LINUX Unplugged - 564: The Goldilocks Build

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

We're following one simple rule to build a Linux desktop so stable it could outlive us.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.Core Contributor Membership: Save $3 a month on your membership, and get the Bootleg and ad-free version of the show. Code: MAYSupport LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMMicrosoft’s controversial Recall feature for Windows 11 could already be in legal hot waterApple GPT — What We Know About Apple's Work on Generative AIChris' BeeLink — Beelink Ryzen 7 5700U Up to 4.3GHz 8C/16TRV BeeLink Nix configuration.nixSlack - NixOS WikiChris' Win 7 Inspired Lookmusnix — Real-time audio in NixOSBoost Pick: nh — NH reimplements some basic nix commands. Adding functionality on top of the existing solutions, like nixos-rebuild, home-manager cli or nix itself.Pick: gridplayer — Simple VLC-based media player that can play multiple videos at the same time. You can play as many videos as you like, the only limit is your hardware. It supports all video formats that VLC supports (which is all of them). You can save your playlist retaining information about the position, sound volume, loops, aspect ratio, etc.

Building a very reliable Linux box still is a hard thing to do. And I don't mean to take away from how great the Steam Deck is, but it hasn't been a solid experience for me. The first time ever I have it hooked up to a 4K television and I drop down to desktop mode, and man, the thing just went wonky. It just felt like the entire experience degraded. And I've had other issues where I go to launch a game, and I've been using the controller to navigate the entire interface to launch the game, and then

the game starts, and I got no controller. And there's just drift in the config and in the setup and anything that's in the user area. I'm just, I'm not really satisfied with it as far as an appliance goes. It doesn't feel as consistent as, say, the Nintendo Switch or, say, an Xbox. I don't know. Maybe my expectations are too high. Yeah, was it always born to be a little bit of a kloosh and we should be impressed it gets to, I don't know, what would you say, 90%, 80%? Yeah.

No, yeah, 85%. Yeah. How often do you actually use it these days? Usually about once on the weekend. Right. So just enough where you're not really, you haven't budgeted time to tweak anything or get it working and you do want it to be in a blinds where you can just pick it up, play a game for a couple hours and then go about your day. Yeah. And so this weekend, of course, the reason why it's on my mind is this weekend, had a little extra time with my daughter

and we spent the entire time troubleshooting issues. No. Oh, no. And I just thought, I know I could do better. I can build a desktop PC that is bigger, better, stronger,

more stable. I think it's in part, there's just config drift and things in there that kind of come along and there's lots of little updates here that you don't really have any control over. So I propose to build it better. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up in the show today, we're going to share one simple rule for a stable Linux desktop. Plus, I'll talk a little about the new rig, a little hardware I just got and what I picked. We'll round it out with some great boosts and picks and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our mumble room.

Hello, Virtual Lug. Hello, Chris and Wes, and hello, Grant. Hello. Thank you for hanging out with us. We've been chatting on the live stream today. We got a little batch up there, a smaller batch up there in quiet listening today, but it's nice to see everybody here. They're getting a low-latency feed right off the mixer, using all free software, listening

on a Sunday morning over at jblive.tv. And a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Thank you to Tailscale for sponsoring this episode of the Unplugged program. It is programmable networking

that is private and secure by default. If you go to Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged, you can try it for free on 100 devices. It's not a limited time deal. It's just for up to 100 devices. I use Tailscale for everything, and I haven't hit my 100 device limit. And it's perfect in the enterprise, too, and greatly reduces complexity. And it's all protected by? Oh, my God. Tailscale. all protected by... Oh my God.

Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Now, we have a little bit of self-info for you. Now, we are not going to be at the Southeast Linux Fest, but our buddy Noah will be from the Ask Noah program. And he is, I guess it's Pinky's. Yeah, he's got a meetup scheduled at Pinky's Westside Grill, Friday, June 7th at 6 p.m. local time. So if you're going to be there itself, I think Alex is trying to make it too. So you could probably go say hi to Alex from Self Hosted. So go to

Pinky's at 6 p.m. on June 7th and go say hi to Noah for us. And report back. Yeah. Let us know how it goes. Okay. I have to build myself. Yes, have to. I'll get to why. A new desktop. And I want this to do kind of a specific job. And I would like this to be the last desktop configuration for this specific job that I ever create. I'd like this to go across multiple generations of hardware.

And my idea for that is one simple rule, is keep it as specific and minimal as possible. And I mean, only install the things I absolutely need. Build it from the ground up. Choose carefully every package

that gets installed. And the reason why I'm doing this is I'm trying to reduce the complexity and I'm trying to reduce the maintenance surface. And I tested a lot of different setups over the last about week and a half. And at first, I started with XFCE. Really? Yeah. Wow.

Can you dive into that a little bit? Well, low resources, for one. Known to be minimal, has worked and will continue to work probably forever. And, you know, we discovered here at the studio that we have an old 1804 machine. But the login manager is running around doing just all kinds of stuff in the background, just basically eating away at back-end process. background, just basically eating away at backend process. And you know, there's things that when you install certain types of desktop environments that kind of come pre-set up, there can be things like the login manager that you don't think about that actually do take quite a bit of resources, even when you're just logged into the desktop. So this kind of stuff's been on my mind because I'm trying to create a really low latency audio workstation. I want it to be as lean and mean

as possible. So I tried XFCE, but the issue there really is that I kept installing a whole bunch of stuff to get everything I wanted. Like I wanted a better terminal. I wanted a better file manager. To make XFCE actually meet whatever your minimum requirements here are that, you know, minimal for the system, but still like actually usable and enjoyable to use by you. Yeah, I'm not on a desert island. You know, I don't need to suffer here. And so ultimately, I tried GNOME for a bit, but actually same problem. Ultimately, I considered HyperLine, considered i3 too, because again, this is very appliance in nature.

I ended up with Plasma. Decided to use Plasma and... K desktop all right what okay what version though because we've had a big new one did you go for the six series or almost almost yeah almost i almost did um you know i want but i wanted i wanted stable and i wanted uh you know kind of tried and true something i could use for a while and 527 isasma 5.27 is in such a great place. It still has that modern feeling. It's feature complete. It's stable and it's still getting patches, you know, for security and whatnot. I bet there's plenty of Plasma listeners out there in the audience who are still using 5.27 and enjoying it too.

Yeah. And the reality is that when you install Plasma, first of all, it's pretty reasonable on resources. Reality is that when you install Plasma, first of all, it's pretty reasonable on resources. And it comes with a suite of top-grade tooling that really has gotten good. And I see people, and I'm happy for them. I'm not taking away from them. I see people out there that are always talking about, you know, I'm trying out ULauncher. I'm trying out this launcher.

