LINUX Unplugged - 565: Mistakes That Made Us Love Linux

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

The facepalm moments that make us question our sanity—and swear off sudo for a week.Sponsored By:Core Contributor Membership: Take $1 a month of your membership for a lifetime!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.FMLinux May Be the Best Way to Avoid the AI Nightmare — What if you care about AI's environmental impact, privacy holes, and the ethical problems of training on data without the creators' permission? The answer might be to switch to Linux. Yes, Linux.Kate Asks about Mistakes to Avoid — Hey boys-Microsoft has officially gone off the deep end with this AI stuff. I'm pretty sure AI Clippy is pulling the strings behind the scenes. Any tips for escaping to Linux before I get assimilated? What are the big don'ts for a newbie?Jeremy Molina on X — sudo rm -rf ./ on the root directory 😓Lee Ball on X — I thought I was in a backup directory when I did an rm -rf but turned out I'd forgotten the ./ and just went into /var/lib/mysql and not the backup of said directory.ChaoticHuman on X — I think my most major beginner mistake once was something like sudochownuseraccount/ because I wanted to not have to deal with file-ownership-conflicts though I no longer remember what exactly I did. I only remember that it led to completely destroying my Linux-system.Ken Starks on X — What are all these files with a dot before them. They aren't programs. Might as well delete them.PDunn on X — Using fringe distos and too much distrohopping causing loss of time and not being productive. Linux can be a time sink I don't have time for. So I installed Ubuntu and moved on. I just use what works and is easy to maintain. Unplugged contributor here.Membership Summer Discount — Take $1 a month of your membership for a lifetime!Chris' Beelink Nix ConfigNix from First Principles: Flake Edition — This guide is a beginner's guide to Nix and related tooling, focusing on the newer nix command, and flake.nix compared to older tools like nix-env and default.nix. It does not require any prior Nix knowledge, and instead builds up the Flake based world from first principles, so that it can serve as an introduction to Nix itself, as well as the concept and uses of Flakes.Pick: Delfin — Delfin is a native client for the Jellyfin media server. It features a fast and clean interface to stream your media in an embedded MPV-based video player.Delfin on FlathubDelfin repoDelfin nix packageA fireside chat with Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek - Nextcloud — Part of this talk was on LUP, now you can hear the full thing.

So we'll start the show with a confession. Out of all the years I've been using Linux, there's still every now and then one mistake I still make that I am extremely embarrassed about that has no justification for being made. I have no excuse anymore. But over the years, on several occasions, I've logged in over an SSH connection to my Linux box. And I'm doing something like a file system format or updates or I don't know, something that really, really can't be interrupted. And, of course, connection gets interrupted. And update goes sideways, wrecks the system. You don't have any kind of remote console, no way back in.

No. And you would think, you would think, after multiple, multiple versions of this, I would have learned my lesson and used something like Screen or Zenji? Zelij. Whatever. I don't even think you ever heard of Tmux. Well, Tmux is fine. But when you got Zelij, why would you ever go back? It's actually pretty great.

So I try to learn from it. But every now and then I'll be logged in. And I'll be doing a bunch of updates. I'm like, I'm doing it right now. i'm doing it right now i'm doing it right now what am i thinking chris because of you you told like a horror story like two years ago about you doing i think you were doing a butterfest conversion or something over ssh and it all went wrong conversion in progress because of you every time i'm ssh and doing updates, I now switch, you know, I'll stop when it's appropriate, switch to a TMUX session and continue. And that's because

you're in my head saying, do the right thing. Good. I'm glad my pain, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, is this the Linux desktop's Windows 8 moment all over again? We'll explain and get into some of the biggest mistakes we've made in our Linux builds. Then we'll round out the show with some great picks, some boosts, and a lot more.

So let me say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. It's tailscale.com slash linux unplugged. Tailscale is programmable networking that is private, secure, and really fast, protected by... Oh, my God. That's right, the noise protocol. And you can get it for free, up to 100 devices. that is private, secure, and really fast, protected by OhioGuard. That's right, the Noise Protocol, and you can get it for free up to 100 devices. It's not a limited-time thing. It's what I use.

I'm still on the free plan for my devices, and now we're moving. It's kind of funny. I started on the free plan, and now we're moving to use it in production at Jupiter Broadcasting. Just kind of expanding from there. Go try it out. You're going to love it. It'll change the way you do networking. I have no inbound ports on my firewall. Tailscale.com slash Linux unplugged.

