LINUX Unplugged - 554: SCaLEing Nix

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

We're on the ground live at NixCon and SCaLE. We catch up with old friends, and discover how Nix is devouring the Linux world one function at a time.Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!FlakeHub.com: FlakeHub.com is the all-in-one platform for secure, compliant, and transformative Nix development. Bring Nix to work the way you always wanted with FlakeHub.com. Register for the private beta and get a secure, compliance-friendly Nix and all the support you need.Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn’t trusted and secure, it can’t log into your cloud apps.Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:nix-community/lanzaboote — Secure Boot for NixOSEelco Dolstra’s PhD Thesis — The Purely Functional Software Deployment ModelDocker and Nix (DockerCon 2023) [YouTube]Flox — Create development environments with all the dependencies you need and easily share them with colleagues. Work consistently across the entire software lifecycle.flox on GitHub — Developer environments you can take with you.Gsettings - Monitor All System Settings Changedconf Reference Manualfoss-north — foss-north is a free / open source conference covering both software and hardware from the technical perspective. We provide a meeting place for the Nordic foss communities and will bring together great speakers with great audiences.An Open Letter from NixOS Users Against MIC Sponsorship — Several members of the community are uneasy with the current happenings around the North American Gathering aimed at NixOS Users and its community (also known as NixCon [sic] NA).pjones/plasma-manager — Manage KDE Plasma with Home Manager.Bastard Keyboards — Custom-designed split keyboards with feature-full firmware.Bastardkb on GitHubPick: nix-starter-configs — Simple and documented config templates to help you get started with NixOS + home-manager + flakes.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. My name is Brent. And a very special guest, the brown bear himself, Noah Cholai from the Ask Noah program is here. Hey, Noah. Thanks for having me. Oh, no.

No, no. Thank you for being here because it is a special, special reunion episode. Part of going to scale is all about catching up with old friends. So it's sort of special that you are indeed here. And catch up with old friends, we did. We'll tell you all about that. We don't have a mumble room this week, but I do want to say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale is programmable networking, and it

is fast. It's private, secure by default, and it's powered by... That's right, the noise protocol, making it all happen, build a flat mesh network across your VMs, your VPSs, your desktops, your mobile devices. I don't know, but you can get 100 devices for free when you go to tailscale.com slash Linux

Unplugged, and let me tell you, Tailscale is one of the MVPs of this trip for sure. Also, a special shout out to all of our Podcasting 2.0 and Fountain and Podverse listeners out there that are on the lit stream. This is our first Linux Unplugged that is live in Podcasting 2.0 form and fashion. And we couldn't be more happy to have you along. Shout out to all of you. Here we are, guys. It's the end of a journey that started basically the moment we ended last week's episode. It's been a long week when you think about it like that. I mean, were we even sure we'd make it all the way?

You know, I felt like we had a good shot but a lot of the things were down to the last last minute but the morning of i could tell we were feeling good we had like that big trip energy okay we got big energy in the studio this morning because we're getting ready to leave although i haven't finished packing brent's making brunch yeah that means i'm almost ready right yeah well it means you're getting in the gear of getting ready and then the wife here's got big energy because she just completed a Wheel of Fortune interview. Yeah. And you did good.

Yeah, I did good. I think I did good. You know, I think Vanna would approve. Yeah. I mean, maybe really they're just looking for somebody to replace Vanna. You could flip those things. Yeah, I can't do heels, though. I probably couldn't reach him without the heels, too. That's good, because we don't have any room to pack heels. We are filled up. Super filled up. And that was

before we even had Wes's stuff in there. I'm glad you left me a little room at least. You were also very fortunately a light packer because you're flying back so you had to pack a little bit lighter I imagine. Indeed. So we piled in my car up at the studio because Brent was already in town. He'd come down via plane and train and had spent

the night or two before getting ready to go. So we got in the car, got everything loaded, and went to go pick ourselves up a Wes. Well, I'm just walking up to Wes's place. Let's see if he's ready. Oh, come in. Oh, hi, Wes. Oh, puppies.

I'm here to... Hi, Char. Char, get him. Get him. to... My chair. Get him! Get him! He's really scary. Hello. I'm here to carry things for you. Okay, great.

I assume you're ready. Yeah. Great. Final assembly taking place now. That's the same as ready, right? Yeah, totally. Just almost ready. I didn't have laundry I'd just finished doing, right?

Brent's always good with the animals, too. Dogs always end up loving Brent. Well, I got to build those relationships all over. I think it's because he's always keeping snacks in his pocket. That's probably the truth really. So we, um, you know, you don't just leave the Seattle area and get to California in one day. It, it's, um, a lot of West coast, Washington, Oregon, and California make up a range on the East Coast. It's like multiple states. And so it's actually a surprising amount of earth that you have to cover.

So we had to break it up into a couple of nights. And the first night we stayed in Eugene, Oregon, which was wonderful. And then we got a little bit further into Yuba City, California. And we sat down and we did a live stream in the backyard of our Airbnb. It had a pool. It was actually a really chill place just as the sun was setting. And we had some of our members and some of our listeners on there chatting along with us.

And we asked Brent what his expectations of scale were, because this is your first scale. And I wanted to see what you thought it would be like. And then at the end of this episode, if we have time, I want to kind of see if your expectations were met or missed or what. So to kind of set that, here's what Brent said on that live stream. Well, as soon as you say community conference, I think LinuxFest. LinuxFest Northwest specifically. Where just the people you meet is the conference.

And then the talks are like, oh, yeah, right, there's talks happening, and those are cool, too. So I'm picturing that, but times three, three or four, I would say. But I don't know if that's accurate, because there's a particular type of person who goes to LinuxFest Northwest, and people have been there for a long time. So I don't know. I'm open to new, you know, blow in my mind.

All right, well, we'll see if your mind was blown. But I want to ask you, Noah, as somebody who's done the scale thing and totally familiar with these Linux events, how did this year meet your expectations? I would tell you that the feeling is different. It changes year to year. That's not a bad thing.

It's just the shape of the conference changes. I think this year it was largely dominated by kind of what we talked about in the pre-show, these two kind of sub-conferences, which I think was good. The other side of it I thought was really great is scale is unique insofar as it's community-based, right? So it's not small little podunk. It's large. It's huge. And it attracts a number of big names, but it's not corporate-y. And that's a weird mix that I don't think you find anywhere else. So 100% agree with you. It is big enough that people that are responsible for some of the projects that we use on a day-to-day basis come out and they say hi and they answer your questions, but it doesn't feel like any one particular entity is behind it or pushing a

message or trying to sell you anything. Yeah. And usually an event this well organized and you know, this size has that feel to it. Like there's something there. Some big top level name that's putting the whole thing on. That's paying for people to get there. Yeah.

But you go to some of the corporate ones, right? And you go and ask the people at the booths and you're like, well, how does this work? Take me under the hood. How does that? I'm just the marketing guy is largely what you get right here. It's like, Oh yeah. When I wrote that quote, this is how does this work? Take me under the hood. How does that... I'm just the marketing guy, is largely what you get, right?

Here, it's like, oh yeah, when I wrote that quote, this is how it works, and it's great. That's a good point, right? The people you send are different. You send some of the engineers because you're talking to nerds, not just like, oh yeah, I can get you on a sales call, no problem. Yes, that. Also, Brent, and something you could probably speak to is

at scale, some of the folks that are running these booths for these large open source projects that we know are actually just community contributors. Yeah, it's kind of amazing. Like many of us are going around giving talks and we kind of rely on the community to help us with all the infrastructure. Like we have Charlotte at our booth, the NextCloud booth, who basically has run the entire thing. I haven't had to think about it for more than like two and a half minutes. And that's been amazing.

What a gift to those of us who are, you know, trying to spread the good word in the talks and out on the floor. And it's just wonderful. So thank you, Charlotte. And the technical infrastructure is also run by volunteers, including some like Ryan that are from our audience. And, you know, they're building out not just the backend like scheduling stuff and the registration stuff and the kiosk to drive all that,

but they're also all the display for the schedules, the wifi network, all of that. Yeah. We also have teamed up with the open Sousa folks just because there's a lot of history there. And it turns out I met drew who has been organizing the whole row of booths that you saw near the next cloud booths it's like four or five connected together for 12 years straight and like storing all that stuff and organizing things like the community around scale is dedicated yeah it is impressive

you know what else is interesting so if you go to the skills web page you can click on the can i trust the network and there they have linked into their repository of all the scripts they're using, how they're flashing these Netgear consumer routers with OpenWRT. And they're doing a full-on enterprise-grade conference with a bunch of open source stuff that they threw together. And they publish it all so you can do it too. That's a great point. They've open sourced not just the networking infra, but the server infra too. And a lot of it is now Nix-based this year too, which is new. Still, I believe some FreeBSD Beehive involved in there as well. But going from a total FreeBSD backend to a Nix backend in like one season of a conference is a big deal.

And I mean, we were there pretty early Thursday morning, kind of the start of the pre-conf anyway. Yeah. And I mean, the network was already going. Yeah. And I have to really give them credit because they're also very open to feedback. Like we'd suggest a couple of things and I think they're going to incorporate that next year. But they're also just very open to telling us how it all works. I mean, volunteers coming up and yeah.

