LINUX Unplugged - 555: Glide like a Goose, Honk like a Moose

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

We test the Linux-first, all-AMD Sirius 16 laptop, discuss the new Hyprland release, and share a few stories from our recent trip.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:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMIntroducing GNOME 46 — GNOME 46 is code-named “Kathmandu”, in recognition of the amazing work done by the organizers of GNOME.Asia 2023.S.O.D.A Machine (Shell On Demand Appliance) — A fusion of hardware, software, art, and hacking, all encapsulated in a project derived from recycled materials.LINUX Unplugged on FountainNostr Protocol Docs — Details on how the Nostr Protocol works and why. Hyprland — Hyprland is a highly customizable dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that doesn't sacrifice on its looks.Hyprland Wayland Compositor Celebrates Two Years With A New Releasehyprland 0.37.1 nixpkgs PRHyprland Release v0.37.1 on GitHubHyprland Release v0.37.0 on GitHubInstalling NixOS with Hyprland! - by Josiah - Tech Prose — In this guide, we will install a minimal version of NixOS with the Wayland compositor Hyprland and Waybar.TUXEDO Sirius 16 - Gen1 — First all-AMD Linux gaming laptop with highly efficient Ryzen 7 7840HS and fast Radeon RX 7600M XT graphics.All AMD: TUXEDO Sirius 16 - Gen1 on YouTubeBackground information on the new keyboard lighting control - TUXEDO ComputersTexas Linux Festival 2024 — April 12-13, 2024 in Austin, Texas.Scinary Cybersecurity — Your On-Demand Cybersecurity Firm.nixos-mailserver — A complete and Simple Nixos Mailserver.List of all NixOS Servicesjus10mar10's NixOS Configdockur/windows — Windows in a Docker container. Unplugged Core MembershipPick: ATLauncher — A launcher for Minecraft which integrates multiple different modpacks to allow you to download and install modpacks easily and quickly.Pick: Dissent — Unofficial GTK4 Discord client in Go, use at your own risk!

Well, I think we're going to get into this later in the show, but I think things are looking really good for the rest of the year for power users, specifically of the Linux desktop. We just recently talked about Plasma 6. Indeed. And now GNOME 46 is out. The couple of things that jumped out at me, they've improved the search for files. They've also improved the way it handles file operation notification.

But, Wes, they finally put the polish on the remote login with RDP. I'm excited to try this. Yeah, we had kind of messed around with the early support. You kind of had to hack a few things together to get it working. Even before there was a UI, yeah. Yeah, but here's what they write in the release announcement. They say, Gnome's remote desktop experience has been significantly enhanced for version 46. With the introduction of new dedicated remote login options,

this allows remotely connecting to a GNOME system which is not already in use. Connecting in this way means that the system's display can be configured from the remote side, resulting in a better experience for the remote user. The new remote login feature means GNOME systems can now be used as a fully-fledged remote resource. It can be found in the remote desktop settings, which is where you set it up in system settings. The bit in here that I'm excited about is that

when you remote desktop in, it'll use the remote's display settings, so you'll have an actual GNOME desktop scaled to the resolution you're on. You could picture how this would be really, really nice in these thin clients that have built-in RDP support. They're super cheap. And you could then connect back to your central GNOME box.

I have a headless GNOME system right now using one of those DisplayPort virtual dummy things. And I've been using Moonlight and Sunshine to connect into it, but I could just use this now. Yeah, we should be clear, right? It's not, it doesn't share like an existing session. It's a new login session. But yeah, for all kinds of applications, you can imagine it being pretty useful.

If anybody's played around with this, what I want to know is, can I leave a session running and reconnect to it later? And if you reconnect to it, does it have to be the same resolution? Oh, you see, you could just leave stuff persistently going. And then you just pop in whenever you need something on a real computer. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Back in the studio we are and coming up on the show today, we're taking a look at Tuxedo's Sirius 16. It's an all AMD 16.1-inch monster that's only less than an inch thick. And I'm really excited to look at it all, AMD 7000 series box. Then we'll round out the show with some stories from scale, a little follow-up on our road trip,

some great boosts, some pics, and a lot more. So let's say good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Go to tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged, and you get 100 devices for free. You build out a mesh network and connect your devices directly to each other in an easy-to-deploy zero-config, no-fuss VPN

protected by... That's right, the Noise Protocol. Secure remote access to production, your database, your servers, your VPSs, your VMs, your mobile devices. I live on my mesh network. Try it at tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. You support the show

and you get it on 100 devices for free. And that's a legit way to try it. And a big-time appropriate greetings to our mumble room. Hello, Virtual Lug. Hello. Hey, Chris. Hey, Bess. Hi.

Hello. We missed you last week. Yeah. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Shout out to everybody listening on their podcasting 2.0 apps. We are live and lit in the podcasting 2.0 apps now as well. So before we get into the show, let's go back in time a little bit, just a few days.

We wanted to go back to Saturday, our meetup at scale, and just say thank you to everybody who made it. I don't really think we mentioned this last episode. We had a great time, and we had a dedicated outdoor wing of the restaurant. It really took it over. We took over the entire area to the point where I found out the restaurant was turning folks away because we had exceeded the fire safety capacity stuff. Which we had not expected. And so I felt really bad if folks showed up and they couldn't make it.

So we're going to definitely take that into account next year if that happened to you. We're going to try to plan for that, maybe take over the entire restaurant. It's a good problem to have. It really is. And it was a heck of a party. We also we make great connections in the Knicks community that I think we'll probably have some of them on the show at some point. I mean, it was an exciting time to see stuff getting built in the next era unfolding, at least the beginning of it anyway. Yeah, and kind of seeing the pieces coming together at this point, I think there's a lot of context we got, and I'm still putting it together.

And then there was one device that i really felt we should have mentioned last episode and it's the soda machine the soda machine which stands for shell on demand appliance and it is a data center built into a discarded soda vending machine the builders i think literally pulled it out of a junkyard and refurbished an old soda vending machine. The builders, I think, literally pulled it out of a junkyard and refurbished an old soda vending machine. And they put in there a rack mount system with networking and a PDU that they can control everything you'd need for a couple of high-end servers that can run a lot of EMs. And then on the soda selection buttons, they put different

distributions. And they call this thing the Shell On Demand Appliance. They really built it out for DEF CON. And the idea was they wanted to see if people would hack. So you put in a buck or something and where the soda would normally come out, a receipt comes out. Yeah, they've got receipt printers installed there. Just working, too. More reliable than any receipt printers I've seen in the wild. No kidding. And on your receipt is, at the very top, the SSH IP and the user

and the password it generated for you. It says access to VMs are over the conference Wi-Fi without a VPN, so you just use the conference Wi-Fi if you're okay with that. And it has a little description on the rest of the receipt what it's all, and where you can find out more information. And when you select one of your sodas, you select the distro. That distro is what then gets deployed inside a VM.

On an old green CRT monitor that's amazing it's still working, they have an NCURSES leaderboard of the most popular distros that people are choosing. Well, word has it, some folks at the OpenSUSE camp found out about this and started sliding a few dollars in the machine and hitting the SUSE button. And the chart for SUSE starts climbing up. Boop, boop, boop, boop. Little hash marks in the NCURSES interface. starts climbing up. Boop, boop, boop, boop. Little hash marks in the NCurse's interface.

Well, then it seems that the boys over at AlmaLinux or RockyLinux, I can't remember, they noticed that the number was ticking up for SUSE. So they go put their money in. Doot, doot, doot, doot, doot. And this kind of goes around. NixOS camp finds out about this. They go over. They put their money in. Doot, doot, doot, doot, doot.

And they start competing with this when we walked up on sunday nix os was well in the lead and what they were doing at the nix os booth which just seemed really clever at least the determinate systems guys and gals were handing out their receipts and a nix cheat sheet, here, you want to know more about Nix? Here's a cheat sheet of all the commands, and here is a shell login. Right, you've already got a VM with NixOS ready to go. Yeah.

It's only here for the weekend anyway, so have at it. Have at it. If you've got any questions, let us know. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. So they had Fedora, they had OpenSUSE, they had Rocky, Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, AlmaLinux, Alpine, and NixOS. Debian did all right.

