass-through support may be landing very soon in Linux and substantially boost the I.O. performance for Fuse pass-through support may be landing very soon in Linux and substantially boost the I.O. performance for Fuse. A pass-through mode is in the next branch that could potentially get merged into Linux 6.9. How great is this?

Faster Fuse, okay. Now, I understand kind of like video pass-throughs and things like that. Why do they call it pass-through here? What's going on? I think normally think about it as you had this user space process that was really processing everything. And then so you'd write to a FUSE file system. This user space process would take that, and then it would handle the writing to the file system. I think with this, and the reason why you're seeing this in the benchmark, is you're getting close to native I.O. performance because it basically goes from this process handling everything

to, I think, setting up a construct that the kernel mode probably handles and then passes it through right to the disk. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting into this, right? With Fuse, you set it up so you can have a user-based application handle all these file system stuff, which is why you can do such neat and crazy things that we've seen with Fuse. You know, like my favorite is you can mount an SSH server as a file system, or S3, using Fuse.

And so maybe this wouldn't help for those use cases, but for stuff where you're, you know, I don't know, like something, similar functionality to merger FS, or, you know, things where you're doing manipulations, but then ultimately those things end up back on file systems under the Linux kernel, just, you know, different ones than what you think you're writing to, this kind of stuff lets you say

let's, basically you clue the kernel in on that, so on a per-file basis, instead of handing it off to Fuse, the kernel can just sort of say, oh, well, I know where this goes. I'll just write it out there. That's brilliant. And so if we're lucky, we don't know yet, but if we're lucky, it lands in 6.9, which would mean again, probably about fall. You know, you've seen it in your Linux distros or something, but still, it's going to be a great summer and fall for Linux desktop just with this stuff. And then you figure Plasma 6 coming along too. That is a funny challenge of our

little ecosystem here. You know, like us folks on the bleeding edge or who are trying to cover those things, we know about it now. But even if you, you know, you might hear about it on the show, but if you're just using an LTS or whatever, you're going to have to remember that. It's going to be a bit. Every time you upgrade, you not only get like sort of the things you remember,

but you also get all the things that have been stacking in the background. When I think about this though, this is going to be a fundamental use case shift for me. When I think of a Fuse file system, I think slow.

Like when I think of an Electron app, I think slow. When I think of a Fuse file system, I think slow. So I think, you know, maybe it's okay for backups or maybe recovering data, but I wouldn't want to write to it on the daily.

What if that changes with this? And what does that mean for crazy stupid storage setups that I could get myself into? Probably a lot. There's probably a rabbit hole there that's just full of, like, trouble. You're going to be rolling your own Fuse application. Very excited.

I see some future episodes. Yeah, I'm very excited at this. So we'll see. We'll also keep an eye on this story. I'm really, really feeling pretty optimistic about the next couple of versions of GNOME, where Plasma 6 is going, and

some of the desktop features that are coming in future versions of Linux. It looks like just what we can see already and the development timelines that are coming in future versions of Linux, it looks like just what we can see already and the development timelines that we know of 2024 is going to be a fantastic year for Linux desktop. Things are just getting better. All right. This is our last episode before the last episode that we hit the road.

So hopefully Brent will be in studio next episode and we'll be packing up and heading down to Nixcon North America shortly after our episode. And then, of course, hanging out at Scale in Pasadena, California. All of it runs to the 14th and the 15th and the 16th, I think. I don't know. But it starts at the 14th and it goes on there. There's a website. We'll have it in the show notes. We're going to have four live streams during our trip.

They're all detailed at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. One on the 12th, the 14th, the 15th, and the live LUP on the 17th. LUP's obviously going to get published. The other ones will not be published. So if you miss them, you miss them. But they're jupiterbroad broadcasting.com plus calendar in your time zone that will also be published as a live item pending feed in podcasting 2.0 apps so you won't even have to do the math if you're using a new podcast app then lunch is coming up and boys i think we need

to start planning for a good crowd i keep seeing more and more signups filtering in my old email i'm getting excited about it plus you, we'll always pick up a few. I wonder, are you guys planning to actually attend very many talks? I'm kind of planning to. I mean, I'm going to hit the Nick stuff hard. Yeah. Then I'm kind of planning to just probably do the social scene a lot. It's a good reminder.

I don't think I've looked at the schedule yet, but I should. Yeah, I don't think I have either. Because sometimes there's always some standouts, right? Yeah, They get really good talks. So there might be one or two we want to catch. Unbelievably for me, I've never been. So I think, I don't know. I don't even know how to scale. So you guys are going to have to teach me. You're my mentors.

Oh, yeah. Well, the first thing is bring an appetite. I like to eat at scale. And we also want to know what you'd like to hear from us in our coverage. So please do boost in. You made this trip possible. And we also want to know what you'd like to hear from us in our coverage. So please do boost in. You made this trip possible. And we do have that scale matrix chat that we'll have linked in the show notes as well. So if you're attending and you want to coordinate or anything like that, that's probably a good resource for that.

And then I'll mention coming up on the show, I have the, I think it's pronounced the Sirius 16, all Ryzen laptop from Tuxedo Computers info review. I'll talk a little bit about it because I've been using it for my Plasma 6 review. I'd like to know what you're looking for in a laptop these days. Please boost in and tell me. Are you looking for big laptops, small laptops, dedicated GPU, AMD, NVIDIA? It's all kind of up in the air right now because if you're looking for a laptop to do certain types of LLM workloads, maybe you actually want NVIDIA. So tell me what you're looking for in a laptop

and if you have any questions specifically about the Sirius 16, which is their all Ryzen system that I have. And I'd love to answer that because probably even the next episode or the episode after, I've been working with this machine now for about seven days, so I'm pretty much there on my conclusion.

But I want to throw one more distro on it. You'll never guess which one. You'll never guess. Debian. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. All right, there you go. That's the housekeeping for this week. Now we do have the mega release from the KDE community.

10 years ago, KDE Plasma 5 was released, and Plasma 6 has taken over a year. And on February 28th, the project announced their mega release of KDE Plasma 6, which includes, of course, the desktop environment Plasma 6, KDE Framework 6, and the apps like KDE Gear all around it, based on the Qt 6 development framework. This was a major rewrite for them. Qt 5 had lost its support by the Qt company, and they said, okay, I think it started with Qt 6.1. They said, we're only supporting Qt 6 going forward. And we knew that the KDE project had a clock.

They were up against time, and they maintained Qt 5 and patched it themselves for a while. Yeah, there's the sort of complicated relationship with Qt and Plasma, and while all the Qt stuff, you know, does get open-sourced and, you know, open-source projects are able to use it, their deal allows them to wait up to a year before releasing some of those things. So it meant either Plasma stagnated or they kind of had to do the work themselves. So beyond all the work of actually getting ready for Qt 6,

there's this ongoing maintenance effort to keep the 5 branch going. Yeah, so how long can you do that, right? You eventually got to switch over to 6. But the trick for the project is not to rug all of their users and change everything on them. There was some Plasma transitions. I was joking with Brent that I started using the KDE desktop around version 2. So I remember the transition to KDE 3.

And I remember the transition to 4. And I remember when we started calling it Plasma, and I remember the transition to 5. And I remember the first couple of releases of 5 being kind of rough, but then they started getting it. So I wasn't quite sure because I have a very, very long history with this desktop. I wasn't quite sure which upgrade experience I was going to get this time. Was I going to get the rough rebase? Was I going to get, you know, the smooth rebase?