I'm trying out that launcher. Or, hey, you know, there's this GPU-accelerated terminal emulator. I've seen this one or that one. People talk about Alacrity and War warp, and those are all fine for people. And I see lots of sweet VS Code setups, and I've definitely tricked out my VS Code setups in the past. But the reality is, KRunner's the best launcher, and it's built in.

Console, it's the best Linux terminal emulator. It's built in. And Kate is the goat. Kate is so so great i mean i knew this you know this everybody knows this about kate but i just decided i was going to give it a try so i didn't have to install vs code oh man so good tiny footprint native app does a great job syntax highlighting for nix configs for everything i use super great built- Built-in console. I completely agree. I deeply love Kate for many, many years now. So you're talking my language here.

Yeah, so you install Plasma and you get all these great first-class tools that work together and save time. And I found that just by installing Plasma, I just installed less stuff. I mean, I remember watching some of those Asahi development streams and just seeing the kind of custom IDE environment that Hector Martin had set up in Kate on Plasma.

So if it works for, you know, making Linux run on Apple Silicon, it probably works for you editing your next config, right? Yeah. You know, it's really sweet. It's, I mean, I've never really been a big fan of terminal console in the text editor, but you make a change to the config heck yeah and then you just do a quick rebuild and see if it works or not just right there you know in the same window it's actually really nice um and it's kind of a sweet spot where it's like

you know it has enough features you can tweak it you can kind of make it your own and configure it but it also i mean it isn't the complexity of vs code or even something more complicated like a jet brains editor and it matches the rest of my desktop which matters a lot i'll get to that in a moment but that is another thing that just looks it's a native application it looks right so i need to replace my thinkpad i've just kind of come to accept it i have a i have a thinkpad floating around somewhere in the studio gone as far as maybe another dimension like it's shifted time realities i don't know multiple people have tried to find this thing like i last time i was there three times spent many many many minutes looking in every nook and cranny and found nothing so i

don't know where this thing went y'all remember when lenovo announced the very first fedora think pads like the i think it was the x1 carbon so i snagged i snagged one up like i do you know got got my got my uh first one and i liked it a lot and it became my home computer and the reason why it became my home computer is a great thin little computer you know it's one of those you could stick between the couch cushions then you sit down you're like oh yeah great here's my computer let's get to work uh so i loved it for that and then i decided I wanted Wes's help with something. And I brought it to the studio. And I've never seen it again. It's gone.

It's just gone. Multiple sweeps have been conducted at this point by you, by other helpers. Nothing. I'm not going to point fingers, but I think maybe some family members were helping us tidy up the studio and things got placed somewhere. I don't know. But I've been waiting. It's been about nine months. It's been a while.

And it has not. A shockingly long time. I thought just, you know, pure sort of statistics of bumping around the studio or wherever would find it. Or you, you know, packing up the RV to drive it around. Anything. Right. And in a couple of episodes, I'll be out in the woods for over a week working from home for the first time since the road trip where I swore I'd never do a show from the RV again. Hey, I remember that. I went bad. Yeah, that went real bad.

I just said, this is too frustrating. And we were doing too much stuff in software and it was really hard to troubleshoot. And I just said, I'm not going to do this again. I'm just going to just always going to go into the studio. But, you know, for mental health, I want to get out in the woods again and I want to be out there for longer than a week and I want to be able to still do the shows. So I'm kind of starting my work from home set up over from just scratch, just starting over. And I just don't think there's a laptop that I want to spend my hard earned money on right now. It's just there's maybe one I'm not aware of or maybe one that I need to try, but, you know, I'd like something

that's about 13 inches or 14 inches for a screen. I'd like it to have a dedicated GPU. And I don't necessarily want a 4K screen on a laptop. I don't think I even want

a 2K screen of that size. I'm not sure, though. You know, there's just a lot of little things that I want to be able to do with it. I have a question for you, Chris. When's the last time you felt this

feeling of like not really having hardware you were that excited about? Cause I feel like in the last couple of years, we've been excited about different ones, like the dev one, or at least for me, the framework and things like that. But is this happened pretty often over the years or is this a kind of a new feeling? Yeah. We were spoiled there for a little bit, weren't we? Oh yeah. Yeah. Even the xps's were pretty exciting there for a while yeah um and now now it feels like yeah you're right it's just not this quite i my hope i think my dream machine would be a like i think a framework style machine that has modular gpu but i don't want it 16 inches and i don't want loud fans.

I don't mind having loud fans when the GPU is connected, but I want to be able to disconnect it and have it be a quiet laptop. So there's just nothing that really fits, I think, what I'm looking for right now. And I don't have a huge budget to spend on this. So I want something that's kind of modern, that's going to be bulletproof with Linux that I could use for production purposes and as a work machine. That's a lot to ask. It turns out. Maybe it shouldn't be, but.

It turns out. I felt like it was. And then the other, you know, there's probably a lot of ways you can solve all these kinds of problems. And I thought, should I give consideration to something like a Mac Studio since a portion of this is going to be audio production and I am going to be running on battery for that week and i got to manage it you know managing 600 amp hours for eight days is going to be tricky

and i don't know what kind of solar power i'm going to get from that so like you know something that doesn't sip a lot of power even when it's you know especially on idle if it's just sitting there not doing much i'd like it to just sip, sip, sip, sip the power. That matters a lot, almost more than the performance. But, you know, both Windows co-pilot PCs, as they're calling them, and something like the Mac Studio, they're all going to suffer more and more and more from this thing that I always like to harp on about, which is strategy tax. And it's only getting worse this year. It's about to get a lot worse. I'm going to play this for you.

Listen to this is Satche Nadella. And he's describing how it's a whole new way to think about Windows and how they're integrating it. They're going to rebuild everything from the ground up. We have 40 plus AI models that are local on Windows machines that then are being used by a variety of experiences that we have built into Windows, starting with this photographic memory feature called recall, which is just phenomenal. And of course, Copilot is built in to Windows.

And Copilot is just not an app. It's sort of a shell affordance that's going to be there assisting you as you be showed a demo of somebody playing Minecraft and me just sharing my Minecraft screen with Copilot. And Copilot helps me finally be as competitive with my daughter on Minecraft as I always dreamed of. And then, of course, the third parties. Adobe showed how they're bringing all of what they do to Copilot plus PCs and many, many more other developers. So it's an exciting day for us to

have a complete rethink on the full stack of Windows for the AI age. Very exciting. 40 LLMs baked into Windows. All these vendors excited about it. I guess it's something that they mentioned them as local LLMs. I agree. Somehow I still don't quite trust it. That doesn't mean they're open source or open in any aspect to LLMs. The problem is I just want my computer to do what I need my computer to do. I don't want it running all this different stuff. And I mean, I like LLMs. That's fine.