And a big time-appropriate greeting to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hey, Chris. Hey, Jason. Hello, Branch. Hello.

Hello. Look at that quiet listening, too. Shout out to everybody up there in the quiet listening just sitting back in that low latency free software Opus stream. Nice to have you with us. OK, so I said, is this the Windows 8 moment? Kind of tongue in cheek. But if you think back, the Windows 8 or really the Vista to Windows 8 era, for those of us that were around in the Linux desktop scene back then, really seemed like a strategic moment that desktop Linux didn't quite grab.

Yeah, I mean, Windows 7 was solid, right? I mean, it took a lot of that NT goodness, you know, you'd gotten past XP, speak not of Vista, but 7, widely deployed, known, trusted by admins, even me as a Linux user, you know, it's like I felt like i could work with windows 7 and then microsoft starts mucking around yeah in ways that even normal end users start to notice 8 was just hated vista was rough for a long time big memory blow lots of performance issues and intel max were slow hot and had just rolled out the awful butterfly keyboard. And it kind of felt like this is Linux's moment.

But looking back at it, I don't know if Linux was ready because this is also when we had just begun the GNOME 3 transition. Oh, that was a tough time. Big transition. We went from something that was really tried and true to something pretty new. It's in a better place now, but early on it was rough. And I mean, it was such a different paradigm. It's kind of hard to recommend to someone fleeing Windows,

you know, didn't like the changes there, wanted a traditional UI, and Gnome's like, wait, wait, we have something better. Yeah. But you do have to relearn everything. Have you heard of touchscreens? Uh-huh. And then Plasma,

which would kind of give you that traditional desktop, they were in transition from Plasma 4 then Plasma, which would kind of give you that traditional desktop, they were in transition from Plasma 4 to Plasma 5 at this time. So our two leading desktop environments were making big transitions. Right as Microsoft and Apple

were fumbling the ball. And then on top of this, our hardware choices were a bit more limited as well. We didn't have the kernel compatibility we have now. We didn't have

the great hardware providers that we did, or they didn't have the options they have. But I propose to you boys, this time is a little different. I'm not going to say this is for every user out there like we used to think back in the day. In fact, I think it's going to be mostly a subset of curious users that like to know how things work. Maybe they're technically inclined or they're not afraid to get technical. But I think there's going to be a contingent of these commercial platform users that say they need to find a better solution because there's just all these strategic taxes like we talked about last week that are building up and they're pushing people to a breaking point that maybe we haven't seen in a long time.

We've been talking about this and this last week, LifeWire.com released an article. We'll put a link in the show notes. And it talks about how all these computers are getting more AI features, and the consumer sentiment that's being surveyed isn't great. And the author's recommendation is to go check out Linux. Whoa. Yeah, the answer here is, well, if you're getting tired of this stuff, go somewhere where they're not getting jerked around like this. And the hardware is a lot better these days. Compatibility is a lot better these days. That is true. I mean, if you last

checked in a decade ago, you don't need weird Windows Wi-Fi drivers no more. Software installation answers a lot better. I mean, you can get very far with just flatpack and app images. Or snaps. And these days, there's a lot

more web apps, a lot more stuff's done on the browser, and we've got all the major browsers. We've got browsers. We even have Edge. So I actually think the story here for Linux is a lot stronger than it was in the Windows 8 era. Plus there's stuff like Microsoft 365, maybe Google Drive. There's a bunch of online solutions

that you can use even for traditional desktop tasks, and you can game on Linux now, at least kind of, sort of. Great point. Great point. Now, maybe not if you're a gamer, right? But like, I think this isn't necessarily targeted. There's that weird Windows power user sort of segment, which I don't know that this is targeting. But if you're not an expert at Windows, you don't really care that much about your OS to start with. Right. Maybe that's when you can swap it out. It feels like they're like people that just look at it as a tool. You know, like I think like if maybe the Linus Tech Tips audience, the kind of Windows power

user that likes to tweak their system out and make it, you know, specialized for gaming or whatever. I don't actually think they are a very good candidate. I think you're right, Wes. I think you're right, Wes. I think you're right. The candidate is somebody who views it as a practical implementation tool. Like we all have family like this. We all have friends like this. It's a tool.

