LINUX Unplugged - 558: Top 5 Essential Apps

Episode Date: April 14, 2024

We asked, and you answered: Your top 5 Linux app essentials and post-install rituals. Plus, some news to better cope with "extreme file-system damage."Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!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:Berlin with Brent: May Meetup — Brent is back in Berlin! Please join the Jupiter Broadcasting community for an evening together, and bring your friends!💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMWarp — Warp allows you to securely send files to each other via the internet or local network by exchanging a word-based code.Bcachefs Repair Code Reaching Complete & Robust Recovery — "This patchset was kindly tested by a user from India who accidentally wiped one drive out of a three drive filesystem with no replication on the family computer - it took a couple weeks but we got everything important back."Linux 6.9-rc3 Released With Many Bcachefs Patches — "[...] but hey, if you had a corrupted bcachefs filesystem you'd probably want this, and if you thought bcachefs was stable already, I have a bridge to sell you. Special deal only for you, real cheap."Fedora 42 Change Proposal Wants To Make KDE Plasma The Default Over GNOMEF42 Change Proposal: Fedora Plasma Workstation — Switch the default desktop experience for Workstation to KDE Plasma. The GNOME desktop is moved to a separate spin / edition, retaining release-blocking status.Changes/FedoraPlasmaWorkstation - Fedora Project Wiki412linux.io — N100 Media Serving Efficiency with Quick SyncPick: FreeTube — FreeTube is an open source desktop YouTube player built with privacy in mind. Use YouTube without advertisements and prevent Google from tracking you with their cookies and JavaScript. Available for Windows, Mac & Linux thanks to Electron.FreeBSD Speedruns — The zero-to-desktop FreeBSD speedrun category records the time taken from the first boot of a FreeBSD image, through installation, to the display of a desktop environment or window manager.FreeBSD Zero to Desktop Speedrun Challenge — The operations and commands that needed to be done took me 1:33 and installation of base.txz/kernel.txz datasets took 0:28. Downloading and installing needed pkg(8) packages took 2:22 of time.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show, we asked, what are the first five apps you install in a new Linux system? You answered, and we have collated the results. Plus, we have a little news we want to tell you about,

then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So let's say good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Hey, Tailscale. Hello. Hey. Hey there. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged gets you 100 devices on your tail net for free. Not a limited time thing. It's pretty great because it's the easiest way to connect your devices and services directly to each other really fast. Build out a mesh network protected by. Wagga. Right.

It's really intuitive. It's super easy to deploy. And if you're in an enterprise and you're looking for a VPN solution that is super, super fast, easy for your users to understand, and allows for zero trust network access that any organization can use, you too can go to tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged and try it for free on 100 devices. We also have a Mumble Room joining us again on this very special episode. Hello, Mumble Room. Good to see you.

Hello, Chris. Hi, Wes. And hello, Grant. Hey. Oh, hi. Hi. Nice to have you all there. Also, the quiet listening is rocking today.

How about that? It's so much fun. It is. It's almost like you're here in the studio with us. They get a real, like, low latency Opus audio feed right off the mixer. Of course, so is the podcasting to those streams also now right off the mixer. Boom. Just right.

Just wired right in. Well, before we get going, I had a random summer inspired question. Would you be interested in a Jupiter broadcasting camping meetup? Maybe somewhere centralized to be in the States for the first attempt. Probably something that would be reachable by vehicle and something where we could hold a few sessions so we could do in-person sessions on topics that the community might have expertise in. Something I've kicked around.

I don't have a great proposal, but I would like to measure interest, see if it's something we should plan further. I'm imagining the little harmonica around the campfire. Yeah, getting real cozy. Sharing stories about Linux. Sometimes using Nix. And I just thought it could be a lot of fun. So boost in or send an email. Linuxunplug.com slash contact. If you'd be interested in a camping meetup, maybe some summer, some spring, sometime.

Brantley, you have apparently a little travel news too. I do. It looks like I'll be back in Berlin mid-May and I would love to do another meetup since they were such awesome successes last time. Still sorting out details, but there'll be a meetup page where you can keep track of all that. And as usual, join our Berlin Buds meetup room in our matrix, and we'll keep the details flowing in there. That Berlin Buds chat room just keeps being handier and handier. I'm glad we did it. We should toss a link to that Berlin Buds chat room in the show notes so people could

find that real easy. Okay. Are you ready, gentlemen? We have the top five apps people install right away on a new Linux system. And I don't think number five is going to surprise you at all. It is a text editor. Yeah, it is. It is the number five item that everybody had on the list after putting it all together. FortyDeuce says that he uses Helix.

Zach attack reaches for open office, but he also likes doom. Emacs, uh, Wes, you're a Vim guy, I suppose, through and through,

even on your personal systems. Uh, yeah, I mean, I've been using Neo Vim a fair amount these days, but of course I have a VS code installed often as well. That was the one I didn't see suggested much. Wow.

I will say I'm taking a look. I'm just, look. This reminded me that Helix just had a release recently. I could see using that. Maybe not for like day job stuff just yet, but for a lot of supporting work. It seems like it's getting a lot better. I'm excited to see they're adding a bunch more

built-in language support, including like Docker Compose support is getting better, PowerShell, and yes, even better support for editing your Hyperland config. But it could be one of those sort of like, you know, as features build out, as it gets closer to just using something like VS Code, it makes it a lot more adoptable. I feel like I don't use a text terminal editor hardcore enough

to need things like multiple cursors or things like that. I do like some of the added features they're adding. Of course, it is also built in Rust. So there's that. You know, that multi-cursor stuff is pretty nice. If you've got like a big document with a similar structure, you just need to make changes on a bunch of lines at the same time. Oh, huh.