Rocky, I think they put a few extra dollars in for Rocky. There was quite a run there for a bit. But then NixOS came in with a dominant lead in the soda machine. And the best part, all these dollars, they're going to charity and a project like this. Yeah, it does. We asked them to open it up for us, too, so we got to see the inside of the soda machine, and it is surprisingly spacious. Yeah, they got room for some more racks, I think. They could put more in there.

It's really great. It's a really pretty neat thing to see. And then up on the screen, they have some stats about the system and all of that. It's a really pretty neat thing to see. And then up on the screen, they have some stats about the system and all of that. They figured they could probably have gotten to about 2,000 VMs per box before it fell over. They weren't sure yet. I don't know if it ever got that far.

But as soon as you put the dollar in and then you press the soda button, on the back end, it's provisioning the VM right away. Yeah, because it only took a minute or two, and boom, there it was. So, so fun. So if you're ever at an event and the soda machine is there, you've got to two, and boom, there it was. So, so fun. So if you're ever at an event and the soda machine is there, you've got to stop by and take a look at that. It seems so appropriate, too, because it's all running there. It's on the conference Wi-Fi. It's not in some data center or somewhere else. It's old school.

It's such a neat project, too, because, like I said, they took it out of a dumpster. They refurbed the soda machine. You would walk by it. In fact, I think we did. I think our first walk through the floor, I think we just walked past it thinking it was a soda machine. And I just thought it was, oh, cute. They put distro names on the sodas. Right.

And I thought just pop came out. But who were we wrong? Well, pop would come out if you chose that option, I guess. Pop was on there. Yeah, I think pop was on there. We then, of course, sat down and recorded in our Airbnb with mattresses all over the kitchen and pillows. And a lot of you sent in compliments on the audio, so I'm glad that you were satisfied

considering we were in a kitchen. Some people suggested that it sounded even better than our typical recordings in the studio. Maybe we need to, you know, mattress up the studio. No, Drew's just got the skills. Drew's just got the skills. Drew's just got the skills. That's what it is. Yeah, I mean, you know, a mattress in here could be nice.

Could be nice. Nap time. It could be really nice. And then we had to separate our ways after the show. Monday morning, Wes flew home for the day job stuff. And that went okay, right? Oh, yeah. Went to a nice little Italian deli with dear listener Jeff,

who was nice enough to take him to the airport. And then the power went out while we were having lunch. What? It was kind of fun though because all the like nearby business you know owners and operators

were coming over and they're all just like what do we do? What is going on? The power went out here at the studio at some point too like

but it was a delicious sandwich so you know. Okay. Yeah I mean it doesn't affect the sandwich. A little Burbank Airport. Not bad. So small, so easy.

Good. I think we should say thank you to Jeff, too. Like, at least me personally. Jeff, you helped me so much during the entire conference with, like, rides and, like, coordinating things and, like, finding equipment that was lost and solving, I don't know, giving me headphone extensions. That's just the things I can remember. So, thank you. And also, did you fix your tire? Oh, yeah.

I got to be around for that too. Yep. Yep. It got fixed. Shaming him on the air. That wasn't his fault. So when we arrived in Pasadena, there was a massive windstorm, and it was blowing things all apart.

And this Airbnb had a piece of plywood propped up with a nail and the wind knocked the plywood over with the nail right where the tire got parked. Like, what are the chances? So that was awful. But we'd had a pretty smooth return trip ourselves. We took Brent up Highway 101, which runs along the California, Oregon, and Washington coast. And I'm curious what you thought, Brent. You got to see Big Tree in the Redwoods. What was your impression of Highway 101?

Yeah, I have been looking forward to this for about a year because last year when we went to JPL, you had promised this exact route and it was taken from us just because of timing and such. So the fact that we actually did it really impresses me. And finally, everybody said that route was going to be gorgeous. And it was like seeing the giant redwoods. You mentioned the big tree, which is aptly named like this thing is 1500 years old, 286 feet tall or 87 meters for those who, you know, speak metric. And the diameter of it is like an

it's the width of the entire 101 highway so 23 feet wide like diameter wise insane of course you got a photo of me and it looks like i'm a little like lego person next to it yeah yeah so yeah there was tons to see i mean ocean oh yeah the way, there's an ocean and a bunch of like. Beach. Beautiful sights. I mean, we didn't stop at all of them. We stopped at what? One or two?

Yeah, a handful. And that was enough to take it in. And yeah, had some crazy experiences. I think one of those experiences you really enjoyed, right, Chris? Oh, me. Oh, me. So we're driving along. And, you know, when the wife drives, it's great.

I mean, we all three drove. But when the wife drives, you know, she's got her music and she's got her way of driving. And we're bombing down the Highway 101. And within like a fraction of a second, she makes a decision and whips us off onto a pull-off. And it's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Because, you know, it's a gravel pull-off. And it comes to a stop. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And I was like alarmed. I was i was like alarmed i like something went wrong like what happened because i was kind of dozing and she's like i don't think this is where we need to stop

okay and so her and brank get out and i'm like so i'm waking up and i'm like oh god we're not ever gonna get home at this rate ah these two and they run down you know they'd run down and just like my kids they take their shoes off and their socks off and they're running off into the sand and i'm like oh they're gonna get sand all over the car i'm going full dad mode and i look out there and i'm like there's there's a log out there they're like is brent kicking a log like what is what what am i is he what's going on and then a few minutes go by and i'm on my phone catching up on email because you know we've been driving all day and he did comes up to the car and she's like um i think we're gonna be here for a little bit there's a baby seal on the beach and i'm okay she runs back down there and i okay well they're gonna be there for a while

sure enough i get out there and i'm not really sure what was transpiring i think they were both trying to like save the baby seal. But we observed the baby seal and then read what you're supposed to do and you're supposed to leave them for 24 hours and report them after that. So we watched, we monitored, we took pictures and we had a full Pacific Northwest beach experience with the waves coming in

and like Brent's got his pants hiked up and he's standing out there in the ocean next to the baby seal trying to encourage it to go home. Go to your mom. And I'm just standing there watching all of this going, oh, we're never going to make it home. No one lost a finger, so it's all right. No.

That is true. That is true. And how much sand got in the Volvo? They did pretty good. They had to sacrifice a few socks to wipe themselves down, but they did pretty good. I used one of yours, so mine were fine, but I think... Also on this trip, we had an opportunity to test a new live stream system built by the Fountain FM team. This is where we publish in our RSS feed that we're just live, and their system and all the other podcasting 2.0 apps pick it up and carry it in the app but now also this new website that

fountain has built and this is particularly interesting to us because we're with we're working with them to try to push the edges of this thing because it's using noster to power the back end you guys might remember we talked about noster a long time ago the idea with the noster protocol is it's a it's a cross-app live chat or website. It's all based on a protocol, which is straightforward, event-driven, and it's basically passing around JSON through relays. And that system is powering the back end of the chat. And because it is lower weight, I suppose, than, say, Matrix or even XMPP, it can be integrated into the live web page, it could be integrated into individual apps. And as structured JSON data, we could also just

integrate it in with bots fairly easily, or it could be associated with a live stream for playback. And this also sort of plays into some thinking we've had around our live stream. And live stream chats, we kind of, we have them in the live stream and live stream chats we kind of we have them in the matrix right now and we kind of start them up and they sort of just dominate the matrix chat for a few hours and then they fade away and then the regulars just start chatting again and then the next live show comes in we kind of ram our way in and we take over the chat for a while and that just goes for and then we then we're gone and it settles down and then it's just the regulars again.

And if you're a listener, it's kind of hard to go back and find out what might have been linked in the chat room or somebody was talking about at the time to say nothing about making it searchable or even accessible without a matrix account. Or obviously if it's just stored in JSON, you could feed that into our notes.jupiterbroadcasting.com search. You could feed it into an LLM. You could just have it play back with a playback client if you wanted to. Or you could do nothing with it. It's really powerful that way. Yeah, it's a fun excuse to get to play with some new tech that maybe we like, maybe we don't.

The kind of fun idea with Nostra, and I know it's like, oh, it's another thing, but it's really an identity by a public key and a private key system. And so you sign up with Nostr, and I know it's like, oh, it's another thing, but it's really an identity by a public key and a private key system. And so you sign up with Nostr, some – wherever. You can go figure it out. I got docs and notes. But then it's one identity that follows you between apps and locations. So you can use the Nostr social media stuff or you could use a Nostr chat app or you could use a Nostr Craigslist app or whatever.

