LINUX Unplugged - 559: Linux is Bigger in Texas

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

We're back from Austin, with interviews and stories to share. Plus, it's Gentoo week and we take our first look at Fedora 40.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:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMFedora 40 beta is fastest operating system I've tested — Apps opened in the blink of an eye. The Overview appeared instantly. Everything seemed to be built around the idea that the user works at the speed of madness and the OS is there to help make it happen.Fedora Linux 40 DocsFedora Linux 40 Cleared For Release — Fedora 40 thus will see its official release happen next Tuesday, 23 April.F40 Change Proposal: Drop Delta RPMs — According to early feedback from Release Engineering, it looks like it will not be feasible to address the shortcomings of Delta RPMs as they are currently implemented, and since they often no longer result in a net reduction in download sizes for upgrades, this Change proposes both to disable the generation of DeltaRPMs during the compose process, and to disable the deltarpm support in dnf / dnf5 by default.Berlin with Brent May Meetup — May 11, 2024LinuxFest Northwest 2025 — April 26 - 28, 2024System76 and Jupiter Broadcasting Epic Parking Lot BBQ — Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 12:00 PMLFNW Talk: 5 Reasons to Love NixOS — NixOS seems to be everywhere these days and has the fanatic energy usually reserved for Arch users. But WHY is it so popular? In this talk, I'll go over 5 reasons I love NixOS and you might too.LFNW Talk: Deploying NixOS Anywhere — In this talk, we'll unlock the full potential of NixOS by exploring how its unique architecture enables installation just about anywhere—from bare metal and VMs to a VPS provider near you.LFNW Talk: LINUX Unplugged LIVE — We're recording a live edition of LINUX Unplugged in person. Our weekly Linux talk show with no script, no limits, surprise guests, and tons of opinions. Scinary Cybersecurity — Founded in 2015, we are proud to be one of few full-service cybersecurity firms focused on small and midsized governmental entities. Serving clients in mutiple states, we provide quality services and solutions that best fit your needs.Jupiter Extras — Texas LinuxFest Day 1Jupiter Extras — Texas LinuxFest Day 2Texas Linux Festival 2024 — Texas Linux Fest is the first state-wide annual community-run conference for Linux and open source software users and enthusiasts from around the Lone Star State.MIL-STD-1553 — MIL-STD-1553 is a military standard published by the United States Department of Defense that defines the mechanical, electrical, and functional characteristics of a serial data bus.Chris' Cave PicturesBuc-ees — If you've been to Buc-ee's, you may already know that this friendly neighbor along the highways has the cleanest restrooms in America. In 2012, Cintas ran a nationwide restroom contest and made it official!Street Fighter 2 Music — Arcade IntroStreet Fighter 2 Music — OC RemixUEFI Boot Standalone NixOS (2024-04-20) — This guide will explain how to install NixOS on the internal NVMe drive of an Apple Silicon Mac using a customized version of the official NixOS install ISO, then boot it without the help of another computer.TeX Shinobi Keyboardnixos-conf-editor — A libadwaita/gtk4 app for editing NixOS configurations.nix-software-center — A simple gtk4/libadwaita software center to easily install and manage nix packages.bhh32's app installerdharple/detox — Tames problematic filenamesJovian NixOS — NixOS on the Steam DeckPick: Shortwave — Shortwave is an internet radio player that provides access to a station database with over 30,000 stations, including Jupiter Broadcasting.

Okay, I know it is Gen 2 day on the show, but if you guys will allow me, I thought we could talk about this headline from Jack Wallen over at ZDNet. He writes that Fedora 40 is the fastest operating system he's ever tested. Wow. Now, I mean, I don't know if that's true. I mean, maybe for him it is, but that's a great headline for Fedora 40. So I think we got to dig into Fedora 40 on the show today. I know it's Gen 2 day, but we got to talk about this. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent.

Well, coming up on the show today, we are just back from Texas Linux Fest in Austin. We've got stories and interviews to share. And Linux Fest Northwest is next weekend, so we've got a lot of things you need to know. But we will start this week with a look at Fedora 40. Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts and some picks. So before I get any further, I want to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug.

They're right there. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris. Hi, Wes. Aloha. Okay, hello. A fine spirit in the Mumble Room today. I like it. I think we're kind of evenly split between quiet listening and on air, too.

Hello, everybody up there. Nice to have you on board. And good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. It's programmable networking software that is private and secure by default, powered by? Wildcat. That's right. And, you know, Tailscale threw one heck of a party at Texas Linux Fest.

That was great. Great venue. Great crowd. Free drinks. What's not to love? heck of a party at Texas Linux Fest. That was great. Great venue, great crowd, free drinks. What's not to love? Secure, amazing mesh networking. And they know I had a good time. They sure do. So go get on 100 devices for free and build a private mesh network between all of your machines.

I run everything in here. I put my NextCloud in here, my DNS in here, my Plex and Jellyfin instances. Nothing is on the public internet anymore that I run, and I don't have any inbound ports. It's zero trust networking, and any enterprise or individual can use it. Go see what I'm talking about at tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. So just a day or two after this show comes out, it is the Fedora 40 release. This last week, they had their Go, No Go meeting, and it was determined that Fedora is, in fact, Go for launch on Tuesday, April 23rd.

It comes with GNOME 46 and Plasma 6.0 and Linux 6.8 under the hood. And one big change that I was kind of sad to see go, I mean, I think it is kind of time, but when I have been on an LTE connection, I have been so thankful for Fedora's Delta RPM feature that is being phased out in Fedora 40. It's been in the works for some time. In some cases, it's actually been a negative on like lower end systems, the CPU overhead to do the Delta. Not so great. Yeah. It seems like the savings kind of got smaller over time.

Yeah. The problems you're mentioning there. The bandwidth got better over time. The machines I wanted to do it became more diverse. So I kind of understand. I also benefited from this. And I'm curious what the incentive is to get rid of it. I mean, systems these days are a little faster. So are we really worrying about CPU usage and such?

One of the things that happened between the time that we instituted what was originally known as Yumpresto, which was the Delta RPM feature, to now was that our updates infrastructure changed in that they blew away the repo and regenerated it completely from scratch with new updated RPMs. This has a very annoying side effect in that we don't actually have the historical chain of packages from GA to the latest updates release, the updates push, to be able to compose delta RPMs to match all the combinations to be able to let you update with a lower network overhead. And so for a lot of people, delta RPMs just didn't do anything anymore. And that's really where it came down to, right? Like the amount of server-side infrastructure for composing it, the time that it actually takes to run it, plus the deficiencies related to infrastructure changes meant that Delta RPMs just wound up not being as useful as they should be.

Thank you for that insight. I think that is probably a great explanation. What do you think, Brent? Did that answer your question? It sure did. Now, Chris, you gave Fedora 40 a spin this morning, I noticed. How'd it go? It's a nice, tight release. I don't know if there's any blowaway feature, but if you're a fan of the Premiere desktops that ship with Fedora, that being Workstation Spin, which has Gnome, or the Plasma Spin, which is going to ship with Plasma 6.0, there's a lot here for you to like. These are both very good releases. Very, very good releases.

On the GNOME 46 side, I think the thing that I'd like to spend a moment talking about is files. It doesn't really get much attention these days. And that's why I'm even more appreciative that the developers did the hard work of refactoring large sections of files or at least portions of files. Yeah, an unsexy utility. But when you need it, you need it. It's nice to have something that has actual capabilities. And they've rearranged the way it shows you what it's working on. They've put a little – the progress indicator is moved and the information it displays is a little more useful.

So files have seen a lot of love and the global search is just faster. And I think that's what Jack is getting at. I was kind of wondering, Jack didn't quite attribute, you know, if there were reasons or a reason for all this speed up. But yeah, I'm curious if that really did match your experience. It does feel fast. It's because it's a combination of everything's on, you know, modern GTK now. We're on Wayland. We're several iterations into pretty solid wayland

support and so if you've got a if you've got a 3d accelerated desktop that the just the general daily interactions feel really sharp and really fast um you know like i hit the overview button and that looks really good and then i launch the files browser and that comes up and it looks really sharp and it launches really fast and everything is the animation feels um really refined and professional like beyond what apple apple is doing these days wow i i think i i think people will say in probably the next mac os release or two that they look apple clearly looked back at gnome for inspiration on how to make mac os a better desktop i really think that's the direction 46 is going in. I mean, it's really, really nice.

And then on the Plasma 6 side, I mean, we've talked about Plasma 6 pretty extensively on the show, but it's just such a solid release for such an overhaul, and then of course you've got the updates that have come along in there, and... This is just making me feel grateful that we have both of these projects at really nice places right now. Yeah. What a time to be a desktop Linux user.

And so Fedora 40 really benefits from that. Plus then you get Linux 6.8. So you get a pretty modern Linux in there as well. You also get like an updated to some of the, you know, core developer tools and things like that.

All the other usual good updates you see in a Fedora release. And, you know, Silverblue and the other spins are also getting their updates. We'll talk about it more, I think, depending on the interest we gauge from the audience.

But I wanted to at least try it. And my takeaway was not one particular thing I felt like I could come on the show and say, this one thing is great, like Butterfest, right? That was a huge feature. But just in terms of developing and delivering a solid Linux desktop experience that goes from strength to strength and features the best stuff that our leading desktop environments are doing, they nailed it. And that's like, I think what you want from Fedora. So I think in that context, I think Fedora 40 is going to be a very good release. Oh, we have a lot to let everybody know about. Let's start with a meetup that's coming up for Mr. Brantley in May.

Yeah, we're going to be in Berlin once again. And when I say we, I mostly mean me, although you gents need to come at some point. He forgot to buy us tickets. Yeah. Oh, I'll see what I can do. Oh, OK. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure you're working on that.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's May 11th. So that'll be in Berlin. Tentative location is at Seabase, that hackerspace sort of spaceship that I keep talking about every time I'm there. I don't know why you'd go anywhere else. That seems pretty cool. It is a pretty sweet spot. But it's nice to switch it up from time to'm there. I don't know why you'd go anywhere else. That seems pretty cool. It is a pretty sweet spot.