And I think that was a key question the project took on. So obviously not everything's done yet and it's not available in most distros yet, but you can refer to their wiki if you want to try it after the episode or you can just grab KDE Neon and have some fun if you want to try out Plasma 6. But let's talk about some of the changes they made and then we'll talk about how disruptive it is or isn't, because we are talking about a pretty big rebase to get this

thing on Qt 6. Yeah, I think it's worth underscoring that, right? Like, before you get to adding new features or fixing bugs or improving anything else, you got to get, you got to port your compatibility over. You got to get to where you were. Yeah. Back to baseline, which is wild. I think it's worth underscoring too, like I think discussions of the first, very first inklings of Plasma 6 started somewhere in like 2018. Yeah. And then 2020, things really getting going. But you just had to do, there was a bunch of work that had to take place in the Plasma

5 branch to clean things up, to get ready, to start the migration of integrating the Qt 6 stuff. Even before you've made an official branch called Plasma 6, you've kind of prepared the whole library to get these improvements. And they were very savvy about making Plasma 5.27 the best release they could because they knew they were going to be on that release for a while, for more than a year, while they built out Plasma 6.

Smart moves by the project, all getting their ducks in a row. I'm hopeful that it's a sign of kind of a maturing and well-oiled machinery going at the project. Yeah. So we have the transition to the new Qt 6 framework, but the other massive I think rethinking and rebuild from the ground up is this is a Wayland-first desktop environment. We are living in a, and you know, you think about this,

the commercial desktops have to do some of these rebuilds every now and then too, and they replace a major component of their stack. And the plasma five series got us a long way with Wayland, but it was born in the X era where plasma six was born in the Wayland area era. And it's, it is a Wayland-first desktop environment.

And so I think that's going to make a maybe. It's such an important detail that it feels like it's going to be one of those things that influences the stability and all of the desktop for just years. I mean, I think this is kind of the first place where we're seeing that if K1 has a hard time, it won't eat all of your applications. They've set up like a backup compositor that things can get passed to and then restored into a relaunched K1,

which, I mean, that's one of those things that you'd expect in a Wayland native environment. You want to just work. It's a feature you expect in the old X version, and it's finally here. Probably one of the biggest user-impacting features. That is just, they want to, it's funny because end users, right,

they're not even going to notice it. It's the kind of thing you wouldn't expect except if you happen to have run into it and now it saves your day. And a lot of that is the Plasma 6 release. It's a lot of stuff that because they pulled it off, you're not even going to notice. But they do have a new overview effect that you might notice. They've

improved it. It just, it looks better. I can't really explain it, but the old one in Plasma 5 was wonky. The algorithm they used was just, it looks better. I can't really explain it, but the old one in Plasma 5 was wonky. The algorithm they used was just a little wonky. This one is much cleaner, easier to actually see everything. And now we have HDR support as well. So that's really great. Yeah. It seems like there's some good color work going on in general. I saw there was some stuff added to help colorblind users as well, which is nice to see. It sounds like they did some work on the breeze theme a little bit. So instead of replacing the theme, which Chris, I think they did in previous

cute transitions, which didn't go over so well with users, they kind of just doubled down on what was working really well. That said, I also noticed reorganized settings, which at first being a long-term KDE user, I was like, wait, the thing I thought was in this place is in a different place. But yes, actually it's reorganized in a way of like everything you want to use the most often as just a user is exactly at the top. And the things that maybe you touch once or twice when you set up your system are a little bit nearer to the bottom. So that, that kind of is really nice to see. I talk about the cube i'm really happy to see the cube back but i think i i this is this explains me this is me and i'm gonna it's

embarrassing but i'm gonna admit it when i first launched the plasma 6 desktop my first reaction was oh thank god they made the panel floating thank god it's floating it was just this it was because i want something new in there and when they had the floating panel it looks so good and it was just the smallest subtle idea that this is a leaner meaner plasma with one little tweak here and there but it's the plasma you know and so now that the the panel depending on you know if you're upgrading it's not going to do this to you but if you're doing a fresh install it floats by default and the other change they made that I felt like was finally, and I don't know why it took so long.

I'm so grateful for Nate Graham for really pushing this forward. They have relented on using the single click like it's a web URL to open up stuff because this throws end users. And most upstream distros have just started changing this to double click anyways. Fedora, Kubuntu, Manjaro, they've all been switching it for years. And Nate Graham suggested maybe we should just disable this and quote,

distros are closer to the users and clearly the feedback they've been getting is that the double click is a better default. Let's admit it and switch to double click by default ourselves. Yeah, I think there's a small set of folks that are maybe not happy about this, but otherwise

there's a lot of long-term Plasma users that whenever you go to introduce Plasma to someone new, it's one more setting you've got to apply to make it decent. But it also, I think, shows you how the Plasma development team can take in feedback like this, and it just feels like there's less hills

they have to die on over there. There's more like, okay, if that's how the users want it, that's how we'll do it. And of course, right, it's just the default, so like if you want the old way, which is a nice way to do it. If you're used to single-click, it's efficient, it's nice. I think the problem is just that other OSs have built-in double-click.

It reminds me of when Microsoft tried to do this thing called Active Desktop, and they put Internet Explorer inside the File Explorer, and they tried to make everything a web link. Oh, yeah. And it's like, no, actually, we as computer users can understand the different contexts. In the web, it's a single-click for a link, and on the desktop, in your desktop environment,

it needs a double-click to execute things. Like, I think that's not a hard convention, and because it reduces the amount of accidental fires of opening a document or launching a program, if you do professional editing or things like that on your system, sometimes when you accidentally click something, it's taken like five minutes to launch your video editor or something. Like, oh, okay, well, that's files associated with DaVinci Resolve.

Let me load up DaVinci Resolve for you. Like, oh, God, i was just selecting the files oh you know so it's kind of it is nice to see that fixed and we also have new touchpad gestures which is really great they've made they've made some small tweaks to the scroll panels just little things here and there like you were mentioning the breeze theme that's all landing in there so you got this new plumbing and then these small touches yeah i think a lot of sort of cleanups in various pieces of the just the components you see in a lot of kde apps so there's just like less borders fewer lines that you have to see so everything just feels yeah slightly polished i

think i was seeing in the chat room this morning as we were getting warmed up uh i think it was dan and jeff jeff were you saying like you upgraded from your Plasma 5 install and it just took your defaults, your settings over and just preserved most of your settings in Plasma 6? Yeah, I barely actually didn't notice any difference until I went looking for them. Think about how freaking impressive that is on a technical level. Amazing. Yeah, I love that. Definitely don't want to see a big change if I'm just updating. Gives you confidence and the stability that you can take this update and not have to blow up your whole workflow. I do think it means that if you're curious about the freshest experience,

you might try a clean install, even if it's just in a VM or on a throwaway install, because I think the change defaults are a big deal. Determinate.systems slash unplugged. Yeah, you've heard of them before. They're the builders of the best Nix installer out there, which has full MDM and skiff mode support. They get over 20,000 installs a day. You know they make great team collaboration tools,

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Get that private beta. Also, make a connection to a great company in the Nix space. I think this is a company to watch and I'm super proud to have them as a sponsor. You can support the show and check them out by going to determinant.systems slash unplugged and enjoy FlakeHub. You sign up for the private beta at determinant.systems slash unplugged and a big thank you to Determinate Systems and to flakehub.com for sponsoring this episode. Now the three of us spent most of our week playing with Plasma 6 in a variety of ways. I actually don't know how each of you went about it, so I'm looking forward to hearing about that. But for me, I stuck this thing on my framework, my Framework 13. That's kind of been my NixOS system.