I don't want a bunch of background processes. You know, I was looking at the Mac that I have and it's shocking how bad it is now. It's worse than Windows XP, where you have all these disparate updaters, lots of background jobs running under generic process IDs, eating lots of CPU and disk, running all the time. Such a mess. And it's, I mean, unless you're an expert, it gets pretty difficult to tell. Like, I mean, some of the Apple built-in utilities are clearly named, and some of them are like Unix-style, a couple of letters that are running. You have to go look up like, oh, wait, no, that's a core piece of the system. Why is it taking 10% of the CPU?

I don't know. And there's just so much you have to unwind now, and it's just getting worse. So on Windows, for a production system, do we really want this thing screenshotting the Reaper recording window, recording waveforms all the time? If you think about it, it's just ridiculous for production use for actual getting work done it's more disk space it's going to waste its io privacy concerns more background tasks or you know best case scenario more stuff you got to disable so this is the strategy tax that i'm always talking about and windows and mac os are only going to get worse. They're never going to get better because they're there to serve the overall company's wider ambitions now.

And the desktop market is just part of an overall more ambitious, broader strategy. And so I think it was pretty obvious I was going to go Linux. But how to get to something that is so rock solid, that doesn give me issues is the bit that I want to talk about next. And every time I build a system, and I bet this is true for all of you listening, it's really about learning from my past mistakes. Every Linux box I set up, I'm incorporating the lessons I learned from a previous install. And I'm trying to bring all of that to bear. So I would ask out there, boost in with the mistakes you've made when you set up a Linux box. Big, small, doesn't matter,

just like any of them. Like for example, one that I still get wrong when I use like automated installers, for example. EXT4. Yes. Yes, that does happen. And too small of boot partitions. Oh yeah. So many things used to just like 512 megs that's fine and you're like i i have a two terabyte disk why just give it a couple gigs i don't care yeah i just recently on one of my test go-arounds did the auto install and 200 megabyte filled that up in like 30 minutes yeah it was ridiculous so like i just what i'm thinking is um i think we could make an episode dedicated to the mistakes we've all made. I'm sure we have a long list. And help the folks that are tired of the strategy tax biting them, jumping from Windows or macOS.

As those get loaded up with crap and we're about to have WWDC where Apple is going to show us all the crap they're about to load everything up with, we're seeing folks like DHH, the CEO of 37signals, a lifelong Mac user, switch to Linux and make Linux the default platform at 37signals. So I'd say boost in and welcome them in a helpful way and share some of the various screw-ups that you've made when you set up a Linux box. Maybe we could cover those and help other people avoid those mistakes. Because I knew going forward, what I wanted was a very minimal, viable production system built to be job specific. No background tasks that are doing anything that I don't know about except for what's required for the job at hand.

Number one requirement right there. And I want something reproducible so I can just roll this build forward so I don't have to ever figure this out again. It was time to test this theory. Collide.com slash unplugged. Go to K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Support the show and learn more about Collide. You've probably heard me talk about them before. It is a solution I think that could have kept me in IT a lot longer.

Did you hear that Collide was acquired by 1Password? It's actually really big news because these two companies are leading the industry in creating security solutions that put end users first. And now Collide's a central pillar of 1Password's extended access management. Collide device trust has helped companies with Okta ensure that only known and secure devices can access their data. And that's what they're still doing, but they're doing it now as part of 1Password. So if you've got Okta and you've been meaning to check out Collide, it's a great time. And Collide comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks. You can build your own if you need to, and sometimes you do.

And you can just really kind of create one for anything that you can think of. Make sure your devices are secure before they connect to your apps and your network. And you can use Clyde on devices without an MDM so, you know, your Linux fleet or contractor devices and every BYOD phone or tablet or laptop or Chromebook or whatever it might be that people can come up with.

Clyde can handle that. Now that Clyde's part of 1Password it's just getting better. So go learn more check out their demo and support the show. Go to collide.com slash unplugged. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Go there, check it out, and support the show. Collide.com slash unplugged.

Okay, so I know after the scramble of LinuxFest Northwest, as we were setting up rigs, throwing computers all around, borrowing PCs, I'm pretty sure you ended up with some hardware laying around, right? Yeah, shout out to Olympia Mike who sent us one of those older model Beelink devices, which was my notes PC for a long time. It worked great. And then

the scramble for LinuxFest, we grabbed it and we used it as a production machine and all the gear we used for our live LinuxFest episode ended up in my RV. And so this little B-Link box, little Intel Celeron, 8 gigs of RAM, 256 gigabyte SSD, no USB-C, so just USB-A ports. Classic. Yeah. use this because if this I can roll the hardware config, if I can roll this config forward, idea works, then I should be able to set just about everything else up on this device, this older, slower one. And if it checks out and it works at testing, I'll get a newer device and I'll just move the config and test the theory.

And so I plugged away at getting this thing all set up and it definitely struggled. Like, you know, even like Firefox, with four or five tabs and element chat running. Oh, no. It was rough. That was before I even ran any production. It wasn't good. It wasn't really good, but it did impress me in some ways. It was tiny.

It's smaller than the NUC ever was. It's smaller than a Mac Mini by a lot. And low power. Low-ish power, which is big and it's quiet. It's really quiet. So after getting the config built out and tested on there, and because I knew I was going to be moving it, it also forced me to follow better practices. So I did as much as I could in my Nix configuration by defining the stuff as best I could there, knowing that work would

then move to the new device. That way you didn't have to do custom NixM stuff or manually download things. Like you could just rebuild the system with the updated config and be done, or at least as close as possible to done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I bought one of their, there was a lightning deal.

It's still a great deal, but I bought one of their newer B-Link devices. I don't know if it's their highest end. It might be like their mid-system, but for what I needed. It's $330. They had an $80 off deal. Right now they have a $20 off deal, so still a pretty good deal. It's the Beelink Mini PC with a AMD Ryzen 7 5700U. It's got 16 gigabytes of RAM and a 1 terabyte SSD, and it also adds

a display port. So instead of just HDMI out, it adds a display port and a USB-C port. So it has the same amount of USB-A, now USB-C port added as well. And of course, you're stepping up from a Celeron to a Ryzen that can go up to 4.3 gigahertz, has 8 cores and 16 threads. Yeah, from a Celeron to an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U. A bit of an upgrade. Yeah. That's better.

Yeah. I didn't do extensive testing, but I installed Prey and I installed a Star Trek game. I installed a couple of games over Steam and my screen rises 1080p and they played great. How was the cooling situation in this little box with that CPU? You know, I never heard it. I do have it down on the floor, but I never once have heard the machines, either one of them, even when I'm pushing them.