Yeah. Is everything working for you? What do we need to change? Which is really neat. And like, oh, you don't like that? Okay, let me figure that out. and they don't do that for free they i was informed that they actually have to pay to disconnect the conference gear and set up their own gear so they're actually paying to do this and they're it's really i mean i'm really really

grateful i wanted to know if you got this vibe um this felt like the actual reunion scale i know they had it like at the la airport uh but this felt like the one everybody was coming back to after like since 2019 you got that yeah maybe a little bit i it was you know it was here in pasadena last year it was good and and you know that was kind of the first year back back but yeah you're starting to see it grow you're starting to see the vendors come back in a lot of the big names that that were out and obviously there's still some people that are taking some precautions. But yeah, it's largely kind of come back into its full swing. The vendor area felt a little bit smaller than say like 2019 era, but still, yeah, still pretty good.

They had like, usually it would be denser at the entrance. And then the sidewall usually be a little denser. And they kind of had boxed in a little bit. But it still worked really well. And there's still plenty of area. Now, the other thing I would ask is, did you find anything that you came in looking for and then didn't see? So for example, I know one of my kids was really interested in seeing the people from the framework booth and dad, is there going to be framework there? And I

said, I don't know if there was a conference in the U S that they were going to be at, this would be the one. And sure enough, they're there. So that the booths that I went to look for were there. I didn't notice anything of absence of notice. In fact, I would say better selection of boosts than in years past. You and I have busted through there, and it's been like all just corporate selling stuff before. And I mean, you still had a little like meta and AWS is in there. You occasionally see companies too, like, I don't know, who are you?

How did you end up there? But most of it is like, oh yeah, there's that distro and this distro and that community event and this project. Yeah we talk about microsoft rate limiting oh yeah actually that's a great segue into nixcon so nixcon actually took place before scale and a lot of that workflow is github based and the thing about nixcon that's a little bit unique of the other conferences is that the majority of like the center area is just people at tables getting work done and installing nix and installing packages and that resulted in github rate limiting the ip that scale was connecting from because all these people were checking

packages in and out a single netted ipv4 address coming out of the conference microsoft knew about the conference like had a booth and was aware that this was happening, maybe GitHub was there too. They could have done it. That's a good point. It really shows you what a big company is. But one of the NixOS contributors pointed out too that maybe we could have brought a local cache. Yeah. That might have been something we could do next year is have a local cache and reduce that. I see at one point, too, they figured out and had on a whiteboard,

but you might have missed it if you weren't looking, that you could kind of put your GitHub token in your Nix comp so that your Nix requests were associated not with the general one. Oh, so that's part of the problem. Not only was it all from one IP, but it's using one token for the most part. Oh, yeah. And, of course, several of the talks are trying to get folks to get started with Nix, and you've got to bootstrap that whole other environment.

You know, there's a C-Lib, C-Compilers. There's a lot of stuff you need. Yeah. I mean, it's surprising the bandwidth held up as well as it did. It's a lot of stress on the network, too. So we got to NixCon and saw people just working. And they had a couple of events that we wanted to be sure we attended. And one of them was the Nix State of the Union.

And this was pretty informative i have to say at rock garbus do you think i'm getting his last name right krabas you're doing great thank you he's the head of marketing at flox he's also a long time nixer and he talked about how they've recently just seen usage blow up this one why this jump um just you don't see it. I barely see it myself. Started in 2012, the graph. This here, this is where the growth started in 2020. And then the big jump

actually happened in May, April, May last year. I have my theories. They are not to be publicly shared because apparently I have strong opinions. It's just Nix got picked up by a lot of social media, YouTube content creators, and that's the spike.

So now you say, okay, oh, YouTube and content creators, huh? I'm trying to think, what other YouTube and content creators are we talking about? So both Wes and I, we pulled up the linuxunpl unplugged.com website on our phones and we're scrolling and i can't go back a page go back a page we go to like the times we're looking at

the chart up on the projector and we go to like the time frame and we're looking in oh that episode was about nix that episode was about nix that episode was about nix that episode is about nix and the timing lines up pretty good i'm not taking full credit for it but it does seem like around the time we started talking about it, popularity picked up. Maybe we just caught in on a trend or maybe we helped that trend get rolling. Who knows? But it doesn't come without its cost. It actually has meant this explosion in users has caused a lot more terabytes to start flowing. And now the scary part, the binary cache. This is Elko, the founder of Nix. That's sort of the most critical thing that our infrastructure team provides.

Everybody relies on the binary cache and it's been around since I think 2012. And since then we've never deleted anything from the binary cache. So it keeps getting bigger and bigger. So, for instance, in September last year it was 346 terabytes in frequent access. So that's the stuff older than a year. That has grown since then to 399. And we also have 140 terabyte in standard access. So that's sort of the recent stuff. And it went from in that same period, so something like seven months from 770 million objects to 793 million objects. So that costs a lot of money. It used to be completely sponsored. But the company

that was sponsoring that stopped doing that. So since then, we get some sponsoring of our S3 bill by Amazon. So we're very grateful for that. But it's not complete. Yeah, we can applaud that. But we still have a pretty big storage cost every month, something like 6,000 euros. So we're currently looking into garbage collecting part of the binary cache. Or maybe if people think, hey, I really rely on the binary cache never deleting anything, then talk to us. Maybe we can figure something out. I can see like there could be a forensic reason why you might want that entire binary cache. Like you want to recreate something and you need the exact libraries at the time, the

exact versions and all of that. So it's kind of a unique value proposition that Nix offers that other distros can't really give. Clear Linux attempted this, but it's so expensive. And then the more users you get, the more expensive it gets. It is kind of nice, though. I think the facilities and the knowledge and insight and complexities of Nix

and its ability to have reproducible builds, its ability to have reproducible builds, its ability to hash the inputs to things, I think that means that there are more options for cleaning up the cache if they have to than there might be in other systems where they can do it a little bit smarter.

They can kind of choose what outputs at a high level they want to keep, how many versions. They kind of touched on like, well, we're going to delete anything older than this, but we'll make sure to keep the latest version of all of these things. So they can kind of just mark that, set the garbage collector routes, and then the next garbage collection can just clean up the rest. The figures up on the screen there were just crazy. And I really felt like it's a little more precarious than I'd like. They have it solved right now, but it's not a totally solved problem. We'll get to that in a moment. But before we get there, Brent had a chance, I think it was day one, to sit down with Ryan. And he kind of describes himself as, oh, a Nix developer.

And he kind of has his hands in everything. So I work a lot in Nix packages. I'm a maintainer of a few programs, NetData. I do maintenance of SystemD. And I'm mostly well-known for working on Lenza Booty, which is the secure boot implementation for NixOS. And that's pretty much it. How did you first get into all of this? Because that's quite a list.

Yes, so a long time ago, a few years ago, some friend came to me with a list of things that NixOS could do. And I was like, no, this doesn't exist. This is impossible to achieve. Humankind doesn't have this sort of technology. So in Hangar, I tried this thing and tried to use it the way it was advertised. And oh, fuck, it worked. So I got addicted. And now you're stuck, it sounds like, doing some important work.

Yes. So when you get into this sort of ecosystem, you find like, for me, it's inspiration. I feel like an artist and there are so many things to paint, so many things to create. And yeah, so I just sit down. I'm always busy just pushing forward new frontiers of what you can do with a computer, basically. Yeah, man. He is so casual about it, but he really is a brilliant contributor. Ryan was also extremely well-dressed, the best well-dressed person at NixCon, I would say. Oh, man, I tried to go for that.

I tried, and I did not succeed at that at all. But, you know, you talk to these people like, oh, yeah, I'm responsible for the secure boot thing, and I'm responsible for this little thing, and you're like, oh, I think my day-to-day life depends on the work that you do. Actually, when we get back, I want to talk about some businesses that are propping up around Nix to bring Nix to the next generation of users. Determinate.Systems

slash Unplugged. Yeah, Determinate.Systems slash Unplugged is a sponsor of your Unplugged program, and they are the builders of the best Nix installer, including MDM support and Skiff mode with more than 20,000 installs a day. They have also that advanced binary caching with sophisticated access controls

that make using Nix at the enterprise possible, and team collaboration tools that you're just going to love because they fit into your existing DevOps workflow. And they've also created a plethora of open-source tools and documentation for the Nix community. They really are a great resource. And above all, they've created flakehub.com, the all-in-one platform for secure, compliant, and transformative Nix development.

You can bring Nix to work the way you've always wanted with flakehub.com. If you go to determinate.systems.unplugged, you can register for the private beta, get secure, compliance-friendly Nix, and all the support you need. So you've got to go to determinate.systems.unplugged. We'll have a link in the show notes. Determinate Systems is prioritizing Flake stability. That means you get a reliable foundation for your development. Plus, with Determinate Systems,

you're always ahead of the curve with their development. You can gain access to new NICs features specifically designed for enterprise success. And Flake Hub provides custom solutions and enterprise-grade Nix support built to handle the needs of even the largest corporations and their compliance requirements. FlakeHub empowers you to secure your Nix environment while still enjoying the full potential and utility inside your team. And the great thing is you're not going to have to learn a whole bunch of new tooling. It fits in with your existing DevOps workflow. It's the only SOC 2 certified platform for Nix, and it delivers a low-friction Nix development experience you've always wanted for a team.

So go bring Nix to work the way you've always wanted, flakehub.com. Go register for the private beta and get that compliance-friendly Nix and support at determinant.systems.unplugged. That's where you go to sign up and to support the show. It's Determinate.Systems slash Unplugged. And a big thanks to Determinate Systems for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Determinate.Systems slash Unplugged. Now let's talk about people that are taking nicks and trying to bring it to a group of people that are too busy to stop and relearn everything. We talked with Ross and we asked him what Phlox is trying to do.