And at the start of the week, I was thinking, okay, I'm going to use, you know, Neon to get this going. That's the blessed way, and it seems closest to the project. But in the back of my mind was just waiting for maybe NixOS to get this Plasma 6 in there. And sure enough, midweek, I was procrastinating enough, and midweek, things started moving in their unstable channel, which got me quite excited. So that is the method I took. I decided to go all crazy, as Chris might say, and Chris might suggest. And I decided to switch to the unstable channel in my NexOS install, which I don't know if that's a good idea yet or not. We shall find out and report later. But after doing that, you know, as it is with NixOS,

it was a one-liner just to tell my system to switch to Plasma 6, which was kind of an amazing experience. Now, given my internet speed, the upgrade took like, you know, hours. But I did it while I was away from home. And that's just has nothing to do with the software, more to do with my space internet. And man, a reboot later, and it was actually kind of an amazing experience. Well, that is slick. All right. Okay. I'm impressed. I'm glad to hear it because that means you're going to be daily driving it. So you can be our Plasma 6 correspondent for a bit. Yeah, I figured from what I've been hearing

and what we've been sort of hearing from the community, hearing from different developers who are working on the project that this was going to be a fairly smooth transition from 5 to 6. And so I thought, what the heck, let's dive right in and just use it full steam ahead, right? So I'm committed to just leaving this on my system and using it from now forward. And my initial thought was, oh, actually, this feels kind of just stable and familiar and like, okay, slightly fresh. I'm seeing some subtle design differences but really this

almost just feels like a point release upgrade from a you know things aren't broken perspective of course you you've you've been sharing with me for years like some of the horror stories of moving between old plasma versions major versions so i was scared that would be the case but since in the last like month we've been hearing this big gonna be quite smooth and sure enough i would say at least from my perspective it really was when i rebooted it was like oh everything's exactly where i expected it there's a few little new things if you go looking for them but man was this ever smooth so i'm very happy yeah and there's a lot of little improvements to the animations.

So it's just things feel a little tighter. And I don't know if that's Qt 6 or if they've some areas. I think it's maybe both. That's great. And really no major stability issues or anything like that. So far, I haven't seen anything break in regular usage. Now, you know me. I go looking for problems and I certainly found some.

But like, come on, it's like brand new for a few days it's been released. So sure enough, there's going to be some edge cases that a Brent might find when he goes looking for them. But overall, like from a daily use perspective, everything's been great. I, I haven't had my workflows be broken. So a few things that stood out for me was Spectacle. I use Spectacle all the time to take screenshots. The screenshot tool. kind of with Wayland find solutions for that because not all the screen recorders were working in the last you know year or so but it seems the spectacle now has a screen recording function which I'm really happy about I don't need a separate program now I think it's early it works but there's like a few little niggles that aren't quite right but for the most part that excites me quite a lot as like a just everyday use kind of item. So I would say, Chris, give it a shot.

I know you like spectacle. I also know that you and I, I'm a moderate spectacle user, but I know you and I are K-Runner buddies. And there is some improvements in K-Runner. Like you can pin things and mirror organize things. Now, did you get a chance to play around with that stuff? Yeah, in the last six months, K-Runner has changed my life. I've just been like diving into it and really digging into it and customizing it. And so this came at a perfect time where K runner now allows you to reorder the search results that it shows you, which exactly three weeks ago, I was like, I wish I could reorder these. Cause really I'm always

looking for kind of the same thing. Sure enough, they the way i am so i'm loving the direction of k runner yeah i agree search is a little is a little faster and tighter now too so that also makes k runner feel a little tighter and faster it's it's really impressive actually i mean we could have this could have been one of those releases where we're sitting like well this isn't working yet and every time i launch this it crashes because the very first look I took at Plasma 6, that was the kind of state of things, like months ago, months ago. I will say, like, everything's been pretty smooth for me.

Where I found the most issue with some new features, and I knew I would, because this is kind of the history of what I've seen in KDE, is that when you're trying to manipulate the panels, it can be problematic. So there's some new panel editing interface, which I think is really great and much improved. And I think it's a good decision to have upgraded that. However, I felt like in the last year they had finally gotten panel editing to be stable.

But with this new interface, it seems like I had things crash several, several times trying to modify things. So I would say early days for that function. It's cool to see the new interface, but you might run into some problems. But it's something you use, you know, once or twice to get things set up and kind of leave alone after that. But it's something you use, you know, once or twice to get things set up and kind of leave alone after that. But other than that, I would say I'm totally happy and glad this worked out for me because I did decide to stick with it. So I think it'll be an okay journey. You know what?

You've inspired me. I'm going to update my machine right here in front of me, which is, you know, it's just a workhorse. I'm going to upgrade it to Plasma 6 during the show. So by the end of the show, it'll be on Plasma 6. All right. Get started. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to upgrade it to Plasma 6 during the show. So by the end of the show, it'll be on Plasma 6. All right, get started. Yeah, I'm going to do it. All right, Wes, so tell us a little. Start with the hardware that you used and the journey that you took.

Yeah, a little boring on the hardware side. Intel-based ThinkPad, which is kind of my default tryout distros on because most stuff just works, and I've tried a lot of distros on here, so it's different software setups. It's a nice little test bed. Also tried Plasma 6 out in a virtual machine just to see, you know, did it feel sluggish? Did it feel faster? And any other issues that way. Plus, it's an easy way to try it.

And to do all that, I was using KDE Neon. Good old Neon. The go-to. I actually thought out of all of us, you'd be like, oh no, I use Nix. You know, I was thinking about it and very tempted. And I think we, you know, we got, we played with it a little bit and got it set up on one of your machines. But

it'd been a moment since I used KDE Neon. And I kind of really appreciate that the project has Neon available for exactly this kind of thing. Right. I agree. Yeah, that is like, this is what it's kind of for here. And especially for a sort of, I don't know if I want to call it a review, but like an experience report of something. I mean, I think the Nix packaging effort for Plasma is all wonderful,

but you know, there's, that is a layer that you got to make some Nix things work. It's a separate project. So it's kind of nice to get Neon and sort of get as close as you can to sort of a pure Plasma 6 experience, at least in the way that the developers are themselves likely experiencing it. And brand new users. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, I think Neon's, I mean, spoiler alert, I decided to go Neon for the exact same justification. So there's the spoiler. I did Neon 2, and actually I've been running Neon on this machine in front of me for years here in the studio. So what did you think? What did you think with that? So you had the fresh coat of paint and everything.

Yeah. I mean, I like it. First off, I'm kind of frustrated because I'm normally a breeze dark user, but the light version looks so good now. I agree. I think I prefer it. I think I'm not going dark mode with it. What?

You know what? I know. I'm the same. It's weird. It's breeze. I was already kind of there with some of the most recent refreshes, but I don't know. It's just, I think I kind of used to use dark mode to kind of hide some of the uggo. Yeah, that's probably it.

Maybe not as necessary now. It might not be as necessary. Yeah, there's like all these little hard edges that have just kind of been polished off quite literally with the floating toolbar, but, you know, just all over the place. I thought a lot of the, you know, the core work is, you know, the framework stuff, just the desktop itself, all wonderful. But I was impressed, too, with some of the work that's been managed to go on to the actual application side, like console, great terminal. It now puts every tab in a separate c group so um you don't have to kill the entire console in all of your tabs at once it can kill a single tab and it won't you know if something goes wrong something hangs it eats a bunch of memory you get a lot more safety which is nice if you forgot to use something like tmux or zelaj and you know your ssh didn't do in

a long running chris has never done that no no, hey! None of us have, right? Come on! You know what, though, Wes? That's a great example of when you're rebuilding and rebuilding with some of the modern Linux tooling that we have, where you don't very often, as a desktop environment, get to, like, re-look at some of your fundamental applications and tools and be like, how could we... If we were to build this today, how would we do it a little differently?

Yeah, I wonder how many of those opportunities came up as you're, you know, having to do these framework updates. You're like, oh, well, I'm suddenly in this part of the code base. Right. Let's fix this. Yeah. 12%. This is going to be a while, guys. The download went pretty quick.