I bet if I got my ear down there when I had the games going, you must hear something. But that's all I'm looking for. I don't think it'll ever be picked up on mic. And the Linux support? I'm going to hope slash assume it's relatively first class here. So the Linux support is fantastic. It does ship with Windows 11. Oh, licensed and everything? Yeah. Okay. Probably some home version or something. Well, now we can have you try

out. No, wait, that was only the recall stuff only works on special hardware. That'd be so great if I got a refund from Microsoft. But, you know, this thing, when you take the $20 off, this thing's like $300. I don't think there's a lot of profit in there for Windows. But it doesn't matter. I ripped it all off, and I have put Nix on there. But, you know, what I discovered is VS Code is a surprising pain in the butt on NixOS. You really have two or three routes you can go. You can install VS Code,

VHS, or FHS, I should say, VS Code, FHS, and that kind of fakes VS Code out into thinking it's in a regular Linux environment. And that one, you can install some extensions and stuff. You can install VS Code where it's kind of more aware of where it's at, but you won't be able to install any plugins. You could do VS Code with certain extensions pre-installed, and then you can also define more extensions in your config, but then you have to define it all in your config. Or you could do the Flatpak route, but then you have basically all the same limitations as the FHS version.

Yeah, it's one of those tricky apps to really sort of confine in a way where you just take for granted so much that this editor has access to its local plugins directory, as well as kind of any like libraries or languages or systems or whatever is on your file system and then when you try to do it especially with flatback but then even with nix uh things get confusing yeah and then you're really

cruising for a bruising when you want to do something like edit your config files and have pseudo escalate and actually work and all that kind of stuff it's it's a pita on nix and i thought okay i could i could i could do this you know because you can go find some example configs on github and whatnot but if i'm going to put the work into making vs code actually function for me the way i want what if i just put that same time and effort into kate and that was really my sort of light bulb moment when it come to Kate. Now on a Nixbox, because this is a very lean system, I have my config linked in the show notes. And this is, you know, I just, I only add that what I have to. So I did

not have all of the policy kit stuff installed. And so once you add all of the policy kit stuff you need, you can actually have Kate edit system files. And it works so nice. And I decided even later on, I made it so you don't have to have a password for sudo, because this, again, it's just a little production box. And so now Kate doesn't even prompt me when I have to save my config files that are, you know, like the next config, it just saves. That's kind of nice, especially when you are trying to write. You mentioned you were trying to do this in a more declarative and reproducible way, so you do want low friction to make sure that instead of just, like, you know,

quickly installing something with Nixam, you are actually going back to the config, updating it, and rebuilding the system, so not having to fuss around with, like, having to enter it twice because you forgot to sudo. That's probably a big help. Yeah, because I'm testing stuff out a lot at this point in time. But what's so great, right, is I figured that out and solved that on the previous Celeron hardware.

And so when I got this new machine and I got just a real base system installed, I SSH'd in, dropped the config and the hardware config on this machine, changed the host name, and rebuilt. And I had everything everything it was incredible so like getting so when i opened up kate it could edit my files it could save it didn't prompt me for my password it was so great i i if you have even if you're on genome you should really consider giving kate a go it is so so so fantastic and um i really really appreciated just the just the actual like investment to get that where it needed to be i think i'm probably set now for a while i think it's kate for me i think i've switched from vs code which is huge had you used kate much before this yeah it's like a quick place when i need like just plain text to like

store something like a buffer almost but brent, you've been a Kate user, right? I've been like a every single day, multiple times a day for almost everything Kate user for since. And you've been holding down on us? What's going on here? No, I keep dropping my Kate love. It's just you guys aren't listening, I think. No, I've heard you. I've heard you.

It's just I was so deep in the VS code. I had it real dialed in. I thought you were I've heard you. It's just I was so deep in the VS code. I had it real dialed in. Oh, I thought you were going to say nano. You will appreciate that this lean, mean build does have NeoVim installed. And I'll set up. And LazyVim, even. So the other thing that I solved on the Celeron box, which is so neat, too, because it's an Intel system. I was able to solve Slack on Wayland and now getting Slack Wayland native.

And there's just a little quick couple of lines you can add to your Nix config and Slack works great on Wayland. And I was able to solve that on the previous machine. And it just ports right over. Oh, it's so great. But the big surprise, I went a different direction for the look and feel. And it matters enough that i think i should mention it what do you mean i mean like so you're going with like dark mode plasma what are you

talking about yeah i usually i'll you know i want something it depends on the screen and all that you know usually go with the dark mode breeze dark and then sometimes there's like sweet sweet plasma so there's a couple different you know-submitted themes. I had a wild hair, and I sorted by highest rated. And I noticed that some of the highest rated plasma themes are all very retro desktop environments, like old Unix desktop environments. And one of them, called Reactionary, looks just like Windows 7.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Is it really going where I think you're going? I did it. I did it, boys. And it's glorious. I love it so much. It's clean.

It's crisp. Surprising, like all the cute elements and everything in the Plasma desktop look fantastic in this old Windows 7 style. Oh, my gosh. I'm looking at some pictures that you've sent us. I love Dolphin, and this does not make Dolphin shine, but I get why you like it. I mean, it really is. It's clean. It's simple. The taskbar still kind of feels plasma-y, but the window decorations are very classic windows. Yeah, it is very much still a a plasma taskbar i don't compromise

there but uh i'll i'll throw uh i'll throw a link in the show notes to the album i put a couple screenshots in there i know man it's just something about it's like low resources too so the windows just feel like they really snap your brain's already internalized like what this looks like right yeah right i'm kind of impressed here because it's really consistent like i thought it would be like it would apply the theme in a few places but for the most part it'd look a little janky but i could see why this is rated highly if if like a little nostalgia is your thing jeez i've always liked the blue that they've used in windows 7 too um and they really nail it in the tele. Like the screenshot of console,

if I didn't put the plasma bar in the bottom and I just screenshotted the console, you would think that was cmd.exe. I would, yeah. I was like, did you backboard WSL? Yeah. No, I got wine and I'm running cmd.exe. I was going to say,

this probably fits perfect for any wine apps you do run. Yeah, really. Yeah, really. You're right. I should try that. That's a great point. I was just blown away that this is the look. I'm always very much trying to make things look

as absolutely modern as possible. And I generally think themes that try to make the Linux desktop look like another OS, especially Mac OS, always look a little cheap and low rent. And they've never worked for me. So when I installed Reactionary and I just I leaned into it. I love it so much. So I put a challenge out there to you, listener.

If you're on Plasma, install Reactionary for a couple of days and, you know, just give it a go. You maybe have to be of a certain age. I don't know. But there's something so special about it very happy with it but like all things nix there of course is an audio production module that i found and it's called muse nix and it provides a set of simple high level configuration options to turn your workstation into more of an audio workstation, including like some real time stuff if you want it, optimizing certain things about devices, adjusting various low level system settings. So I, of course, installed this.