Yeah, maybe that doesn't come up in normal stuff. But I could see... Dev stuff, test cases, fixture data, that kind of thing. Yeah. I'm curious, huh. Yeah, maybe that doesn't come up in normal stuff. But I could see – You know, for like dev stuff, test cases. Sure. Fixture data, that kind of thing. Yeah. I'm curious, Brian. I was going to ask you, what would it take to convince you to switch to a new text editor?

Like, what are you looking for and what is your current text editor? Okay, current text editor, which showed up as number three on my like rated list of must-do apps, is Kate. I've been just, I love Kate. And it's like one of those cozy things I need to have on every single machine. But you're asking what would it take to switch? And that feels like a danger zone question. When I was last in Germany,

I had a few folks try to convince me to do the Neo Vim thing, even with like, there's a Neo Vim game and everything to get you kind of used to all the key bindings. And so I'm like step one in that journey. And actually, I got a glimpse of how compelling it is, but didn't quite surmount the hurdles, plural. But I think that would be interesting. But what would it take that doesn't really answer your question i'm just buying time here because i don't actually i don't know i don't know what it'd take for me either the thing i like about kate for me is

that it's just so well integrated into plasma so yeah a lot of key bindings and stuff are common across applications that's what i was thinking of maybe you for some reason switched away from plasma to genome or something like that maybe then you might re-evaluate like that's sometimes what does it for me that's what jiggles the handles i switch desktop environments but you're probably not doing that anytime soon well you know we do a bunch of testing of different desktop environments uh quite often for the show and i always find myself installing kate which is not the right idea often because it pulls in a ton of packages and stuff it's one of those just cozy apps that i really have come to really love you know i think too there's like a you could maybe have the best of both worlds for you um right there's there's vim or neo vim in practice the actual editor and then there's just

you know using the vim style of key bindings. Yeah, key bindings in all kinds of places. And movements, yeah. Yeah. I'm a big fan of having, like, standards. Like, almost, if you look at Markdown, it's like a standard that everybody just kind of adopted that's common everywhere. So if you're in, you know, you're, I don't know, using a new application, well, Markdown's probably going to be in there in the same way that it is everywhere else. using a new application, well, Markdown's probably going to be in there in the same way that it is everywhere else. And so having some of these really common key bindings, such as Vim key bindings,

just they're common in applications where only us nerds would really care or notice that. But I've seen that it's surprisingly standardized, which I like a lot. And I mean, you can just, it's like little superpowers. You ever just need to delete everything in between two quotes? That's three keystrokes in Vim. I've always kind of resented the fact that Vi and now Vim has certain key commands simply because keyboards didn't have certain keys. And it's from a time when computers literally had a different type of input device. And so those limitations have carried over into something that's on all of our systems now. And I've always just found that to be annoying and limiting, but it's also a good thing because it is a construct and a standard.

And if you learn that, you can apply, I mean, I think even like a lot of our Markdown editors have five key binds, so. Yeah, I don't know at this point though, I'm very invested in VS Code because one of the things that I like to lazy do is I like to open up my Docker composes over an open SSH connection and then have the fancy formatting right there.

And I can just do it right there in my desktop environment. It's so great for like working with Markdown too. There's so many great Markdown tools for VS code. So it's yeah, the real easy preview right there. I guess I'm kind of realizing I'm kind of a little freaked out by the fact that I feel like I'm sort of locked into VS code, which is fine,

but I don't think I realized how far down that rabbit hole. I wonder if other people listening have the same problem. Are you just totally locked into your text? I'm more locked into a text editor than I am an operating system. Yeah, and this is a Microsoft text editor. Although they're on my good guy list right now for the whole XZ thing, so that bought them a lot of cred with me. That was one dev.

You know, I've been actually quite hesitant to completely dive into VS Code for the exact reason you're describing, Chris, because sometimes it's almost like driving a new car. If you ever like try a friend's car that's like way fancier than the version you have, then you know what it's like. And you're always going to want that new car and you're never going to then from that point on be happy with your own and that's that's true for so many different you know like a camera if if you're a camera person it's the same deal like you have a particular generation of camera and you use that and you're happy with it but as soon as you try like the new slick thing it changes your perspective and so i've been really hesitant even though it probably

would help me to to dive into vs code or evenodium, because I feel like once you do, it's maybe that's a silly reasoning. But once you do, like everything else just seems a little not as good. VS Codium doesn't feel like a silver bullet solution to the problem either, because it's still ultimately dependent on Microsoft. It's definitely been, you know you know d microsoft a bit and i suppose that's one layer better but you're not getting away from that dependence i suppose maybe it's worth thinking about the like what what uh areas you know it's like if if more editors had a remote ssh thing with that you know and decent docker compose support with that no they do yeah mean, that's not the only editor that does that. Yeah. Because there's part of it, I think a lot of the value is

it's available pretty much everywhere. It's easy to install. It's free. I run the VS Code server version on my tailnet too, so I always can just go to HTTPS code. So it's highly available. It's configuration out of the box. You don't really need to do anything. You can do configuration, but you don't need to to have it just work.

And there's plugins that install very quickly and easily with no restart available for pretty much everything. You just nailed it. Another one on the plugins is that it's very targeted. It's pretty much the first thing that's targeted for plugins. Yes. Yeah. Like there's a lot of things that will come out and some of the times they just launch as a VS Code plugin. Right. And then eventually maybe there's like lot of things that will come out, and some of the times they just launch as a VS Code plugin. Right.

And then eventually maybe there's like the IntelliJ version. Yeah, it's pretty wild. And because of the plugins, pluses and minuses, right? And maybe some folks prefer it the other way, but you don't need like a per, this is my Python editor and this is my Java editor. Yeah. I mean, you can still do that, of course. That's why I like it. of course, but that's why I like it. And especially because I don't spend time every day in any one of those few

things, something that's pretty good at understanding a lot of the things I throw at it is really handy. So it's, yeah, I was just thinking about that. They got me. They got me. Are you ready for number four on the list? Gentlemen?