That's one of these companies. I've been in this industry for a long time, and these are big problems that the Nix community are solving, and they're problems that everybody is encountering. And I think that the way that Nix is going about solving those problems is the right way, but involves dealing with really big principles and really big constructs. And a new user coming to Nix, I think, is confronted with a lot of concepts right away. So what we're trying to do at Phlox is figure out how we can build something with Nix that makes it easier for people with existing teams and existing stacks to adopt it and be able to, you know, go to their colleagues and say, hey, I have a Nix environment for you, but you can use Phlox to activate it. And so you

don't have to learn a new language and you don't have to learn a bunch of new commands. And it behaves like the package managers that you're used to. And the reason that this is important, I believe, is because it's going to bring the principles of Nix to the kinds of people who don't have the time to learn everything that Nix is. And along with that is, of course, documentation and trying to target different user bases. And Ross had a great analogy that I wanted you guys to hear, because I think it really just concretely puts it in perspective of what these companies that are building around Nix are trying to do for everybody else it's interesting i i look at people in the so i do woodworking in my garage and i don't i'm not i'm not an amazing woodworker i'm kind of a i'm kind of a uh i just i tinker but there are woodworkers who make their own

workbenches and they're like legit and it's like a thing it's a rite of passage and some make their own hammers right and i bought my workbench because I've got like 12 other hobbies. And in a sense, Phlox is selling workbenches. You know, like I'm in awe of people at Nix who are like this committed to their craft, you know, that they're going to learn all these principles. And Phlox is built for people who are like, we're in 12 crafts. So we just need to get to the answer right here. And I'm hoping that it exposes the Nix community to a whole lot of new interest. And Wes, you were mentioning to me that when you first heard of Phlox, you're like, I'm a little skeptical. But then they start talking about how they're going to be building like escape hatches so you could actually use standard Nix expressions and things like that. Yeah, OK, right.

I mean, I've obviously drunk the Nix Kool-Aid, so I'm all excited. I'm like, oh, man, the Nix expression languages is a way better way to configure apps than all the other ones. And then here's Phlox coming along with like, oh yeah, well we've got a Tummel file that you can write to. And under the hood it's Nix. So on first blush I'm like, is this really for me? But things like escape hatches, things like

you could build an environment with Nix and then expose it for people just using Phlox to activate and use. I think that means it has a clean interface on top of Nix. So I, as the Nix nerd, could find value from it, interact with it, use it if I want that sort of UI, UX layer, or just play Nix, but I still have something I could introduce to teammates or friends. What I find is a theme that's interesting is,

especially when these new technologies are kind of like hitting that curve and getting extremely popular, is the abstractions that come with it to make it a little bit more approachable but those escape hatches like you're mentioning is like well maybe use something like flocks when you're first getting started because some of us have been daunted by you know nix itself but if you can get started and then grow into all the other underlying technologies it's such a beautiful way to do it when i first saw the Phlox demonstration, I thought, okay, if you can kind of get Docker composed,

you can definitely get this, because it's a directory-based system. You go into directory, and it's plain English commands that are invoking these Nix build environments that do the stuff for you. And it's kind of like a Python environment on steroids. If you've ever used a Python virtual environment, you sort of activate it,

and then anything you install in there just lives in that directory. It's not going to muck up the rest of your system. Phlox takes that concept and applies it to basically everything. The workbench analogy was great, too, because we were talking with Ross after the recording, and he's like, you know, so I eventually ended up building my own workbench. Like, once I had learned woodworking enough and I knew what I wanted, I knew what I wanted from a workbench. And then that was the moment I stopped and I built my own workbench. And I like that analogy even more. It's like, you can start with something that gets you going so you can learn the value, you can deploy it, and it's something a team can use. But then later on, if you wanted to graduate

up to pure Nix, that's available. It makes it approachable. Yeah. There's also something to be said about having quick wins, you know, instead of spending one, two, three days, maybe a week of just grinding to try to get these wins. Well, and like you could be somebody who might be in a position where they're all in on Nix, but the rest of the team doesn't really understand the value yet. Right.

And the folks, you know, with the Nix knowledge or just with the Phlox knowledge, they can set up the environment, they can publish it up to Phlox Hub. In the back end, I guess, workers will automatically build that for all the supported architectures. And then, you know, we're onboarding Brent to the show and we need him to have all the right tools like, I don't know, Reaper or something. He can just download and activate that Flux environment.

It's already built and now it's running on a system without really much setup. And you never really have to know Nix at all. Right. So you have determinant systems and you have Flux that are kind of coming at these in different angles. And determinant systems is really building something that's fantastic for compliance in the enterprise. And flocks is building something that I think is great for like a lot of the MacBook users out there and folks that are just trying to get their heads around just properly managing a package and consistently managing software. And so they're kind of – there is some overlap. But at the same time, they're clearly kind of cooperating as well.

In fact, the State of the Union was one Phlox employee and one Determinant Systems employee. And from what you can get from NixCon, these seem to be the preeminent companies that are trying to bring Nix to enterprise in the rest of the world. It kind of makes me hopeful that we'll find a situation like we've been lucky enough to have in Linux world, where there's enough of a shared infrastructure value that all these companies realize that like making Nix better, it's really good for everybody. That's the page they seem to be on right now is we make Nix better and all of our stuff gets better. So we start, we had a chat, Ron, who is the co-founder of Phlox and also on the NixOS foundation board and helped put together NixCon.

Brent thought he'd have a little fun and throw a challenge at Ron and see if he could attempt to explain Nix in 30 seconds. Spoiler alert, not quite 30 seconds. So funnily enough, we've been, I think, thinking about what is the right way to message anything that is Nix-based has been almost as hard as figuring out the sciencing behind figuring out how to bring Nix space has been almost as hard as figuring out the sciencing behind figuring out how to bring Nix to people at an easier basis. So we did have a lot of iterations. And you know, I want to give a huge shout out to Ross Turk, our head of DevRel marketing and everything in between. He also makes amazing pogs and speaker gifts all in his home factory. I think I think he cracked it. I think we have messaging that has been landing with folks, right? The whole notion of package manager with virtual environments and the whole notion of, you know, you can just, this is the first command you run, right?

Forget about all this complexity. You've been dealing with complexity for years. It's like, now you don't have to do it, right? What about Docker? Let's talk about Docker. And there's kind of an entire base to that. So I think there's a lot more reception. A lot of folks are even coming to us and saying, hey, I've been looking for something that is outside of the solution that I'm currently using, whether it's container-based or Docker-based or whatever it is. And therefore, the market, I feel, is also more receptive in the time that

we're in. It sounds like just the right time. I have a skill testing question for you. If you had to explain Nix in 30 seconds, how would you do that? Let's do it. All right. So Nix is the largest package repository in the world. It has 80,000 packages. So you can imagine, first of all,

it's a package manager, right? And the thing is, is that Nix is a package manager that can actually then scale and be utilized on any type of like OS or metal as long as it's Linux based. So take your favorite package manager. Imagine that's Nix packages. Now, on top of it, layer functionality that allows you to do virtual environments and create environments and put them in any place and anywhere. And that is the little notion about it.

wear and that is the little notion about it so it's like imagine what you wanted to you know python virtual environments to be your entire life but then add two two notions to it plus plus the other thing about it is that nix also is built in a way that allows you to recursively visualize the entire map of what's happening inside your system that'll not only gives you the visibility security wise but it also allows you to be able to fully isolate whatever you're running wherever you want it to be right so as humans when we kept adding layers into the software stack i might have gone through 30 seconds so we can cut that off but as we've gone through the 30 you know the software stack we've added layers we've added containers we've added vms we've told you you can't work on local i want

you to work only in the cloud we you know only in the browser whatever it is but nix comes back to the core and says you can work anywhere with the same set of principles and the last thing i like to say is that we've been using the comment of like the same bits running the same way in different places i think that's just not the way we need to work why do we need the same bits running that just means that i'm running something that's not native on a different machine and that's not optimized for it, right? Why not make sure the thing runs the same way with different bits in a different place?

And I think that's what Nix is. That is a new idea in a way. Also, one of the themes that I like to hear, I have to be honest, it plays to my bias. One of the themes that I heard at NixCon is the operating system matters again, which is kind of technically not true with Nix, but I really like the sentiment. Like, yeah, the OS matters again. Let's get that stuff back on the OS.

I mean, a lot of the, you know, the tools, Docker, etc., we kind of just took the existing OS and traditional Linux, you know, GNU ecosystem and kind of, yeah, we built new layers on top to try to manage it. Nix was one of the first things kind of trying to think, well, what if we just fix the problem in the lower layers to start with? Now, there's a 30-second description, right? Now, how long was his description? One minute, 42 seconds. Oh.

I'm curious for those of you who've been watching the Linux desktop and just Linux itself as it's been evolving for a long time, does this feel like a new era or something that's kind of a new chapter for Linux? Maybe. Maybe not yet. I don't know. It's building. It's awkward because Nix has been around for a very long time.