But it's nice to switch it up from time to time. And I haven't actually confirmed with them. They just said, yeah, yeah, you guys come anytime you want. But I guess I should let someone know because 40 people showing up. This is something. So we do have a meetup page for that, which is linked in the show notes. If you want to just RSVP, that'd be nice. But you don't have to, per se.

But we'd love to see you. Yeah. It seems like it's been a really great event. I wish I could have been to all of them. So that'll be may 11th meetup.com slash Jupiter broadcasting. And then in the more immediate future, like next weekend, it is Linux fest Northwest 2024.

And if you can't make it, well, the next best thing is go grab a podcasting two to no app at podcast apps.com because we will be live in our RSS feed, 9.45 a.m. Seattle time, 12.45 Eastern Daylight time, 4.45 p.m. UTC Saturday, 9.45, right as the Fest doors are opening. You know, when you mentioned this earlier,

you didn't say you were going to be this specific. I know. Is that a guarantee that all of you are going to be ready right at the end of the show? You know, it is a guarantee that all of you are going to be ready right at the end? You know, it is a great opportunity for the audience that can't always catch this show when it's live to catch it a little earlier, like maybe you guys in Europe. And we're going to try to – we'll be trying to capture the feeling in the Expo Hall. We're going to try to have Brent remote in one of the rooms as they're getting ready for the setup just to really kind of give you what the vibe is like. Stuff that won't make it into the released version of the show,

but if you tune in live on Saturday, you'll catch that. Then on Sunday, we're doing Linux Unplugged Live from LinuxFest Northwest at our regular time, 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 7 p.m. UTC. And it should be a lot of fun because there's going to be some great folks showing up at LinuxFest. I happen to know of some news that's coming out of there. We'll have conversations around that. Plus, there's going to be a new Ubuntu to talk about as well. And if you are able to make it, by the way, that all is going to be pending in the RSS feed. So if you have a podcasting 2.0 app, all you have to do is just be

subscribed to our RSS feed. Or you can tune in at jblive.fm. We will have it at the jupiter broadcasting.com slash calendar as well. During the day at Linux Fest, we're doing another barbecue. System 76 and JB are throwing a barbecue in the parking lot during lunch Saturday. These are famous at this point. I know. And so I think maybe we're going to rent a grill. Like we're working on that. I think Emma's close.

But I still think we could probably use like backup support, maybe like a backup barbecue or two, some tables, things to facilitate barbecuing like spatulas and tongs and things that we're not going to have. We could still use that if you're a local. Barbecue sauces and hot sauces and such? I saw Olympia Mike is jumping in with tables and perhaps a barbecue. I think we could still use that. Yeah, or sauces. Sauces because we're not going to be a condiments. Yeah. We're going to have the basics.

We're going to do like a Costco run. And so we're going to have like the core essentials. But anything fancy, we're not going to have. So if you want to share with the community, please bring it. We're going to attempt to make it work. Can we do a pineapple again? Maybe. Yeah.

Let's grab a pineapple. It's a good idea. You got a lot going on Saturday. You got a talk going on Saturday. I do have a talk. I forgot about that until this very moment. I guess I should sort something out there. Yeah, buddy, better get started on that. Yeah. And we have a bunch of other friends giving talks on Saturday as well. We've got Carl from System76. Of course, Alex is giving the first opening talk in that room. And also Neil, you're in there. And Frank from NextCloud's in there.

That's just day one. Yeah, I was weirded out by being on the front page of the site. And day two is just as action-packed in the exact same room. Olympia Mike's giving a talk, Five Reasons to Love NixOS, which I think there are likely more than five. And our dear Wes Payne, you're giving a talk. Yeah, deploying NixOS anywhere.

But gosh, I got to follow Olympia, Mike. That's going to be tough. Well, I like that he can prime them with like, here's the basic things to understand about Nix. And then you can come in with, here's to how to take over anything, any Linux box. Yeah, you got a Linux box somewhere? Let's put Nix on there. I feel like whoever organized these talks set them up in a nice kind of trajectory for the listeners. It steps you through it. And then right after Wes, well, so between Wes's talk deploying NixOS anywhere, there's lunch.

But there's also after that, in that same room, it's Linux unplugged. We're going to be in the room Wes is in for his NixOS Anywhere in the room that Olympia Mike is in. We're just going to do it after lunch. We'll probably be scrambling during lunch. So we're going to need like a food runner to grab us some food because we're going to have to set up everything in that room to do the show. Now, is this the very first like official session for a Linux Unplugged live session? Like we usually do it in the hallway track or whatever. It might be the first one on the calendar.

It's possible Linux Action Show has been on the calendar a few times. Oh, that makes sense, yeah. But this is definitely the first time Linux Unplugged has ever been an official live session on a calendar. I feel like Room HC 108, if you're a JB listener, that's the room you want to stick in. There's a lot of good stuff. Keep your eye out on that one, yeah. And then we kind

of want to do something fun. So we're going to ask the audience that makes it to our live Linux Unplugged, what was your first Linux box? What was your hardware? What was great about it and what was awful about it? And I know when I asked you, Brent, you started thinking about this. Wes, I don't think I know your answer, what your first Linux box was.

And I also want to ask if you're listening, boost in and tell us about yours because we'll include yours while we're doing the Q&A with the audience. I think that could be a nice way where the boosts and the live audience can kind of intermix a little bit so tell us what was great and awful about your very first linux box i'll tell you i'll give you a preview of mine oh really um mine had like a quasi transparent blue case what and it was like an amd k6 yeah that was my personal, my first personal Linux box, yeah. And that was it. Can we define these factors a little bit?

Because I ran a Linux on like my first PC that I had as a kid. Yeah. But only for like a couple hours. That doesn't really count. You're talking like daily driver kind of box, right? Well, at least the first one you spend some time with. All right. Consistently running Linux on it.

Yeah. My first machine was probably at school, although I'd love to hear about those too because those are probably some pretty rare machines. So I'll leave it up to the booster. And if you make it in person, I want you to start thinking about this now because we're going to go around with a microphone and ask some of you about your stories. Now, let's talk about Texas Linux Fest, boys. And before we get there, I want to mention that the way we got down there and the way that an independent show like this was able to travel all three of us and get an Airbnb and do all of that is because a member of the community, Donald, who owns a company called Sineri, reached out and sponsored us to get down there. It was a really cool thing to do. And Sineri is an on-demand cybersecurity firm that serves all across the United States,

not just Texas. They are local to Texas, but they work in multiple states. And they were not only one of the primary sponsors of Texas Linux Fest, but they also got us down there. And Donald took us out to dinner the night we got there. So I encourage everybody, go to SINARY.com. It's S-C-I-N-A-R-Y.com, SINARY.com. Go check them out.

It's really because of them that this coverage was made possible at all. Donald didn't ask for any kind of special placement in the show or anything, any kind of thanks like that. But I think they definitely deserve it because it wasn't cheap to get all of us down there, get our, you know, the flights and the Airbnb and all of that. And then he took us out to an expensive place at dinner too. So signary.com, they were really great. And if your business needs some cybersecurity work, some help, these guys really seem to know their stuff.

We saw their crew come to Texas Linux Fest and just like devour the event. They left the booth to us. It was like, clearly a lot of sharp folks. Yeah. And we got to take over their booth. And because of that, we got to do a live stream. We had coverage and we were front and center at Texas Linux Fest 2024. Now, it had been a few years since the Texas Linux folk got together.

The pandemic threw things a little awry. I first went, I think, in, I don't know, I don't want to say, but I think 2015, 2016, a long time ago. And it felt like way, way too much time had passed since the last Texas Linux Fest. And that was the general vibe, I think, from everybody that made it. Too much time had passed since we all got together. It's organized by a group of volunteers. It's put together in one of the best venues in Austin. Truly one of the best venues in Austin.

And they have a giant expo hall. And then they have wonderful rooms upstairs that are properly air conditioned, properly partitioned. When you come to the facilities, it is rare in event facilities. And the views were gorgeous, too. That whole massive glass wall looking out onto Austin. And like I said, Terry Black's, which is one of the best barbecue places in the world. I know people argue if it is the best. I won't say it is the best, but I'd say it's in the top of the best barbecue places that average folk can actually visit.

And when we arrived in Austin, we went to Terry Black's. We didn't go home to our Airbnb. We didn't go drop our bags off. We went directly to Terry Black's and we met up with Donald. And Brent broke his no meat rule for some actual rare Texas barbecue. What did you think? You know, I had a feeling going into this trip that I'd have to do this and that was okay.

I was ready for like a meal or two. I didn't realize how this would define the trip for me. It's a lot of eating, dude. It's a lot. Yeah. There were no options other than meat for the most part and everywhere we went. But I will say, you know, being a hunter and such, which has asked me questions about it later, it's complex.

Yeah, this was certainly some of the best I had ever had. So worth breaking the rules for a little bit, I guess. Well, and it seems breaking the rules immediately when we arrived and then breaking the rules again the next day at the exact same location because, you know, some other people wanted to go to Terry Black's again and we didn't say no. Can't say no. Across the street from the venue is a pretty convenient lunch option at that.

But I didn't really know what the Terry Black's experience was going to be like because you said, oh, yeah, across the street from Terry Black's is going to be great. But you didn't really describe how it's a whole thing. And it's very popular. Yeah. There's a long line. Folks talk about the meat and the quality of the meat and the tasty things there. But yeah, there's a whole other actual experiential aspect.

Waiting to get into the place. The queuing is part of the experience. And they've got this figured out because the queue snakes its way past all the smokers, past all the wood that they use that's properly seasoned, that they use for all the smoking and stuff. And so you kind of get this tour without even knowing you're doing a tour. And halfway through, they also have like a drinks bar. So they've got this queuing stuff figured out in Texas. Yeah. And once you're in, it is business time.

There is no messing around with the gals behind the sides bar. They will move you through and they'll get you checked out as fast as possible. I screwed up both times that we went through and i'm still nervous about it means we have to go back you gotta practice i i've gone through enough now that i just find it humorous like i'm here to buy so like don't yell at me like i don't have fun and i looked for a hot second at like some drink that they had and i spent one beat too long and they both started yelling at me but it's's so, so, so worth it. So we ended up in the booth.