There's file storage apps because it's a – you just use your public or private key depending what you need to log in. And that identity can follow you across all those different services, including what we're using for the web chat right now. That's neat. It does mean one more sign up for Nostra, but maybe it could be the last or, or yeah, you know, ideally one day he could use it in multiple applications in places. I am already. I've been experimenting with that now that they're doing this and it's neat. I don't find the Twitter replacement of Nostra the most compelling use case. I'm experimenting with that but

I find like this back end structured JSON relay system very useful. Right. So like the relays already get built out and then you can start passing data along that relay system for whatever you're doing. Yeah, and build applications on top of it. Interesting.

I like that. So I have a question for everybody in the audience as we wrap up and get back to present time. As we go forward into Texas Linux Fest and Linux Fest Northwest, when we do these live streams, do you want them posted in the Linux Unplugged feed? Would you prefer they get posted somewhere else, like in an in the Linux Unplugged feed? Would you prefer they get posted somewhere else, like in an extras feed or a live only feed? Boost in and tell us where

you'd like that content, because we did those live streams and we did hear some feedback saying, hey, I'd like to be able to play it back. We didn't want to just put random hanging out live streams in the RSS feed. You know, we want the RSS feed to remain high signal. And if we just start dumping like two hour hangout live streams or something in there, that's not really what we think people are looking for. But we would be interested in posting them if you are interested in listening to them, but we'd like to know where you'd like to see those.

Yeah, what's appropriate. Yeah, to let us know. All right, and now, back to the present. So this week marks two years of Hyperland, and Hyperland 0.37 came out with what they say, fully featured animations on layers. Ooh.

I also just wanted to give a nod that Hyperland has made it to the two-year mark. I think that's just awesome to see. And the 0.37 release has a couple of nice features in here, Wes. Worth pointing out, there is already a 0.37.1 bug fix, so if you're upgrading now, maybe we just go to that one. If you don't remember, Hyperland is the desktop that tags itself

as the tiling compositor with looks. Hyperland provides the latest Wayland features, dynamic tiling, all the eye candy, and powerful plugins. And I gotta say, I did hear it get mentioned a few times at scale, people talking about Hyperland. And I got to say, I did hear it get mentioned a few times at scale, people talking about Hyperland. And if you are a tiling fan,

it does look really great. It's kind of one of those, you can build your own desktop environments, use the file manager you like, use the terminal you like, use the launcher you like, and use their compositor to make it all work and look really slick. Yeah.

So you do kind of still got to put in a little bit of work. You don't get a ton out of the box, right? Like you probably want to make sure you've got the default terminal installed and that's about all you'll have. But if you're the kind of person who likes building it up yourself or you don't need a lot, it sure starts out real sexy. It feels like the perfect desktop environment for somebody to make a flake or something that I could drop on a Nixbox and have their extremely custom desktop environment. You know, I think Brent found a really nice resource we'll have linked in the show notes

that I didn't see till today, but I'd like to give a try to, which kind of spells out how you might want to go about setting up Hyperland in NixOS. And I think you're right. Like the combo of the super configurable and build your own environment world of tiling window managers,

plus the, you know, just give me your.nix file of.nixOS, could be real nice. Well, for me, the adoption of these kinds of things, I think, is harder because there's such a lift to get it configured in a way that works well for me, where if I could take somebody's existing, hey, this works really well for me, and just try it,

and then tweak it from there, I feel like it'd be a lot, lot more straightforward to adopt and try. Rather than you having to go figure out all of the bits yourself. Yeah, that's ground up stuff. It just takes time. It's a whole change of workflow.

Yeah, I felt the exact same way as you, Chris. So I'm linking to a resource here by Josiah, who is like, here's the absolute most basic thing you need in NixOS to get this started. I can hear a few people probably saying, oh, NixOS again. But really, this project says, you know, the three distributions that are most going to work with Hyperland right now, because it's so bleeding edge, is Arch, NixOS, and OpenSUSE at Tumbleweed. And so it's perfect for NixOS to just kind of like give it a try. And I found that there's a tiny niche of people who are combining NixOS with the configurations for Hyperland.

And so you kind of get these dot files specifically for this environment. And you can launch that very, you know, already customized setup that you're looking for, Chris. Some of them are like super fancy customized and i wanted to get as close as possible to the native experience first that's where this uh resource that i'm looking to kind of gets you there it gets you the basic pieces and then you could see okay here's the vanilla install with a few recommendations and i think from there you could look at other people's configs and do some plucking of various things.

But I tried it this morning, and I kind of got really frustrated and then crested that point just for like 10 minutes where I was like, oh, wait a second. I might actually like this. So who knows? I mean, using a tiling- only interface is kind of a new thing for me but i got that little hint of like hey wait a second so i don't know this might grab me i'm not sure yeah i think it is worth calling out that you know not only is hyperlink packaged in nix

packages but they maintain um it looks like quite a nice flake just in the repo. You can see even in the.37 release, some of the fixes and changes are for the Nix-based CI. So I think it's sort of first-class support, which is nice. To me, there's three distinct categories that are really appealing to me in the desktop world right now. And Plasma 6 is that really powerful powerful full-featured desktop i spent uh you know a lot of a lot of my recent uh weekend and computing use just in plasma this week um just really using plasma and like oh yeah this has been great this is really nice it was i've been on gnome

a lot recently this is great and then you have gn 46, which we just talked about previously, and they're really refining you set it up, but probably static once you have it set up. Yeah, there's just fewer moving parts and it's easier to understand. I mean, like you can get, you probably ultimately want like a display manager, but you can just get started on a TTY running the Hyperland command and, you know, putting the bits, seeing what you get, and working with it from there. I love that. And I just think – I mean there's so many other desktops that I don't mean to diminish what they do. But when I look at these three desktops and how they're each so clearly going after a core market and they're so nice now. We have such good choices in 2024 for the desktop that I kind of feel like I need to spend more time with both GNOME 46 and Hyperland and Plasma 6. And then I want to sort of standardize just for a while on one of those and, I don't know, just really lean into just using one desktop environment again for a while.

I mean, there's a lot to like and there's a lot of knobs you can twist, even in the Gnome. So congratulations to them. And we'll have links to Hyperland in the show notes if you want to read more about it. And, of course, we'll have links to the configuration that Brent was talking about. Determinate.Systems slash Unplugged. Yep, they're the builders of the best Nix installer with over 20,000 installs a day and so many great tools built around Nix, including documentation and team collaboration tools.

And of course, last but absolutely not least, flakehub.com. The all-in-one platform for secure, compliant, and transformative Nix development. Bring Nix to work the way you've always wanted with flakehub.com. Go register for the private beta and get a secure, compliant, friendly Nix

and all the support you need at determinant.systems.unplugged. I've mentioned this, but the reality is stark. Nix requires extensive privileges from your GitHub keys to cache write permissions. I could go on. And a lot of this, nearly all of this, will stretch the boundaries of any identity and access management platform. Well, FlakeHub reimagines identity and access management for NICs, evaluating security with a dynamic identity-based access controls instead of outdated static permissions and secrets.

You can authenticate and authorize using any IAM roles, JSON web token, single sign-on with trusted policy-driven identities that are aligned with modern DevOps and cloud-native workflows. It's so nice because it fits into your existing way of working. That's so powerful because it snaps into your existing way of working, which means you might be a Nix fan, but if your coworkers aren't familiar, they don't have to change their existing way of doing work. That's powerful because it means all of your coworkers and your company don't have to learn Nix to adopt Nix. You see what I'm saying there?

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and support the show by going to determinant..systems.unplugged. That gets you registered for the FlagHub access. That's determinate.systems.unplugged. And a big thank you to Determinate Systems for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Determinate.systems.unplugged. Now, gentlemen, when I was in studio last, we had a brand new fancy laptop in the studio.

I admit that for the last Linux Unplugged, I used it and stuffed it under a desk and had it just kind of running there. So I didn't really get a chance to get my toes dug into this one. But Chris, you did. You spent, what, a couple of weeks on this thing. So I'm curious to hear what this thing is and how it went. And I used my hands instead of my feet, too. So I feel like I probably got a better weeks on this thing. So I'm curious to hear what this thing is and how it went. And I used my hands instead of my feet, too, so I feel like I probably got a better take on it. So the Sirius 16 Gen 1, I believe by a new ODM.