We just before the show, in fact, we'll link to the paper that was like really the inspiration for Nix in this week's episodes, episode show notes if you want to check it out. But the Nix language and packages started in 2003. The Nix OS Linux distribution started in 2007, and the first Nix stable branch was in 2013. Yeah, I think Ilko said that someone in 2012, they got binary cache, which means, okay, you don't have to compile absolutely everything

to try to use this stuff anymore. So it's not new, but it feels like the market fit is new and the sort of thing is people looked at nix it didn't have all the packages it didn't have everything it was too complicated so then they bounced off of it and they tried docker and when that took off and now we're starting to reach the limitations of that especially in the hardware accelerated era of ai where people need constant access to network and hardware and storage in more and more aggressive ways. So local packages are kind of the all new hotness again. But also there's been a long time of these declarative configuration products in the market.

So the market understands like the value of something like Ansible. We're not over the hump of yet of why Ansible over Nix, but the fact that they understand that there is a value there is good. I mean, we weren't there back when Nix started. So it feels like we're in a new era of market fit. And I don't know, maybe that's why we're starting to see these companies start now. There's definitely a critical mass aspect to, I mean, we joke on the show all the time, right? Like, oh, of course, it's already in Nix packages. And not everything is, but I think a lot of the more complicated types of apps that could be packaged or are packaged in other distros are in Nix packages. So if something's not there, kind of like we saw with Helipad, it's more for the effort of just someone needed to do it than it was a hard problem to solve.

It's also really straightforward to start getting your own software on Nix and you don't have to go through a gatekeeper. Right, yeah. Publish to Nix packages if you want to contribute upstream, but Nix is very flexible to just build it right there in your box or for yourself or privately internally. And how often do enterprises want their own little private repositories and their own little thing that they can just graft into their existing system and configuration and it's just treated like it's from the package repo.

That's huge. That's a huge value right there. So while you were talking to Ron Brent, you also just wanted to get his reaction to NixCon North America because this was the first NixCon North America. Ron was the first NixCon North America. Ron was involved quintessentially in getting it rolling. And so we wanted to see if it met his expectations. I am here because I'm one of the foundation board members of NixOS and also the founder of Phlox, which is a kind of like a bringing Nix to work effort that we started a few years ago.

And I mean, it's been a big conference for you, the very first NixCon. How's it going? Yeah, so I thought about the idea of bringing NixCon for the first time into North America in September of 2023, which is less than six months ago. And it was exciting. I think I proposed it as an idea at actually the NixCon in Europe, and folks kind of were good with it, and we kicked it off, and we didn't know if it was going to be 20 people and a few people who got lost,

but we keep them there until they know how to write a Nix derivation. But it ended up being almost 300, I think, I don't know, 270-something, so pretty fucking awesome awesome and love it you must be really proud of the outcome really because we've been getting amazing feedback and i would imagine you've gotten some too yeah i think what was beautiful about it is just uh the energy i think uh we had the conference hall and that track and it was full but then you walked outside right you kind of like you open the door and everyone's in the common area all hacking together teaching people packaging for the first time and i think that's like that's like insane and and and that's

what you know gives me the drive to do it again and charge my human battery body battery whatever you call that now and up you know it was brilliant to have tables out in the common room because, yeah, they were filled with laptops the entire time. Yeah, and I love the fact that we were able to bully the other tracks not to use the common area. Kindly, though, you know, because we just, they looked at us, we looked at them, they're like, you want to do Knicks? They're like, they turned around, so.

So perfect. Tell me about the foundation. Give us like a primer and how you're involved in it. Yeah, definitely. So foundation is a body inside of the Knicks community. We pretty much have a charter of keeping the lights on and having the light shine a bit brighter for tomorrow, which is kind of a nice fancy way of saying all the fiscal items, the legal items, the bureaucratics, the final escalation points. But one of my ideologies when I came in for the first time to kind of think about this

was that I really do believe in duocracy models and bottoms up community models where the, you know, we come together and then whoever is willing to do the work is empowered to make the decision. And when someone is empowered to make the decision, ideally ideally they're more incentivized to also do the work. I think that's a little bit about the foundation. So maybe unlike others, we don't make technical decisions. We don't make any hard top-down, this is how things operate here. But we just try to empower and do more.

And then a lot of us wear multiple hats. So it's like I'm with the hat of also organizing Nixcon. do more and then a lot of us wear multiple hats so it's like you know i'm with the hat of like also organizing nixcon but you know one of the things i like noah is the foundation doesn't get involved in technical decisions and the other primary goal of the foundation is to make sure there's like a year of runway so that they disappeared the nix infrastructure lasts for a year and then eventually they want to get to two years of runway oh that's extraordinary so they empower the geeks to do the work that they want to do. They move obstacles out of the way and let the work happen.

Feels like a pretty good model. I mean, we'll see how long that lasts, but I'm pretty, I'm pretty, actually, I'm very impressed by the people that seem to kind of be in more leadership roles. Ron himself, I mean, he's clearly a good speaker. He's energetic. He's intelligent. He's tuned in. He's obviously well informed on Nix, too. And he can speak to media. This is a bigger deal than you might realize, because Nix is kind of going from the domain of the geeks that created it, God bless, to the geeks that can talk about it. And that is going to also help with adoption, especially in certain enterprise roles. Yeah, it sounds like Ron in his past life had worked for Meta and was trying to figure out,

like, how do we make, you know, the developer experience really rock solid? How do you get iOS tooling on folks not running macOS? You know, be able to build these crazy cross-distributions that you might need to do it at scale. And then found that, you know, Nix already existed and was solving these problems. It just needed, you know, a little more polish. Now, we wanted to wrap up NixCon with how we started it. Brent sat down with Zach Mitchell, who joined us earlier before, well, months ago when NixCon was announced, and we wanted to get his impression on how everything went. It was really that first, like, opening ceremony slash workshop

when it was basically standing room only that we were like hell yeah we did it uh and so uh yeah that kind of like sustained itself for the whole two days of the conference and uh yeah so i think it went really well we got a lot of positive feedback um there's a ton of people asking us to do it again saying like you know if you do it I'll definitely come back that kind of stuff and that's pretty much exactly what we wanted to hear yeah and if they do it again I think we're going to be back again 100% it was a great event and learned a ton

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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.com slash unplugged. One thing became really clear, though, at NixCon, and that was that Nix is eating the world. Now, this clip is actually from a keynote that was held at a different event by different people, but by Docker and Phlox employees. And they just straight up are talking about how Nix is being used on the back end of Docker Hub. I want to kind of impress upon you the idea that Nix is another option that we have here.

I want to kind of impress upon you the idea that Nix is another option that we have here. This adopting a declarative approach and how we can use Docker and Nix together is the thing that we really want everybody to get out of this talk today. And at the end, we've got a little bit of a call to action because there are some actually really interesting opportunities that we have to bring a new way of using both Docker and Nix together. And we're kind of interested in whether people want to join us on that. So there was this really interesting experience that we had during this event. And it was accentuated by the way scale is laid out. There are two physical buildings. And the main scale event was taking place in the core building the traditional building if you will and ubicon was taking place and a couple other events were taking place over

there and then in a separate building across a you know a courtyard there was a nixcon event and it was like its own conference completely disconnected and disassociated from the other bits of what were going on at scale and so you would go between these two worlds in real time and it was like the two planets that were orbiting the sun the same sun but they had no idea that there was a civilization on each planet and well maybe the nix people knew but definitely the people at the ubicon event and other places had no idea what was going on because you'd go over to the NixCon side and you'd have a hundred people heads down on laptops and you'd have, you know, another 60 people in

sessions. And they're essentially rebuilding the way we package and distribute software and the way we deploy it. And they're solving it at fundamental levels that we have been struggling with for decades in Linux. And it's, you know, I go over to Ubicon, no offense to Ubicon, but I go over to Ubicon and within five minutes of sitting at a session and in the Q&A, we get into a snaps versus flat packs versus app image versus Docker image versus this Docker image and that Docker image. And 20% of the Q&A is spent just how do I actually install this thing and what's the best way and what are the pros and cons of these different formats.

And I hear I should use the snap. I hear I should use the Docker image. i should use the docker image i hear i should do this person's project i hear if i have a pie i should use this and it's you sit there and you go these people have no idea what's coming for them they're completely ignorant that there is another entity in that building a black hole that is sucking in everything they're talking about just sitting down heads down working while these people are chattering away about what doesn't work, there's actually people in another building that are solving these problems that are coming for them in 10 years, and they're totally unaware of it happening. And it is the wildest thing to witness in front of you.

It's like there is a fundamental shift happening that is solving these problems, and there could be a scenario and an outcome where we no longer have, should I use the app image? Should I use the Snap? Should I use the Dev? Should I use the RPM? Should I use the Flatpak? Should I just use the Docker image? That conversation may eventually go away in some form, and the work is being done right now, and the people that will eventually be dependent on that work have no idea it's even happening or about to be changed out from underneath them. are about to be changed out from underneath them. I wonder if you think, I have an opinion on which I'll share, but I wonder if you think it was an advantage or a disadvantage for it to be in a completely different building. I think it was an advantage because there was some intense directed work and learning happening in one scenario,

but it presents the problem you just suggested, which is that there's this divide. So what do you think? I would tell you that I think that allows the workshop, lets the people get the work done, the marketing and or the on-ramp to it. That's what the expo hall is for. And, you know, the next table with Martin Wimperis, the Fox guys next to him, that, at least from my perspective, offered the opportunity to, if you wanted to learn or dip your toe into the water, that was a comfortable place to do that.