Not like a booth at Texas Linux Fest, but the booth at Texas Linux Fest. The biggest booth. The booth that was when you open the doors to the expo hall, we are right there. Like the greeting committee. Right there. Like front and center framed for everybody to come say hello, which worked out great. I'm not really complaining other than I wish I had some branding and stuff we could have put up because I just didn't really think about it. We traveled light this time around. Yeah, we sure did.

This is what we were really attempting to make it one of our lightest travels ever because we didn't drive. We flew. And we typically – we put a lot of gear. We can put swag and stuff in the RV and I can drive that or we'll load up like, you know, a crossover type size vehicle and we can fill the back with swag and banners and whatnot. But this time it was pretty much what we could carry on the airplane. So we came really, really light and the plan was originally to drive down but that just didn't work out with the timing of scale and then texas linux fest and then linux

fest northwest is next weekend so how would you have gotten back yeah i don't i don't have a warp drive um so we ended up flying which meant light light light so we had no logos no banners no nothing except for our gear and ourselves and And we were right there front and center. And as we were trying to get live, we realized that these new super strong mic stands that we had bought, these flexible arms, they're like gooseneck flexible arms that supposedly support something ridiculous like that. And we start setting up and we realize as we take them out of the box, these things do not hold our microphones.

Like it's the most stupid thing to get derailed by. And we thought, I mean, we thought we were doing a good job of pre-planning that we had intentionally tried to pick the best option. And we got three identical ones. We had them still in the box that they were easy to bring with us in our luggage. Wes was doing like gooseneck acrobatics to try to get his to balance just right. I found a spot that kind of worked, but I mean, you still couldn't quite get it in a way that either was too low or was right in the way of your hand that you probably wanted to use to type on your keyboard. It doesn't help that we have, like, three-pound microphones.

We have big, heavy microphones. I didn't see one moment where we were willing to not use those. Yeah. So maybe it's on us. Yeah, maybe. But Brent got mine working literally with some twine and a rubber band. Always bring string. He put it into some sort of gooseneck loop

and then gave the loop structure with the twine and the rubber band. That's why you bring me, right? And that's how I did day one and day two. Yeah, we decided we really didn't want to figure this out again, so we just left those in place overnight. Yeah, we packed up really didn't want to figure this out again. So we just left those in place overnight. We packed up all our gear except for this stupid improv mic stands and we left those. So if anybody knows of some great travel mic stands, please send them into the show because it was embarrassing.

And the worst part is we're running late because it's such a dumb reason. And we're the welcoming committee for the entire thing. We're right there front and center when you open the doors and we're sitting there scrambling and people are coming up hey guys and they're like all in a great mood to see us and we're like hi sorry we're busy right now we have a disaster it actually brent does great brent jumps up and usually chats with people and lets west and i troubleshoot things but we we did get the stream up. We did get the microphones in place. And those will be the whole day, day one and two that we streamed are at extras.show if you want to listen to them.

We'll play you some highlights in today's episode. But if you'd like to hear the whole day from start to end, you can, well, you can go listen at extras.show. And of course, while we were there, our friends gave some talks like Alex. Alex himself hosted a great talk. Kind of like the mechanics of how Tailscale works. I saw a lot of folks in there. I think we're excited to go learn more and play more with Tailscale after that talk.

Yeah, it was a standing room only. Like there was every seat was taken and we were just standing in the back and there was other people standing around too. It was really well attended. I think the organizers felt like they hadn't done a very good job at the event. That was some of the sense I got. We'll get to some more of this later, but I actually think they did a fantastic job, especially now having behind the scenes of how LinuxFest Northwest gets organized

when you're dealing with a group of volunteers that haven't done this for a couple of years and you're working with venues that charge so much now. That's another thing that's changed. Right. Like just a cart of coffee through the grapevine, we found out, cost the fest $2,000 just for one of those carts of coffee. I didn't even see a coffee cart actually. They had some up in the room.

Oh. Yeah, up in the room areas. But, yeah, I mean at $2,000 a pop, you're only going to do a couple of those. You're right. I mean it's just wild how much these venues will charge for some of this stuff. And to have them have to navigate that, I just feel like they did a much better job than they're giving themselves credit for. It was a great venue.

People were really, really happy to be there. I think that's what counts, right? It seemed like everyone had a good time. There was a lot of interest in the talk, so those were well attended. I heard from multiple people like, oh, yeah, you know, in the past, the talks have been really a reason for me to show up to Texas Linux Fest. And I think they were rewarded for that again, which I think means they'll be back. Now, I want to get into some of our other stories and some of the things that we saw. But first, I thought maybe we'd play some of our chats that we had while we were there with folks.

Because while we were streaming, we had several opportunities to sit down and talk with folks. And some of the conversations we had were just really fantastic. Collide.com slash unplugged. You've probably heard me talk about Collide before. I think it's one of those tools that if it was around when I was in IT, I would have stuck around for a little bit longer. But did you hear that Collide was just recently acquired by 1Password? It's a big deal. that collide was just recently acquired by one password it's a big deal it's a big deal because it's advancing their mission to make user focused security the norm not the exception for over a year collide device trust has helped companies with octa ensure that only known and secure devices can access your data that means it checks for phished credentials or make sure that a system

is compliant before it can connect to your network. And they're still doing that, but now they're doing it as part of 1Password. So, if you've got Okta and you've been meaning to check out Collide, now's a great time. Collide comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks, and when things come up, and they do come up, you can write your own custom checks for just about anything. And you can use Collide on devices that don't have MDM software installed. So your Linux fleet, yep, you can manage it along with your Windows and your Macs, all from one dashboard.

But it also means contractor devices or every BYOD device somebody can think of, and I have seen all kinds. Collide is an end-to-end solution. And now, well, now it's part of 1Password, and they're only going to get better. So go support the show and check out Collide. See if it'll work for you. Go to K-O-L-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Go learn how Collide works.

You can watch the demo, support the show, and perhaps improve your personal user experience. It makes it great for your end users, too. Collide's the end-to-end solution we recommend. Go to k-o-l-i-d-e dot com slash unplugged. Collide dot com slash unplugged. Now as I like to do at every fest, I try to figure out who has come the furthest. And I think this time around

it was Frank Karlochek from NextCloud. He came straight from Foss, Asia in Vietnam. And I don't know how he was still awake, but he did join us for a conversation that I think was pretty interesting. There was an announcement that came out from Germany about 30,000 government workstations switching to Linux. workstation switching to Linux. And one of the lines in the Ars Technica article that seemed like I wanted to have more information about, and your tweet helped

me even highlight it, is they're migrating from SharePoint to Nextcloud. That seems like a really big deal. Is there any details you can share there with us? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this is an interesting project. We are working on this for years, actually. I think three years, or maybe even four. Oh, wow.

So I think it's fascinating, because there like a few years ago or many years ago, there was this famous project of Munich, Munich moving to open source and Linux. Right. And this was a failure for different reasons. One of it was probably that it all started on the desktop. So they started to move Windows to Linux workstations. And they really had trouble with

acceptance of the normal office workers. They're like, oh, this looks different. That's weird. I don't want that. At the time, I was involved in the KDE project a lot. And I still remember that we got a bug report that, why are these folder icons blue?

They should be yellow. No, really? Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Because, come on, they're yellow in Windows. Why are they suddenly blue? That's like I need a training to understand that now. So this was a bit challenging.

And in this project now, I think there is a lot of learnings. And this starts on the server not on the client now like replacing Exchange with an open source alternative, replacing SharePoint with Nextcloud and so on and people can at the moment still use their Windows

or Mac or phone, tablet, whatever they use, but the migration will start on the server first which I think is a better strategy Are they also going to switch out the Windows applications first, like say Firefox but the migration will start on the server first which I think is a better strategy. Do you know, are they also going to switch out the Windows applications first? Like say Firefox and... Yeah, they will.

They also will move to LibreOffice and some other things. But this is a little bit like second phase basically. Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, that would make sense, right? You get them on the back-end services, that's the least probably impactful to their day-to-day work. You get that done ahead of time, and then they're

compatible with whatever they move to. So is that battle lost, in your opinion, then? Citing Munich as the example. You mean the desktop? Yeah, the typical office worker using Linux. I don't think it's lost. It's at a time, I mean, the Munich

project was, I don't know, 15 years ago. This was the time where a lot of the applications that were used are still desktop applications. Nowadays, a lot happens in the browser, in the cloud. True, yeah. And I think this is another opportunity, because if they move to, I don't know, desktop world, to something that happens in the browser,

and it could be Microsoft 365, could also be NextCloud. This is like an easier migration than just, I don't know, replacing Outlook with Thunderbird or something. What's changed a lot in that sort of 10, 15-year period as well is the adoption of mobile devices. People do everything everywhere. Yeah, they can email on their phone now. The other thing that I kind of recall

not working so well in Munich is they deployed their own Linux distribution. Yes. Do you think that was what you did back then? Yeah, it was. It was more common. Is that a similar approach they're going to take this time, do you know? Are they going to go with something that's more off the shelf? I hope not. I think this was a mistake.

I don't know. I mean, the IT people at the time who worked on the Munich project, I mean, they did a really good job, but they tried to do too much, right? I mean, there are Linux distributions which are good, and desktop environments that are good. I'm not picking any sites here, but there's things you can just take and use, right? I mean, why do you build your own thing? That's just crazy.

And not only is it a huge hill to climb, but then it's tricky to find anybody that has any expertise. Everybody has to be in-house taught, and so that's a lot of friction, too. And there's no training programs around any of that. You've got to create all of that. I think we're a lot more mature in the software

development lifecycle than a lot of that stuff now, too. We understand what maintenance means over a decade. Or some. Some, yes. Fair point. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I know that there's a very similar project in France happening at the moment,

and they are actually in the process of like, oh, look at all these nice, cool open source tools on the internet. Let's take it and build our own product on top of it. And we'll hire 100 developers who maintain it. And basically, they're forking everything. And it's the same mistake. I mean, they don't understand what they're getting into. A huge, huge pile of work, really, I have to imagine.