And here, Wes, why don't you grab that while I talk about it. Yeah, let me try my hands at this thing. I mean, the first thing you'll notice is that it's got a 16.1-inch screen. Yeah. And it runs at 2560 by 1440. It can go up to 165 hertz. You can clock it down to 60 hertz if you like. 16 by 9 aspect ratio.

Okay. It works great for, like, watching videos. 1,000 to 1 contrast ratio. 300 nits, so not the brightest, but not bad. And that screen supports AMD FreeSync as well. It's got an all-aluminum chassis. It's kind of a gunmetal gray. It does have a fingerprint reader on the side, but I don't believe it works with Linux.

Yeah, it's kind of nice where it's at, but it doesn't work with Linux right now. Check out those hinges on that monitor, though. And the hinges down here at the bottom. Look how cool these hinges are. Those are like serious hinges on this thing. This looks almost Brent-proof, I think. I know. It's really sturdy.

Brent, you were marked on the hinges as well. I think they could withstand even your most strenuous usage. There's no flop right now. No flop. No. Yeah, they look like they're a style of hinge I've never seen before. Can you describe them? They're almost like, I don't know, the thing you might have on a car hood or something.

Yeah. Or for a door on a car. They're kind of U-shaped. They're metal. And when you take the bottom of the laptop up, they take up the entire available space inside that laptop. They're as thick as the laptop, which is just under an inch.

It's a nice closing mechanism. It is nice and solid, right? And it's kind of hefty. It's near five pounds. But again, this is a 16-inch machine with plenty of bits in it that we'll get to. It feels evenly distributed, too. It's not like one side is massively heavy, so it's easy to hold. Yeah.

Up to 96 gigs of RAM. What? It's got USB 4. Wait, did you say 96? 96 gigs of RAM. Yeah. Yeah, they got a little extra space in that thing because the AMD processor runs a little bit cooler.

So you get a little extra space and you get 96 gigs of RAM, both of which are user accessible with the slots in there. Two easily accessible M.2 storage slots as well. The battery could be replaced by an end user. So you could have up to four terabytes of PCIe 4 storage in this thing. Wi-Fi 6E, two full featured USB-Cs on there and two full featured USB-As on there. It also has an RJ45 full LAN jack, not the mini jack. And I really appreciate that the power, the Ethernet, the HDMI, and one of the USB-Cs, which is directly connected to the GPU, is on the back of the laptop, which is so nice. So nice. I really, really think that when you combine the ports on the back and that all of the RAM, the battery, the hard drive, it's all user accessible. That is rare.

So the CPU in this thing is a monster. It's the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS with 8 cores and 16 threads. Boys, it's got a top speed of 5.14 gigahertz in a laptop. My goodness. Four nanometer technology, so it actually runs cooler than the Intel equivalent. Four nanometer technology, so it actually runs cooler than the Intel equivalent. They say it's on par with a 14-core i7-13700H from Intel. This is quite the little keyboard backlight going on here.

Yeah, so it's got a full RGB keyboard backlight. You can set it to one color. You can individually configure it in their control center. The keyboard is like a rubber membrane, I would say, but the buttons feel really sturdy. They don't really have any wobble to them. It is a keyboard that you don't pay a lot of attention to. It kind of falls in that probably not the best keyboard I've ever used,

but far from the worst keyboard I've ever used. Same with the trackpad. That's how I would describe the trackpad. Feels really good. Not the absolute best trackpad I've ever used. Far from the worst all the gestures it is off-center though some folks like that you get it you do get the numpad don't it's a personal preference wes it's a person i i kind of like the numpad i wish i could have the numpad and my trackpad still central you know centered um but when you're actually using the laptop you you don't really even notice it.

It's really not a big deal. You can turn off the lighting completely using like a function key, keyboard combo. It does, so when it comes with Tuxedo OS, it comes in hybrid graphics mode by default. And the control center lets you configure some of the things, but not all of the things this machine can do yet.

They are working on that. There's some documentation on that. and documentation on the keyboard as well. It's got a moderate battery life. Again, when you're rocking a 16.1-inch screen and you've got a big AMD GPU and an internal AMD GPU and a big AMD CPU, depending on what you're doing, I find three to six hours is what I was getting battery life. Okay. I didn't push it extensively

because for a laptop like this, I'm kind of using this as almost a desktop laptop. Yeah, somewhere in the middle, right? You could take it to the coffee shop with you. You can work, probably get almost a day's work, but for serious stuff,

you're going to want to plug in anyway. You've got USB-C4, and these are connected directly to the video card, so you're doing multiple monitors just fine. I see it has a barrel power? Yes. Does it also have USB-C, or is it just barrel? I've only used the barrel connector.

You might be able to run it off of C. I don't know if you'd want to, though, if you're really pushing this thing. I've only used the barrel connector with this. We could try a USB-C, though. You want to try it you want to try it trying it yeah plug it into the back one there because that's the one i would use and i would think you would at least get something off of that and i i like that it has a full hdmi port and a full ethernet port yes so it's really since they come off the back like where you just plugged in on the c it's really nice to be able to just you sit down at your desk i plug in my hdmi cord I plug in my Ethernet, I'm good to go.

No power? Not charging. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It might be because that thing does kind of have like up to a 70-watt TDP, depending on how you... Yeah, okay, that makes sense. You have it loaded out. It can really haul.

It does have USB-C on the sides too, which is nice, so you don't have to use the ports on the back. Oh, well, maybe I... Are you getting power on one of them? On the side? Yeah. That doesn't surprise me. Okay.

That's kind of what I was expecting. Nice to have in a pinch, though, you know, if you're just trying to charge up. Yeah. Yeah, as long as you're not slamming the system, you could probably just, you know, you probably have plenty of power to charge the battery. So, you know, you're going to see varying degrees of battery life depending on how you use it. What do you think of the design of the thing? I don't know if it would win any awards,

but it's professional. It's sleek. I'd be happy to take it with me wherever. There's some ostentatious elements like the... It's got a light bar on the front. Right. Yeah. You can set that to be a different color.

You can kind of control that a little bit. That's as far as they take it is that light bar on the front. And then you could set the keyboard all to one color. So I feel like it is a machine you can game on that you can also take to work. That makes sense. It's not like the Alienware that has lights on the back. It doesn't have RGB orbiting around the bottom of it. You could actually put it in more of a discrete mode with the keyboard and that light bar on the front. So that to me is a pretty hard line to walk where it can be a gaming computer,

but it also can be a work computer. The build's really solid. You don't feel any flex in the case. I think this is, again, this new manufacturer really seems to know what they're doing. And with those hinges, I think that's going to last a long time. So if you're looking for a laptop that's kind of a desktop replacement that you could take to work, you know, it's a take-it, it's a take-to-town, and it's a gaming machine, this is it. And I threw my games at it. I could play them at the full resolution

and have still a pretty good frame rate, but if I did turn it down to 1080p, I could turn it up to absolute max settings, and the games would still run great. And that's plenty for me. And that 16 by 9 ratio actually works really good at a 1080p setting. Yeah, I bet. So for games and for videos, I like the 16 by 9 aspect ratio.

Okay, so this is a Tuxedo. I mean, there's even sort of a little Tuxedo Linux logo here on the SuperKey. That must mean it runs Linux just great, right? Yeah, so it comes with Tuxedo OS. You can also option it with Ubuntu. I think we should put Nix on there. Something we should try. I have sent them an email asking them how many of their customers they know about running Nix. I was kind of curious.

Because when I went digging to see what other people thought of this laptop, I did see other folks running Nix on it. Oh, great. So in theory, maybe there's even some hardware profiles out there. And I thought I saw the Tuxedo OS control panel packaged for Nix. I think it might have been written in Rust, too, as a matter of fact. Hey, yo!

So I think that might be worth trying, maybe before I ship it back, just so I can get a sense of that. But I did want to try Tuxedo OS because then you get their working hybrid graphics. You get their working control center stuff. And for gaming testing, that was probably the way to go. And, you know, then mess around with Nix after that. I am in the market right now for a laptop. I don't know.