The install's going to take a minute. Dolphin saw some love in this release. I think I take Dolphin almost too much for granted because it's just a top-notch graphical file manager on the Linux desktop. Sure is. The thing that stood out to me this time is some accessibility improvements, notably that the toolbar buttons and the disk space in the status bar are now keyboard accessible. You can press F10 to open the main menu and Shift F10 to open context menus. You can press F10 to open the main menu and shift F10 to open context menus.

And it's just those little details that I really appreciate, especially like maybe you're on a laptop and you're not trying to use your kind of crappy trackpad all day. And you just want to, you know, let the keyboard drive it. Yeah. I mean, Dolphin's been good for years now, but in Plasma 6, it's just, again, just turned it up a little bit better. And it's one of those things like when we did our Windows challenge, you know, that stood out to me that at least in a lot of places, not everywhere, but a lot, especially the old places on Windows, you just have that, right? You can press Alt and some F keys and like you can do a whole, you can install the whole OS without your mouse.

I used to, yeah. I used to use, because you used to have to use large portions of Windows before you had like certain drivers loaded. You could get around the whole OS. Yeah. So it is really nice to see that coming to Dolphin, you're right. I do want to echo Brent's love of the spectacle improvements, because I'm

a big spectacle user myself, and I think it's a great little screenshot utility. I haven't tried the recorder yet, but that's nice to have. There's also lots of little things, like better ways to set the quality. You can do VP9 if you want, and they added a bunch of CLI options.

So if you want to like launch your screen recording in a script or something via Spectacle in console, duh, have at it. That's great. You know, there's one other Spectacle upgrade that I forgot to mention, which is there's a new button for capturing all of your monitors,

but they are scaled to the same scale. So if you have like a 4K monitor with your 1080p plugged in or whatever, it captures them all at the same scale to create like a nice shareable whatever. I thought that's a small thing. It's so amazing. Also, a small improvement I liked in NeoChat was Spaces support. You know, NeoChat's the KDE's Matrix client. And I mean, we use Spaces for our Matrix environment,

so nice little feature bump. I'm an old man. I was really happy to see the desktop cube back. Oh, yeah. That was great. You do have to have four desktops set up. Just FYI. Wes, it's a cube. I want a

triangle next. You know, back in the day, Brent, back in the day brent back in the day there was different shapes in fact uh to really make it a classic you also need to have an aquarium in there somehow yeah uh the other last thing was um yeah just the defaults in general um i wonder how far this goes i'm curious what you think on this how far far does this go to, like, shrinking the gap between the out-of-the-box experience between Plasma and Gnome? You know, like, in the past, I've really valued Gnome as just, like, pop it up, kind of doesn't even matter, the distro, at least if it's Fedora, Ubuntu, or, you know.

Right. And I can just get to work, maybe an extension or two, but, like, otherwise, it pretty much just works, at least, like, on a single screen, on the go, on a laptop. Plasma is, I mean, yes, it does, but, like, if you want to kind of get to the same UX, pretty much just work at least like on a single screen on the go on a laptop plasma's i mean yes it does but like if you want to kind of get the same ux i thought you might you kind of needed some settings and tweaks yeah yeah and i feel like that's that might be a lot less now huh yeah in fact one of our more popular streams was like do these first like 20 things when you first set up plasma yeah and get it all configured to work right and And you're right. And I'm not sure, I think maybe in part,

I've adapted a bit more to Plasma, but I think in Plasma 6, they've closed the gap. I think they have, you're right, because the default theming and white spacing is a lot better. The defaults in general, especially with things like the double click. The search improve, you know, everything's snappy and fast

and just right at your fingertips you're blowing my mind you're blowing my mind it's like they managed to they managed to close that gap without rugging all their users yeah and i still think it would be you know it'll still work for us here in the studio it's like a power workstation and production environment yeah environment yeah huh all right well so I, like I mentioned, I used the Tuxedo Series 16, which is an all Ryzen system. And that was great. That was really, really nice to not have to fight to get good video acceleration. And I used Neon, like I said. Earlier in the development cycle, I was using Nix.

Oh, yeah, right. There was a little GitHub repo that had a flake that kind of had like a preliminary Plasma 6 build before it was getting integrated into Nix packages proper. And then at some point you realize, well, I want to see it in Neon and I want to try it on different hardware. And so I wanted to just reload anyways when I got the Tuxedo, so I just went straight to Neon at that point. I don't think it's an overstatement to say Plasma 6 should probably be a master class in free software. The way they have rebased this project and changed just enough to make guys like us happy, but keep it sane for the folks that don't want a big change, don't want the UI

to rug them, and they want their settings to be respected. I don't know if we've ever seen this pulled off in Linux desktop history before. Not to take away from anything any of the other projects have done, but generally the work of just this rebase is so massive that there's really no time for these other luxuries. But this feels like a release made of luxuries. I'm just completely blown away how they managed to do this without completely jarring their user base. And so even though it doesn't feel like a major upgrade, it's clearly a major upgrade that sets the pathway

for another 10-year release cycle of this thing. I mean, I don't know, but it feels like what we have here is we've rebuilt after major infrastructure changes, Wayland being a first-class citizen now, namespace support and console, these kinds of things, better improved gestures and algorithms for how things get viewed in the overall. I just, I'm really blown away just the more I think about it, what they've accomplished here without making it massively disruptive. Kind of feels like, you know, we've come a long way in the last, I don't know, four or five years.

Kind of think, you know, as Gnome made a lot of progress down the Wayland path. And for a while, Plasma felt a little shaky in that regard. I mean, you could do it, but there's just a lot of edge cases. It kind of took a while for that to become a major focus of the project itself. There'd been, you know, K-Win forks and just sort of other rough signs of like, well, how much can we count on this being really solid in the next decade, half decade? But here we are, that that time later and it's better than ever now for these gestures uh i i saw that there's some improvements in gesture

swiping and chris you've had some gripes about this on various desktops and you are extra sensitive to this i'm curious have you tried the gestures how do they stack up against say the gnome desktop and is this something you can use in Plasma from here forward? I'll say up front, they've solved the major problem, which is you've got this muscle memory. If you've used macOS or GNOME, you've got this three-finger swipe or whatever, maybe it's four-finger swipe, depends, to move between your desktops laterally. So right and left, you just swipe on your trackpad and it slides you over and you can boom boom boom and you can be on your third desktop really quick

and it's it is really a feature that makes for me working on a laptop where i'm used to having lots of screens manageable in plasma you could kind of make this work various different ways you had to disable something and add something and tweak something and then you could kind of make this work various different ways. You had to disable something and add something and tweak something. And then you could kind of get it to work. And trust me, I've done it every single time and every now and then it breaks. And I don't know why in plasma six, it works out of the box as they say.

And the thing that they've done to solve the muscle memory problem is three finger or four, four finger swipe works. Yeah. So it doesn't matter which one. It just works. And then when you do the four-finger swipe down, I think it is, or maybe it's up, you get the overall horizontal workspace management like you do in GNOME.

So you get the desktops in little versions up top, and then the individual desktop windows that you can move through, and the animation looks pretty good. It looks a lot like kind of what you'd expect managing spaces in macOS or GNOME, and I say that in a good way because it's, again, you translate those skills directly to managing this. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't feel significantly worse

than those other implementations. No. They've done a good job catching up. Yeah. I would love to be able to drag Windows from the little tiny preview icons to the other ones. You can't do that yet. Yes.