But I am also feeling kind of more positive about this. It sounds like you're feeling a little more positive about this particular transition, especially in a way there'd be a good gain if they just got the backend services off of proprietary. I mean, the desktop is also great to see. Well, I mean, in self-hosted, basically one of the entire main

parameters of the show is own your data. Yeah. Which includes owning the outages and the data loss and backups and everything else. But, you know, and NextCloud is fundamental to that. For me, at least, in my home lab. Yeah. I replaced

all my cloud syncing, all my calendar, all that with NextCloud. Yeah, do you remember we used to use stuff like Dropbox back in the day? Yeah, yeah my calendar, all that with NextCloud. Yeah, do you remember? We used to use stuff like Dropbox back in the day. Yeah, yeah. And Google Calendar and Google Contacts. Never heard of it. Well, Frank, I hope you enjoy the stay here.

I hope you like the fest. Thank you for sitting down with us. Thanks a lot. Spent a little time. It's always good to catch up. Thank you. Are we going to see you at LinuxFest Northwest too? Yes.

Oh, you maniac. Good. Yeah, I don't know. I live in a plane nowadays. Oh, you maniac. Good. I don't know. I live in a plane nowadays. Yeah, I bet. Do we know, did Frank get a chance to get some good Texas barbecue?

Yeah, did you hear? I didn't hear. Well, we'll have to check in at LinuxFest. One of the things that he doesn't talk a lot about, but he's also quite the photo bug and I think he goes and spends a lot of this time

going out there and getting photos. It's a nice excuse to explore the city. Yeah, what a great little side hobby if you're going to be traveling like that anyways. What a great side hobby. So this other interview that we want to feature is with listener Keith. And one of our favorite things about going to these events is just discovering how much better our audience is than us as people. No kidding. It's so true.

And the things that they accomplish. And Brent does a great job of kind of circulating from time to time and finding people that could be interesting to chat with on the show. And he sat Keith down with us. And Keith sat down, we thought, to talk about Wireshark and just, you know, packet sniffing. And we're like, okay. You know, Wes and I are kind of still setting up for the morning. So we were actually kind of heads down and we were kind of just sort of chatting with

Keith about, you know, packet sniffing. That's pretty neat, right? And then somewhere in the conversation, it became obvious to us that the reason why Keith was packet sniffing is because he was testing software that's going to get deployed on the International Space Station. Then we had to ask him a few questions about that. So are we talking, though, like hundreds of computers on the ISS? Are we talking dozens?

If I remember right, don't quote me, I think there's like 44. Okay. And is it somebody's job up there to be like the ISS IT person? I think it's, you know's the ground control handles all that, and if they need an astronaut to go pull a box, they will. They just give them instructions. Yep. They have written instructions on how to do all that.

The internal ones are fun. The external ones are not so fun. Maybe they have to go outside. There are sometimes times they have to go outside. Space mosh. I think they've only had to do one. For a computer failure, though. Yeah, for the entire time that it's been up there.

That's nice to hear. Just as computer people, I would imagine and hope that physical stuff or pumps or interlock or other things would fail more often than the computers. But given how computers work, you could see it going the other way, too. They do have some testing software that Honeywell provides. So they can actually put the box in there and run the test suite. And they have spares so they can, let's say if this one piece did fail, they can put a new part in, put it back up on the shelf. And if they ever need it, they can just hang it out and put it back in.

How are these getting, are these getting manufactured in the States, these machines? Are they manufactured around the world? No, these are all manufactured at Honeywell in Lundale. Oh. But we do, there are equipment in russia and in italy also i guess i i knew honeywell was involved but i guess i just didn't understand the depth yeah it's not what i picture when i think of honeywell right it's very cool honeywell does a lot of things yeah it sounds like it that's what i'm learning here well my, at my facility, it's that.

They do reaction wheels and gyros for satellites. Let's see what else they do. We do all kinds of things. Do you get to use much Linux in the course of your work? We do have what they call an MDM test thing. They do use Red Hat. We use a lot of, like, the horizontal mates use Solaris. It's not Linux, but it is Linux.

Still some Solaris action. We do use some of the, like, Sigwin products. Oh, yeah, sure. So, I mean, we don't use Linux per se on some of our stuff, but yeah, kind of. Some of the open source world's tools at least. Yeah, I mean. I guess, are they updating the systems up there

in space? Are they installing patches and updates? Yes, they do. And they have an internet connection that they can just... They have multiple different connections. They do have internet. They have some other ways, like SATCOM type of communications. And they're doing, like, Windows updates? No.

I wouldn't think so. Right? I just can't imagine running Windows in space and keeping it up to date. They do have laptops. They do have laptops that do have Windows on it. Can they update those? I think if they have to do it, they send it up as an image on a disk or something. That makes sense.

At a next flight, and they just ghost the whole thing. And you're invalidated, tested on it. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Well, it was interesting, because it was like, how do you activate Windows from space? When we originally did some of this stuff,

we actually had to get Microsoft to say, okay, we'll not have you do activations and stuff. They gave you like a secret code you could put in there to bypass activation? I don't remember what they gave us. We'll take care of it for these machines. That seems like an appropriate use case to bypass activation. It's nice to have the ability to call up Microsoft and ask for that. I don't think we could do that. No, probably

not. We're going to be on a road trip. We'd really like not to activate Windows for a bit. I don't think we'd get very far. I'm not sure what the legalities of being in outer space are either. Right. If you agree to a EULA in space, I don't think your trademark applies

here. Yeah, exactly. That's pretty neat. And Wireshark helps make all If you agree to a EULA in space. Right. I don't think your trademark applies here. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's pretty neat. And Wireshark helps make all that go. Yeah. That's, like I said, just another tool in our tool bag that we use for trying to diagnose issues that happen. That's pretty cool, though.

We have a 1553 analyzer that looks all 5053 traffic. We have a SCSI analyzer because there is some SCSI. Still, huh? Yeah, on some of our ground equipment. Really? For disk or what? Yeah, I remember this stuff was built, originally built in probably 95 or earlier. And so some of the stuff for communications,

I'm still using SCSI back then. It's still there. SCSI disks, SCSI accessories. I mean, as long as you get everything right, get your numbers, get your SCSI number right, get your Terminator set up, it's not so bad. Yeah, I mean, one of the AMDMs used to have a rotating hard drive,

and now they have solid state, and they're all SCSI-based. You can buy solid state SCSI devices? No, Honeywell made it. Oh, okay. Dang, that's pretty sweet. Yeah, I don't think we can do that either. All right, we'll bang it together, yeah. They made their own solid state drive.

Bcash FS on a solid state SCSI. You're telling me, for them, it was easier to create their own device than just get off SCSI? Well, because it's... You've got to remember, all the stuff that they put in these MDMs have to be rad hard.

I mean, they're basically the newest computer processor we use is like an old Pentium. Wow. And that's the newest one. The other ones are like 386s because they are rad hard. I'm not going to get flip bits or anything. What have they done to them to make them hard?

I'm not sure what they've done. And why can't they make them newer? Well, I remember we were talking with Tim. He was saying the same, right? Like, weren't they using an old Motorola or something? Yep. An old PowerPC. But I think it was made by Motorola. I think it's because the newer chips have higher

densities. More air. More chance of an error. I think they do have newer processors. It's just the cost of getting it tested. If I go to space, I don't want to bring an old computer. I want a nice computer. Well, yeah.

I mean, I think all the newer stuff are using newer RADHARDEN stuff. Can we get like an Apple M-series that's RADHARDEN? Yeah, yeah. Can I bring like a Ryzen machine too? Can we get hardened Ryzen? RADHARDEN Ryzen. It Rad Harden. Yeah, yeah. Can I bring like a Ryzen machine too? Can we get Harden Ryzen? Rad Harden Ryzen. That just sounds cool. So what are you hoping to pick up from the fest?

Anything for work or just here in general? I'm here personally for myself. I couldn't figure out what I could say here. Company. He didn't want to go into too much detail, so I just let it go there. But he's doing kind of a swing of events, too, which is pretty neat for work. Whenever you can get work to swing that.

And what just a wild world he's working in, huh? Yeah, one of my favorite things to do to you both is to find someone like this in the crowd and to just send them to you guys without giving you a heads up at all and see what happens. And, yeah, it turned out pretty good. Yeah. I was like, okay, I can talk about Wireshark. It's been a minute, but let's talk about it. I went a whole different direction. You know, he mentioned doing like a spacewalk to replace some of these computers.

Yeah. And could you imagine that? Having to get your suit on, go through the airlock just to like, I don't know, flick this thing on and off or replace it or something. Then you forgot the screwdriver. And then like, what's also also like you go to a social event and they say, so what do you do for a living? Well, I repair computers in space. I mean, that's a wild job, right?

That's a wild job. We tried something brand spanking new with this Linux Fest. We gave Brent the ability to go remote. Now, it wasn't perfect. Oh, thanks. Well, it wasn't your fault. Not the technology, not you. Yeah, it wasn't perfect. Oh, thanks. Well, it wasn't your fault. Not the technology, not you. Yeah, it wasn't.

We were on a 40 kilobit connection. So the codec is not fantastic. But the content was pretty great. And it was a lot of fun for us. We're going to try to use this to, I got to remember after the show, we need to order you a new headset. We got to do that.

We got, there's a little, there's some modifications that we learned that we need to make. But I think we got it figured out. So I think we're going to be able to do this with even's some modifications that we learned that we need to make, but I think we got to figure it out. So I think we're going to be able to do this with even more success at LinuxFest Northwest. But for a brief moment in time, we set Brent Lee free, and he bumped into the chair of Texas LinuxFest. And our buddy Carl was there as well. Hello, I'm Ted Gould.

I'm the conference chairman. We're at Texas LinuxFest, and we've been calling for about 10 years. It's 2010. This is our 11th conference, but we took a little break for the pandemic that happened. But this is our first one back after the pandemic, and we're excited to be here. Did you say 11 years? Yeah. So it's, well, 11 conferences.

So it's been since 2010. But yeah, we've been doing it for quite a while and all over Texas, in Irving and San Marcos and Austin. That's amazing. And bouncing around like that, I would imagine, has unique challenges for organizing an event, but also unique opportunities. Can you give us a tour of that a little bit?