I was surprised by this. This is based on the submissions. Of course, it's probably skewed because it is our audience. I was surprised by this. This is based on the submissions. Of course, it's probably skewed because it is our audience. But when I sorted, the number four most commonly installed application on a brand new Linux system was Tailscale. Tailscale with little comments saying, and this is the same for me, required to connect to their other applications.

Yeah, I think it's become part of the necessary bootstrap, right? It is for me, man. Like when I have to reboot the PyZelle, I mean, as the thing is loading, just as the icons are coming, I'm like tapping on the tail scale, and I'm launching, and I'm making sure I'm connected to tail scale because everything, right?

All my sync services, everything's on my tail net. Yeah, now that you've really built out a lot. But yeah, I think, I mean, it could also be NetBird or Nebula or whatever, but getting your sort of like core networking infrastructure, which these days is often now a slick mesh VPN that gives you an overlay network. You start by using it as a VPN. You're like, okay, I'll use it to connect these two systems or whatever,

or these three systems. But then you really start to understand, oh, this is where I should host everything. This is actually like my own little private internet. I think there are a lot of great ways to solve that. Definitely worth checking out. If you haven't played with, like Wes said, NetBird or Nebula or Tailscale, it seems to be getting very common in our audience, and I can see why. A lot of these also let you add, right?

Like you can use that to add like a security or ACL type layer on top if that's useful. Yeah, very much. Can I ask you, Chris, how that's gone with family members? Because I know a lot of your self-hosted services are serving, you know, family basically. I only really have solved it for a couple of them. The others have just sort of lost access. And I'll tell you for like media services, damn you, Brent. The honest answer here is the Apple TV is so great for this now because

Tailscale released an app for the Apple TV and it's rock solid. It connects immediately when the Apple TV boots. And so you can have all your media services on your tail net with no public exposure, Plex or no nothing like that has to know what you're doing. And the Apple TV just connects immediately. It's so nice for that kind of stuff. You could probably get the app. You could probably sideload it on the Shield or any of the Android-based ones.

So that's been great. The only downside there is so far, I haven't really solved it for like the TVs when we go to an Airbnb that you can't install a tail scale on. I might, you know, but now this on our next trip, I'm going to bring a little GLI net, and maybe I could set this up as a subnet router or something like that, and then solve that problem. I don't really know yet, but there's that. So Tailscale at number six makes sense, and I think you guys will probably be a little surprised.

All right, our number three category had a little bit of a surprise in it. three category had a little bit of a surprise in it. The number three most often installed application on a new, fresh Linux system was Element. Wow. Closely followed by Signal. Element chat closely followed by Signal. You know what I didn't see come in at all? I don't think. I don't think I saw anyone submit Telegram. It was on our list. Nobody submitted Telegram anymore. Element and Signal. What don't think I saw anyone submit Telegram. It was on our list. Nobody submitted Telegram anymore. Element and Signal. What do you think of that? I'm surprised by Element.

But I think as like folks who are pretty self-hosting friendly, it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Also security and privacy conscious. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. And if you're in our community, you might be hanging out in our chat room. So, all right. It makes sense.

All right. Let's keep going then. The number two, not going to surprise you here really, so I won't tease it. Firefox. Firefox and Brave. Zach Attack reported Brave. Hybrid Sarcasm mentioned Firefox and Firefox Sync. And this actually gets to my list.

gets to my list not to spoil it but my first item that i install is a browser and the extension sync which pulls down bitwarden and then i just start logging into everything because a lot of the apps these days to do a like an oauth login that actually pops up the web browser and makes you through the web anyways yeah so like i gotta get that going like right like, right away. So I'm not surprised that we saw that. I appreciated Hybrid's sarcasm pointing out specifically because they needed to get Firefox Sync working. I was there with you. And then in that same kind of vein, the number one first installed application on a fresh Linux system. This one makes absolute sense if you were to ask me. It is, surprise, surprise, a password manager.

It just unlocks everything else, doesn't it? Yeah. I like Minitat. He gave us little details of his OPSEC situation. He says he's using ProtonPath with KeePassXC as a backup. I have questions about this. What is the process here? Is it like, oh, every time I change something I change it in both places?

That's a great question. How do you back it up into a different... Or are you okay with a drift? Do you accept X amount of desync of you lost the newest two passwords because you do a backup once a month? That wouldn't be horrible. Maybe Proton exports into a KeePass database.

That would be handy, right? Yeah, can you just trigger that? Okay, so a couple of things surprised me about the list. We only got one mention of Steam. Meditat had it number four on his list. Only one mention of Steam. Also surprised me. Fort Deuce had Git as number one on his list.

Nobody else mentioned Git. It's because they're all curlpipe into bash. But it's often installed by default as well. Oh, true. Yeah. Has this jogged any thoughts, Wes, of what your first go-to application is on a new Linux system? I feel like Git probably would have been up there. And these days now it's Nix.

Yeah. I've just transitioned to getting so much of my software that way. Like Firefox. I do that in Nix now. No. On the Ubuntu install? Yeah. Yeah well uh-huh what's really cool about that is that instead of bringing your applications between different systems you're just bringing your package manager and everything's all the same and you can yeah just install the same packages all right brent what

about you what's your like number one first app that you install? Is it a password manager? It is. And I kind of saw this as like, I just assumed everyone would have similar processes because they're almost like categories, right? It's like, okay, first, everybody needs access to their like secrets, basically, to let them into anything else they want to do, like file syncing or whatever. So yeah, password managers right at the top. You probably embarrass me because i use keypass still um i don't know why i still don't i don't know i don't trust the online stuff still you know just for the first time in my memory the other day i used bitwarden i was going to you know make several new accounts real quick and things stopped i couldn't save oh. Oh. About two months ago, I had Bitwarden not syncing between my systems for the day. And then it synced later on.