I would like to do that. I think the animation is good. I don't think it's quite as smooth as GNOME or Mac OS, but I think it's pretty good, both for the switching and all that kind of stuff. But that's such a minor complaint. I'm so happy that they have this working and that it works with three and four fingers. It's so great. So now I know from the future going forward, I'll sit down in front of a plasma desktop and i'll just that's me swiping me swiping now chris i decided to try gestures you know i'm not really a gestures

guy i've got much to learn from you in that respect but i figured i would try to get on board with the gestures brand you got what are you, an animal working with that laptop, holding down buttons on your keyboard to switch desktops? Yeah, you know. Yeah, much, much to learn. But I figured I would try it because you'd give me a hard time, which you just did. Thank you very much. Everything's going smoothly.

And I found, at least on my hardware with the framework, that I had to—now I'm still learning. I'm a young pup, but I had to just pause just a beat with my three fingers on the trackpad just to get it to work. So I had to like, fingers down, just pause a moment and then swipe. Is that your experience? Yeah. So yeah, I think that's got to be like their logic trying to figure out if you're scrolling or moving or what and so i think yeah you need no activity for a moment now for me it's not much of a problem because for rsi purposes i have two input devices i have a vertical mouse and a trackpad and i really only use the trackpad for the gestures

so that setup i think is why i probably don't why you don't hear me complaining about it but i do think there is a pause there for like the logic to figure out what you mean to do. And they do have like some like anti-rejection stuff in there to make sure you're not doing the wrong things. It could be just figuring that out. I imagine it's probably something you learn and then you don't even think about, you know, if you use this for a week, you just don't even think about that, that tiny pause that

you need to do. But at least as someone who's new to gestures, that stood out for me. Report back next week. Yeah. Right. Yeah. that tiny pause that you need to do. But at least as someone who's new to gestures, that stood out for me. Report back next week. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I'm going to keep it on the tuxedo for a little bit,

for a couple of days. I got another distro. You'll never guess what I'm going to load on there next. But I feel like if we were to just reframe this for a moment, this isn't how we really think about these things and we don't encourage people thinking about these things. But if we were to recontext these into the great desktop wars uh plasma has really made significant moves here that give them a innovation runway that feels a little less burdened by technical debt now and i was prepared to come on the air and say, probably want to wait to Plasma 602 before you jump on.

It's really rough. Exciting, but a lot of things to figure out. We're both, I mean, all three of us, I think, are really saying it's been really solid for us, right? Yeah, I don't have any qualms about using it day to day. Impressive. So I really feel like that they've set themselves up for a strong future. I think that for people that are power users that like to really take advantage,

for people who like to mess with their computers, I really feel like the Plasma 6 desktop is worth a look at. I'm at 99% right now of the install. That's going pretty good. It's installing the DIA binary XORG driver. Of course. I don't even use XORG on this, but maybe it's a compatibility thing.

So I'll reboot. I'll reboot and we'll see how it goes. You know, nothing like rebooting during the show. You don't need the show notes, right? No. Collide.com slash unplugged. You've probably heard me talk about Collide before. You probably heard me mention too

that Collide is such a great resource if you're in IT and security. Did you hear they've been acquired by 1Password? It's pretty, pretty big news. And these two companies are really leading the industry in creating security solutions that are really user first. And users can really use these tools. And for over a year, Collide Device Trust has helped companies with Okta ensure that only known secure devices can access their data. That's what they're still doing. but now they're doing it as part of 1Password. So if you've got Okta and you've been meaning to check out Collide, now's a great time. Collide comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks, and you can write your own custom

checks for just about anything you can think of. And you can use Collide on all your devices, even the ones without MDM, like your Linux fleet, maybe your contractor devices, and every BYO device that your users can think of. It's just the world these days. And now that Collide's part of 1Password, they're only getting better.

So go check them out at collide.com slash unplugged. Learn how they work. Watch the demo. They got a great video over there. You can support the show doing that. It's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slashugged. Learn how they work. Watch the demo. They got a great video over there. You can support the show doing that. It's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. A big thank you to Collide, and that's Collide dot com slash unplugged. Now, occasionally I get this weird feeling like Chris has a surprise for us, and I'm having that feeling right now. Chris, do you have anything for us?

like Chris has a surprise for us. And I'm having that feeling right now. Chris, do you have anything for us? I'm doing a thing. I am doing a thing that I kicked off last Friday. I'm calling it This Week in Bitcoin, thisweekinbitcoin.show, www.thisweekinbitcoin.show,

a high signal Bitcoin news podcast that I'm making for the JB community that wants to stay informed on what's going on and the podcasting 2.0 community. The Bitcoin dad pod is going on hiatus. That's how you say it, right? That's how you say it. And then I decided I wanted to keep going. You know, I used to do a funny story, short story time,

if you will indulge me for a moment. Stay a while and listen. My first Bitcoin podcast was about 13 years ago called Plan B, and I started it before Linux Unplugged. And I wrapped up Plan B in 2013 and then launched Linux Unplugged the next week. And I thought, as I'm looking out at all the things going on right now, I've realized that I find Bitcoin just to be absolutely more fascinating now than ever, especially with the ETFs and everything. So I'm just going to mention it now. I'm not going to put it in the all-show feeds

because I'd be open to feedback on that, but it just seems a little off-topic. So I wanted to mention it here. No crap coins, just Bitcoin focused on Signal and open source. You guys know how I do it. It's just me right now because it's live to tape, lean mean, and I publish it out. But things can always change if it gets popular,

and I'd love to have you check it out. And I'm going to try to just have high-signal, no-hype news coverage for you. www.thisweekinbitcoin.show And give me your thoughts. Check it out. And your feedback. Now, Chris, I noticed Episode 1 is out. Can you give us a little teaser of what you covered in Episode 1? Well, there's been speculation that jeff bezos has been buying bitcoin at monstrous levels uh and i don't know if that's true or not but i just sort

of outlined the data that everybody is getting excited about that some somebody is buying like 100 bitcoin a day somebody is doing 100 dca of bitcoin a day right now and they've already spent like two million bucks and since bezos just cashed out like eight billion worth of amazon stock who knows but uh other than that um i'm one of the things that i'm going to do is i'm going because there's a lot of media coverage these days is i'm going to take some of the clips and do the kind of thing that i like to do in some of the shows where i'll riff on some of the clips and play a little bit of audio focus on open source project updates and things like that so that's sort of what you get out of episode one and what you get out of future episodes too.

Thank you for asking, sir. And now it is time for Le Boost. And The Dude Abides is our first booster this week. And he's also our baller booster because he is coming in with 50,000 sats. He is our dragon. I hoard that which your kind covet. He writes using Fountain FM. Here's live boosting.

Happy episode. I was looking for a way to quickly check to see if I was connected to Tailscale without the command line. Not sure if you've mentioned it before, but I found a helpful little app. Could even be a pick of the week. It's called Trayscale. And as you've probably guessed it, it's a tray icon. It is GTK based and yes, it's packaged in NixOS.

Well, as you can probably guess, the Doodabides already have it installed. Of course. I do as well. Do you? Do you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good. Yeah, it's a good app and there's a GNOME extension that works with it as well. Yeah, I do definitely recommend Trayscale.

Go out there and try it out. I think you're going to like it if you have, because you can also get like your IPs, get a copy of your clipboard real quick. It's a nice one. Eric D. boosts in with 50,000 cents. I hoard that which your kind covet. Boosting to say that Fountain has recently won me back after a few months of using Podcast Guru. I tried it again when Podcast Guru's Albie integration stopped working for me, and I'm happy to be back. I love the transcript feature and the social feed view. Seeing other boosts within the app adds so much additional value to the podcast episodes. One bug I've found, though, show notes don't seem to show everything.