Yeah, so it's interesting because there's a huge tech community in Austin. And so we tend to get the most people who are in Austin. But we're trying to figure out how to break into those other communities because there's a huge tech community in Dallas, there's a huge tech community in Houston, and how do we get into those communities? It's been a unique challenge and I don't think we're good at it necessarily yet. We're just trying. But this year we partnered with the KCD folks to get them here

and I think that was really exciting because they brought a lot of Kubernetes energy. I think it's interesting to see how Linux has changed. I think a lot of Kubernetes energy. I think it's interesting to see how Linux has changed. I think a lot of people identified with Linux before, and there's not a lot of people who identify with Linux as much. They identify with Kubernetes. They identify with Raspberry Pi.

They identify with, you know, Android. But we all know those are all Linux things, but they don't necessarily... I don't do Linux. I do Kubernetes. I don't... Yeah, and so I think that's an interesting challenge going forward. That reminds me of a point that our keynote speaker

in 2019, the last event we had, Thomas Cameron, he brought that up in his talk about how there's all this move to the cloud and all these things, but if you're a Linux nerd, you've got to leg up. The cloud is Linux. Do you think in that way Linux is like an old term or that there are new relationships to it?

You know, I think that some people do view it as an old term or that there are new relationships to it? You know, I think that some people do view it as an old term. I think it's kind of a foundational thing. It's like, is math an old term? Well, math is an old term, but I think it's going to flow through. I think you'll see

as people move on for years and years and years, they'll say, oh wow, Linux was there. And so your 22-year-old just out of college isn't going to say, I do Linux. They're excited about this new thing that's hot. But then they're like, oh, yeah, my whole life was Linux. I hadn't really put it together, but going to Scale and then Texas Linux Fest back to back, I realized that we're seeing a new trend develop post-COVID with these conferences. And that's like the co-located conference.

Scale's done this for a while, but now we're seeing it take off in other places. They had like a KubeCon kind of event. Yeah, Kubernetes Community Day or something like that. And I think it works to different degrees of success. I don't know if I'd say it's a banger of success. You know, we saw this with Scale and NixCon and Ubicon. And the discussion is, is there a lot of crossover? Does this make it more economically viable?

Is this a better way to make these more sustainable? This is a new thing that's happening with Linux events. Well, we're an educational nonprofit. It's about bringing the community together and allowing them to learn from each other. And I think that's the same thing. We could talk about it in the microcosm of, you know, Nix people learning about this,

but the reality is that we're all learning from each other and that's exactly what the mission of the nonprofit is. Can you gents talk a little bit about like the hopes and dreams for future Texas Linux Fest? Like, this is a great one, I think a huge success. What's coming up next? What do you want to try? And how do you want it to grow? Well, so I think we need to reestablish yourself after the pandemic. I think a lot of people have talked to me about like, oh, yeah, I didn't know this conference existed. I've lived in Texas for 20 years and I didn't know it existed. I'm like, well, really? We've been around. I don't know how you missed us. And so I think we need to reestablish ourselves as an event on the calendar. A lot of people actually said, oh, this is the

first one. And I'm like, no, it's not the first one. And even vendors were telling me that, oh, this is the first one. And I'm like, me that, you know, oh, this is the first one. And I'm like, okay, well, so I think we need to reestablish ourselves and get a constant slot, even getting conference space after the pandemic was hard. And so we just need to be like, oh yeah, every spring I go to Texas Linux Fest

and get that pattern down and then we can start to build on it. So I think reestablishing is the first part, then growing. You mentioned a bit of a relationship with scale, and I'm not that aware of that. Can you explain how that works? So we're both under the same

501c3 non-profit, LinuxFest. So if you go to LinuxFest.org, they sponsor scale text LinuxFest. DevOpsDaysLA, and I don't remember the rest of them. ShellCon? ShellCon, I think so, yeah. So they do a bunch of different conferences,

and they kind of act as a fiscal sponsor for it. So they help us with the fact that you have to do payments ahead of time and stuff like that. They handle those for us because we don't get vendor payments until later, and then they just do all the financial parts, and they're the actual registered 501c3. Well, we appreciate what each of you are doing, so thank you very much for that. Thank you guys for coming out.

We really appreciate you guys coming here and being on the floor and talking to everyone. We really appreciate the work you guys put into it too. Nice, thank you. And promoting the conference. Like they're our media sponsors. So Jupiter Broadcasting is, and we really appreciate that.

All the promotion y'all have done on the show, talking us up. I know I saw quite a few attendees talking about how I can't wait to go to Texas Linux Fest and meet Chris and meet Wes and meet Brent. So that's just driving that kind of human connection. That's why I love Texas Linux Fest, why I love a lot of conferences.

All of the technical stuff is great and love it. But also the most important thing to me is getting to see my friends and connect with people. Like I have friends that I only see at conferences that live all over the world. I want to take a moment and thank our Unplugged core members, our core contributors. If you want to support the show directly, you can go to LinuxUnplugged.com and you can click on the core contributor link. This show has generally an ad spot right about here. But right now the ad market, the Ar ard market, what am I trying to say?

Aardvark. The aardvark ad market, which is really rough, is even worse than normal for podcasts, especially podcasts that focus on the Linux niche. It's just the state of things. It's fine. But if you'd like to help us keep going, you can contribute directly every single month by becoming a core contributor. You go to linuxunplugged.com and you on Core Contributor right there at the top of the website. Now, it wasn't all just about the fest. Of course, we had to have ourselves a full Texas experience because it was both Brent and Wes's first time to

Texas. Well, it's not my first time to Texas, but my first time to Texas Linux Fest. I read the doc wrong. You both were first time Texas Linux Festers. Not your first time to Austin or your first time? It was my first time to Austin. Good. All right. Good. Okay. Good. We'll go with that. We'll go with that. We'll go with first time to

Austin. Jesus. It's like extracting milk from my knee. I tell you what. I'll go with first time to Austin. Jesus. It's like, you know, extracting milk from my knee. I tell you what. So I want to know what you both thought just in general, because as somebody who spent like six weeks in Austin one time, I'm like an expert. I'll give you my quick, I'll give you my quick take just as an update. It really feels like in the last six years, Austin has clearly become a food town. Like if you just want to take an eat vacation, you should just go to Austin, Texas, because there's everything there.

Even the stuff that Texas traditionally sucks at, which is like Thai food. I can speak from experience. They get pretty good in Austin and they got, uh, you know, breakfast places that are fancy. They got places that are real true, kind of like a Texas experience, like know, breakfast places that are fancy. They got places that are real true, kind of like a Texas experience, like the burger place that we went to. Everything. As far as eating, you are covered unless all you want is a salad. Yeah. Shout out to Sandy's, open since 1946, also right next to the venue. Yeah. Also shout out to those birds.

Yeah. The great-tailed grackle. Kind of a crow, corvid-looking bird with a big, long tail and a strong desire to steal your lunch. Yeah, don't let your guard down for a second. These things will take your burger from you. I mean, like, and they're making such a ruckus, too. Yeah, fascinating. I mean, they could be your car alarm, no problem. So we stayed a couple of days after Texas Linux Fest and Wes didn't have as much time but we – Brent and I had a little extra time because honestly it was cheaper to fly out a few days later than it was to fly out on the weekend. So we stuck around and we decided we had a car. Let's go head out into the Texas hill country. I've heard it's beautiful. I'd like to see it for myself.

I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to natural beauty, being from the Pacific Northwest. I've never heard you describe yourself this way. But I am. My standards are very high. I think the Pacific Northwest is some of the most beautiful places and country in the world. Not the most, but it's in

there, right? It's in there. On a list somewhere, surely. Definitely. In the top ten. There's a lot of beautiful places definitely yeah oh top 10 top top 12 anyways we get down to texas i'm like all right texas what do you got because i have got very high expectations and i have been told over and over again the hill country is beautiful. And I was not disappointed. I really enjoyed it. So, Wes, we went out there and we went to some of the caves. I'll have some pictures if you go to chrislast.com on my nostril.

But describe these caves because, I mean, they were just great. Yeah, the Longhorn Cavern State Park, a limestone cave formed by the cutting action of an underground river that receded thousands of years ago. But, you know, before it became a tourist attraction, it was used by Native Americans, Confederate soldiers, and outlaws. And then in the 1920s and early 30s, it was actually a nightclub that had shows being broadcast via radio back to San Antonio. Sadly, no shows going on when we were there. But you remember when we went there, it was significantly cooler. Oh, yeah.

Underground. 80-something up at the top and, I don't know, 60-something down in the cave. It's like $25 and you get a tour of all of these underground caves. But even if you just walk around the place, it's pretty neat. I distinctly remember you not really wanting to go down there because you thought maybe it was out of reach to those of us who didn't pay. All right. You're going to bring this up. All right. I thought. Wanting to go down there? Because you thought maybe it was out of reach to those of us who didn't pay? You're going to bring this up.

All right. You're going to bring this up. So Brent is like the most like rule follower you're going to – until he's not. And then all of a sudden he's like this rebel that wants to just push the boundaries. And so I'm like, okay, well, we'll see where we go. We'll see. We walk out there and they have like all these signs about how you need to sign up for the tour. Sign up for the tour.

Don't go over here. You can't go here. You got to be on the tour i'm like and i'm getting like a strong vibe that they clearly want us to pay to be out here but brent has this sort of um i don't know you might call it canadian french attitude he's like well let's just go find what we find and if they if they get upset i'll just charm them and it'll be fine i'll tell them i'm canadian and i didn't understand and it'll work. And Wes and I look at each other and we're like, yeah,

that probably makes sense. So yeah, I'm fine with it. Yeah. All right. All right. If you're going to take the blame. So we walk around the facility and I see all these signs about where we

can't go, but we kind of walk the edge of that and go down a set of stairs and, and we end up in a cave where there's a whole bunch of signs. But this whole area seems to be open to the general public. But then to make it as embarrassing as possible, the tour group shows up while we're down there. We're just kind of like hanging out, sitting in the cave, having a snack. Clearly not without tickets. Like sitting on these like really impressive carve outs and we're just kind of having a snack.

There was no sign that said don't sit there, but it was kind of unclear. But Wes, did I not say before we went down the steps, did I not say watch the tour group show up while we're down here? Did I not say that? You sure did. I did say that. So we're down there and it's where the tour group kind of sets up and starts. And the guy that was giving the tour thought we were trying to like sneak in. And he gave Brent the sternest look I have seen on the entire trip. Like, don't you dare come along as a freeloader on my tour.