And that day, I needed to log in on four different computers to that new account because I'd set up a new service and I was using it in different spots. And so every time, I saved it in Bitwarden

on every computer. And then I ended up with four versions now in my in my vault so it like synced all up at one point when the when like the back end came back online and now i've got four copies in there and it and of course the other the other thing is is go figure like the day it wasn't working for me was the day where i was logging into that service four freaking different times and so every time i was having to like go look up the password. Anyways, every now and then I have had sync issues, but it's otherwise been like really solid. The thing I've really loved about KeePass and its kind of rudimentary approach, shall we say, compared to some more modern password managers, is that occasionally when I'm setting up a new system, be it a, I don't know, a new laptop or

a phone, it's not always in the ideal circumstances. So occasionally I'll find myself just like SSH-ing a key pass database over to a new computer because I, I don't know, don't have access to file syncing for whatever reason. And it's like, so often that's one of the very first things I do when I install a new system is just, just get a key pass database on that system. It doesn't need to be syncing. It just needs to give me enough access to then have access to the syncing stuff. And I found key pass just to be a nice fallback in that way. It was like, it has a bunch of different ways I can use it. And sometimes that's actually great. Do you both set up Phish pretty quickly on a new system?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. If I'm going to be using it for like any length of time. Yeah. Phish is one of those systems where when I was mentioning VS Code, you know, you try a new shell and then you just can never use an old shell again. And Phish is one of those for me. It's like anywhere I am, I install it because now I can't use. You know, Bash just seems so deprecated in comparison.

Yeah, it's not great for my memory. I'll tell you that. There are times where I'll sit down and the system doesn't have Phish. I'm like, oh, yeah, what is the command? Does it have a dash here or not? Is it one word? You know, that is a bit of a problem. But it's not so bad.

I love Phish. So, yeah, Phish is definitely on my list. Obviously, ChatsR2. I kind of – like Brent, for me, it's a category. It will either be installed via a package manager like Nix or I go on Flathub and I just new tab, new tab, new tab, new tab, new tab, new tab of all of the applications. And I just go get their name, their regular, whatever actual Flatpak name is, and I just do one Flatpak install command and I just paste them all in there all at once

and it will just pull it all down and figure it all out. So I'll do all my messaging clients and all of my Flatpaks in one go. And I believe you actually could do it declaratively if you were using Nix fully, but I kind of enjoy the process of perusing Flathub and finding the new things or alternative versions of things and trying them. And so like, you know, Telegram and Element and all that, it's just getting all blasted on at once.

Yeah, I think, you know, Nix changed what mine would be, but then also just the prevalence of things that are both, especially for chats and password managers in a few of these categories where there's a web version and there's like an electron-ish version. So I think I kind of progressively go on a new system. I might just use a bunch of stuff in the browser for a while until I decide like, yeah, okay, no, for the things I'm doing on this machine, I do need the full app.

I've been using my MacBook a lot. And so that means there's a ton of things that are not natively available to ARM Linux and like Element is one of them. And so Slack is not packaged for ARM Linux. I mean, this is no shame on the Asahi project. It's really killer.

It's just the developers that make these... It's still a niche platform. Yeah, they're not packaged. Ironically, they're making it for ARM Mac OS or whatever, but fine. Whatever. They they're making it for ARM Mac OS or whatever. But fine, whatever. They'll probably make it for ARM Windows when they sell 10 of those devices. But having to run some of these apps that I had traditionally ran as Electron apps, having to now run them in a browser tab that happens to be Firefox,

I'm not kidding you if not every single one of them seems faster. So there isn't actually like – it's not so much of a downside because Slack and Element are unequivocally faster, just obviously faster in Firefox. I don't know what's going on, but it's way better. The thing that I can't get around doing that is – and I know I have a special kind of problem with like Windows and tabs with browsers. But everything then in my like taskbar is all the same icon, and I can't quickly get to different things. Is there any ideas on how to solve that one? Because that'd be nice.

I actually have a sort of command browser, my main interface browser, and then maybe there's other windows for research or whatever. That's just always up. So the taskbar becomes the window switcher. Yeah. The sub OS, you know? I guess. Yeah. The OS is really the browser. To me, this is solved with multiple monitors.

And I have multiple monitors then with pinned tabs. So like all the chat apps are on one browser window, on one monitor, and they're all pinned. So they get like little red dots when there's a new message, which I find to be sufficient for now. And actually, to be honest with you, Brent, about 90% of the time I'm in do not disturb mode. I don't want the notifications or the flashy flashes anyways. You check the ones you know are important.

Yes. Expecting things from. So in some ways it's kind of better. But I think for me it's less about the messages that are coming in and more about the messages I want to send out because like if there's any friction to changing context, then I find that really disruptive. Yeah, I think if I could have all things be equal, I'd probably still prefer to have standalone applications that I can all tab through and manage as individual windows. I don't know if there's a way to use something like Natifier with the Firefox engine. You know, for a hot minute, Firefox had that functionality where you could make web apps

as separate standalone apps. I wish they brought that back. If anybody knows how to do that with Firefox, please let me know. I know the answer for Brent and I when it comes to file sync is NextCloud. Do you use any kind of file syncing? I do some syncing with sync thing oh yeah sync thing's great i love i also use the crap out of that but probably you don't do much syncing on the desktop if you want to send a file around you're probably just netcat

netcatting it around yeah yeah for me there's something about like working on a file upstairs in my office, you know, editing a file, getting a clip or finding a music, finding a song and saving it in a folder and then coming down here in the studio and opening up on a computer down here. And I've done nothing to facilitate that. It just happens on the backend.

I just love it, Wes. I love it. And it works so great for like, Oh, I'm working from home today. Well, let me just sync up.

And okay, I've got all my files. I've got all my soundboard. I got everything I need to go. So helpful. I think that's actually, Chris, something that I appreciate about Kate. And you'll tell me if I'm wrong about this with the other text editors is that it can just do auto reloading of certain files. And that, you know, when I'm bouncing between machines, that's just so valuable I don't even think about it. Yeah, very true.