I can only see the first paragraph, but keep up the great work, Fountain. Eric, thank you for that boost, and your concern there about the show notes is officially on the list, and Little Birdie tells me that perhaps the next little UI tweak update will fix that problem soon. I don't know if it'll be in the next one or the one after that,

but it's coming very soon. That social feed thing, I just want to touch on this. That is the number one thing that bounced me off the app the first few times. I don't want a social feed. I can't really stay on social media. Then I just decided, much like when I had to just adopt GNOME and just kind of use it for a bit, once I decided, oh, well, I'll try it for a bit. I'll give myself a month. And then I discovered six new podcasts that way.

And it kind of becomes, depending on if you are willing to follow people, you can kind of get a sense of what's a buzz in podcasts. It's actually a pretty interesting experiment. So now I'm actually a big fan of the feature. I'd like to remark here that Eric and the dude are tied for Baller Booster. So thank you both. Really, really, really appreciate it. The hybrid sarcasm came in with three boosts for a total of 42,500 sats. The answer to the ultimate question.

The first one, a little bit of follow-up feedback from last week, gave Fountain tagging a try, and it's certainly workable, but just not 100% what I'm after. The dynamic playlist functionality that Gene Bean boosted in last week is exactly what I want from Fountain. It's why I kept going to Cast-O-Matic. He also mentions, uh, you asked about my dad stuff playlist last week. Well, I'm currently subscribed to Dad Tired, which sounds quite appropriate, Daily Dad Jokes, and Forfeit Fatherhood. Plenty of parenting resources out there, but not much focused on us dads. So I'll share whatever new stuff I find. Daily Dad Jokes?

There's a Daily Dad Joke podcast, Wes? Okay, I'm curious. Man, that's great. You know what? It's nice to see some dad content out there. Thank you, Hybrid. Really appreciate that. Distro Stew came in with a row of McDucks, 22,222 cents.

Things are looking up for old McDuck. Ah. I'm glad he wrote this feedback. Concerning the NextCloud episode, or the NixCloud, I should say, why was there some SQLite hate in there? You know, when self-hosting anything, including NextCloud, I always look for the option to use SQLite hate in there? You know, when self-hosting anything, including NextCloud, I always look for the option to use SQLite. On my phone, my services usually have no more than five users anyways. So I see the selling points as it's the most widely deployed database. It can

handle millions of statements. It uses less memory than the big DBs. And it's trivial to back up. I can just copy the Next cloud.db file. So why? Why is SQL hate? SQLite hate? I mean, I think a lot of it comes down to, and really we should say, we don't really intend SQLite hate.

I mean, it's super useful. It's a great embedded database. Tons of stuff uses it. I've used it in projects. Apps that we don't even realize are using it are using it for all kinds of little things that are useful. And because it's an embedded database, right, you just load it up as a library and all kinds. They've got bindings to everything,

so it's super easy to use, and it gives you, you know, structured relational data, which is nice. I think probably one of the things that has hit us in the head is a lot of projects treat it as a second-class database. You know, it's sort of said to you, like, well, you can use it for your test install or for, like, a teeny install,

but if you want all these things or the features, I think that more attention ends up being spent on the integration between the app and a sort of more traditional client server database like Postgres. I think also in the case of

Nextcloud, the signal essentially from the development team is don't use SQLite. So it's not the recommended database by the project. And as a result of me being stubborn and using it regardless, I've had issues where Wes has had to save my database. So, you know, like I've had problems. And then, of course, when I went and complained that I had SQLite problems with Nextcloud, I had to hear from everybody in the entire world that it's not actually a recommended or supported database. So it's not so much that we were hating on SQLite. We were kind of hating on SQLite

in conjunction with NextCloud because it's not a recommended setup. But it works great for tons of things. And I'm still technically using it, and it still technically works. I just might need Wes to save it again in a year or so. You know, about once a year. And, you know, there are some good points there.

Like, I do, the trivial backup stuff is really nice. I think, you know, Postgres backups are decently easy, and we've seen some stuff with Nix tooling to make that easier, but it is hard to beat a single CP. Yeah. Authorities boosts in with 3,000 cents via Fountain. Would love to see more comments, input, et cetera, from the mumble room in the recorded show. At least

when it adds value to the discussion. In some older episodes, I remember hearing some interesting perspectives from the mumble room. Thanks for the great show. You are the mumble room, sir. You make the mumble room, right? Or you could be. You could be, yeah.

You're right, we generally have more looser conversations in the pre and post show, which gives the Mumble Room opportunity to jump in there. But you're always welcome to join and then tag us in the chat room. The way it works is you generally want to be in both. You get in the Mumble Room, you can hang out and listen to the show. And if you want to participate in the conversation, you can just tag one of us in the chat room and then we'll work you in. Now, Thor boosted in through Fountain with 11,479 sats. Now last week I asked about keyboards and what people were suggesting for ergonomic setups since

I'm changing my desk setup here. And they recommend, uh, I strongly recommend getting a split keyboard and taking the time to get used to it. Even one step further, build it from a kit. There is pride in using something you've made yourself. And since you mentioned that you want it to feel good, then I would say that adds the feels for me. I got a Korn Split keyboard from 42keebs.eu, but going directly to a 40% keyboard may be a bit much to begin with. Maybe the Lily 58 is a better recommendation. By the way, long-time listener and first-time booster. Hey-o! Thank you for taking the time to get that set up. I know that can be a bit of a journey, but we always really appreciate that. You know, with the closure of some part of Open Collective,

I don't really understand it. I just am once again really appreciative that the listeners are working with us to set up a direct value system that has no middleman between us so really appreciate that and great comments on ergonomic keyboards this is a topic we should be talking more about and i kind of wanted to underscore the split keyboard thing i've been thinking about it more i i have one that it's they're not connected the two pieces are not connected so i can really spread it out sometimes which is really nice put a plate in the middle of it you can have lunch and your keyboard but also just when your wrists need a little stretch out it's just really great the thing i worry about with a split keyboard is it's it feels so custom that like i i fear i'll get the wrong

one and then just be eternally unhappy it does honestly feel like a subject that does require a bit of experimentation and to each their own so you could yeah yeah i think that is a genuine concern well you know the best thing to do then would be to go to like a store that has them and just try them or i have an idea just keep the recommendations flowing in boost us in let me know what you think i should get maybe we'll work it out and we'll feed them all into an lm it'll just spit you out an answer now for our second boost of 10 979 sats he says uh hey i forgot to like fix the amount in the first boost so here's a post number boost so skip the very first number and guess the country from that quoted word did you have any success here?

This kind of seems like a bit of a riddle. Yeah, it does. I did my best, and so it was 10,979 sats. You strip the 1 off that, you get 0979. Based on that and the post number, I'm going to say you're in Oslo, Norway. Hello, Norway! But do let us know if we got that right.

Well, I think might be right because 42kebs.eu might point to at least the right continent. That's what I was thinking. Wes has like a probability score with these and that was not his highest probability score. Just like a large language model.

Alright, Gene Bean comes in with, hey look, it's a row of ducks. Isn't that cute? Look at them go. He says, are there new features like the ones you mentioned for the Linux unplugged members? Are they going to be coming to the SRE feeds too? Oh, yes, all feeds eventually. However, I'm still working out kinks and bugs.

In the members feed, we went with our largest member feed as a launch. As you do. As I do. And so I'm working out little edge cases. It's the fastest way to get all the edge cases. It definitely is that. It definitely is. Thank you for asking, Chief.

T. Cario comes in with 12,345 Satoshis. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. Spaceballs boost. Hearing some of the pain points of your monitor troubles, I couldn't help but reminisce on one of my contributors to Lutris several years back. There's a feature for disabling monitors when you launch a game, and part of my change was to support consistent reconfiguring of your displays

after the game had closed. I used four monitors at the time, and this specifically used X-Render, so I don't know if this has been updated to support Waylander or anything, but I would look out for this option if you happen to use Lutris. Okay.