So it was good. But it was about as embarrassing as possible. You were embarrassed? I was so embarrassed. When the tour guy showed up. Before then I was Oh, you were embarrassed? I was so embarrassed. When the tour guide showed up, before then I was good, but the tour, I was so embarrassing. But then afterwards we saw pictures of, we got pictures of salamanders, we got

some great shots of salamanders, we got some great walking, and it was all good, but for that brief moment, I was so mortified that he thought we were trying to like freeload on his tour. I mean, they don't even turn the lights on in there until the tour comes in. Yeah. They're serious about it. I liked interpreting the signs

and just seeing how far we can take it. You weren't mortified? You weren't embarrassed by that entire situation? No, because I thought we were on the right side of the signs. It's true. We technically were. But you saw the look you got. You got a look. He didn't say anything though, did he? I think he says it like, sorry look. He didn't say anything, though, did he?

I think he says it like, sorry, guys. He said something like, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I can't let you in. I'm not letting you in. Yeah, but it was very stern. It's like when somebody gives you really bad news with a smile, that's what this guy did. You know, I learned this by being a photographer,

and as a photographer, you, I don't know, push the limits of trying to get into places and stuff. And if you look like you know where you're going and what you're doing, you get into lots of spots. I'm not responsible for wherever you try to go, though. I mean, maybe by yourself. Maybe would have made it in. But with all of us looking guilty. To be honest, that wasn't the goal. We weren't trying to get the tour.

We were just trying to see as much as we could see just walking around. And I think we, you know, check. And we got, and we cooled off for a bit and then we got to

continue on the drive. We ended up at a great spot for food and Yeah, the Colorado River just coursing all over. We crisscrossed it, I don't know,

a couple of different times and some lovely views. A castle included. Yeah, we stopped and saw a castle. Who knew? Who knew there was castles in Texas?

I didn't. And around that same time, we took Brent saw a castle. Who knew? Who knew there was castles in Texas? I didn't. And around that same time, we took Brent to his first Buc-ee's. I did not know what a Buc-ee's was. And I didn't even really know until we got there what the experience was going to be. It was an experience. I would describe Buc-ee's as a place where they had the idea of what if we had so many gas stations you could just go shopping while you got gas and then from there birth like the wall of jerky and all of their you know food and everything like that there were several jerky walls yeah there

was um a lot of meat again this is a theme from pretty much everywhere we went in Texas. Yeah. It was really the only thing I could eat. So I had more meat. I always enjoy the people watching at these places. That's always a great part of it. The Buc-ee's is also an opportunity to get like little trinkets for family back home and stuff too. You got a bunch of things, didn't you?

Just little things for the kids and whatnot. They also love Buc-ee's. You know, right here on the side it says, World's Cleanest Restrooms. I don't know, did you get to try that, Brent? I did because Hadiyah kept going on and on and on about it, so I figured I got to try these things. And they're like fuel station washrooms,

but the best that could possibly be within that definition. I would say, yeah. Yeah. Good experience. You know, like good, solid walls and doors between the restrooms. Good and clean and well-maintained. Occasionally when I'm traveling, I ask a question to someone who's like behind a counter. And then I immediately feel a bit embarrassed about it.

And that happened at the Buc-ee's. Oh, really? And I got some food for lunch. And then I immediately asked this person who was kind enough to serve me a giant plate of meat. I said, oh, is there anywhere I can sit here to enjoy my lunch? And she looked a little embarrassed.

She said, no, you, probably the only place is in your car. Yeah. And I didn't expect that because it's kind of a restaurant in there. They serve a lot of food. Yeah. It's mostly food. But also Texas. And just a lot of food. Yeah. It's mostly food.

But also Texas. And just go to your car, dude. What's your problem? Yeah. You're here to get gas. What? It's a cultural experience. Yeah.

So there was Bucky's for you. And then, of course, we did have that after party that was thrown by Tailscale and our buddy Alex. It was wonderful. Do you remember what the venue was called? I don't know. Gibson Street? Oh, yeah. Oh, nice memory.

Gibson Street Bar in Austin. Good, nice, like, deck area where you could sit outside and enjoy the evening. Yeah. That was nice. I mean, I think a good, you know, obviously not the entire folks at the conference showed up, but there was a good mix of different people coming through, plenty of space there in the bar to kind of hang out and get to mix with different groups. As always, you know, the audience is super inclusive and welcoming and the folks at the conference and like a lot of

people are seeing old friends and making new friends. You know, our dear friend Carl occasionally during the fest gave us some like inside baseball about what's going on. And during the after party he said, hey guys, we kind of prepaid some of the drinks here and we have a limit, but we're nowhere near that limit. So have at her. And that for me was like the green light to try a bunch of drinks that I've been wanting to try for a couple of years. But also with that like Texas flair or even Austin flair, if you will. So I ended up having some great experiences and I don't know if you boys did. But I got an

old-fashioned which is you know not unique to Texas by any means but what was unique was that they used a local bourbon and uh the bartender literally like searched around for 30 seconds which is a long time when they're like packed trying to make drinks and then he grabbed this bottle off the shelf that he finally found and began to open it, like take the seal off of the bottle. And I thought, oh, okay, I'm getting a special drink here. And sure enough, it turned out Alex had ordered the same drink in old fashioned, but he didn't ask for the like, you know, the Brent special. And mine was way better. So I had an amazing experience there.

And then for the next drink that really hit me was not hit me as in hit me, but hit me as in a memory. I figured I should get some mezcal, a drink with some mezcal. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because that's like regional, right? I asked him to make me something with a local mezcal. And same deal. He went looking on the shelf for the special mezcal and made me. I didn't mention what the drink was, but now that I've done some post-research,

including up here in Seattle, I think it was a mezcalita, which is like some mezcal, which is like a Mexican agave alcohol. It's considered like an overcooked agave, or at least I think that's part of the translation. Quite an old drink. But it has a really super smoky flavor. So if you like smoky, it's for you. If you don't like smoky,

you're going to hate it, but it had some lime in there and it was delicious. So really a nice time for me. boost to gray now we do have some boosts to get to, and Eric is from our podcast, our baller booster this week with 79,000 sats. Hello, Jupiter Broadcasting. The Retro Gamer Emmy certainly noticed the recent plays of Street Fighter 2 intro track just to hype us up on the live stream. The SNE version is fine. But let's be real. You got to try this next time. And he links us to the, oh boy, look at him with like, Wow.

With the S3 object storage linkage here. This is pretty great. That is good. Yeah. Yes, Eric. Thank you. Those are great. Those are really great. And then, of course, there is also a remix version that has been, of course, of course, you can't have a classic without a remix.

Those are really good. If I wasn't already hyped, I'd be hyped. Thank you, Eric. Those are fantastic. I will save wasn't already hyped, I'd be hyped. Thank you, Eric. Those are fantastic. I will save those after the show. Nice call. You know, you tuned right in. You got it. Appreciate that. Hybrid sarcasm came in with 74,205 sets, which... I hoard that which your kind covet.

But hey, isn't that a familiar number? Do you think so? Yeah. What does Google have to say about it? Hmm. So you're telling me that there's a special, like somebody just boosted in out of nowhere with a special number? That's never happened, Wes Payne. It might be happening right now.

It might be something known as a registry number? Tough little shit. Little. Here's a Defiant Boost to celebrate the best Trek ever, Deep Space Nine. Hardly a bad episode in the bunch, even the ridiculous ones. Is it though? Is that true?

Hey, we got to watch the baseball episode on our trip. That was nice. That is true. Pluto TV comes in clutch every single time we go on a trip, doesn't it? Yeah, one of our traditions is to play Star Trek 24 hours a day while we're staying in our Airbnb. Yeah. And I have to agree here with Hybrid.

I hadn't really dove into Deep Space Nine. You boys are kind of giving me the Star Trek tour over the years. And I kind of gained a new appreciation for it. And you were explaining, Chris, to me that like the colors were new back then. And I kind of, I sort of fell in love this trip. Yeah. The original series is really bright. And then where, so they, so the original series is famous for kind of being one of the first shows to really push color on TV. And then Deep Space Nine is famous for being one of the early shows to push a continuous narrative through seasons on television. Yeah. Right. You went from episodes in a bottle where everything sort of resets

and you go find a new planet with a new alien and you figure out what's going to happen in that episode to a long-running cross-galaxy war over several seasons. Yeah, it's great. Thank you, Hybrid, for that boost. We really appreciate it. Now, Sean W. came in with a couple boosts, totaling 35,813.

Quacka quacka, it's a treasure. Yippee! Long-time listener, medium-time party member, and first-time booster. Hey, thank you. Congratulations. You made the journey. That's a lot of support. And that's a lot of trekking. I've been listening since the Matt Hartley days. Every year that you cover LinuxFest Northwest, I really wish I could be there.

So this year, I pulled that pin. I'm crossing the Pacific, and we'll see you all in Bellingham. Sean from Australia. What? Whoa! That's nuts! Sean! That is ridiculously awesome.

We cannot wait. So, hey, Sean W., remember, remember, remember. And Sean follows up remember, remember, remember. And Sean follows up here and says, in case you didn't think I was serious, here's an on-the-move postcode boost from the airport. Uh-oh. 3,045 Satoshis. So they're on the move, Wes. Where are they at? I think they're in the Melbourne airport.

Wow. Boosting us from the airport en route. Which I think. That's so great. From the date of this boost means that they are probably planning on spending some time here in the Pacific Northwest. Oh, well, definitely plan to come to the barbecue. How long is that flight? What, like 18 hours or something? I did it. It's 24 or so.

You know, in Sean's honor with this boost, you know, taking the effort to set up all of the things required to boost, especially when you're outside the States. And if they're staying a little extra, I feel like maybe we should do something on Monday or something, Sean. So make sure you come say hi. And I'll probably recognize you from the accent. But really appreciate you making that effort. That's incredible. That's really exciting. Also, somebody else who's made it just a real hero's effort to make it possible to show up at LinuxFest Northwest. It is our very own listener, Jeff.

B-O-O-S-T. With 35,567 sats. And Jeff has been placing all of, like, the blocks in a row to, like, actually make it possible to show up at LinuxFest Northwest. And he wanted to send a little love to Brent, who glides around like a majestic Canadian goose. I thought it was a Canadian moose. Oh, honk like a moose. I'm surprised you don't know that.