And then if you were interested and wanted to go further, there's a place. Hey, these guys are doing all this work. You can go down there and hang out. Yeah, I think that's very true. It is, though, sort of like this, there is something brewing and nobody's realized it yet. Well, I mean, the combination of it being in the basement, but then also it kind of started. I mean, it was a pre-event, right? Like we came down for NixCon.

We wanted to go to scale, but NixCon sealed the deal because the first one in North America. But a bunch of folks just came for scale, which is, I mean, it's great. Scale is important. So you could show up to this year's scale and have no idea that it was really happening. Or we talked to a lot of folks who are kind of aware and they're like, oh, I might go watch a Nix talk.

Yeah. It feels like okay all right well it's coming for you you're going to become a nyx user whether you like it or not you just might not know it um but you know like i mentioned at the top of the show scale is always a moment to meet and catch up with old friends or new faces that we have like online relationships with and all that kind of stuff and our buddy mr martin wimpress wimpy was down in the next con section and uh out of the corner of my eye i caught his laptop and it's a sleek looking laptop and i said um what you got going there you know because we know martin he's he's created a buntu mate he's got a very

opinionated idea of the desktop and he has got a what i would call sweet gnome setup that in the past you would have built your own distro for, but now he's just created his own desktop environment on top of Nix, and he walked us through a little bit of it. So everything's declarative, right? So even the dock, right? So this is dash to dock, but everything in there, I haven't manually configured that.

That's actually a Nix configuration. That's great. So you're saying even the icons in your dash. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like fixed workspaces, so I just have those configured as fixed things. And when I launch an application, it automatically launches the application

on the right workspace. So I have workspace one to eight. Each workspace has a particular function. So when I move to that workspace... Are you using a GNOME particular function so when i move to that workspace are you using a gnome extension to tell it to go to that virtual desktop yeah it's called auto move yeah yeah um and if we do um that there so that's just bringing up a terminal which i'll do here we'll then which has been fancified another terminal which i'll do here and you'll notice that i've got the, what's that window manager everyone's going?

That's about Hyperland style window borders. They're all part of the GNOME configuration. We'll open up another one. And now when I tile this one, it's going to give me the option of how I want to lay out. So it's a tiling assistant about how I want the other window to be tiled. That seems very flexible. But all of this, all the indicator stuff is all pre-configured and enabled. The shrinking of the space between the indicator icons is all factored out in the GNOME configuration.

Overview at start is disabled by default. When I super, it brings up the app grid, not the overlay. And workspaces is turned off in the app grid. All of this is just all Nix, Nix configuration, the whole lot. There's some knobs in here I didn't even know you could tune. So the way you can do this is you run dconf watch slash. And now, everything you poke in GNOME, where it makes a configuration change...

You can see it right there printed out on the screen. So you're basically doing like a tale of Deconf. Yeah, and then you can copy and paste that into the Deconf Nix configuration thing to now make it a decorative configuration. That's a good tip. Oh, that's a good tip. So it's Deconf Nix configuration thing to now make it a decorative configuration. That's a good tip. Oh, that's a good tip. So it's Deconf watch slash.

Yeah, that will just watch every change in G settings or Deconf. Now, in Nix OS in 23.11, there's a Deconf user database profile module. So you can now in Nix OS at the system level configure things. There's G settings overrides, which is kind of good for defaults. But the thing about Deconf is you can make changes to things that aren't defined in the schema. So GNOME extensions don't have schema references. So the only way you can automatically provision and configure your GNOME extensions is using that Deconf overlay. Can you show me what that looks like?

What, the configuration? Yeah, sure. That's so great. So how many extensions would you guess are installed? Well, I won't have to guess. I can show you. It's got to be a fair amount. I think it's eight or nine.

Oh, that's not bad. Popey was joking with me saying, oh, what, you're going to make your own distro now? And I was like, no. You don't need to. was joking with me saying oh what you're going to make your own distro now and i was like no i'm going to make i what my end goal of this is is to make a flake of my interpretation of what the gnome desktop could be and then people could just consume that one flake they don't have to turn on any gnome stuff that flake will just give you this like out of box experience i would definitely try that i would give that a go And then using Home Manager and its decomp module, you can then make your own user overrides to my configuration, which is how I do it. And he demonstrated like, I can have this set up for my family. I can have these different

kind of changes and tweaks there. It was so slick. So one of the things as I was kind of chatting with him, you know, I asked him, how is it going with a bunch of mate and he goes you know lts coming out this would be the time i'd be really digging in doing the grind i'm not because i if i'm going to build something for the rest of my family to use i have to believe in it and i think that the way that it's going is nix and so that's going to be his pet project that's going to be the thing that will replace the the you know the the use case for a bunch Monte. Isn't that something? Isn't that? And I, you know, imagine, so you start with a base system, and then

you just pull in his flake. I wonder, could you do it on a Fedora box? Well, I don't know about everything. You could certainly get a bunch of the software. I think you'd need to get the right roots. You'd have to figure out how to go run that system on top, right? Because you're probably going to need at least the GNOME stuff to get it right.

But you might be able to do it at the user level pretty easy. It'd be a big swap out. Yeah, I think maybe a home manager version of the Deconf module, you could do that part. Why the desire to run it on Fedora? I'm just thinking, like, so people didn't want to have NixOS space. Because I think, like, one of the things people have a hard time wrapping their head around is they're so used to a package manager. And then, like, why do I have to go, like, add my software to a config file or do, like, a flake? Like, why can't I just say install and then I have it available immediately? And why do i have to go like add my software to a config file or do like a flake like why can't i just say install and then i have it available immediately and why do i got

to do this rebuild you know and i think people will get it eventually but i think one of the initial like one of the initial reactions is i just want to install the my piece of software and use it okay how about you split the difference you use nixos for the base operating system have all of the package and configuration to to get you to a stable ground and then flat packs on top that's what i'm doing for my kids i'm doing uh so for both bella and dylan right now i have have all of the package and configuration to get you to a stable ground, and then Flatpak's on top. That's what I'm doing for my kids. So for both Bella and Dylan right now, I have a base config that I've done,

and then they just install the software they want through Discover, which just installs Flatpak. Yeah. And that's actually working. That, to me, makes sense. I mean, if you look at it, that's kind of the direction Apple's going, right? They give you a solid base to build off of, and then you put all your stuff up here.

Yeah, I could see it working. I think that's kind of the same rationale the Phlox folks have, right? They're offering sort of an imperative API on top of the declarative stuff as a bridge between the two worlds. Okay, well, I'm lucky enough to work with a bunch of amazing people, and two of my favorite people are in this very

room, so I feel like, well, not including the JB folks, of course. Sorry, guys. But Daphne is one of those people who I met for the very first time when JB was invited to join NextCloud last March. So exactly a year. That's when I met Daphne. And we've been kind of friends ever since. And the rest is history?

It is. But I think you're a brilliant person. And you've had a positive effect on me. And also, you lead some big teams at NextCloud. And I think you have had a positive effect on me. And also you lead some big teams at Nextcloud. And I think you have a massively positive effect on them as well. So would you introduce yourself, which teams you work on and how it is being here? Oh, it's lovely to be here in California. It's a big adventure for me.

When I joined Nextcloud, I started as a support lead. So I managed the customer support team. And then I also got a bit bored there because all the problems were at some point sort of manageable. So I moved also to manage the integration portfolio of integrations of other software with Nextcloud. And then I became also community developer manager. And now I have a whole team of developers. We are primarily responsible for the AI projects at Nextcloud. But we also still develop integrations with other software and 60 other apps. It has been a blast.

What about scale? This is your first scale. It's also my first scale. I'm curious, you've had experiences at other conferences like FOSDEM and other conferences that I actually don't even know because they're European-based. But how does scale itself compare to those experiences? I think scale is a very warm and welcoming place to be. I personally didn't have great experiences at FOSDEM being from a minority group. Maybe the conference is just a little bit too large if you are relatively new to open source. But I've had better experiences on smaller conferences in Europe

like False North, which is the Scandinavian open source conference in Europe. And Scale has been similar to that. I didn't find it too large. It was manageable in terms of size. People are very enthusiastic about Nextcloud. And it has been a wonderful experience. Now, you gave a talk, I think an hour and a half ago at Scale. Can you give us an overview of what that was about and how it went?

It went well. It was about AI ethics because it's a difficult field. A year ago, chat GPT suddenly became large. And there are so many problems with AI. And the question is, should Nextcloud be doing AI or not? And it's so difficult because on the one hand, we are a competitor to Microsoft who is doing AI. So if some of their features become popular and mainstream,

then maybe we have to provide them also, but in a better way, because, yeah, if the users and the market expects it, otherwise you have a problem. But there's many problems with it, ranging from discrimination, bias, carbon emissions, which people does it benefit the most, because it doesn't support all languages, requires expensive hardware, it generates nonsense.

For example, during the talk I explained that even Nextcloud's AI, while we try to be open source, is not fully ethical. And I was explaining that I had some examples of people misusing it. Even in our team, we had a support engineer using ChatGPT to provide support. But ChatGPT doesn't know Nextcloud OCC commands, so that went wrong. And I explained that this type of text generation is a form of mansplaining as a service. And I would imagine there's a privacy aspect to it all as well. Yes, because most big tech solutions, of course, gather all your data,

and the Nextcloud solutions don't have to do that because it runs on your own server. We've seen a big incidence of user data being sold to various companies for AI training. Have you investigated that at all? Yes, we have seen that in the last months Tumblr and WordPress and Reddit were considering to sell the data of their users to train AI models, But of course, users never consented to that use case. That's perhaps the overall problem with consent in surveillance capitalism in general, because consent doesn't really seem to work for the simple fact that it needs to be voluntary and it needs to be informed.