Oh, I'm going to have to try this. I think we should add this to our list for when we rebuild the studio systems. It activates the CPU frequency governor to be like performance mode always. It sets swappiness to 10. It'll tweak just a couple of sensible audio device UDEV rules. And then it sets like a global environment variable for where to put plugins. Ooh, nice. So you just get basically like.VST in your home directory.

And you can just, if you drop things in.vst, you now have this as like a environment variable as to where VST plugins live. Kind of paper over some of the custom NixOS stuff and make it just work like you expect. Yeah. It also, you can enable the RTCQS command line utility. And it's kind of like an audit of your system.

It'll go through and analyze your various state of your box and tell you where maybe latency is being introduced or maybe where something isn't quite right. Yeah, you might like this, Brent. You might take a look at this. This is brilliant. Well, the one thing that always kept me from these real-time kernels is like the hundred steps you have to do to like, oh yeah, you got to remember to do this. And oh, that affects this other thing and you have to go do that too. But these modules just kind of take care of everything for you. For someone like me, who like is technical enough to be dangerous, but you know, not technical enough to solve all these things. It's absolutely perfect. So gosh, I like this a

lot. I was very impressed. And again, my config is in the show notes. You can see how I'm incorporating this. And then you will put a link to the Musenix project so you can also see. They have several ways you can install this, including a flake channel. That's what's so great, right? I mean, it's just like a NixOS module. So if you're already using NixOS, as long as you get this onto your system somehow, whether that's a flake or Git clone or whatever, it handles setting all the options for you. And there's a community that's discussing what's the best option and this hardware works best in this way. And they're then incorporating that stuff.

And it's stuff that I'm tangentially aware of, but I wouldn't necessarily know what to tweak. So to have, it's like they have your back. It's like they got that solved for you. uh, next OS modules is that for me, the biggest benefit is this like known good default settings or like best practices are built in. And that is just priceless for someone who's just getting into it or learning, or like, you just don't have time for it, or you just want the best. It's like the entire community is building those best practices for everybody to benefit from. And that to me, that's just still an amazing thing. I'm impressed to see here that Amusenix, I mean, it was last updated five days ago,

has plenty of commits and 34 different contributors. So, yeah, there really does seem to be a community here. Yeah, it's so great. And, again, I set it up on the Celeron B-Link first. Tried it all out on this. I knew this machine was going away. Tried it all out there this. I knew this machine was going away. Tried it all out there. Hammered out what works.

Figured out, and I mean, I spent like a day with noting, if I make this change, how does it drop my latency and return audio back to the studio? I was, you know, doing the full round trip. I even had a live stream a couple of points during the week where I was checking the entire round trip based on if I make these modifications, how does it sound, what does it do, and being able to work all of that out while the hardware is being sent, while it's in the mail. And then it arrives, and I just bring it home, unplug everything from the one B-Link, plug everything into the new B-Link, put a USB thumb drive in, done. It's just really something. And what I really internalized

is creating this configuration that just moves forward forever, regardless of what hardware I put it on today. Maybe a couple of things tweak if I go from Intel to AMD, but for them, or, you know, NVIDIA to Ryzen AMD. Yeah, your hardware config

needs to change a little bit, but, you know, all the package stuff, that just still works and all the services. And it's just a purpose-built audio workstation config. It's been slightly optimized, you know, pipe wires in there with jack emulation enabled, wire plumbers set up, you know, that kind of stuff's just been slightly optimized to do audio production, but also, you know, it's a little desktop machine that I can get some work

done during the day. And, you know, Nix makes it super easy. So like on whatever random Linux machine I could go build and try out a VM of your whole experience here without committing to anything. Absolutely. Yeah. Maybe it's a good starting point for our audio system that we want to build. What I, what I really kind of want to emphasize is what I'm doing here is trying to keep it simple, but also I didn't overbuild the machine. Right? Like, something I would have done in the past is I probably would have gone for a more powerful computer. And because this line of thinking, I had to dismiss. But it was like, you know, it would be nice to have a few more ports maybe even some pci slots

right like i started i started thinking about like if i'm gonna spend the money like maybe i should make sure it's gonna be really powerful and i don't know if this little box is really gonna be fast enough for me because i'm really really particular and i talked myself out of it and i got something that literally is just you know it a nice, sensible step up from the previous machine. It adds one more port. But, you know, it's enough. And it's simple. And it's quiet. And it's tucked away.

And the config is also the same thing. It's simple. It's quiet. And it's all tucked away. And it just gets out of my way. And the system's only doing the task at hand. It seems like it's nice, too, in that, okay, you've got the config solved. That can live. I mean, it's on GitHub now. So you can just only doing the task at hand. It seems like it's nice to in that, okay, you've got the configs off that can live. I mean, it's on GitHub now. So you can just pull

it down whenever you need. And then, you know, the box was, as you say, you've kind of found the right spec level, where it's easy to deploy easy to get. I mean, I think I saw on Amazon had like prime one day shipping or something. And, you know, it's like a reasonable enough expense that you're not, you don't have to like budget six months out for this huge new rebuild. You can kind of like pick one of these up without having to worry too much about it. And they do throw it on sale from time to time. They definitely do. It's funny because the night I was thinking about it, I go to Amazon, lightning deal.

They're listening. The lightning deal, though, doesn't have the same speedy shipping as when it's not the Lightning deal. So if you want it quick, you've got to get it. They still have a $20 off coupon. Yeah, there you have it. That's the new setup, and I'd love to get your tips. If you want to take a look at my config in the show notes and boost any suggestions or things I should tweak or add, I'd love to hear it because this might be a good starting point for us to start building our audio workstations in the studio. So love your eyeballs on it either way.

Linuxunplugged.com slash membership. We have eight redemptions left of the promo code May. I guess it kind of makes sense. May is almost over. It'll take $3 off a month forever if you get the Unplugged Core Contributor Membership or if you get the Signal Membership, which is for all the shows. There's like eight redemptions left. You can go at Linux.

You can get it. Go get it is what I'm saying at linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Then use the promo code May. I'll try to remember to also just put a direct link in the show notes. Eight redemptions left. Thank you, everybody who took advantage of this promo code. You know, we we kind of been nipped by the market, right? It's the ad winter is nipped. The unplugged podcast. This spot right here should be a regular ad. And it's not. So we're like, you know, a wagon

missing a wheel. But like the members came together, formed like a trust wheel, attached themselves to the wagon, and now like we're still going down the road. It's sometimes a little lumpy and bumpy, but it's better than it ever has been. So thank you, members. We really appreciate that. Linuxunplugged.com slash membership. There are just a handful, eight redemptions left for promo code May, which takes three

freaking dollars a month off. That's how you know it's an ad winter because it's not a limited time thing it's like forever that's why there's only eight redemptions left and it's for both the uh the main signal you know for all the shows or for the core contributor where uh either way whichever one you get do me a solid and just take a listen to the members bootleg feed the ad free feeds nice because you don't have to hear this crap but i mean it's not crap it's pristine chef's kiss quality stuff but my point is there's a lot more a lot more show like we put we put content in other places too that we make it we try to make it great for the members so if

you signed up go listen to that that bootleg feed at least once. Maybe on a road trip. I don't know. It's kind of long. All right. LinuxUnplugged.com slash membership. Promo code May. And now it is time for the boost.