Did we get the wrong brother? Yeah, this might be the other one. You made it this far, though. I'm very impressed. You know what? I thought I would have been included in sooner. C-dubs boosts in with $33,333. Coming in hot with the boost!

Have you tried Cubes OS? I was hesitant at first, but it's now my daily driver. No way. I want to hear more about this. I would not believe C-dubs. I would think that is BS, except they sent that in with Boost CLI, which is, if they sent that in with Boost CLI. All right, all right. This is serious.

Finally, the desktop that puts privacy and security first. Wow. Now, here, boys, we've got a challenge. Oh, no. Oh. C-dubs says, I challenge you to get Cubes OS going, but with a twist. Instead of the default Debian or Fedora cubes, use NixOS. And then tell me how you did it.

Is this a thing you can do? I mean, it's supposed to be a bunch of, you know, sort of what, isolated VMs tied together with the cubes magic? Hold on, I gotta look this up. See, I feel like this is the perfect challenge. It's like, here's something that seems simple, but with an extra show-approved love topic connected to it. I can understand that you could have VMs that run NixOS, but could you actually have NixOS as the host platform for CubesOS? That's what they're asking.

What? And then also it makes me wonder, could we build such a thing? Make it so. Maybe, yeah. such a thing? Make it so. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe we should. Make it so. All right.

Thank you, Cdubs. I think we're going to need more on that, but that is something I am very interested in. We are pre-LinuxFest Northwest, so it is very possible, just to be honest with you,

I may forget about this, but I do like this idea. You're already Googling, aren't you? A little bit, yeah. But, you know, maybe send us in a reminder boost in a couple weeks. Yeah, after Linux Fest. And or, like, Cubes Crew, if you're

out there, also boost in. Yes, yes, Cubes Crew. Yes, the Cubes Crew. Please let us know if this is a thing. VT52 sent us in 31,337 sats, which I think is like a elite sats with an extra 30k. B-O-O-S-T!

What's that? Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of NixOS running on my Mac Mini M1. Hey, interesting. Just kidding. It is, of course, really, really quiet. Can you get access to GPU acceleration? What's going on with this VT? Because I've maintained that when the Asahi project makes it possible or whatever you're using, it does seem

like the Mac mini could make a nice little home server, especially if Jellyfin or Plex could get access to video acceleration. But I suppose if the CPU is fast enough, maybe you don't need it. I'd love to know a little more on that because it does seem like that'd be great. I think I measured the mini at somewhere around 10 watts, 10, 15 watts. That's great. Yeah, and that was when it was, like, doing stuff. So, you know, I don't know what it is when it's idle. That was when it was doing stuff, according to a smart plug.

We'll have this in the show notes, but VT links us to what looks like an excellent markdown docs file all about how to get this going, like a UEFI standalone setup, you know, to make all the Asahi bits play nice with NixOS. Probably something worth checking out later. A-Ron comes in with a row of McDuck's 22,222 sats. Things are looking up for old McDuck.

Yeah, this might be the self-hoster in me, but I'm surprised that Docker wasn't even mentioned in the top five apps. It's like the number three app installed for me. Good point, I suppose. Most people, I think, were taking a desktop focus. But, you know, I mean, I do end up installing Docker on my desktop.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Wes has had to also suffer Docker desktop on the Mac for work purposes from time to time. This is true, though. I am free for the moment. Yeah, nice. Oh, interesting. But I think also would be on my, like, top seven list for sure, absolutely.

I don't know if it made it on my top five. It would be, like, my number two for a server deployment. But for my desktop, I bet you it's in my top seven. Not top ten because, well, we don't talk about my top ten. I bet you it's in my top seven. Not top ten because, well, we don't talk about my top ten. Mrs. Eniotech666 boosts in with 20,000 sads. Boost!

Boosting in again for my husband. Thanks, guys, for all the hard work you do. Glad my husband has this community. That is amazing. Shout out to him, too. I want my wife to do that. She boosted in some of my favorite shows. Come on, honey.

That is really great, though. Thank you, Miss Anyatek. We appreciate it. Now, we had some live boosts come in as we're doing the show, so I don't know if we have all of them, but Adversary17 came in with 7,000 sats to say, simply, the most elegant boost possible. DexSword came in with 6,912 sats to say that the Raspberry Pi 4 had synced

to a Western Digital Blue 1TB SSD using a USB to SATA adapter. Using, you know, on a Pi 4, I mean, it's useful, right? He says, I'm not new to Linux or self-hosting, but I haven't run my own node yet, so I felt like the next appropriate project was setting one up.

Happy Sunday. Always looking forward to the pod. Thank you, sir. Faraday Fedora came in with 4,444 sats from Fountain to wish Mr. Payne a happy birthday with an additional row of ducks. Oh, that's so sweet. Oh, look at that. A birthday boost for Wes.

We also got a New Zealand boost from Falkland Tim. Ah, okay. I was going to say Falkland Tim. Oh, this is fun. Boosting in from New Zealand. No idea what you're all talking about. Just saw the little red live icon. Here's all the hard-earned fountain sets.

Hey! That's neat. Thank you. Make it so. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. In a similar sense, Original Science came in with $9,001 to say pleasant surprise to see Jupiter Broadcasting on Fountain. It's over $9,000!

Yes, we are now live on all the podcasting 2.0 apps. And then we finally got our Spaceballs boost of the episode. Kira Seatt comes in with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stats. So the culmination is 1, two, three, four, five stats. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. And this was a response to the question we had about how would you build your own vanishing system? And they write, for a vanishing system, the easiest one I've done was a live distro. I made a custom live distro that was configured the way I like it. I stole the idea from the Cali folks.

But that way, you could just boot into it directly, make Grub booted, or Kexec if you want to. Darn right. Yeah, pick your live CD of choice. Why didn't we think of that? I mean, that's a nice, yeah, right? You can kind of customize it, add on whatever extra packages you need if they're in the repo, and make a new ISO.

I still maintain that I love the idea that you just somehow, with, I mean, really be three commands. Create the RAM disk. Kexec into your environment. No, no, no. Create the RAM disk. Restore the ButterFS. Then Kexec into the environment.

And you're boom. You're good to go. I'm excited to make you do your first Kexec sometime soon. I watched you do it so many times I feel like I've done it, you know? Now, Zack Attack came in with 5,321 Satoshis. It's on the topic of tails, saying that when they want to run something that isn't going to be saved on a machine that they're in front of, what would be beneficial, though, is a way to have two passwords

unlock different sections of persistent storage. That way, if someone forces you to unlock it, you have some plausible deniability there. And I will confirm VeriCrypt, which I used to give this a spin when we looked at it in past episodes, does exactly that. It allows you to set up two passwords, and one of them when you throw it in there just gives you a bunch of photos of Wes, and the other one hides your OS which is

exactly what you're looking for what no what don't don't you okay no choice no I guess not I guess not but okay all right thank you for that I appreciate that Mick Lang comes in with 4096 that's fun will now commence I think that might be like a 4K boost. Oh. So is there a special sound we should have for that? Maybe. They write, I hope I'm not too late to answer episode 556 question about the first five things I install after a fresh Linux installation. Here are mine. Number one, Firefox. Number two, Fish Shell.

Nice. Hey, yo. Yeah, definitely. Number three, Git. Number four, NeoVim. Nice. Number five, Yadam. Yet another. dot files manager.

Oh, we didn't hear very many dot files managers. And that's surprising. Yeah. Yeah, what? You're just going to use your tools without configuration? It just gets me so worked up. Gene Bean, our pal Gene Bean, boosts in with a row of talks. Not chiming in with our pick, Atuin, to say I love Atuin and self-host the server at home.

Now, TacoStrange came in with 12345, Satoshi's, and you know what that is. That might be a Spaceballs boost. 12345? Yes. That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. Home Assistant is what got me into self-hosting

and back into Linux as a daily driver. I discovered it on accident while looking through the Raspberry Pi imagery at all the available images and came across Home Assistant. I tried it out and it's now at the center of my smart home and I can't live without it. It quickly outgrew the Pi and it's

currently running on a VM in Proxmox. That is a neat story. Strange, that's incredible. You just discovered it while like browsing through Raspberry Pi images and like, hey, this is Home Assistant thing. Never even thought to browsing through Raspberry Pi images. And like, hey, this is a homelessness thing. Never even thought to browse through Raspberry Pi images. Yeah. That's, wow.

Not what I would have expected. And I love it. Forty Deuce came in with 4,242 sats. And they write, Austin is a, or Otten is a nice pick. I know, it's horrible. I'm going to read Otten, which is A-T-U-I-N is Austin for the rest of the day. What? No.

Yeah, Austin. Yeah, Austin. Okay, great. That way we keep with the Texas theme. Oh, can you blame me? No. Can you blame me? I mean, it looks like Austin.

Just add a T as Tatooine. Well, and maybe move that T, you know. Auten has some great features, but I simply wasn't aware of them when I tried it. I appreciate the nod to Terry Great-a-ton. Thank you, 40 Deuce, and thank you very much for sending in 4,242 sets. And a little shout-out to Terry Pratchett there. I like that a lot. Tomato boosts in with 12,345 sets.

I think that's pronounced tomato, Wes. We're going to have to go right to Lunacrispy. Two things for Brent's ergonomic interest. Ensure the basics, arm and hand positions, and cross shifting especially. Brent in particular might be interested in the tech Shinobi keyboard, which is mechanical based on the old ThinkPad layout, including a track point. I love mine. based on the old ThinkPad layout, including a track point. I love mine.

Currently working on a split keyboard design, I guess, the people behind that keyboard are, with a track point. So that also might be worth waiting for. You know what this boost does for me? First of all, it lets me know that I have ergonomic interests, but also makes me realize that the audience knows me better than I do because I didn't know I was interested in a ThinkPad-like mechanical keyboard until, you know, Tomato mentioned it. Tomato?

I believe it's Tomato. I mean, you know, there's an H in there. Oh, you should check this out. Go, um, I'll put a link in the doc. Yeah, you should. I actually think you'd like this a lot. And I think you could travel with this thing too. What?