I lost my ThinkPad. It's embarrassing. It's like three or 4 years old so I mean it's a little before it's time it's somewhere in the studio no doubt somewhere but the studio it's a mess and I have no idea where it is and it

really was nice to have this laptop because I don't have my regular thinkpad and what this laptop showed me is I do think I'm in the market for a laptop with a dedicated GPU. Especially these days, you know? Yeah.

If you're trying to do, you know, games. I hadn't decided, should it be NVIDIA or AMD yet? Yeah. It is really nice to have all AMD. Because when I did try KDE Neon here for a bit, everything just works. There is a premium Linux experience when you're all AMD hardware.

This thing remains pretty quiet too for, you know, until you really start cranking on it. All of that just kind of comes together. The microphone, the webcam, they're okay. But the rest of it is so nice that I think the Serious 16 goes on my top five contender list. I don't know what else is on that list yet the only reason why it's not a guaranteed pull the trigger for me is because i think i want a 14 inch laptop it's a little hard like on the plane you know yes traveling it's portable enough to yeah for your day-to-day stuff but yeah do you want to throw in a? It's a bit of weight. Yeah, I think I want a 14-inch. But a 14-inch with a modern dedicated GPU, that seems tricky.

Where this, if you're okay with or if you want the larger screen, it's surprisingly thin for what you get. And the fact that you can open this thing up and, you know, start with 32 gigs of RAM and then later on put 96 gigs of RAM in this. That's pretty killer. Start with one disk and later put another disk in this or upgrade the disk. Swap the battery out down the road. Even the fans and everything is very serviceable.

Say years later when this thing is out of warranty and you want to just do it yourself, you just pop this one panel off and it's all just right there and user accessible to various degrees. Yeah, that's hard to find these days. And at this less than – it's 0.8 inches thick. That's rare. And for the kind of TDP this thing pushes and the hardware it pushes. So this is on the top five for me. I think I want to find a 14 with dedicated graphics, but if you are looking for a 16-inch laptop,

16.1-inch laptop with a smooth Linux experience, this Sirius 16 Gen 1 is just knocking it out of the park. And I don't know of many laptops that are all AMD in this 7000 series, right? This is the Ryzen 7 7840 HS with a TDP of up to 54 watts. And this thing, when under full CPU load, they've actually got this thing cooled such that they tell me in the documentation they can get it up to 80 watts for the CPU. They do have to do some limiting if the GPU and the CPU are cranking at the same time. Okay, well, makes sense.

They're still able to push an incredible amount of power and efficiency out of this thing. And then the dedicated GPU is the Radeon RX 7600M XT. That has a clock speed of 2300 megahertz and 8 gigs of GDR6. It's maybe not the highest end video card, but it's pretty great. It's not far off from the highest end.

And it met all of my, like, let's game with the kids' needs and all that, as well as a good work machine that I could go set at my desk and just plug in the power and the Ethernet and the HDMI cord. No dock even needed. I didn't even need a dock.

That's exactly it. And I had, I guess, because USB 4 is technically Thunderbolt. So I could have hooked up a Thunderbolt dock. But when you just put the ports you need, it's just three ports right there in the back. It's not a big deal. It's not a big deal, Wes. So the Sirius XVI, we'll put a link to it in the show notes. I like it.

And this is the first one of this series. And I'd definitely give it a go if you want the all AMD workflow. And tell them we sent you. I guess we don't get anything for it. I guess it's nice to know that you heard about it here, I suppose. Collide.com

slash unplugged. Now, you've probably heard me talk about Collide before, because I think this tooling, had it been around when I was in IT, I probably would have been able to stick in a lot longer. Collide has made things so much simpler for those of you out there that have Okta. But have you heard that Collide was recently acquired by 1Password? That's pretty big news. I mean, these two companies are leading the industry in creating security solutions that put users first.

For over a year, Collide Device Trust has helped companies with Okta ensure that only known secure devices can connect to the network. It avoids phishing issues or devices that are not compliant. They still give you all of that, including that dashboard to manage all of your systems, but now they're part of 1Password.

So if you've got Okta and you've been meaning to check out Collide, now is a great time. Collide comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks, and you can write your own custom checks for just about anything you can think of. And I think it's great that you can use Collide on devices that don't have MDM, so people that want to bring their own Linux boxes or maybe a contractor.

That's pretty sweet. So now that Collide is part of 1Password, they're only going to get better. So go check them out. That's collide.com slash unplugged, K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Go check out their demo. Great way to support the show and see what they're all about. Collide.com slash unplugged. Well, it feels like we just got done with scale, but it's already time. Well, past time, actually, to start planning for our next event, Texas Linux Fest 2024. April 12th through the 13th in Austin.

Woo! And a huge thank you to Sineri, who is getting us down there. They're bringing us to Texas Linux Fest. They're also helping support Texas Linux Fest directly. They are a local on-demand cybersecurity firm at Sineri.com. And I think we're changing our plans right now. We were going to drive down, but then after this drive we just did and how much time it took,

we looked at it. We just said, Oh my God, we can't do this again right now. So now I think we're flying down. It's all kind of up in the air. It's really more last minute than I would like, but I think we found a place.

I think we figured out our flights. So that's a pretty big piece of it. Sounds like we'll be there. Yeah, we're going to be there, and we're going to try to live stream from the floor of Texas Linux Fest. It'll be my first Texas Linux Fest. I'm looking forward to it. Oh! Yeah, my first as well, and my first time

in Texas. So you boys are going to have to show me a good time. Whoa. Oh my goodness. Carl, if you're listening, we better... Challenge raised. Yeah. We're going to be so busy because we're going to be there for a lot less time now too. We should plan to just sleep before we go and not really when we're there.

That would make it a lot more efficient. We'd love to see you there. And then of course shortly after that, you know what happens. It's LinuxFest Northwest. And that's also going to be a great event. So either one, we'd love to have you at it. Ask not what your podcast can boost for you, but what you can boost for your podcast. Cultivator came in with 61,021 sats.

Hey, rich lifestyle! I just ordered me an R3-S6S because y'all made it too tempting. I haven't purchased a console since the original Xbox. I'm not a big gamer these days, but I really love the old games, so I can't wait to test it. It's going to be a great gift idea to buy a few and hold on to them for the holidays. Smart. That is really smart because they're probably going to get pulled off the market. By the way, this is a zip code boost.

Greetings from the Great Corn Desert. Wes, did you bring your... Oh, good. You brought the map. Of course I did. I'm impressed. Not even the VR, this is a zip code boost. Greetings from the Great Corn Desert. Wes, did you bring your... Oh, good. You brought the map. Of course I did. I'm impressed. Not even the VR one this time. Great Corn Desert.

I don't even know where to begin to place that. Oh, I think it makes sense because this is a postal code in Dixon, Illinois. Ah. Which is seemingly about an hour and a half or so west from Chicago. Hello, Dixon, Illinois. If we ever do make that Chicago meetup, I hope you could make it out there. And that's a bit of a drive, it sounds like, both directions. But Brent will try to make it worth your time somehow.

Just to, you know, chomp on some corn to keep your energy up. Oh, Wes. Eric D. boosts in with 50,000 sats. I hoard that which your kind covet. with 50,000 sets. I hoard that which your kind covet. Is it just me, or did your audio quality somehow get better than usual in this On Location episode?

Keep on keeping it crisp. Hope you had fun at scale. Maybe. You know, it's possible, Wes. Maybe we just need to be On Location in Airbnbs having a semi-show party every time for the best quality for the show. That's the recipe that works, and our audience demands the best.

It's just what it's going to take. You can also wonder if we actually were on location, if you want to go there. You definitely were on location. Okay, confirmed. Yeah, I mean, I was definitely badgering one of them to stay at their bloody booth the whole time. And I talked to Chris outside of the venue for some of the downtime because, gosh, I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off for most of it. Indeed. What's a booth?

A hybrid sarcasm boosted in with a whole bunch of booths here. Let's see. The first one here is for one, two, 3, 4, 5 Satoshis. Oh, could that be? The combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. Now, there wasn't a message for this one, but there is another boost for 12,345 Satoshis. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yes! That's amazing! I've got the same

combination on my luggage! Strangely, there's also no message, but there's a third one for 12,345 satoshis. We're gonna have to go right to ludicrous speed! And a last boost here from Hybrid Sarcasm. 5,000 sats saying, hey, it's been a while since we've gone plaid. The hell was that? Spaceball 1. They've gone to plaid. I've also recently decided to sign up for Fountain Premium. If I'm going to ask for features, I should probably be supporting the project. Aw.