And both of those things never occur in the tech industry. Now, our crowd listening is all pretty technical. And I think hopefully many of us have kind of thought of these things at least a little bit at this point. But how do you feel about just the general population and what's coming? I'm not sure they are really fully aware. And I'm also not sure, honestly, that they know how to use AI software that is now pushed to them. Well, I don't know, because JAT GPT seems to be like integrated into every search field out there. It's almost like they have no choice but to use it, even if they don't even realize they're using it. Yeah, but that they have no choice and that they are using it doesn't mean they know how to use it. Okay. Any recommendations?

Well, first of all, be careful with using it to generate drafts, for example, for your presentation or draft for a report. Yes, you can use it perhaps at the beginning of the writing process, but certainly not at the end. You have to put the human back into it and you have to check all the facts. And you have to check that all the literature that it references actually exists. And also be careful with introduced bias because text generation is all the time assuming

that doctors are men, bosses are men, and nurses are women. Well, here's the life example that a boss can also be a woman. Also be aware, well, perhaps that's not for the average user, but if you're deploying AI yourself, be aware of the energy consumption. That's something we just started talking about too. Wow, there's a lot there, but I think that's all really solid. And I really appreciate that Nextcloud is giving users some tools that don't feel creepy. Yeah. And you're integrating AI stuff, but you're at least being

open about like, well, we've got options that are totally self-hosted and private, and maybe you need to take advantage of other options, but at least you're calling that out in a way that few other services or apps are doing. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Well, a big thank you to Daphne for joining us. And Joss, you've taken the place now. Joss, introduce yourself, please, for us. Oh, introducing myself to the JB audience. That's quite a thing.

I think many of you actually might have heard my voice at one point or another. And I work at Nexcloud, like Daphne. But you have a little bit of a longer history, that's for sure. Right. I started a little early, technically, at the day before we announced it. So that would be June 1st, 2016. Back when we were all young men and had a few less years on us. Oh yeah, quite a few less years.

It's really crazy to think that it's been almost eight years. That's just unbelievable. The world has changed quite a bit. And not just with COVID. It's been quite a ride. A lot of new technologies. I got to give credit to Nextcloud, though. You guys have been pretty good at riding those waves and trying to figure out what is something that's actually worth investing in.

What's a trend that you don't need to necessarily jump on? That's been pretty impressive for those eight years. Yeah, I think one of the tricks, honestly, we do is we love those little test balloons. Very often we will develop something in the first thing and see if people use it, pick it up. And then if it doesn't get picked up, then it's okay. Yeah, I'm not always happy with that approach.

They're like, well, it's a bit of an abandonware approach. And I mean, yeah, I'm not always happy with that approach. You know, they're like, well, it's a bit of an abandonware approach. And I mean, yeah, I see the pain. But, you know, for some things, you just need a couple of iterations to get it right. Like one of the things was the project feature, which we introduced quite a while ago. And it was a way where you could say, hey, this file is related to that file. So people just didn't do that. So at some point, we basically just dropped that and replaced it with the related resources, which basically looks at like relations between the files based on who they have access to it.

So if you have a file and it's shared between Brenda and me, then it'll show up when I go to one file. It shows up all the other resources that are exclusively shared between Brenda and me. But it took years to really, you know, first it was unused, and now we have something that kind of works, and we're, well, there's some new stuff coming in this area, of course, for the next release. I don't actually know your history with Scale. Can you give us a taste? Like, is this your first one, or you've been here for like 10 years over and over? I've been at Scale about six times since about 2010 2011 so it's been a while since my first scale um so back then i was community manager for open suza and we wanted to organize a a meeting of all the the contributors who were contributing to marketing

at the time i looked at like where does everybody live? And, you know, you will think OpenSUSE, you know, SUSE being such a German company, the easiest place would be in Germany. But it turns out that actually the most efficient place was this side of the US. So we were like, well, there's this event coming, scale. How about we just bring everybody there and, you know, do a meetup the week before scale, in which time we can, you know, work on some materials and get it all printed and then bring it to scale and have a big open-souza booth there and really build up a thing.

Yeah, it was really quite an experience. I don't know. I think scale is really cool. It's really a community event, really, you know, open. And so that was really nice. It is very community. So, Brent, I want to know, how did it meet your expectations? Yeah, in that clip we played previously, I said,

well, I've got lots of LinuxFest Northwest experience, and I think it might just be three to four times that. And I actually think that was pretty accurate. It felt very busy in the main hall so actually going to nixcon sometimes even though nixcon was a huge success it was like ah i'm like with my people now that's a good point you could like escape hatch out and go to a smaller con and then pop back into the big con that's that was actually pretty nice yeah i was wondering like i mean i think there are some cons excuse excuse the pun there, to that approach.

Maybe the discoverability of NextCon perhaps was hurt, or folks just not intermingling from DevOps days over to NextCon or to the UbuCon track. But you're right. I mean, it did mean you could escape the general chaos and go find like-minded people in whatever track. I'm hooked. Like, it was exhausting socially in the best kind of way, you know? And we often talk about how going to these events and hosting the meetup that we had, which was a huge success.

Oh yeah, we didn't even talk about the huge meetup that we had. So many things have happened. It's crazy. Like it's just an intense experience. And you know, so you and I were talking about that this morning. It's just like, there's so much happening. You wish somehow it could be like a week long, but I know they would just cram in just as much in a whole week,

but it's, it's, you have to do it. Yeah. Like it recharges you for months. I, you know, I look at how many teams were sent down here and,

you know, and it's not the whole company for any of these places, but it's, you know, that's a nice chunk of the team. That's, that's real numbers. That's real money. That's real time and real value that people get out of this

conference so i'm and it's exciting also to just get together and see each other i have a question for you yes you've got like quite a depth of history with open source i'm curious how it feels different in north america versus in europe, you have different events in Europe too, of course, and some are a bit more commercial, some are a bit more community, like FOSDEM in particular. That's a completely insane event. There's no registration. They have no idea how many people are going to come.

I'm guessing it's for the building code, because honestly, this cannot be safe. If you see how full it is, it's nuts. And that one is almost actively anti-commercial. Like you will not see any commercial boots, nothing. It's only pure community. While on the other hand, you've had projects like Linux Stack Berlin,

which I've been at many times. It's now like it doesn't exist anymore. And there was a lot more like scale where you have kind of the melting pot of like there are community booths there are commercial booths there are communities less commercial booths you know which i personally like a little bit more for them is just chaos but like i think businesses bring things you know good things do to open source yeah i miss it now in now in Europe with Linux stack being gone. A more scale like event would be good to have a bigger one in Europe. I do miss it a little bit, I think, because now everybody just goes to FOSDEM.

It doesn't cover all the bases, you know? Yeah. I do love how scale does that in a nice way. Thank you, Jos. It was great to have you again. Thanks for being here. And now it is time for the boost. So Kraftnix boosted in and he's writing about a military industrial complex sponsor. I got like a contractor for the military. The Nixcon EU organization decided to reject that sponsor. However,

the Nixcon North America sponsor or Nixcon North America did not reject that sponsor. However, the Nixcon North America sponsor, or Nixcon North America did not reject that sponsor. And there is a post that we can link to in the show notes to bring people up to speed. Kraft Nix writes, this is extremely disheartening to me personally. They believe that people who care about open source should care about the military industrial Complex sponsoring events. So we talked about this on the live stream, but I wanted to address it in the show because I think this is probably some people listening will have this. Oh, yeah, for sure.

I mean, and just also thanks for the discussion, Kraftnix, and for the 80K sets. Yeah. You know, I don't even know their name because there was no indication that they were a sponsor i didn't do you remember what their name was i think you do right no i actually don't andrew andrew something like that uh but having attended all the nixcon events i don't i can't even i couldn't even tell you the company's name uh it is tricky though in north america because unfortunately the military

industrial complex is such a huge part of our economy. And, boy, I wish that wasn't the truth, but it is the reality. And it's not only just a big part of the tech economy, it's a big part of the United States' GDP, which is gross, but it is the truth. And if you accept that a nation needs to have a military, which probably most people do at some level, you might not agree with what that military does, but you probably accept they need to have a military. Then you have to ask yourself the question, should that military be using the best software possible? And then that kind of brings me to a point where I'm not so sure how I feel about this anymore. You know, we were talking with Ron a bit and, you know, pointed out some of the growing pains because this is the first NixCon North America. A lot of the funding for Nix, a lot of the emotional involvement, a lot of the people participating. That's been in Europe, and there are more government sponsors available.

And to your point, Chris, in the U.S., well, often maybe there's like a program office or something, but the real money is at the Department of Defense and the contractors that flow through there. Yeah, there's also, it's hard to pick and choose because I used to work in IT as a contractor for a company that on the outside you would just think is a 100% green company. They specialized in inverters and solar panels. Their name was Outback Power Systems. You can Google them.

They were completely known for just being environmentally friendly, green company at the total edge of developing solar technology and their biggest customer was the military in iraq and you know it's like wow so they're like doing a lot of good pushing solar and renewable energies forward and their biggest contractor is the military and it is just kind of the reality and this is just a little tiny 200 person company in arlington washington this is everywhere we did hear mentioned during the kind of the reality. And this is just a little tiny 200-person company in Arlington, Washington. This is everywhere.