No, I don't disagree. But for me, file syncing is actually way at the top of my list. I didn't see it on anyone's list in our sort of audience top five. But for me, it's like the second thing I do on any new system because it just gives me access to everything else. Like even often just like my knowledge base of how to, I don't know, do some esoteric Nix command to get my system up and running. So it's just, for me, it's way at the top of the list.

Password manager, the number two is FileSync. Collide.com slash unplugged. You've probably heard me talk about Collide before, but did you hear that Collide was acquired by 1Password? That's a big deal, and it perked my ears up because I know both these companies have been focused on the end user for a long time, some of the best experiences out there. And for over a year, Collide Device Trust has helped companies with Okta

ensure that only secure devices can access their data. That means somebody doesn't log in if they have phished credentials, or somebody can't get on if they're not up to your policies. And that's what they're still doing. But now they're doing it as part of 1Password. So if you got Okta and you've been meaning to check out Collide, now's a great time. It would have kept me in the business for longer. It truly makes IT a little more livable. And Collide comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks. But of course, you can always write your own checks for just about anything you can think of when you need it. And I think the great thing is, is Collide will work on devices without an MDM.

So your Linux fleet? Yes. Contractor devices? Finally. And just about every BYOD phone or laptop or tablet or, I don't know, Raspberry Pi. I don't know. You wouldn't believe the things I saw people bring in. You wouldn't believe it. Clyde's there for you. And now they're part of 1Password, so they're only going to get better. So go check it out, collide.com slash unplugged to learn more. Go watch the demo, see how it works.

Also, going there, checking it out, that supports the show. So it's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Collide.com slash unplugged. And thanks to Collide for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Well, if you've been paying attention, you'll know we're a little bit excited about BcashFS here on the program. Some good news

and I guess a little bad news, depending, in that just two days after a Linux 6.9 pull request was submitted for bcachefs to better cope with quote-unquote extreme file system damage, we got another pull request for this current kernel that aimed to improve recovery capabilities of this newer copy-on-write file system.

Extreme? Extreme. You know, you got to really appreciate the early adopter goats out there that are out there trying this putting their data at risk that could have been us wes i feel like that could have been us yeah so it's like the good news is the capabilities for recovery are getting much more sophisticated and reliable in bcacheFS. The bad news is it's early days. It's early days for the 5.5 system. Bad news is they had a reason to try those tools, I suppose. In the future

you'll be able to blow away all metadata except for extents and leaf nodes and the system will be able to reconstruct basically everything else giving you your data back under the correct paths. So that sounds pretty promising. I guess in this case, the patch set was tested by a user in India who accidentally wiped one drive out of a three-drive file system

with no replication on the family computer. Oh, man, I feel that one. But, I mean, listen to this from Kent. It took a couple weeks, but we got everything important back. No kidding. Yeah. So recovery tools seem to work. But be cash on the family computer?

Okay, yeah, it was a little early for that. I guess I didn't even think about that, but that is probably a little early. I thought it was summed up nicely. As we're recording early this week. 6.9 RC3 just happened to release and Linus commented, Okay, so this RC3 looks a bit different than the usual because there's a large series to BcacheFS to do file system repair after corruption. Not normally something we'd see in an RC kernel, but hey, if you had a corrupted BcacheFS file system,

you'd probably want this. And if you thought BcacheFS was stable already, I have a bridge to sell you. Special deal, only for you, real cheap. Oh man, I wonder if that stings for Kent to see Linus put that part in there. But it is true, it is early days, and it's probably good that we are very clear about reminding people of that yeah i mean you know already uh you shouldn't have one copy of important things and you definitely shouldn't have that one copy on a pcash fs system not that we would ever do that no of course not yet but soon nice to see that get immediate attention though by the kernel team you know that could be something in days past years past where it would sit around for months and there'd be a few releases.

And it's nice to see that actually getting immediate attention. And, you know, these kinds of like recovery from bad events that will happen in the field will happen as a bunch of users start using it. It's probably a phase we need to go through to sort of get to the next level of stability and have all of these new repair code and utilities actually tested out there. Now, this next story, I thought maybe Brent had like pulled an April Fool's prank on us or something. I mean, I'm still not 100% sure if this is not an April Fool's prank, but Joshua Strobel, known for his work on the Budgie desktop and Solus, along with some Fedora developers, have submitted a change proposal to Fedora to switch Fedora's primary desktop environment from GNOME to Plasma Workstation.

Wait, what? Yeah. I like this a lot. The argument essentially says that Plasma 6 has gotten to a great, here's what they write. They say, with the release of Plasma 6, KDE Plasma has developed into a high-quality, well-regarded desktop experience.

It's been at the forefront of creating a cohesive desktop platform that empowers users to have full ownership of their computing experience. They don't really go at GNOME or anything. They mention, you know, that there's been recent Wayland improvements.

Oh, wait. There's one little GNOME take-home. Oh, that there's been recent Wayland improvements. Oh, wait. There's one little GNOME take here. Oh, is there? Did I miss that? Unlike other desktop experiences such as GNOME, the APIs leveraged

by Plasma applets and widgets have been more stable across minor Plasma releases, reducing long-term user frustration and promoting a healthier ecosystem for developers

and users alike. That's a well-written shot at extensions, isn't it? Yeah. You know how you hate when your GNOME extensions break? Use Plasma. What do you think of this, guys? I mean, probably a snowball's chance, right?

But what do you think? This would really generate discussion if this happened. Right. I'm trying to remember, do you remember that sort of discussion around the blog post sort of defining how GNOME was'm trying to remember, do you remember that sort of discussion around the blog post sort of defining how like Gnome was really important to the, you know, like if it wasn't just the default

desktop experience, it was something that like Fedora was, you know, building in and optimizing around in a very deliberate way. Yes. It's hard to imagine that changing. But maybe,

I mean, maybe you just, you know, it's not Gnome. As long as you have the right primitives in place, either one could express sort of the Fedora desktop vision. I mean, maybe you just, you know, it's not, as long as you have the right primitives in place, either one could express sort of the Fedora desktop vision. I mean, so I'm just, I guess, toying with the idea of this actually being a thing. My initial reaction is maybe the very, you know, just as Plasma 6 is being introduced is maybe the wrong time.