Oh, that's great. I got to make sure my subscription is current as well. You know, it is time. It is time. Now, Torped comes in with a row of McDucks. Things are looking up for old McDuck. He says, I really liked the VR and Linux content. Do you have any updates on the implementation that you have been using?

Well, I just got myself a new headset called the Bobo VR, which was on pre-sale. This thing is the Cadillacs. Ooh. Cadillacs of headsets. First of all, like a drill battery, it's got a hot swap battery situation, a 10,000 milliamp battery that actually

can deliver the voltage that the Quest needs, unlike the previous ones that couldn't fully. This one does. And you can get a dock and you can charge multiple batteries and you can hot swap batteries onto the back of your head. Swap in, swap out, swap in, swap out. And the Quest has a battery, so the Quest will keep running. You swap in, you swap out. You can just keep going all day in your little virtual environment.

And then it's got all this nice cushioning where they kind of rethought the way this thing sits on your head. So there's really almost no weight on your face anymore. It's luxurious. And then to put it into opulence, they've built a fan into the forehead with a dial on the side so you can turn up. I like it around 65 percent. You can turn up the face fan and you get cool air blown on your face. This is premium. Yeah. Check out the Bob fan, and you get cool air blowing on your face. This is premium.

Yeah, check out the Bobo VR, and it's for the Quest 3. It just started shipping. And it's a great example of the accessories in the two ecosystems. Something like this for the Vision Pro is going to be $300, and something like this for the Quest is like $60 to $80. That's it? Yeah. Wow.

So it's extremely comfortable to wear now and the way i've been using the quest with my workflow is kind of whittled down to one particular scenario and that's i'm at home and i need to work for a couple of hours and i just am so used to multiple screens or i'm going to be on a video call i like it on the video calls it's a way to kind of of be on video without feeling Zoom fatigue. I just, I don't know, for me, Zoom calls are, I'm exhausted by them because I'm constantly looking at the camera angle, the lighting. And I want to make sure I'm making eye contact with the camera because I'm like speaking to somebody. Like I'm thinking about the production angle of a Zoom call way more than I need to be.

And when I'm just a stupid cartoony VR in there, Avatar, it's no big deal. I'm on camera. People can see me. I can react. I can move my head. I can blink. They can see my room, but it's a virtual me.

And I could do those twice as long as a regular Zoom call or Google Meet or whatever. So I've been using it at home when I need multiple screens that way. Now, considering we might be flying to Texas Lenox Fest here in a couple of weeks, do you think you'll take that VR experience with you on the flight? If I was flying by myself, I might consider it. I don't know how the Quest does on the airplane, but that's tricky when you're, you know, like if we're all flying together, say like three of us are sitting in a row, we want to watch a movie.

That'd suck. Or if I'm sitting next to the wife and she wants to watch a show with me i can't you know yeah there's not really a solution for that yet it'd be great if you could just like hardwire the two headsets directly together so there was zero latency you just watch the same thing like one just becomes like an hdmi output or something but not yet so it's kind of a private thing you know nobody can see what you're doing in there for better for worse i actually like it i don't really like like even family or kid like the kids or anybody i don't know just don't read my messages on my screen i don't know it's you know i don't know it's my stuff um and so in vr that's definitely i it's great i can have these things up all over the house they got no idea there's windows everywhere they got no idea it's fantastic so i love that aspect about it but yeah um i'm not using it at work especially

in places where i already have my screens and i don't bring it with me very often i considered bringing it on this trip but again the pass-through isn't good enough like i said in my review to actually use it here in the studio where i can see the mixer quite well almost really. Really? Almost there. But you got to remember, we're working with cell phone cameras and low light situation here. So until that tech is really great, the passer is going to be limited. And once it's really good and you can see keys really well and you can see knobs and dials and buttons, then I could really see wearing it while doing a show and looking like a real idiot. So a generation or two. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe one or two. I think we'll be there.

Yeah. Gene Bean came in with 11,249 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. That, of course, was across six different boosts. He was listening live. He says he likes Brent's honking. Did that make it in the released version? That might have been the members-only version.

Brent got into some good honking. Accurate moose simulations from our Canadian. I did my best chicken call, but it wasn't so great. That's pretty good. You want to hear my chicken? Yes, please. That's my chicken. I could do, I think, either a dove or a pigeon, depending on where

you think it fits. Alright, let me hear it. He also wanted to give mad props on the stickers to Jeff and the Golden Dragon. He loved them. He says he felt bad that he didn't recognize listener Jeff at the sticker table, but he figured it out eventually. Oh, Gene, don't feel bad. Sometimes I see Jeff and I don't even recognize him.

You know, he's a man of mystery. It's totally understandable. You don't really see our faces, do you? recognize him. You know, he's a man of mystery. It's totally understandable. You don't really see our faces, do you? Unless you're watching live, I suppose. We had a boost from some guy named Noble Payne. I wonder who that could be. What are you, testing the boost system over there? Oh, yeah.

So it looks like these are the live boosts from last episode. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Very good. So, you know, I mean, you got to get in on the boosting. All right. Why don't you take the next one, then? Yeah.

Tebow in Obara comes in with 18,289 sets. Pew, pew, pew. First to say, more distros, please. It's Linux unplugged, not Nix unplugged. All right. All right. All right. All right.

That's fair. And then reporting from a Samsung 24 Plus, maybe? S24 Plus? Ah. And, yes, Fountainountain has issues with Android Auto. Won't work from the lock screen. So if you unlock your phone, then open Fountain, the shows will show up and you can eventually play through. So on the S24, you have to unlock it first before Android Auto works, what they're saying.

I guess so. So a little nuance there. Right, right. I ended up mostly using the iPhone for our drive because it has unlimited data versus the metered data on the Pi Zelle 7. Okay, that's convenient. But we were not in a car with CarPlay for the entire drive. And you know what? It's fine. Yeah.

It really is fine. I mostly drive my car with CarPlay, and I'm like, oh, you've got to have CarPlay, or you've got to have Android Auto. But then, you know, you just get a mount and everything works fine. You got the maps, you got everything. You already have a screen. As long as you've got a solid audio connection to play the music or whatever. Yeah. So I don't know, I'm not such the CarPlay

Android Auto Maxibless I was before the road trip. I mean, you also had two live DJs sitting in the car with you so that helped. Yeah, it helped. Right. Well, Distro Stew boosted in with 3,333 sats via Fountain. In the episode where you talked about Helipad, you said that someday Nix will have everything like an easy mail server. I happen to be evaluating mail servers for my home network and recently came upon NixOS-MailServer. Not in Nix packages yet, but it is quite complete.

You should check it out. My personal favorite mail suite is MailCow, which depends on Docker Compose, but I've even found Flakes for it. If you want to blow your mind, just scroll through the thousand services already in Nix packages. Yeah. Yeah, no kidding, right? Thank you, DistroStu, for linking that NixOS-MailServer. I knew there must Yeah, no kidding, right? Thank you, Distro Stew,

for linking that NixOS mail server. I knew there must be some out there, right? What does he link us here to? The service? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot. I mean, yeah,

there's so much software already available. Yeah, I think this is going to be an area that expands even more, though. There should be basically Nix configs and flakes for everything. And for those of you that want it, you just drop it in there and you can run it and you don't even have be, basically, Nix configs and flakes for everything, and for those of you that want it,

you just drop it in there and you can run it and you don't even have to be on a Nix OS. You can be on an Ubuntu system with an Nix package manager. I hope it eventually becomes, yeah, that way, right?

Like, you're making your software, you want people to be able to try it, kind of like now you might put it in a flat pack or whatever, and that's still

a great option, but if you've got a flake in there, it's super discoverable. If you do want us to try out a distro in particular, too, let us know. We're always willing to give a distro a go.

Also, nice to meet you, Distro Stu. We happen to run into Distro Stu just sitting on the next floor room. That was great. Just10Martin comes in with 12,340 sats and says, NixOS was first Tegna Linux unplugged on episode 347 after I started listening during the COVID shutdown. I didn't understand the benefit, but now I'm all in.