Ah, the boosts. I really missed the boosts. And this week, we, I don't know. This is a good may and i feel like my being gone means more boost came in i'm not sure how i feel about that but uh we did get a baller boost here yeah we did no second best comes in with 555 555 sets monster boost Hey, rich lobster! And Monster Boost. How about that?

Hey, guys, Swan Boost from the kids' table. Swan Boost. Oh, I see. All fives are swans. Did you guys know? That's brilliant. Did you guys know that RealPlayer, RealPlayer is still a thing and still makes a version for Linux. Last updated February of 24.

You can even pay for it still if you're feeling nostalgic. $24.99 for Express or $39.99 for Plus. When I saw that, I just laughed and thought, I need to boost the guys about this. You know, Real Network still has an office like downtown Seattle. What? Although I went to their website, and the first thing that they were pitching was, greater visibility, greater confidence, safer for security, AI-powered facial recognition for security professionals.

Oh, of course. They do have RealPlayer as one of their four products here, but it's just one. So which one are you going to get? Are you going to get the Plus or the Express version? Oh, they have RealPlayer Mobile too. Can you not get it? Oh, you can get free. Oh, but it's got in-product ads. I see. Okay. Audio only downloads. You don't get the free version either. I'm just trying to think of what the use case is. Oh gosh, they're still using the same logo for real too. The best video downloader just got better. Download or stream from YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, Facebook, gosh, they're still using the same logo for real, too. The best video downloader just got better.

Download or stream from YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and thousands of websites. Interesting. I'm going to argue my pick coming up is better. But thank you, No Second Best. That's a very generous boost. We really, really appreciate it, too. And I will mention these generous boosts go a long ways right now because we are down a sponsor in the show. And so no second best.

You're basically our sponsor this week. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. And the baller boosts don't stop today. Hybrid Sarcasm came in with 250,000 cents. Hey, Rich Lobster! Thank you, Hybrid. Oh, with some feedback to you, Chris.

Don't you dare take away my boost sound effects. Okay. All right. You know, and he put some real stats on the line for that statement, too. We tested it. Yeah, right. So last week in the show, you tested sort of minimal boost sound effects, and I guess we're getting feedback on how that went.

I think so. I think so. I would call last week more selective sound effects. I know you tried for none, but you couldn't help yourself. Now, Rotted Mood came in with 50,000 sats, another impressive boost. I hoard that which your kind covet. Absolutely.

Saying Heil, I had to disappear there for a while to deal with, quote, real life. Getting caught up in all JB shows now and hope everyone is well. Oh, there's also like a Spock kind of salute in there. Live long and prosper. It is very nice to hear from you. Yes. I hope you live long and prosper.

And as the wise Mr. Spock says, you're doing a good job. You're doing a good job. Thanks for checking in. Dan Johansson comes in with 30,000 sats. All right. Pew, pew, pew. Great, too. Oh, how about this?

I passed my Linux Foundation Certified SysAdmin exam this week. So to celebrate, here's some sats. Thanks for keeping the shows alive. I wouldn't have been able to do it without all the knowledge these shows have provided over the years. Dan, congratulations. Awesome. Do we get an applause for Dan, everyone? Yeah, we do. do absolutely and you know

I think he must be out celebrating because Dan is here for like every single show in the mumble room but not this week I hope he's having a great time Dan congratulations really great to hear cultivator comes in with 10,112

sets it's over 9,000! Listening live on Fountain for the first time while I plant my corn. Just after hearing an old office hours on this feed with Chris talking about his corn. Yep. Yep, I remember that. I am not doing 90% as much corn this year. You know, it's so rainy here right now.

It's a tease. We started planting, and then just the rains came, too. That's fine. You can get some from Cultivator, right? Yeah, maybe. I'd love to get some. I'll send him some stats for it. Thank you, Cultivator.

Appreciate the boost. Magnolia Mayhem boosted in 7, 7, 7, 7, which must mean something, right? Make it so. Thank you, sir. Show speed listening for me has a huge margin depending on my interest in the show, how slow they talk and how easy they are to understand. Shows that I like with hosts that talk fast and don't have thick accents or bad equipment are usually around 1.25, but something like Lex Friedman can get as high as 3.1 times.

No, I am not kidding, he says. Most shows sit between 1.8 and 1.9. That's very specific. Whoa. Kidding. They seem like very well-tested and calibrated speed. I mean, 3.1, 1.8 to 1.9. Wow.

Yeah, I wonder when he listens to a podcast, he starts listening to it and he's like, this is 1.8. This is a 1.9-er. You know? Wow, though. Lex Freeman at 3.1. I guess that would make it like a 45-minute show. So there's that. That helps. Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow. VT52 comes in with

4,455 sets. Coming in hot with the boost. Alex mentioned how there were many nines we self-hosters hit. Reminds me that I just hit my five nines. Impressive given how much I like to tinker. I got a NixOS pick for you. It's called NH. And it's a wrapper around the standard NixOS rebuild command and others.

Gives you a much more understandable output when rebuilding and can even let you know what actually is going to change, e.g. some package is going from this version to that version. It, of course, is in Nix packages, and it's up on GitHub, too. Again, it's called NH on Viper ML's GitHub. That looks fun. We're going to definitely have to try this. Plus, it's a sneaky little Rust pick. Oh, it is?

Really? Yeah. Hey, you know, somebody should put it in there, put it in there, because we love the rust. Also, um, congrats, VT. Sounds like you have a very reliable home lab. Gene Bean comes in with a row of ducks.

Oh, Chris, you're correct. I'm on iOS. But back when I was using Android, I, too, had rotation lock on. I'm really surprised it is still needed so bad over there. I would have thought they'd have addressed that one by now. Brent, did you get to weigh in on the rotation lock stuff on Android? Do you have orientation lock on all the time?