Takairo, that's great. That is, I mean, I love that, A, it disables them, for the people that don't remember, I was having issues where I would go to turn in a first-person shooter, and my mouse just keeps going to my second screen. And then I go to turn in a first-person shooter and my mouse just keeps going to my second screen. And then I go to turn left

and it just goes to my other screen. And I look up and it goes to my screen above my monitor. And I can't keep the mouse inside the game regardless of what I do and it doesn't matter

which game I play anymore. It's on all of them. I do like that. I mean, maybe you could start with something like a script if you needed to, but having it built into the launcher is smart and just like

blank your monitors, get the game going, and then, you know, the moment you close, you restore. Oh, that's a the restore. Yeah. Oh, that's a great feature. Smart.

Great contribution. Thank you. And we got 2000 sats from Lego feet. That would be hard to find shoes, but Lego feet says, uh, sends in a little bit of fountain feedback here. The show notes don't work for me. I get the first paragraph, but in other applications like pocket cast, I do get the entire show notes. The full thing, yeah.

That will be fixed soon, especially now that we've identified what the issue is. So thank you, Sarah. I've been having my weekly meetings over there with Nick from Fountain, and we'll have something we're going to talk about in a little bit that they've been working on that's going to be the foundation for our new live page.

So when we're on the road to scale, we'll have a brand new live stream page you can use that's part of Fountain. And they're getting it all set up for us. LRE741, hello, sir, comes in with a row of ducks. That one's got a little brown butt. Since I know Fountain said they're going to be fixing issues, I've been having issues with the JB private member feeds and trying to boost. I do have streaming stats enabled since it's been offered, but I don't know if it's been sending a single stat. So this is one of the little things I want to look into

because I don't use the member feeds very much. Actually, I don't use any of the feeds very much, but the member feeds are each individually generated, so it's kind of hard. It's a little harder to test, yeah. But I will. I will look into that and hey thanks for i mean everything but uh also for attempting to stream those sets yeah

yeah and helping us work this stuff out as we get these kinks worked out then we'll roll them out to the other feeds and you know it's part of the process woden 501 comes in with 3000 sats i love my kinesis freestyle pro keyboard yeah with the tenting kit. It's a split mechanical keyboard with quiet switches and N-key rollover. For the mouse, the most ergonomic option and my favorite is a vertical mouse. Anchor make a good one cheap enough to see if you like it. The only downside of the vertical mouse is they're not great for gaming. Between these two, I avoid any carpal tunnel or trigger finger issues. That does sound like a nice setup, Wood, and thanks for letting us know.

Yeah, I'll co-sign on the Freestyle Pro, too. You can get that. It's not cheap, though. But you know what? When you start to get a nicer keyboard, it's $180, actually, isn't that much. And especially if you're doing this for your day job or an important hobby, you're going to be a lot of hours on it. It's going to pay off.

You're touching it all the time. Now, Greenino sent in a space balls boost one two three four five yes that's amazing i've got the same combination on my luggage hey did someone say backups in the last episode i have one word for you our snapshot serves the best of both worlds one utilizes hard links for files, saving space on your disk. Number two, saves as normal files. So being able to browse any files you want

is nice. So there's no chunking or databases to fiddle with. But rsync for mirrors of the chunked duplicati and Proxmox backups don't quite know what he means by that.

So I've used rsnapshot for a long time, gentlemen, and I just recently switched away from it. Really? Yeah. So I've used our snapshot for a long time, gentlemen, and I just recently switched away from it. Really? Yeah. So I loved it for very many reasons, all of the ones listed, but I just kept running into like these edge cases where it was like, oh yeah, I got to go and manually like move things. Or so I, I moved to Borg backup, which I mentioned, I think in that previous conversation. And it's like all the benefits of our snapshot and more. So, I think, in that previous conversation. And it's like all the benefits of our snapshot and more.

So, I mean, everyone has different use cases, but I would say our snapshot's great, but there are more powerful things out there that also, yeah, there's compromises, but provide even nicer features, at least for me. I do love hearing people's backup solutions. I could read Boost about that all day because I try to take all that information in.

It's one of those things, right, where we've got all these sort of Unix-y oriented tools available. And so you can kind of form all kinds of different pipelines to move your data where you need it with whatever tradeoffs make the most sense in your setup. Thank you, Greeno. Appreciate that. VT52 sends in a row of ducks and he says, oh, hey, looky here. Plasma 6 has just been merged into NixOS Unstable. Linky. VT, thank you for sending that in. We spread that around

immediately and I think Brent, was this, this was I think the link we used to get you kicked off, didn't we? This is exactly the boost that immediately when boosted in put me on a different path. So, VT, thank you. i really appreciate it it might be a nice moment too to just like uh send some praise to the nixos packaging folks too

because you know plasma is not a simple project to package yeah um and you know nixos screen nix package packages is amazing but sometimes there's like a little drift because there's whatever 80 000 packages to maintain. I did not expect like for almost same day Plasma 6 integrate. I thought, you know, okay, maybe a week, you know, a couple weeks even. No. Yeah. Right there.

I know. Very impressive. It bodes well for the future of Plasma users on NixOS. The PR for this one is pretty hilarious too. It just says, yeah, it's the entire thing, and I apologize in advance. Rotted Mood comes in with 10,000 cents. Hey-o! In regards to local AI, have you guys seen this?

I haven't tried it yet, but plan on sitting down with it to see how it runs and how it might assist my coding. And links us to github.com slash bigcode-project slash starcoder2. Starcoder2, a family of code generation models. Hmm. You know, this is our only boost so far pertaining to last week's topic. I think that's signaled to us that last week's topic wasn't a good one. That's how I interpret that. And we were, after we wrapped up, we were kind of on the fence. We weren't really

sure. We wanted to get it out there because we think it's important from a discussion standpoint of we need to have more network effect around open source AI and we need the tooling to be better on Linux than ever. But I don't think it really resonated. But I really do appreciate you sending that along. Yeah, it looks nice.

It looks like, at least here on the Quickstart, star-coder 2 models are intended for code completion. So you it looks nice. It looks like, at least here on the Quickstart, StarCoder 2 models are intended for code completion. So you're not going to do stuff like write a function that computes the square root, but you could integrate it into your editor

and have stuff that you might otherwise only get from something like GitHub or GitLab. And actually be useful. Yeah. Yeah, that's really cool. It's StarCoder 2, and we will have a link to that.

Thank you, Routed Mood. Appreciate that. Nomadic Coder sent in 5,555 sets. Make it so. I develop applications for a major academic library. I have seven years worth of engineering notes I take throughout my workday. So I installed local GPT and indexed all of my notes. I was really surprised at the quality of the answers to specific project-based queries.

I was really surprised at the quality of the answers to specific project-based queries. It was pretty cool to receive a nearly correct conversational answer from my own notes. And best of all, my personal notes didn't get loaded onto someone else's server. This is neat to hear because this is definitely one area we've thought about toying with, I mean, basically all the time. Yeah, yeah. I mean, imagine if you could feed all the show notes and show docs. Imagine if we fed the source for all of our show docs, and then we could ask it about our shows. Yeah.

All right, our second boost about last week's topic. Appreciate that. Local GPT, an open source initiative that allows you to converse with your documents without compromising your privacy. They write, with everything running locally, you can be assured that no data ever leaves your computer. Dive into the world of secure local document interactions with local GPT. You know, between that and then the star coder stuff, those are both areas where, you know,

you really might have some sensitivities to just what data is going where. And at least maybe these aren't necessarily completely competitive, but it gives you an option. Nomadic Coder, I really, really like that recommendation. I think that's one that I want to play with after the show. Really appreciate that. Forward humor comes in with a row of ducks. Hi, gang. I've been out in the past few months, been out there studying heads down in my spare time trying to get my CISSP exam.