You know, wait a point release or two when it's a little bit more stable. Maybe that would make a lot more sense. I don't think it's likely to happen. I don't I see. So Matthew Miller jumps in on the conversation four days ago. He says this is a matter of process and decision making. So he's closing down the conversation because the change process is for engineering decisions and is decided by the F.E.S.E.O. So that's why it should either be closed or withdrawn. I'm going to take the privileged action of dropping the mic and closing this topic.

That doesn't mean that these tangential discussions need to stop. I just try to think if this actually did happen, it would be so beneficial for plasma. I mean, we saw the sprint that happened around plasma when Fedora announced that they were making changes to GoWayland or they're doing this or that to ship Plasma. You saw the results. It gave them a rallying point. And you would just think if you could increase the user base of Plasma even more so, you could catch more things, make more refinements. The team is so responsive and good about feedback. It could be so great for the Plasma desktop. But I think what you touched on, Wes, is the truth, is the Fedora community doesn't see Fedora Workstation as Linux that ships GNOME. They see it as an integrated experience.

And GNOME is absolutely part of that. But Chris, back in your day, KDE was kind of everywhere as the main desktop environment. And that slowly switched to gnome and it's yeah it'd be interesting to see it switch back i mean i suppose that is kind of true you know if you go back to the mandrake days and the open susa days there were that where they had a lot of user share that is true there's a lot of kde plasma i don't even know if we call it plasma back then it does i mean it would be an interesting world where you know, how much were we talking about when Ubuntu came back to shipping, you know, by default, right? And sort of the Fedora and Ubuntu landing on very similar setups. For that to switch out to Plasma would be, I think, quite notable. But it would also make me wonder, like, how much, you know, good additional contributions, bug fixes, just sort of momentum would that send to the Plasma project, which could be really nice. Yeah.

Geez, I'd love to see that. But I think this is probably – I'd love to see a real nuanced response to why it's a no. I'd love to see a nuanced answer as to articulate why GNOME. Because it really – Fedora Workstation really is kind of targeted at a more sophisticated developer audience and power users. And you could see that user base that would probably be more inclined to like something like Plasma. I mean, I find that Plasma does so much stuff. And yes, it's a lot. That's exactly part of the problem, I suppose, from the GNOME perspective.

But I don't know. I guess when I discover that Plasma has some capability or feature, I'm never put off by that. I'm always impressed and grateful that some developer took the time to integrate that and that it has those kinds of power user features. And you just kind of keep discovering them as you continue to use Plasma.

And yeah, it's a lot, but I don't know. It's something about acknowledging that you're using a powerful tool and giving you access to take advantage of it to the best way and most efficient way possible. And I feel like that's kind of a philosophy that Plasma has really embraced. And it does seem like that mentality would kind of match up well with a leading edge style distribution like Fedora. But I just don't think it's going to happen. But, you know, the Plasma flavor of Fedora is a release blocking edition, so they work hard on it.

Yeah, that's for sure. It's going to be quite nice. Thank you to our Unplugged Core members, our Core contributors. Thank you very much. If you'd like to become one, you can go to LinuxUnplugged.com and click on the Core contributor link at the top. You get an ad-free version of the show or you get the members version, which is like an hour and 40 minutes right now. It's been quite the show. A good little pre-show over there.

Thank you, everybody who becomes a member. Go to linuxunplugged.com and sign up. And now it is time for the boost. Our baller booster this week is Sassanomite coming in with 100,000 sats. Hey, Rich Lobster! Used in Podverse, he writes, Hey, friends, I busted my hands pretty good while skiing in February. Oh, God.

After 11 surgeries and counting, my left hand is back to 80%, but my right hand is still full of pins and not great for typing. I've been using Apple's mediocre dictation service, but I'm finally back home at my Linux workstation and I'm looking for a dictation solution for GNOME. Ideally one that runs locally and doesn't require epic amounts of configuration. Any suggestions?

Wow. Well, gosh, Mike, so sorry to hear that. Yeah, man. You know,

Cessna Mike gave us one of the best beat-up experiences of our lives, where he took us up in a Cessna and flew around Denver, gave us all a little view and family members and friends that wanted to go too. That was a lot of good fun. And he seemed like an active guy, so I can imagine this has been quite the setback. So we're really sorry to hear that. Wes, do you remember there was a tool I was using for a hot minute that would pull down models and could do transcription on the fly on the Linux desktop?

I don't remember. There was an app that I had been using. And it could do translations. It could do text-to-speech and speech-to-text. I think it was on Flathub. Yeah. Maybe we can find it again. Yeah, we'll take a look.

I know there's got to be others out there. You know, Piper and Whisper are the two core technologies you probably want to look into. Anything that's powered by those is going to be able to do this for you. I mean, there's other things out there. I'd imagine maybe people could boost in and tell us what they are. Yeah, if you have ideas, please do. But as far as new tooling that's come along that's pretty good and modern, it's Whisper and Piper, I think, that are going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. And you can run them as containers. I'm just not quite sure what the output format would be. Yeah, I think the trick is going to be if you needed the tie-in so it can input into your whatever text box, right?

Yeah, that's going to be the tricky part on Linux. That's where we could really use some advice from the audience. He says, I'm typing this using the AquaVoice website that was promoted on Hacker News a week or two ago. It's okay, but it jumps around quite a bit, and it isn't running locally. Also, let us know what the plans are for Denver. I may be back there getting pins removed about the same time you'll be out there. It'd be great to see you all.