Yeah, we talked about it previously. I lock that thing like 98% of the time. It's only whenever I seem to be showing somebody photos of my cats that I seem to turn it off. But other than that, it's on. I decided to turn it off after last episode whoa and i yep i've been going lock free for the week and uh it's not bad actually it's really hasn't been bad i actually did the same thing really and how's it gone for you yeah not bad i will say on the flip side you know with with it on at some point in android i forget which version they added a little like it detects when you try to lock it and it gives you the option to still rotate that is that is

really solid that's been a nice middle ground yeah that kind of makes me lean towards going back to orientation lock because you can always just bust out with that you just got to keep your eye out for that little button and then it'll thank you for the boost todd from northern virginia comes in with 11 101 sats This old duck still got it. I don't know. It feels classy. He says, I hesitate to admit it, but my listening speed is set to 2.0 with silence skipping enabled. Please don't tell Adam Curry.

Oh, we won't. Wow, though. So you're listening to us at 2.0? Wow. Could you imagine? I think we need to speak slower to make sure Todd doesn't miss anything. That's a very good idea. Yes.

Wait, that doesn't work. I'm so surprised by all this advanced playing. Because I have heard from some folks who use like accessibility features and are used to having screen readers and stuff like that with really, really fast listening times. But Chris, I'm exactly like you. I find my comprehension and everything goes down past, I don't know, 1.3, 1.4, something like that. Generally. I have like two modes. Like if I'm really listening, the speed can be helpful because it's like i don't get bored i have to really focus and maybe i retain more but i just

feel anxious it gets me feeling like the people i'm listening to are anxious especially with the silent stuff that really makes it seem like it's a rushed conversation i'm curious if anyone because almost well every single one of these is about speeding up, but does anyone slow anything down? Yeah, we're our 0.7 gang. Yeah. Yeah. In Virgo, with 5,000 sats, says, I'm chipping in late to say that I listen at 1x only. I like to listen to you guys on my way to work while walking my dog.

JP feels like home to me, and home should be relaxing. So 1.x it is. See, that's smart. That's... You know, I have a confession that I haven't been ready to share for the last couple of weeks because I'm deeply ashamed by it.

Here we go. And it has to do with speeds. So as everyone might know, we use reaper quite a bit and i i've been use it to record uh the podcast recently since oh you know audacity caused me to uh screw up a recording uh maybe a month or so back so uh but i previously has been using reaper exclusively for playing drums and recording stuff there and like practicing songs. So I had, here it goes. You guys are going to give me such a hard time.

I had my playback speed at like 0.9 to, because it's way easier to learn a song a little slower and then ramp your speed up. And I don't know, for whatever reason, the template that I had for doing recordings had 0.9 speed locked into the template. So the first couple episodes a few weeks back that I recorded with Reaper, I may have sent Drew exports with 0.9 speed of my voice. Did he point this out or did you figure it out? Did he point this out or did you figure it out? No, no. I figured it out after noticing and then I didn't think I should say anything because I felt so embarrassed. But even now I'm like blushing and stuff.

I feel so. So I apologize to everyone for the last couple of weeks who received my voice like just a little slower than it is in real life. And that if I caused you to go you know higher than one time speed i apologize this explains it we have fixed this is what's happened everybody had to up it hashtag blame brent well uh zac attack comes in with 7777 sets i am programmed in multiple techniques and guess i'm an old man i play back at just good old 1X. There you go. Also, thank you for the Knicks coverage, as I've been wondering what was happening over there. I always value the Jupiter team's insights on these matters. And just to further the Fedora Atomic discussion, UBlue's Aurora image is pretty darn slick and may actually replace Monjaro on my desktop.

You know, that's our first boost about the next coverage. We got a boost here from Vomit Farts for 3,000 Satoshis. Okay. What does Vomit Farts have to say? Vomit Farts did not need to write a message for us to enjoy this boost. But I just wanted to say, keep up the good work. Oh, okay. So maybe that was also some feedback on the Nyx coverage, perhaps.

Oh, they did boost in for our 5 to 63, the episode we did talk about the Nyx community issues. Thank you, Vomit Farts. Yeah, thank you, Farts. Appreciate it. Nyx Zip comes in with 5,000 sats. That's not possible. Nothing can do that. This boost cleans me out until I can get Fort Nix set up on my Odroid.

Up until now, I've relied on sending my Albie account stats from a hardware wallet, but that hasn't been available for a while, so I wanted to pass along that part, and thanks to you guys, I got my technician's ham license. Boom! Technician Ham license in the bag!

I'd hope to see some of you at SciPy or a happy hour this year. It is in your backyard, after all. SciPy. to see some of you at SciPy or a happy hour this year. It is in your backyard, after all. SciPy. Oh, there's a little SciPy Python conference going on around here, huh? I have to look into that. Thank you, BigZip. Appreciate that.

Oh, yeah. SciPy 2024 is coming to the Tacoma Convention Center in July. Hmm. I have no Tacoma policy, but that's great. DeckBot comes in with 2001 sets all right i hear you guys like linux challenges you know nix tumbleweed graphene slackware 32-bit what do you think about putting systemd back into devLon. For extra geek cred, don't add Debian to your app sources. I will allow use in a PBA, but not from a DevLon upstream or analog. So not from Debian or Ubuntu.

But if you want to use Nix or Fedora or even packaging your own Debs, that's all fair game. Huh. Wow. This is kind of clever. I do love this idea of putting systemd back into Debs. Wes and I have, as of last week, heavily, heavily modified the Ubuntu 18.04 machine we use for recording. You know, you can do a lot with Nix, and we needed to get a newer version of an application. But that newer version of the application also get a newer version of an application, but that newer, that newer

version of the application also required a newer version of Jack audio. It required a new version of glib C. It required a bunch of new packages. And it was just not ready for 1804 or 1804 wasn't ready for it. But Wes, you stood up basically like a parallel Nix environment that does have these new dependencies. It does have all this stuff. Sure does. And thankfully, the interfaces have been stable enough that it just kind of works with the rest of the system so far. Yep.

So, you know, after that experience, it makes me think maybe we could pull this off. But do you think that approach would work as well for something so, like, deeply integrated like SystemD? Yeah, I bet it'll be a bit harder. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, because the temptation would just be to Nixify the entire thing.

What point does it become Nix? We've got to think about a deck bot because there is some execution there. If anybody wants to iterate on this idea, please boost in and give us some thoughts because that does seem kind of fun. It mostly just seems like a competition where we each really just mess up

our DevOps systems report back that we broke it. Pretty much. just mess up our dev1 systems report back that we broke it pretty much distro stew boosted in with 11 111 satoshis i'd not thought much about the hosting costs of a distro until nixcon when they showed their sheer cost of hosting the repos many thousands of dollars a month on s3 so i have some some questions. Number one, how will Nix fare if they do fork? Will the new fork have the resources and donations to fund that? Question number two, how do most projects handle these costs? Number three, what happens if donations dry up? And number four, can this somehow be supported by the community via mirrors

or torrents so we don't need to completely rely on centralized hosting? I'll take a couple of those from the bottom four. Can this be somehow supported by the community? You know, maybe, but there'd be a lot of technology that have to be created, including probably changes to how the package manager works. What happens if donations dry up? That is a serious concern. It's something that the Foundation is constantly thinking about. Although we are seeing, hopefully, you know,

as more folks deploy NICs in more places, that you then have more spots with vested interests that are motivated to help this thing keep going. What do you think? You got any thoughts on the fork question? Like, how will other forks handle this? Would they have the resources? Do you have thoughts on that?