Yeah, I think you could. I hadn't even considered that. You could standardize on one great keyboard that goes with you everywhere. You know, I have to say thank you to everyone who's been sending me keyboard recommendations and ergonomic recommendations. I have a giant list of keyboards now that I just can't decide from. So thank you. Interstellar Dave came in with 10,000 sats from Castomatic. This is the way. Hey Chris, you mentioned the issue about accessing tailscale while staying at hotels. I bought one of those new GLI net devices, the MT3000, have it running on tailscale while staying at hotels I bought one of those new GLI net

devices the MT3000 have it running on tailscale it's about as rock solid as the Apple TV and every device connected gets the benefit of local network access as well the only

pain has been with the crappy hotel captive portals yeah I do however find the best option is to start with my laptop to access the hotel Wi-Fi then use the MAC address cloning option in the router to start with my laptop to access the hotel wi-fi then use the mac address cloning option in the router interface to clone my laptop i then disconnect from the wi-fi

on the laptop and connect with the router and voila i bring this and my streaming media stick pre-configured to log into my router's access point and it's golden that's a killer little preset traveler setup sounds like yeah we did pack the pack the GLI net, ours, which is not that one, but we did pack ours and then never actually had the opportunity to break it out because there was decent Wi-Fi at the venue and then at the Airbnb. I think this is the best internet we've ever had at any of the Airbnbs we've ever stayed at. It was Google Fiber. I don't think it was gig symmetric or anything, but it was still fiber under the hood. It was quite solid. So I packed it and I never had an excuse to use it.

And then also they had a Roku, and we just used Pluto TV, so we didn't really need anything special for that. And then they had a Plex app, so if you wanted to do something, it just didn't really come up. But you never know. We may have to bust it out at LinuxFest Northwest. Jordan Bravo comes in with 10,101 sats. Smoke if you got them. Boosting to register my interest in a JB camping meetup, assuming it's family friendly. On an unrelated topic, I came across two Nix projects of interest, a GUI editor for Nix

configs and a GUI store for NixOS, inspired by the Gnome Software Center. I'll put links in the show notes. We've seen a couple of these. I think so. But good to have. Oh, these are both from the Snowfall folks, I think which is part of the Snowflake stuff that we tried out. Taking it to the next level.

Love to see it. BHH-32 comes in with 5,000 sats. More feedback from our Top 5 Essential Apps episode. When I reinstall on Ubuntu-based system, like say Pop! OS, I actually use a Python program to install things that I use every time, and then links to their GitHub.

I will be converting it to Rust, though, in the next couple months. Uh-oh. You know what happens when you convert things to Rust, Wes? You get a Rust thing. So be careful. If you don't want to go around and have that, I don't think you're going to be able to turn that off. Thanks for writing in, BHAs, because I was kind of wondering if we'd see some of this. You know, like there's lots of great tools out there, but I know in our audience, I was sure some folks were kind of rolling things themselves. And, you know, like a Bash script or a Python program or a Rust stuff, you can get a lot of leverage out of that.

No, I disagree completely. You're totally wrong, Wes Payne. get a lot of leverage out of that. No, I disagree completely. You're totally wrong, Wes Payne. Now, the galactic starfish boosted in twice with 3,333 sets times two. Now, this number is from Adam Curry's Boostagram Ball, if I remember correctly. He calls it a stripe and has a special sound effect.

I can't seem to find that clip, though. So you just have to believe me. I like the number 3,333 rings. I also had an idea regarding paying maintainers. Value for value could be really impactful here. I've had an idea to bring V for V to the Minecraft mod space, but it could actually make a massive difference to the desktop Linux ecosystem as well if there was a way to stream Sats to maintainers. Users would probably want to set a stream period for a week, let's say, or a month just to curb privacy concerns. I don't have the know-how nor the time to throw at this right now, but sending this idea out there, maybe someone's willing to take it on.

I hope so. It does seem like there should be some kind of crossover. If we can solve the problem for podcasts, it seems like we should be able to solve the problem for open source software. We all use Austin, that shell app. Yeah. Austin. Right. And then you kind of, there's a plug-in there that looks at all the commands that you run, and then from that

it sends boosts based on, you know, on your usage. That's not terrible. That's not actually horrible. Southern Fried Sassafras comes in with a row of ducks. Wes wants to shoot hard drives at the range. Sounds like he's going to self.

I still do want to do that. That seems pretty fun. I don't know about this year, but we've got to make it to self sometime. One of these days. Yeah, day two of the Texas Linux Fest stream

did get a little spicy. Tux MM comes in with 5,000 apps. B-O-O-S-T. Top five-ish apps for me installed on a new Linux. System either Debian or NixOS. Megasync for synchronizing files across my devices. Firefox if it's not included already.

Ah, a LogSeq user for synchronized notes. All right. Trying to keep every bit of my daily life info in LogSeek. You know, boost back in, TalksMM, and let us know how that goes. And what do you mean when you say you're trying to get, like, every bit of daily life? Are you talking, like, your food, what you did at work? Like, what does that mean? Daily journal?

Yeah. I have thought about keeping a food journal, just to see if I could, you know, figure out a good diet and things like that. It changes you. Boy, it seems like a lot of work. Worth it. They also installed Detox, which is a CLI tool to remove spaces and stuff like that from file names. That sounds pretty handy. And last but not least, YTDLP, which we know and love.

I wouldn't know what to use that for. Thanks, Tux. Appreciate that. Noodles comes in with 5,000 sats. B-O-O-S-T. I have an app pick. It's Jovian NixOS. It's a NixOS implementation of StreamOS for the Stream Deck. I installed it day two of having my Steam Deck, and I have been very happy with it ever since.

Never looked back. So, J-O-V-I-A-N, Jovian NixOS. You think I got that right? I think so. All right. I think maybe there's a hidden challenge in here. What about like a little showdown? We've got Jovian NixOS and we've got Bazite, that sort of Fedora Atomic style project that's also targeting the Steam Deck. Right.

Let's see how they compare. Yeah. How do they compare versus – I mean you've got to beat the stock experience. Of course, yeah. You've got to give me a good reason to go with something else. I don't – I guess I haven't done the work, but I'm not quite sure what they are. But it does seem like kind of a compelling challenge. Just let me borrow your Steam Deck.

It'll be fine. We'll break it. I think listener Jeff should try this on the plane. Yeah, on the plane. Definitely. That's the way to go. That makes a lot of sense. All right.

Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We had boosters because we were really uh stacking across two episodes so there's a extra long boost segment this week but we really appreciate it because we stacked 513 286 sets thank you everyone this is a value for value production which means the audience can send in what they thought the show was worth to them in a boost with their message. They get us talking. It's actually one of our favorite segments because it's unplanned. It really is part of the community contribution to the show. You just need a new podcast app.

You can boost into the show with those. You can also listen live from Texas Linux Fest or Linux Fest Northwest or whatever we're doing. That's all part of the podcasting Twitter standard. Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We appreciate it. And we do have some picks to get to before we get out of here as well. That's all part of the podcasting 2-0-0 standard. Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We appreciate it. And we do have some picks to get to before we get out of here as well. I want to mention Shortwave.

Since we'll be live, and if you'd like to listen from the desktop, Shortwave is a Linux desktop app that will stream internet radio stations right there in a native application with 30,000 stations built in. Oh. And jblive.fm is one of them. So if you just search for Jupyter Broadcasting in their built application with 30,000 stations built in. Oh. And JBLive.fm is one of them. So if you just search for Jupyter Broadcasting in their built-in directory, our stream will come up. Don't worry, it's also packaged in Nix. Oh, good, good.

And you can listen live next weekend. So you don't have to be on a mobile app. You could do it from the desktop at JBLive.fm or you could go grab Shortwave. Brent, I want you to install it and try it, okay? Okay. How much time do i have again all the time in the world i don't i don't mean right now brent oh sorry you've got a

show to finish all right yeah focus i just meant in general you should give it a try we'll do yeah jblive.fm you could also just plug that into your browser what i like about shortwave though is that you can create a sub library of your favorite stations so i have like a handful in there of course you can also find newer stuff if you're just like, okay, let's try out this internet radio thing. It's got a really nice app. And if your desktop supports it, it'll show up in the media playback controls. And if you're on GNOME, it just seamlessly integrates with the GNOME desktop.

Oh, this is fun. They have trending there, what other users are listening to. This is a lot more developed than I think I expected for a FOSS app. Yeah. And so there's, it turns out a ton of content out there on these radio streaming apps. Christmas vinyl HD. You know, actually Christmas music was one of the things I use the internet radio for just, and then kind of took it from there. And also you'll like this Wes, and this is what kind of got me using it, is it has solid Chromecast support. Is that right? Yeah, so you can tune into like a holiday radio station or whatever you're listening to, whatever your mood is, and Chromecast it as well.

So that's not so bad. So check it out. Shortwave will have a link in the show notes. It's probably packaged in your distro, and of course it's up on Flathub too. And even has a dark mode. Well, good, good. Also, an official happy birthday to Mr. Westpain. Your birthday was why we were all, you know,

in the middle of traveling and all of that. So hat tip to Mr. Westpain for making Around the Sun one more year. Can't imagine a better crew to spend it with. Aw. Also, thank you for joining us for this Gen 2 episode. This is, you know, Gen 2 day on the show, and we hope you enjoyed it.

And I hope we'll see you at LinuxFest Northwest next week as well. You got that stage 2 finished, didn't you? Don't forget, we do want to hear about your very first Linux box, what was great about it.

There must have been something great about it. And I'm willing to bet there was something awful about it as well. So boost those in. We'll be doing also a live Q&A

during the Linux Unplugged next week. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yep. That's it for now. That's it for now. Links to what we talked about, linuxunplugged.com slash 559er.

A bunch of great shows over at jupyterbroadcasting.com like Coder Radio, Self Hosted, and This Week in Bitcoin. Find it all at jupyiterbroadcasting.com. And if you want even more show, become a member. Our Unplugged core gets the entire live stream, which is like 247 hours at this point. And if you don't want it, you can also get a short, tight, ad-free version of the show. We've got both available for you. Choose your own size. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'll see you back here next Tuesday. And when I say Tuesday, I actually mean Sunday. Thank you.