Yeah, I would. Well, we're going to be out there for Red Hat Summit. Do you know the dates, Wes, off the top of your... May 6th through 9th, I believe. Yeah, man, we'd love to see you. Wow. Keep us posted on how it's going to. Yeah. Thanks for writing in hybrid.

Sarcasm comes in with 50,000. I hoard that, which your kind covered double Sunday, twice the goodness, twice the boost boost. Thank you. Hybrid. That is very generous of you.

You're like, like if I don't hear from hybrid, I'm like, I wonder if he's okay. Like you're such a consistent, reliable booster. I'm like, I wonder if he's okay. You're such a consistent, reliable booster. I'm like, I hope we hear from Hybrid. Is he alright? We gotta get this man a beer. Or a beverage of his choice. Maybe a root beer. I don't

care. Whatever he likes. Now 412 Linux came in with five boosts total for 5,012 sets. Coming in hot with the boosts! Hey gents, really been enjoying the latest shows. The members feed is the absolute best feed. Here's a little bit of requested feedback.

Regarding the Fountain livestream, I've listened to it while on a walk, and it's great. The quality is good, and it's a great option while on the go. Oh, that's nice. Thank you. Yes, we are now live in the apps for Podcasting 2.0. The great thing there is you see the pending in your time. So you see when the show is going to be and when we're live. But then also,

if you just want to use your web browser on your phone or on your computer, when we're live, you can just go to JBLiveFM and pull it in that way. Cause it's really just pulling in an audio stream. Regarding hardware. I would encourage other listeners to explore B-Link or other mini PC brands. Just recently purchased an N100 S12 Pro for $125. It's going to make a great media server. I published an article at 412linux.io regarding

the hardware acceleration, if that's helpful. I was able to play 4K media while sipping 14 watts thanks to Quick Sync. These mini PCs have replaced all of my needs for Raspberry Pis. thanks to QuickSync. These mini PCs have replaced all of my needs for Raspberry Pis. Oh, they sent us a list, too, of the first things they install after a fresh Linux system. They run a full update on the OS and apps.

Yeah. Of course. I can't believe I didn't mention that. Well, you asked for apps, I think. Yeah, and depending on how I deploy it now, I just am deploying the latest software generally. Install VPN software. Yep.

Check that box. Remove Firefox Snap and install the dev. Okay, so we know what distro you're using. Install PCSCSD for my YubiKeys. Another bootstrapping trust sort of operation. And then Romania, QO Notes, which is

we do not talk about QO Notes enough. I've been thinking about going back from Obsidian to QO Notes again. Mumble, Codium, Element Desktop, and recently now Proton Mail Linux app. I suppose I should now include Logseek and

stuff. And it has its own thing. We did see one Logseek come in, too. Now I wonder what they use Mumble for. I hope it's our room. That'd be great. It says, I appreciate the effort, too, for making the production each week. Well, thank you. NickAboutWhoIs comes in, I think, comes in with 7,730.

What? What? I love it. This is from the Friday stream. We did a Noster Friday stream and a little Noster workshop, which is posted on Xris.show. And Nick was listening live. And he gave us a postal code from the Netherlands so 7534

Westpain are you looking it up over there? Enchede Enchedi I think that's what we decided on the live stream Enchedi that's what it was Enchede Netherlands okay I don't think I think you had it right the second time

Enchedi yeah near Gleamer Brug. There you go. Yep. That's definitely it. That's gotta be. You're such a natural, Wes. Now, Mary Oscar came in with 10,000 sats. Also the Noster Workshop.

Thanks for helping us test the Noster web chat. It's over 9,000! Thank you, Oscar. Yeah, it's really exciting to see, you know, maybe a real possible use case for us, at least for Nostr. Besides just using it for me to tweet off random things or whatever you call it, I guess, post. Fun to have a nice excuse to play with it. It is. It is. The Nostr workshop could be definitely worth checking out.

It was really fun. We gave out a bunch of Albie invite codes as well, and we got rid of all of them, which was really actually super fun. So thanks for everyone who showed up and asked for some Albie invite codes. Extras.show slash 90. 40 Deuce comes in with 4,242 sats with some honorable app mentions. RepGrip, FD, and Duff, D-U-F. That's a RipGrip. RipGrip.

What did I say? I said RipGrip. RepGrip. No, did I? Brave, pCloud, TickTick, LogSec. There's a LogSec. Yeah. Oh, you know, we didn't see much Spotify.

We did see a couple. Honorable mentions. TopGrade. TopGrade. And then everything else in his Nix config. Oh, TopGrade is upgrade everything. Yeah. I was looking at TopGrade.

We could make that a pick, really. We should take a look at that sometime. I think we need to call out here how 42 wrote in mostly formatted as a Nix expression. Yeah, and it worked. Can I also call out 42 boosted in 42, 42 sets? So 42, 42 sets. Very creative boost. So on brand.

The answer to the ultimate question. I see what he did there. I see. Okay. I think top grade is there. I see. Okay. I think Top Grade is worth taking a little look at. And they got a great little look at their, you see their logo? Yeah. This is cute. That's great. Top Grade is, hmm, alright, perhaps a future pick.

Meditat, our last booster for this week, came in with a Spaceballs boost. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life uh thanks to nixos my top five apps are already installed by my config but they are the first things i have to log into that's really it that's really it now it's really one of the first apps you log into now isn't it uh-huh how do i need to use first no yeah it's so

obnoxious in some ways i mean i don't mean to be an old man about it, but, like, everything has, like, its own system. Some apps use your email for two-factor. Other apps want, like, an actual two-factor app. Some things just send the password. It's just, ah, it's such a mess. It takes so much time, too. But that's not what's important.

You know what I did that was, like, the easiest way I can think of to come up with my top five list was go through my next config and look at the top like four, five, six, seven, eight. Sure. Just the first things I put in my next config when I first got into next. Yeah, totally. That makes sense. We had a really good showing. Thank you, everybody, who took time to boost in with your top five or your comments on the show.