I mean, I think it ends up kind of depending on what the forks are and of which components. Because you've got, you know, Nix, the tool, the build tool, the package manager, the language. And then you've got Nix packages, which is kind of separate. And then you've got kind of NixOS on top of all of that. So I think we've seen forks that focus a little bit more on like the Nix layer. I do think it would probably be quite challenging to try to stand up and fully support a parallel Nix packages. I mean, at the end of the day, if you're willing to build everything or have your own, you know, cache internally for a company or for your own home lab, like you can build the

whole Nix system, especially just for your architectures, and it'll all still work. You just won't get public binary caching. And that kind of changes the usability for a lot of folks who don't want to build everything. Yeah. And Nix's storage situation is a little more extreme than, say, Debian. Even though Debian has a ton of packages, Nix is storing a ton of iterations. Right.

They're trying to keep things as reproducible as possible, which means not only keeping the recipes, the derivations, but they also have a whole bunch of historic build inputs and outputs that are living in that cache. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a big job. I mean, there's things they could do to kind of tidy it down a bit, but then the users lose some of that reproducibility in theory. So it's a line they're trying to walk. Great questions. Thank you for that boost. Nev comes in with 2,000 sats. I heard you guys were talking about playback speeds. Well, I only listen at 1x,

but sometimes for some shows about trading card games and goldfish, I have to step it up to 1.25x. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So there are shows about goldfish specifically? Can you send those in? Yeah, I've got to hear a Goldfish podcast. Although I don't know trading card games. Is this like a subtle dig over at Coder Radio? I think you might be right.

Thank you, Dev. I'm very fascinated by the playback speed. I think that particular setup makes some sense to me. Well, one final boost on that. Sam H comes in with a row of ducks. I mostly listen at 1.25x, but I might go up to 1.5 for something long or down to 1x to make sure I catch everything. Or if I'm running low on JB podcasts and need to stretch them out.

Also, just reporting I generally enjoy the boost sound effects. Hey, that's a great little tidy boost. Thank you very much. Appreciate that feedback. Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We do have that 2,000-sat cutoff to read it on air just for time. We had 26 boosters, so we do get all of those boosts. We really appreciate it.

And this week, we stacked an absolutely incredible and extremely grateful 963,433 sats. Whoa. Thank you, everybody. You know, this show has been kind of limping along because of the ad winter, but there are weeks like this that does feel like like even regardless of what happens with the advertising market, the show's always going to go on. If you'd like to boost in, get your message read on the air and support the show,

go get a new podcast app at podcastapps.com. This show is adding more and more Podcasting 2.0 features. This feed is now Podcasting 2.0 enabled, so there's lots of nice stuff you can get, including built-in live stream and more. So go check them out. At podcastapps.com, we love Fountain and Podverse and Castomatic. Those are like our top three. We totally recommend them.

Thank you, everybody who also streams your sats as you listen. Those come right in, and we see those as well. And of course, a big shout out to our members who are also participating in Value for Value with their monthly contribution. We really appreciate all of you. That was a great week. Thank you very much. Now I have a pick that I think might be a little better than RealPlayer. It's called GridPlayer. It is a simple VLC-based media player that does side-by-side videos, and it will go up to as many as your system can handle. Now you're thinking, Chris, what would you use this for? Well, if you've got any security cameras,

you could create yourself like a quad box of cameras, but also the gosh darn thing supports Streamlink with YouTube DLP. Ooh. Uh-huh. So, this morning, just for funsies, I threw in like four news live streams

and just had four boxes, and you could just mute and unmute which one you want, etc. There's lots of little playback controls um and it's anything vlc can play i like this easily swap videos with drag and drop okay yeah yeah it's just like a little python app it works on windows mac and linux oh obviously we love and trust vlc under the hood, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's on Flathub. It is. Flathub, Snaps, there's an app image. Yeah. If it's just a Python app, I bet we can get this thing packaged for Nix. It's pretty cool.

And it's just really simple. It is what it says on the tin, but I actually find this really great, because we've got in Jupes, we've got these privacy screens that go down. And so I can't really see what's going on around the rig but when i was working the other day i just pulled up the camera feeds put them in the little quad box and i could see what was going on even though i had all the

privacy screens down while i was working it's pretty neat and then i you know this morning put the news feeds in there watching the live news and then just muting and unmuting the ones i was interested in and muting the other ones when they go to commercials just super fun i don't know it makes me feel like a big shot so check it out as grid player just muting and unmuting the ones I was interested in and muting the other ones when they go to commercials. It's just super fun. I don't know. It makes me feel like a big shot. So check it out as Grid Player. Yeah, it's packaged up in a lot of different ways.

We'll put a link to the GitHub up in there. You know, I mean, it's a minimal viable system with a couple of extra nice things in there. You know, I did put video playback in there. I tried to not install VLC. You know, first I installed MPV and a couple other apps. But VLC, it's so handy because you get those menus

where you can choose the audio device and it's easy to put URLs in there for streaming. VLC is just such a great app. If you're doing Target and stuff, there's obviously things that are more efficient or better in a ton of different ways. But for one tool you can install and kind of just know it's probably going to play that.

Yeah. It's hard to beat. Yeah. So I got VLC on there and grid player. So, I mean, it's not like nothing extra on there, but it's still pretty tight overall from what you get from like a Linux system. It's pretty good. So check out that config. I'll have it in the show notes.

Also, don't forget, we want you to boost in and share some of the various mistakes you've made when setting like a Linux system. It's pretty good. So check out that config. I'll have it in the show notes. Also, don't forget, we want you to boost in and share some of the various mistakes you've made when setting up your Linux box. Boys, you should brainstorm a few. If we get some good ones boosted, and I think we could do a segment on it. Heck yes.

You know, own a few of those mistakes, I say. And of course, you can always join us live. We are live each Sunday. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station.

Come on in around noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern bad time, same bad station. over at linuxunplugged.com slash 564. Some good stuff in there. You'll also find our feedback form over there. Links to like the mumble info, our matrix chat, which is going 24-7. All of that. It's on our website. How about that? linuxunplugged.com

And then there's a whole bunch of great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com Fresh coders and self-hosts and more. Thanks so much for joining us. See you right back here next Sunday. Thank you. you