We did hear a mention during the State of the Union. I think the foundation especially is aware of these pains. And I don't think they're trying to have a super heavy hand. I mean, obviously, maybe there's issues around, does that funding make or break if the conference is possible? That might be one thing. But if it's just a little extra slush, I think they're curious and open-minded and want the community to speak out.

If folks are passionate, it's a discussion worth having. And I think it's an important topic to keep on our radar, something we'll continue to follow. So thank you, Craftnix, for boosting in, and thank you for being our baller! Hey, rich lobster! 50,000 sats boosting in from Sovakin.

I hoard that which your kind covet. Short message, Sovakin just wanted to say, I'll be listening from my hospital bed. And this was a live boost we got from the morning before Nixcon stream. Wow. We got a couple of boosts that hit pretty hard this week, and that is one of them.

Sov, man, like, hope you're doing okay out there. Thank you so much. We're pulling for you, and thanks for listening. We hope you're doing okay out there. Thank you so much. We're pulling for you. And thanks for listening. We've been thinking about you for days. Thank you very much. Now we got a 50,000 boost as well from Miss Enutech. I hoard that which your kind covet.

Another one of those that hits the heart. Boosting for my husband, who's a longtime listener. He introduced me to the show four years ago, and I just want to try and support him back. He's a wonderful dad, and he loves the show, so thank you very much for that. That is so amazing. A little more context, because they boosted multiple times. I believe he's just recently been deployed, or he's in the military as well, and he's able to listen to the show from afar and this is sort of a gift to him is boosting and supporting one of his favorite shows so that's amazing and definitely hits us in the feels thank you

thank you very much for supporting the show and if you want to boost in with his name we'd be happy to give him a shout out he sounds like a great guy yeah whatever we can do yeah hybrid sarcasm comes in with the classic now 42,000 sats because I know you guys know this, but it is truly the universal answer to everything. And they write, boost from the trenches of another production cut over a weekend.

Hybrid. I mean, you are just, you are putting in the hours. Oh my goodness, dude. All right, very well, very good. I may be pushing the limits of caffeine consumption for humans. You're in good company. I wonder what that is. Does it stack up to our caffeine consumption?

What is the LD50 somewhere at like 1,200? That's what I tell myself. I know Jeff got a nice reality check of the caffeine consumption in this place. Unbelievable. I never thought that a single person can intake so much just before breakfast. I intake very little, so it kind of evens out between all of us at the end. Yeah. Oh, boy.

Let me tell you what. It's a way of life, especially when – so thankfully for the last couple of nights, I've been solid. But for the first few nights I was here, I was coming – I had a tooth infection that I was fixing, and it was sort of the end of it hopefully. But I didn't sleep for the first two nights that I was here. So I was basically and it was sort of the end of it, hopefully, but I didn't sleep for the first two nights that I was here. So I was basically living on caffeine. Now I learned last night from Daphne actually that some people, very small percentages of population, and I think Wes might be one of these, they can have caffeine and sleep no problem. It doesn't affect them in any way. Is that true for you?

Sometimes even helps. I've noticed like you'll caffeinate fairly late into the evening. Yeah. I don't really have a cutoff. Yeah. I have like a two, three, three o o'clock cutoff we're like an hour away from my cutoff right now as we record i should probably slam another one you know golden dragon coming in live to say uh dragon used to consume 1400 milligrams a day i like that he tracked it that is so nerdy well at that level you probably should just to be safe well actually i think there's a valley.

Like, at first, you track. And then you go into the, I'm consuming so much, I don't want to track valley. And then you come out on the other side, like, I got to get a handle on this. And then you start tracking it again. I don't know where Golden Dragon is in that sort of use pattern. Is there a similar curve to Nick's adoption? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Oh, and GoldenDragon says he can still sleep on it, too.

GoldenDragon coming in. TKyro comes in with 24,690 sats to say he's having a problem with the Fountain Live feed, but other apps, even though it wasn't specifically focused at Fountain, other apps are getting the notifications and he can listen to the stream in Podcast Attic, send it to his Chromecast, and put it up on his TV.

How about that? So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. To say, I expect my Spaceballs Boost sound clips paid back with interest. Hmm. All right. Well, here you go then as. As a little interest on top of that Spaceballs. Pew, pew, pew. I think you've earned that. I think you've earned that.

VT52 came in with 10,101 Satoshis. Thank you very much. And here's something for your trouble. Maybe, just maybe, this is finally enough to convince Chris to get on the home manager bandwagon. Uh-oh. enough to convince Chris to get on the home manager bandwagon. Uh-oh. And then we've got a link here to a declarative Plasma config in Plasma Manager.

This is really, really slick. So I'm just going through the config right now because, you know, this stuff's just plain text. You can just read it. It sets the tooltip delay to five, so it's nice and quick. It's using the Breeze dark theme. It sets a wallpaper. It looks like it takes care of some of the title bar buttons so they're in the right way.

Get your minimize and maximize and close in the right way. I need this. So this is what Wimpy was doing, but the Plasma version. Yeah, it is. That's really neat. I think that's actually pretty brilliant, VT. I am very much feeling it is time for me to start playing with this. I want to talk to

Wimpy more about it. Maybe if he publishes his Flake, that'd be a good starting spot and then just sort of go from there. Or if folks want to boost in, like, what's the best modern, probably Flake forward way to get started with Home Manager? What should we try? What should we avoid? Oh my gosh. How are you configuring your desktop? I want to see it. I want to see the config file. Please, please. I want to see that. Oh my gosh. Wow. All right. Thank you for that link. Now, Zach Attack came in with 2,500 hey oh you're back on fountain thank you zach b o o s t i used to have a gpx canoe for retro emulation but lost the charge cable of all things seeing what you're using last week got me thinking i'd pick up another small retro system

just so that i can stay in my bag and get busted out every once in a while. We should pass that around so that for the, so the folks listening here in the living room can check out the RS, what is it? 36 S is that right? It's in front of the TV and hopefully charged. Really neat device. It's been a lot of fun. Alex brought his, you know, because he's the one that told me about it, and he loves it for just the offline plane flights. Yeah, Pokemon on the plane, what more could you want? Now, SWAT boosted in with a row of ducks. And he writes, if you like split keebs, like keyboards,

check out BastardKB.com, who are a truly open hardware shop. They actually have everything posted on their Bast bastard KB GitHub page. I met them in real life at ClackyCon. What? That's awesome. ClackyCon. Okay. So helpful. And they were not pushy. They had a passion for Keebs.

Is this like, is Keebs like something the kids are calling keyboards now? K-E-E-B-S? I think Swat's deep i like it currently switching from a decade old dos keyboard ultimate to a new bastard keyboard cherry dibs what is happening right now cherry b dibs i don't know any advice is welcome especially with regards to using layers optimally and yes i am a vim user oh that's too bad well if anyone out there can understand what swat is saying boost back boost back with your tips and answers.

Give us your hot kibs suggestions. I actually am feeling like a little left out. I didn't realize there was bastardkeyboard.kb.com. I didn't realize there was clackycon. Well, and I know editor Drew just got a ploopy mouse for himself. Canadian company. I'm sorry? If you can spell it, they're great.

They look wonderful. Ploopy mouse? Yes. It's a whole new language okay all right you want okay all right you want it all right you take the next one that's weird it's ploopy come on it's a ploopy mouse now galactic starfish boosted in a couple boosts for a total of 7 000 sats hey regarding that productivity app discussion last week, I found all the task apps I've used to be too inflexible. As someone with ADHD, I need to be able to do rapid task switching without the encumbrance of opening the app or checking something off. And I need to track billable hours in the workplace. Self-motivation is a big problem for me as well. I'm someone who

gets fired up about five projects at the same time, but just as fast as the fire came, it dies again. So on that note, I am developing a system and will be developing an app to accompany this scatterbrain workflow style in a way that is rewarding, flexible, intuitive, and simple. It's still a ways out, of course. So reading this part on the air isn't necessary. However, I'm curious to hear how listeners struggling with this very problem have solved it for themselves. Well, I think they all do what you're doing and try to build themselves a system. It comes back to that workbench discussion with Ross, right?

I mean, I think some folks, whether not having the weird skills to build it or just better fit by what is available, maybe there's a system you can use, but if you have particular needs, you probably need the power of open source to craft something that actually works for you. I'm here for it, though, to see what they can come up with. I mean, super productivity is a tough act to beat. That looks like a pretty dang good app. Yeah, and I feel like because it's open source, we can integrate a lot of these ideas that work for various people into the same app.

I mean, a lot of the background work has already been done. So why recreate the craft there? Fair point. Fair point. All right. Our next boost comes from Mr. Pibb,

which is 7,777 sets. He writes, I've been enjoying the AI discussion and have stable diffusion and code llama running on my PC as a result. Nicely done. Looking forward to your coverage from out in the field and hope to catch some live content as well. Safe travels. Thanks, Pip. And hey, maybe boost banking and let us know, did you catch that live content and did it work for you?

What do you think? How'd it go? Because we're developing a whole new pipeline. Trey Fordham comes in with a row of ducks i bought an r36s that's that handhold there you go for myself but when my four-year-old saw it he wanted one too really intuitive and i actually ended up buying the second one in the color he wanted that's true we should have said there are multiple colors out there i, when you're looking with something between $40-ish and $80-ish, depending on where you get it, not too shabby, really. Now, Bearded Tech came in with a total of 4,034 sets across three boosts. Coming in hot with the boosts!