I will mention that when we're coming back, we're going to be celebrating someone special's birthday. Somebody special, of course, that somebody special is Mr. Wes Payne. It's coming up. Wow, they're excited for you, buddy. He's got friends. Yeah, I gave him liquor before.

Oh, yeah. So if you want to send a birthday message in to Mr. Payne, we'll be reading those in the next episode. We're out right now, presently. We're at Texas. So we should definitely celebrate your birthday while we're in Texas. Don't you think? But we stacked 420,144 sats.

Winner. Winner. It really whips the llama's ass. Thank you, everybody. 27 boosters with 44 boosts sent in. What a showing. That was really great, and the timing worked out perfectly

for us to spread that across the two shows. Thank you, everybody, who streams us those sats, too. We really appreciate that. Thanks for taking the time to boost in your app picks, too. Yeah. It's fun being able to do

a little quick survey like that. Well, and I feel like I'm going to grab a few new ones, too, so thank you. And I think we probably missed some, so if there was a glaring one that we missed, please do send it in still. I'd like to hear it because like top grade, that's a little gem. I'm going to set aside and take another look at it. I've heard it once before, but seeing those kinds of things come in are really useful. So thank you everybody. We really do appreciate it.

FreeTube came in as one of the apps on the list, and I was surprised to only see one person mention it. So I wanted to give the audience maybe a reminder. You may have heard of this, but you may have forgot that you could use YouTube without creepy tracking or advertisements. There's no JavaScript that they can execute. Now, they'll probably still get your IP address, but you don't have to worry about their weird cookies. You don't have to worry about their weird tracking JavaScript. It's a nice app. It's called FreeTube.

It's available on Flathub, and it'll just give you essentially like a cleaned up version of the YouTube experience. Maybe like it's not quite equivalent to NewPipe because it's essentially a remake of the web interface. But it might kind of serve that same kind of purpose that you have with NewPipe where you can have some stuff in your phone instead of the main YouTube experience. Another way to have your subscriptions and history being stored locally. Yeah. Yeah. And Google is none the wiser. And perhaps maybe then it doesn't mess around with your main feed with suggestions.

Hmm. So I just wanted to make a mention because I only saw it sent in once and it's such a handy little tool that we have. It's available for Linux free tube. It's on FlatHub. We'll put a link in the show notes. All right, boys, that wraps it up for us. I have some new apps to go install. I know that. We'll be traveling back to Texas, so we will be live at our regular Sunday time.

We'll be back here in the studio at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. I'd like to know, would you join a camping meetup? Boost it and tell me. Also, if we miss something, one of the apps, what is the most important app? Let us know. What did we miss? Send that in. If you are going to attend, you would attend a camping meetup. Maybe also boost in a proposed location. Oh, yeah. Oh, geez. I can't believe I didn't think of that. Yeah. I'm picturing, like, middle somewhere, like maybe Denver, Colorado, like not actual Denver, but like Colorado area, but maybe not.

Maybe there's a better location. I don't know. You keep promising Bozeman to me. Oh, it's not quite central, but it is beautiful. All right, links at linuxunplugged.com slash 558. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode, and we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Well, Brent and I had the same idea in our planning process for the show. We came across this link.

It's because somebody blogged about it, and we'll put a link in the show notes. Apparently, the FreeBSD community has speedruns. They even have a FreeBSD wiki on it, and this individual documented their FreeBSD Zero to Desktop Speedrun Challenge. documented their FreeBSD zero to desktop speedrun challenge. And the wiki kind of suggests some, like, different kind of best times and things to do, and this individual goes through and talks about what they did, and they timed it. You know, like they write, I had a 13-year-old ThinkPad W520 from 2011

that I managed to get installed in four minutes and 23 seconds from zero to desktop. That's so impressive. Do you, I mean, that sounds kind of fun, and I feel from zero to desktop. So impressive. Do you, I mean, that sounds kind of fun and I feel like it's something we could try. I don't know, but maybe it's,

maybe it's arch, maybe it's Nick's, maybe it's free BSD. Would we want to do free BSD? Speed, speed run. I mean, no,

where, why do you, we should, we should have a ban on mentioning gen two for these content challenges for a year. We should just have a one-year reprieve. I just think Brent hasn't had to go through it yet. I just feel like this is something we could do.

That does seem fun. We could look at the FreeBSD wiki and maybe we could adapt it. I could see that. It's been so long since I installed Arch. I'd like to know if this is something the community would participate. Maybe we set it up and we announce it in one episode and everybody tries it it and then they let us know what their times were and then we kind of – I don't know. What about Debian? I feel like there's a lot to click through in the Debian install.

Oh. Well, there's no way, no way, Wes, that they are speed running it by clicking through it manually. They've got to be automated. I'm sure. So the blog post goes into some details here which is kind of fascinating so uh they describe the operations and commands that needed to be done took me a minute 33 yeah and then the rest sounds like just the computer chugging away at certain things and they describe other times that it you know was required to do certain things but

so there's some manual intervention here yeah so it looks like looks like the biggest time was the download of the packages, so that's really going to depend on your internet connection. Speedrun must be manual and unscripted. No additional or custom tooling may be used to assist the speedrun. Okay, now I'm on board. This is interesting, right? This starts getting interesting. Did you say local cache?

Is that what I heard? Yeah, it doesn't say anything. Again, that's how you'd solve for the download being a factor yeah hmm there's something to it this could be maybe it's a fest event maybe it's something we're supposed to kill that network i don't know we did have a challenge at one of our meetups previously yeah and that was great remember it was the self-destructing linux that was a lot of fun it'd be fun if we i mean this would require a lot of work we need something like volunteer to do it, but you know,

you had like a setup where like a fresh VM was made and you got to do your speed drum and then that could be like recorded on the leaderboard. Yes, dude. Yes. Okay. Somebody, not us has got to work on this.

If we take a break from the show, I think we can probably get it done. There you go.