I'm in the technology cord for a small school district and I use NixOS internally with plan to use more this coming summer. Here is my NixOS configuration. Ah, thank you. It's been a while

since we got one of those, but I always appreciate it. It uses the Snowfall lib, which provides structure and niceties. It makes syncing between machines quick, and I find the needed settings quickly. It goes on to say, my task manager of choice these days has been TaskWarrior with TaskWarrior Web UI. Aha. And there's also a command line version.

NixOS and Home Manager make setup straightforward, and Tailscale makes syncing across the web a breeze. I have an iOS shortcut to add tasks on the go, and I can get synced copy of my tasks on any of my machines. Task Warrior is unbelievably flexible and so far into the nerdy category that it's just plain fun. Add one digit on the end for a zip code boost, the home of Mark Twain. Ah, man, Task Warrior is bringing me back.

It is super flexible that's a nice tool nice setup okay um as for our zip code boost adding the one that makes it uh 63 401 which is a postal code in hannibal missouri hannibal missouri shout out to you what do you call that when you you basically build out a workflow like that that's totally custom to you but just kicks ass? Like the part that really got me is the iOS shortcut. Right. Because whatever I came up with, I'd like the wife to be able to use.

And that could be just an icon on her home screen. And kind of like, yeah, it makes the... Because often that's what you can use the web UI maybe or a bunch of options to review them. But if you have a way to quickly add, that solves a major problem. What do you call that? What do you call that custom?

Bespoke? Bespoke. I bet you people out in the audience have all kinds of bespoke setups like that for various things, for photos or for tasks or for hosting their website or their blog. I bet you there's a lot. I'd love to know. Boost in and tell us what they are.

Probably going to be interesting. Priestley WePhD boosted in with 2,669 sats via fountain. To the NixCon organizers, it would be nice if you could put on your North American conference each year alongside different Linux and open source conventions. Not everyone can justify a trip out to South California, but it would be nice to see it in other locations. I definitely hear that. The advantage that being adjacent to scale is, is not only do you have the draw of scale, which is going to pull a lot of people

that might not be going somewhere else, but scale provides a lot of the infrastructure, the location, managing that, the facilities. And they've got it down. I mean, they've really polished that thing out now, which is great. Well, it seemed like having an extra venue just literally across the way was a brilliant solution to having them separate, but also together. Yeah, that's a unique thing to that Pasadena Convention Center is there's those two buildings.

And so you can have the main scale event in the main building, and then you can have the adjacent event in a building across the foyer. And that's kind of a unique arrangement as well. You could do that some college campuses, I suppose. have any of that expertise or a team that manages that, it's so much of a lift. And then you combine that with the network effect of doing it when scale is already happening. It's what drives people to go to scale, right? I mean, I hear you, man. In fact, tell you the truth, I'd kind of rather go to Southern Carolina than I'd rather go to Southern California. I'll tell you that. But, you know, it is what it is. It probably saved me quite a bit of money. It's really expensive there. I mean, just extremely grateful that the audience helped us raise the funds

so that we could do the Airbnb, we could do the trip, we could feed ourselves, all of that. Because typically these events have been a net loss for JB and we're able to break even. And that's all I need to be able to do it. We got the coverage. We got the content. The content is the real value.

And the audience helped us do it in a way that I just didn't think would be possible because California is an extremely expensive place to visit. But we made it happen, and we're extremely grateful. I do hear you, though. It would be great if it could happen somewhere else as well. Maybe have multiple of them. Maybe it grows to that one day. If it does, I'll go go to him it's worth it bearded zero dot bin comes in with

row of ducks he says i suggest banana for scale how does no feel about the whole boosting business i'm you know i've been i've been slowly talking to him about it to kind of get his feel on it we had a really really good conversation conversation at lunch. I think Noah definitely understands it as a potential. You could allocate a little bit of your portfolio to it and just have it as a possible investment. I think he totally gets that. I think he's probably held Bitcoin for over a decade. I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure about that. But as far as taking boosts into the show, Noah doesn't really need to monetize the Ask Noah program. He's got multiple day jobs.

He's always working. He's got multiple jobs. And he's not – this is the full-time – this is my full-time gig and this is what we try to do. And we try to make sure that everybody involved is compensated for their time. And we try to hire the best for editing and publishing. And these guys all work really hard. So we have a bit of a different kind of scope than the NOAA program does. I do think eventually our friends will – some of our other friends will join on board because it's an open network.

Anybody can join at any time. They don't need permission from anyone, and it's absolutely one of those rising tide type things. I hear a lot of the folks that boost into these show boosting other podcasting shows as well. So it will grow with time, but these things obviously have to be just tried by fire and we sort of burn our path and then there'll be a walkway for others to follow in. And we're good with it.

We're the world's largest Linux podcast by a ginormous margin and we can take this on and we can forge this path and we'll be happy to do We're the world's largest Linux podcast by a ginormous margin, and we can take this on, and we can forge this path, and we'll be happy to do it just like we have for decades. Plus, I mean, we're almost on a two decades now. We're almost to 20 years, right, of doing this type of thing at Jupyter Broadcasting. And it's something that we've settled into, and we will continue to do, especially with the outrageous great support from our members and our boosters. Speaking of, Sam H. comes in with a row of ducks.

Regarding Martin Wimpress talking about creating a reusable desktop flake, this type of thing is something I was really looking for back when I was starting with NixOS and have never really found. I really like Ubuntu Monte. Seems like a lot of care went into it. So I'm looking forward to seeing whatever Martin comes up with. And I hope we see more desktop presets. I agree.

Yeah, what a nice thing. I would love to live in a world where when Hyperland comes out, they just have a file you grab, drop into your Nix config directory, whatever you do. Maybe it's Flake. And you just grab it, and they're just immediately available when they're ready.

It's going to be a glorious day. Glorious day. One day. Advery's boosted in with three boosts for a total of 10,096 sets. It's over 9,000! Great coverage on scale. Also giving Fountain the good college try. Overall, the experience is good.

The UI is fluid. It hasn't given me too many headaches and is easy to understand where to find settings and elements. Been on for a few weeks now, and it's just good work from the Fountain team. However, I'm probably going to switch back to Podverse because, well, I just really like it. Mitch has done a great job so far, and the app keeps getting better. Yes, indeed. which has done a great job so far, and the app keeps getting better. Yes, indeed. And also, shout out to adversaries for listening live and boosting live as we go,

trying it out on the fountain feed. Thank you very much, sir. Men in RB comes in with 2,500 sats and says, Greetings from Bangalore, India. Wow. Again, tumbleweed user here. Thanks for the Sterling PDF tip. It's worked well for me. Yes, Sterling PDF is one of my MVP applications.

A little web app. It lets you do everything that people would probably want proprietary PDF editors for. But because it's a web app running in a Docker Compose, Docker container, it's available to everybody on my network and everybody on my tail net. That is so nice. So now we don't have to worry about any of those apps. You can edit PDFs. You can mark them up. You can fill them out. You can convert things to PDF to worry about any of those apps. You can edit PDFs, you can mark them up, you can

fill them out, you can convert things to PDF, all the things you'd want. Sterling PDF. It's really great. Bendy boosts in with 5,000 cents. B-O-O-S-T! Thank you so much for the NixCon and Scale coverage. Missed being there

due to a business trip. If there's a chance to get the live streams from Scale, I would love to hear them. Thanks for bringing Scale to us that couldn't make it. Bendy, we are trying to figure out how to publish that. So that's one of the things I'm asking the audience this week is how would you like to consume those? We do have the Jupyter Extras feed, which we don't use much.

We could publish them over there. Or we could publish them in the main show feed. And then I suppose my third question is, if we did publish them somewhere, should they be published in the all shows feed? I don't want to spam people with stuff. So let us know your thoughts on that. Now, Eric boosted in three boosts for a total. Oh, it's actually three rows of ducks.

Oh, it's actually three rows of ducks. Now it happens to be three identical messages. So here we go. Just boosting in a pic. GitHub.com slash Docker with a UR slash Windows. As much as I love Nix, sometimes I just need a short-lived Windows VM to run a simple Windows application. Like the TAC software I use, for example. It's a Docker container that sets up a KVM VM and installs Windows for you. It's pretty neat. It downloads the ISO and installs it for you using the unattended installation method.