The only thing that hasn't made Fountain or Podverse stick for me yet is the UI loading time and the Android auto. I wouldn't. Okay. I got to make a quick comment. If you're going to boost in with the Android auto, tell me what phone you're using. Cause I'm on the pies L seven pro skis and I'm not seeing this. And like,

I don't spend a minute in my car by myself without listening to a podcast. Like I'm constantly using that, but I have heard that people are having issues with the Android of the autos. Got to narrow that down, but I want to narrow it down to devices if I can. Well, Bearded continues, don't take me wrong, I want to use Fountain,

but if I'm in a low data area on my phone, Fountain can take something like five or six minutes to load the UI sometimes. Whoa! My thinking, and I wonder if they could toggle this, is that might be related to the SAT streaming. Maybe not actually related to the pod playing, but trying to make a connection back to the server

so that way you get your SATs, but first it's got to time out. And there's some sort of linear dependency where that has to load before you get to the next step. Right, because the SAT payout is pegged to the time playback. So you don't want to start the time playback until you've got the sat streaming figured out. Not an easy problem.

That's my thinking, at least. I don't know for sure. Now, Android Auto for both Podverse and Fountain work if you start the app beforehand. And then it needs to pull everything in. I don't know exactly how it's doing it on the back end, but I'd assume it hits the API endpoint to get my pods.

I wonder if one thing that i do that i've habitualized i wonder if you guys do this is before i get in the car i do kind of like as i'm like getting my wallet and my keys i open up the podcast app and i do a quick refresh and just see because i want to pull it down when i'm on wi-fi if i can and i think maybe that is maybe one of the moves that i'm doing i'm not waiting till i'm in the car and maybe switching between wi-fi and lte which is probably a pretty precarious moment to be switching now tech has a potential idea for how to solve this i wonder if there's a way to store the last successful api pull into a persistent database or so that way you can locally on device use that until some other

new api pull is complete Store it and cache it. Oh, watch out, watch out. Wes brought the big map. Oh my gosh. I can't believe you packed that. Yeah, it turns out there's a zip code boost in the mix. By the way, this is a zip code boost. The number of sats multiplied by 49 plus 28. Yeah, so you start with 2,033 sats.

Thank you, tech. Then you do that math. Yeah, add more that aren't sats. Yeah, so you start with 2,033 sats. Thank you, tech. Then you do that math. That aren't sats. Hint, this will be helpful for confirming that I got this right. It's the 49th U.S. state. Okay, I did the math. The zip code is 99645,

which is... Hold on. I mean, sure, Brent knows what the 49th state is, right? There are 49? Plus or minus. Yeah, okay. It is a postal code in Alaska including cities such as Palmer, Lazy Mountain, and

Farm Loop. Oh, man. How great. Whenever I see this, I get a little jelly. I'm like, oh, I'd love to have Lazy Mountain, Alaska in my address. Yeah, although, have you heard about those fountain loading times? I don't think you've heard of that. Maybe I don't. But we really do appreciate the boost.

Thank you very much, Bearded. Also a very active contributor in our Telegram group. Now we did get a row of McDucks. Things are looking up for all McDuck. User 27, who I don't think has said their username in fountain yet, said, See y'all at Texas Linux Fest. Safe travels. That was a live boost, wasn't it? Yeah, so the remainder here are live ones

we pulled before the boost segment. More have been coming in. We're not going to get them all, but we're doing our best. We do love it. And the dude abides comes in with 10,000 sacks. Boost! And just says, hi there. And then look who managed to boost in, even while they're at the event. Gene Bean comes in with a row of ducks, saying, just popping in for a moment to say how great it was to meet everyone this week.

Honestly, when we meet the boosters, it's like we're meeting celebrities. It's so great. Like, oh, it's Gene Bean. Even my wife knows who Gene Bean is, right? Two more live beasts from the bean to live beasts? Yeah. Two more live boosts from the beam to say all hail the moose honking Brent. And you know, for what it's worth,

Gene Bean doesn't really care if a sponsor is also a military contractor. The money spends just like anyone else's. Picture vision came in with 10,000 sats to say hi from Germany, sending you my sats earned through Fountain. So far, keep up the good work, a.k.a. Frank. That is very, very generous, Frank. Thank you. And if you do meet us in person, feel free to tell us your boost ID or your matrix handle or your online handle. That helps a lot. I want to send out a huge shout out to the Golden Dragon.

Now, Jeff, you worked with the Golden Dragon to bring something special to scale here. Yeah, it was really great. We needed some more stickers specifically for the event. And the Golden Dragon, as we know, makes these stickers. So whipped them up, sent him some stats. He sent me some stickers and people have loved them. So thank you so much. Can you describe some of the stickers that you made?

Because some of them are inside JB Joe's. And hilarious. The Hawk Strike sticker. Hopefully some photos of that will go around in the chats. Now, we should make it clear. Hawk Strike is a technical term not to be joked around about. It is the

right amount of velocity and strength in which you hit a power supply to stop it from making the grinding noise. Send it to me and I'll post a picture of it at chrislast.com on my Nostra profile. People can check out chrislast.com. It's so, so great. And Wes already is rocking it on his laptop. Yeah. I mean, come on. The ThinkPad was born for the Hawk Strike because it has a kind of loud fan. And at some point the Hawk Strike is going to be needed. You know, you know, you've done it it that machine noise is just grinding away you don't got time to replace that fan so boom hawk strike too loud it makes it worse yeah and uh it's just great

stickers all around people loved them yeah they definitely all went i think i might have a few left but uh they're all gone so the mascot was here in spirit for sure, right? That was pretty fun. Yeah, our sticker game probably would have sucked without Jeff and the Golden Dragon getting together. So I'm really, really grateful of that. It's the kind of thing where we're way too busy breaking our feeds to think about that kind of thing, unfortunately.

So it means a lot to have other folks who are helping out. You know, at NixCon, Jeff and I showed up at like minute number one of NixCon just to kind of catch everything that was going there during the live stream and I was like, hey Jeff, just put out a little stickers on this table. This table's pretty empty. Maybe we can like share some love. And

he put out like a giant handful. I was like, Jeff, that's too many. And 30 minutes later, they were mostly all gone. So I think they are well appreciated out there. Heck yeah. They all disappeared. That is really great. Well, I am thrilled to say with part thanks to the live stream

we had 50 boosters, 92 total boosts and we stacked 406,421 sats, which is fantastic. We were out there earning that and working that. So thank you everybody who boosted in that value. It's very much appreciated. and working that. So thank you. Everybody who boosted in that value is very much appreciated.

And of course, a big thank you to our members as well. And our sat streamers out there, we see you and everybody who tunes in for these live streams. We just had so much fun doing this and a shout out to the fountain team who has been working behind the scenes to make all of this possible in real time, eight hours ahead of us, like staying up until 3am

to make sure that our streams go smooth. So a big shout out to all of them and everybody who boosted in this episode. We really appreciate it. Now I got a special Knicks related pick. You know, I wanted to keep it in theme this week. And this was a tip that was given to me by OurBodyWimpy. And he said, go check out Nix Starter Configs by Mysterio77 on GitHub. And we'll have a link to this in the show notes.

And it's a bunch of simple and documented config templates to help you get started with NixOS and Home Manager and Flakes. It's like all the boilerplate you need, you just grab it and you tweak it and you make it work for you. I think this is especially useful

if maybe you've played with NixOS before or Home Manager and you have the non-flake version and you're wondering how do I go from my configuration.nix to the flake version? Well, yeah, check out these templates from Mysterio77

and you'll find what you need. Before we started the show I had like five tabs open. I'm just like, oh, I gotta look into this. Oh, I gotta look into this. Oh, I gotta look into this. It's so great because like somebody else solves the problem and then you can grab that example and solve the problem for yourself too.

And it just kind of inspired me to like, oh, I could be doing things a little differently. I could try it this way. I hadn't thought of that. You know, that kind of thing. Just spend an afternoon and take a read through it. I think you're really gonna like it. But I think that's it for our live coverage here

at Pasadena, California. There are so many things still to tell you about, but in some ways to get all of it, you really do have to be here. But we do try our best to try to capture it for you, try to encapsulate for you. Now, what happens next for us is we get this episode out and then Monday morning early before Brent's ready, maybe even before he's had a chance to eat breakfast, we're going to hit the road. We're going to try, try to take him up highway one and show him the coast between California, Oregon,

and Washington. And then we should be back in the studio in time for next week's episode. And I'm going to somehow in that time, try to convince Brent to stay around too. So we'll see. I got one more Sunday with him. Yeah. Right.

Well, at least one more episode, Brent. Well, I did get an email recently that said that the hotel I booked in Vancouver is on strike and I would have to cross picket lines together. So I think it's just easier to stay an extra day or two. Well, then you might as well. Right. And then you can stick around, do a live stream with us next Sunday. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, everybody who supports this production. You're the reason we're down here. And I can't tell you how much that matters to us. Thank you to our members. We hope you enjoy the member special from this crazy event. Make sure you join us next Sunday, noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. You can get our show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 554. We'll have our LUP plug going again.

The Mumble Room will be back next week. RSS feed at linuxunplugged.com as well as our contact page. All right, boys, we've done.com as well as our contact page. Alright boys, we've done it. This officially marks our scale coverage. Congratulations. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'll see you back here next Tuesday. As in Sunday! guitar solo Thank you. you