The certified information system security professional. Yeah. Look at you. I'm proud to say I passed. Nice. Nicely done. That is fantastic. That is really good. I'm excited to return to the Great Jupiter Broadcasting content.

How I have missed you. Thanks again for the great show and all the labor of love for the community. Well, Forward Humor, thank you for that row of ducks, and congratulations on the new cert. That's exciting. Sam H comes in with 2,222 cents. I'm giving Fountain another try. I tried to boost the member feed live unplugged, but when clicking boost, it just spins for a moment and nothing happens.

We must have a bogus split in there or something. So that's our second report this week. So after the show, I'm going to write it down right now. After the show, we're going to subscribe to a member feed, and we're going to test this. Right? Yeah. We're going to see what's wrong. Yeah.

Going to splits says something went wrong. Yeah. We're going to find out what that something is. Mm-hmm. It's probably Brent's fault. Definitely. Now, Zach Attack came in with 8,473473 sets you're doing a good job here's a shout out to the makers of antenna pod you guys have the best podcast app out there but please integrate it with albie and add in boosting and 2.0 i've not had trouble with downloading rss feeds like i've

had with podverse and fountain also the way its inbox and queuing system works just feels natural to how I want to listen to podcasts. It lets me queue up what I want and just has a more polished feel. Also, thank you Chris, Brent, Wes, and Drew for the work you guys put in. This is also a zip code boost. Just add a four in the front. All right, Wes Payne.

I got to add letters? You got it. Numbers? What's happening here? I know. Man, oh man. Okay,

well, you add a four, you get 48473. Okay. That seems to be a postal code in Genesee County, Michigan.

Well, hello, Michigan. With cities like Schwartz Creek, Flint Township, and Rankin. Schwartz Creek

almost sounds like something that'd be in a comedy. Hmm. You know? All right. Zach Attack, appreciate that. Thank you very much. Antenapod's beloved, of course.

I am always impressed by the various little issues people have with Android and podcast clients. It's kind of like on iOS, it's like it either works or it doesn't work. It's like a yay or nay thing and generally it's the same

on almost all the iOS devices except for the older ones. But on Android, man, you can have just like individual arbitrary features just don't work in an app, but then on a phone right next to it, a different Android app,

works just fine. It's really, really crazy. It's really crazy. It's, I don't know, fragmentation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Maybe Android needs to use Nix. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shout out to Curtis Drums, who is a value for value music artist, who saw some sats coming in from our members feed.

And thank you to our members who are members and boost. Absolutely incredible. Absolutely incredible. And everybody who boosted into the show, we have the 2,000 sat cutoff to actually make it into the show, but we read all of them and appreciate every single boost. We had 25 boosters this week, and we stacked 247,790 sats. Thank you again, everyone. What we're trying to build here is a sustainable model that anybody could adopt, a software author, a music artist, an audiobooks author, or a podcaster.

There's no middleman. It's all peer-to-peer software it's all free software it is a little tricky because you're buying outside this established financial system you are going from a closed source system to an open system it's not always easy but that's been true for all of time but what you when you're on the other end it is set up it's easy to refill and boost back in. And it's a great way to interact with us. It's our improv moment on the show. It gives us a chance to hear from you. We use it also as a multiple different way

to gauge signals in your interest around the content. And thank you, everybody, who takes the time to just set that sat streaming and lets it go. Really appreciate that. Really appreciate our members. We have links on our website. You can get an ad-free version of the show or even better, get the bootleg version.

It's like double the content. The bootleg version of the show is like two hours and 45 minutes right now. Lots of stuff over there. Thank you, everybody. Oh, really appreciate it. You guys are great. I'm getting so excited about the trip to scale. We have so much great stuff to bring you over just the next couple of months.

Just really, really cooking. We have a pick for you this week i'll throw in a bonus pick called cpu controller but i don't i'm not gonna talk about it i'm gonna talk about fountain radio which is a community station for music it's like an internet jukebox you can find it at radio.fountain.fm, and it's a jukebox where you send in, like, you know, your favorite songs, and they get listed in there, and you can boost them up to the top of the track if you want and send some sats to the artist.

It's got a chat room. And you don't have to send sats to chat. You just have to send sats if you want to, like, add to the queue? Yeah, or boost a song up in the queue. Oh, okay. But if you just want to listen and chat, no sats required. I assume you do have to have a phone account.

Not to chat. Maybe to chat. I'm not sure. I do have a phone account, so I can't say otherwise. But you also could log in with Albie. Oh, neat. Brent and I were on there this morning, hanging out before the show, and I was on there a little bit on Saturday, just playing tracks and hanging out with folks.

Bite bit and stop by, and we were hanging out and playing music. It also gives you a chance to kind of see where we might end up with our live app that we're going to have for on our trip to scale. And they're going to take some of the technology they've built there and apply it to our use case, which will then also be expanded to other concerts and podcasts. And we'll kind of create a use case study around what we're doing for JB for podcasts, and then hopefully publish that at some point. So there'll be like a path other podcasters can follow to do the same. And so Fountain Radio is kind of the first iteration of this. If you want to check it out, it's radio.fountain.fm. And it's a great way to

discover new music. Mainstream music just hasn't been working for me, boys. I don't mean to be that guy, but it really hasn't now for the last few years. I've just really burned out on it. And, you know, value for value music is unique. It's interesting. And some of the songs really, I really, really dig. So check it out. Radio.Fountain.FM. And then we'll have a link

in there to CPU Controller, a straightforward little GUI written in Python Qt 6, which is in theme for this episode, to disable and enable individual CPU cores. And then for Ryzen systems,

Jeff, you recommend all the time, I always forget. Ryzen Adjust. Ryzen Adjust. You know, the idea there is you can get yourself a nice, big, you recommend all the time. I always forget. Ryzen Adjust. Ryzen Adjust. You know, the idea there is you can get yourself a nice, big, fast machine, but then when you don't need all that power or heat, you can turn down the individual cores. And there's a little Python Qt 6 app to do it.

So if you've got Plasma 6, you've probably got everything you need to try it out. You can just go grab it. It's kind of one of those things, you know, it's nice to reason you might be using Linux partially to make up because your system's not automatically doing it, but you can do it all yourself if you want to. I'd almost rather have the control than have it automatically. Yeah, at least you know,

and the algorithm controlling it's not going to suddenly change out from under you. Again, thank you to our members. You get double the content or you can add free version of the feed. We have links at linuxunplugged.com for that. Also, I'm looking for an app for anybody out there who's an android user that is great for scanning documents i've got scan bot

right now i think is what it's called but it it first of all it always tries to like take it try it tries at the wrong times it's trying to do a whole bunch of other stuff i want a very simple clever little app that like i could recommend to the spousal unit if I ever get her on a Pyzelle where you can like – maybe it's a business card. Maybe it's a bill. You can just hover over it. It will do a great snapshot and scan. Would you please boost in a great app if you have one for that on Android? And then I'll feature it as a pick if I find one that works really well.

So don't recommend ScanBot. I've used ScanBot. So if you've got that, that's fine. But I'd like to have something else boosted and let us know. Don't forget, we're live on Sundays. We have the next one. Should be fun. We're going to have it in studio. Brent's going to be here. We're going to be packing to go to scale. So join us Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern next week. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And remember, links to what we talked about today, linuxunplugged.com slash 552.

We'd love to hear your experiences with Plasma 6 or why you're not going to give it a go. You want to be that stubborn Linux user? Make the case. We'll hear it. We appreciate all of it. Of course, you can always email us at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. You'll find our Mumble info over there, our Matrix info is on the website as well,

our membership deets, all of it. It's a website with links at linuxunplugged.com. It's great. Glad somebody finally came up with that. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. As in Sunday!

Yeah! Thank you. you