There's only the trial license installed, and it's not cracked or pirated at all. We got to try this. This looks super handy. I mean, I've kind of rigged up versions of something like this, but having it all packaged, ready to go, a Docker run away, my gosh. That'd be great for tax season. Honestly, like that's a good reason to have it. Eric, thank you. I'm going to totally check that out. We will have it in the show notes too,

but it's github.com slash docur slash windows if you want to try it. Man, that is slick. What a brilliant idea. At first I thought he was boosting the wrong show there with that link. All right. Well, thank you, everybody, for boosting in. That's all the boosts above the 2,000-second cutoff. We do read them all, and we really appreciate everybody who boosts in.

And this week we had 23 boosters across. Get ready for this, guys. 42 boosts.. And this week, we had 23 boosters across. Get ready for this, guys. 42 boosts. Wow. Yeah. And we stacked 259,507 stats. Thank you, everybody, very much. We really appreciate you.

And shout out to those of you who just hit play and stream those stats. We see those coming in every day as well. Every hour of every day. We really appreciate that. Now go to bed. Yeah. Stop it already. Maybe they have us on a sleep timer. Also, thank you to our Unplugged core contributors. We really appreciate you. LinuxUnplugged.com will have a link to the membership if you want to use your fun coupons

and support us directly. All of these are ways to support the show. This is a value for value production. You know, I was glibly saying this, but I mean it. Think about what we're doing here. I had a couple of really great conversations with listeners at scale, and I don't know if I totally agree, but I felt really honored that they made this comparison, and it was that, you know, you guys are the Linux

magazines of the current time. And I take that as a serious responsibility, and we are also trying our best to create something that is for the listeners. And I take that as a serious responsibility. And we are also trying our best to create something that is for the listeners. And the fact that we can have the world's largest Linux podcast that is trying to take that on, we can go and make these connections at NixCon, we can go to scale, we can do it all based on the value that we received from our audience directly. The fact that we can kind of even begin to pretend to try to be at the category of Linux magazines without all this corporate influence and meddling going on in the back end, it is so much simpler

and so much more straightforward and so much more sustainable this way. What really killed these Linux magazines was their cost structure and their corporate structure. We don't have those same problems. And so, yeah, it means we have a smaller lift. But as a Value for Value podcast, it means we can do something that I think is sustainable for the long term.

And we can do it with a technology stack that is an open network, that is available to anybody, that is all built on open source. And that's where the boosts come in. And that's where you come in. And you can also become a member directly. Does that mean we're going to start shipping live distro DVDs to members as well? We should. NixOS presets. Yeah, presets, essentially. I mean, we're kind of getting that direction as we work on stuff.

I mean, we kind of are. And that was one of my favorite things about the magazines was getting the DVDs because, you know, bad connections back in the day. Right. Well, maybe you could do something along those lines for people who are you know on the higher end of the um uh contributing members like maybe once a year do like some kind of deluxe thing which is um a usb or a disc that has i'll come i have to be a disc well yes but it'd be fun but a disc that has you know you're an. It has to be a disc, right? Well, yes, but... It'd be fun. But a disc that has an interesting Linux distro of the year plus a

selection of the year's top hits of episodes or whatever. Brent, you still have that DVD burner, right? Oh, I actually have a couple. You'll be our production facility. No, no, no, no, no. I don't want to do that. Brent just be cranking them out. Yeah, sounds like it. Good plan. All right. Good meeting. Good meeting. Thank you, everybody who supports this production.

It means a lot, and we really appreciate it. Two picks. I shouldn't do it, but I'm doing it. I had a bit of a gaming-focused week when I got, well, a couple of days when I got back. You know, catching up with the kids, testing out the laptop. It was a great time. Tired of driving. Somebody's got to do the hard work and relax and play video up with the kids, testing out the laptop. It was a great time. Tired of driving. Somebody's got to do the hard work

and relax and play video games with the kids. And I had my bacon saved this week by AT Launcher. So my kids love the Minecraft mods. And some of those Minecraft mod managers are really focused on Windows. And so if you've got your kids on Linux and they're asking for these types of things and you're constantly trying to find these apps

to get them to work under Linux, check out AT Launcher. It'll integrate with multiple different mod packs to allow you to download and install those and quickly deploy them. It'll get the right version of Minecraft all set up, including things like some of the texture packs as well. Wow. All from one interface across multiple different mod pack repos. And save my bacon because I was trying to get, like, the Cursed Launcher or whatever the crap it is. I just wouldn't work on Nix.

I tried the flat pack. I don't know if it was an app image. I tried the app image, which got me kind of far. I tried the one package of Nix. Just wasn't working. Wasn't working. Grab AT launcher off Flathub. Boom.

Works right away, Wes. That's so nice, too, when you're sort of playing a casual occasional support. Yeah. I'm not an expert in Minecraft launchers. Well, right. You've got to go. I'm sort of reverse engineering how this works. You've got to go figure out the whole, like, culture on Minecraft launchers.

Yeah. It's a thing. It's a thing. And then, because you can't deny that people use Discord. It is a thing that is happening in the real world. Discord is a thing. But I can deny Electron. Friends, I present you Descent.

Yeah, there we go. Descent, I don't know. I like Descent. Descent, I think, is probably what it is. And it is a GTK4 Discord client written in Go. Oh, that should be snappy. Lean, mean, and snappy, Wes. Lean, mean, and snappy.

I'm going to have to try this. You know, like, I don't know. Discord's fine. I have no love for it. I don't think, I mean, I'm not pulled that strongly, but I do have some friend groups who game and when they're, you know, gaming and chatting on Discord as one does. And I use it just infrequently enough that I've always got a new dev to download or, you know, I have to reinstall the thing every darn time.

I wonder if this will just work for me. Yeah. And it's just, if you do have to update, it's just a flat pack update away. If you're running a new software, it might just do it for you. It doesn't have all the features. Wait minute discord doesn't allow third-party clients so don't tell them about it then because it works great yeah well i mean i'm just saying if they detect it they'll just straight up disable your account all right well use it at your own risk so i installed it and um i found it pretty useful i bet i'm not a heavy discord user so i'm sure it

probably doesn't do some of the streaming stuff, or I'm sure it doesn't do some things. But if you're just looking to respond to chats and stuff, I'll use it until they ban my account. You know it? And then when they ban my account, I'll cry about it. Yeah, that is a good note. They do make a note of that, too, over on the GitHub review, which we'll have linked. I love it when that kind of stuff happens.

You know? So, you know, just ban my account. That's fine. I didn't want to use your service anyways, right? Didn't want to use it. All right. Well, we're going to wrap up there. But just a reminder, we'd like to hear how you would prefer to consume those live shows when we do put them out there. I mean, they're not all crap.

They might be worth downloading. How would you like to download them if you were going to? Also, if you have any suggestions for a 14-inch laptop with a dedicated GPU, boost that in too. I'd like it to be semi-current and not a million bucks. Not, you know, not sitting there looking for spending too much money. I know, I might be. I might be asking for too much. I could be asking for too much.

And, you know, maybe if you have like a desktop configuration and next you want to boost in, we can see about trying some. Yeah, especially Hyperland. I'd love to see people's Hyperland setups. I really think that should be a thing. We need like a dedicated like GitHub repo where we start sharing these or something. Yeah, you boost us in a link to your flake, and it's got an output we can... Yeah, and we add that to our repo.

I don't know. I don't know. Let's think about this. You start brainstorming, we'll start brainstorming. I think there's something we could do there. I think there's something there. We'll also be live in our regular Bat Time next Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at JBLive.tv. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station. And now live in a podcasting 2.0 app. So if you get a

new podcast app, not only do you get extra features, you also now can listen in live. It'll just show up in your feed when we are. We'll also put pending in there. We'll put it in there a day or two before we start so you can see it in there. You can schedule it in. You can pencil this into your busy social calendar schedule thing. No excuses. They're busy, Wes. Just kidding. They're busy, so don't pressure them.

Whoops. Links to what we talked about today at linuxunplugged.com slash 555. Never going to get to say that again. That was pretty fun. Well, maybe one more time. Thanks for joining us on episode 555 of the Unplugged program, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you.