And they don't want the tool to do a whole bunch of stuff that they don't need. It's like getting a multi-kitchen device that does the – it's a rice cooker. It's a slow cooker. It's a crock pot. It's also a hot top. It does all these kinds of different functions and features. It's an air fryer. It's a rice cooker, it's a slow cooker, it's a crock pot, it's also a hot top. It does all these kinds of different functions and features. It's an air fryer. It's a toaster.

And you really just wanted a rice cooker or you really just wanted a slow cooker or you really just wanted a toaster that just toasts really good. Now you got to like click through 16 menu items that you didn't need to get to the one that you actually use every time. Windows and Mac OS are becoming multifunction printers. And sometimes, you know, you need a fax machine and a scanner and a dot matrix or a dot inkjet printer whatever you like you need all these things in there and sometimes you just want a really nice laser printer and linux is the people that want a really nice laser printer just one thing that does it or they want

a really good toaster they want their computer to be one thing and do it really well it can be for tinkerers too but i think it can serve that niche. Yeah, and while I am not necessarily always an LTS kind of guy. Yeah, my computer is a playground. But, you know, we have a concept of LTS. Now, we can't quite say, right, we did have the GNOME 3 transition. We lose desktop environment sometimes like Unity. So it's not like there's no change.

But Plasma 6 is fresh and solid. GNOME's gotten a lot of polish. And we have other options, right? You could put someone on XFCE or Mate, and it's not going to meaningfully change. And even in the changes we do have, you've still got those LTSs where, you know, you've got

quite a long range of support before you're going to have to deal with the change. That's very different than the Microsoft model. I mean, I know we don't have all the answers, and it's not going to be as easy as going into Best Buy and just buying a laptop, but for people that want to take the effort, I think Linux desktop is in a better place than it has been. And we

kind of backed off from doing new user content because we figure people listening to this show are probably pretty enthusiast about Linux and kind of pass the newbie stuff, but I think we have an opportunity here that maybe we can make a show you could share with somebody who's considering this. I don't know if you've been following the saga on social media,

but there have been more and more people coming out of switching to Linux from Mac OS just recently. And I think it's gotten me thinking about this topic. So let's do one for folks that are considering this and let's talk about some of the mistakes that we've made. Some of the accidents, things that we got that have been sent into the show from the audience. And then we can kind of laugh at ourselves and maybe newbies can hear these mistakes and maybe

not repeat these things and they can get to work a little bit faster. Because again, I think we're looking for somebody who's not super technical, but they're practical. Maybe they're like a Mac power user who's getting a little frustrated with Apple. They're like a Windows power user, not a tinker, but you know, they know how to use a few things. I think that's the perfect user to maybe consider switching to Linux right now. And there's a lot of mistakes they could avoid. Collide.com slash unplugged. You've probably heard me mention Collide before because it's such a game changer technology. You prevent problems before they connect to your network, before they use your applications.

You empower users to solve problems directly using platforms they're familiar with, and it kind of deflates that tension between IT and the end user. But have you heard that they have been acquired by 1Password? It's big news because these two companies kind of have that same philosophy about putting end users first. They're really the leaders in the industry there. And now Collide's a central pillar of 1Password's extended access management. This is something you have to check out at collide.com slash unplug. They're taking things to the next level. Now, Collide Device Trust has helped companies with Okta ensure that only known secure devices can access their data for a while. They're still doing that, but now they're doing that as part of 1Password.

So if you've been meaning to check out Collide, now's the time. It comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks. You can write your own if you need to. And Collide will work with devices that don't have MDM. So that means your Linux machines. That means contractor devices, which were the bane of my existence.

And of course, all the BYOD stuff you could imagine, phone, laptop, Chromebook, tablet. You wouldn't believe it. Printers with Wi-Fi, gaming access points I've seen people bring in. This stuff is wild. I don't want to get into it because I was on the IT side. There was some hostility there. Collide solves that. Smooths it over. Probably could have kept me from burning out. So now that Collide's part of 1Password, it's only getting better, and you've got to go check it out. Support the show and go to K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Learn more. Watch their demo.

Check it out. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Collide dot com slash unplugged. Well, we got a note in from a listener, Kateate recently that kind of set the scene for this entire episode it reads hey boys microsoft has officially gone off the deep end with this ai stuff recently i'm pretty sure ai clippy is pulling the strings behind the scenes any tips for escaping to linux before i get assimilated What are the big don'ts for a newbie? Thank you, Kate. Great question. Thank you for writing in. But before we start, please, everyone,

help us out here. Boost in your mistakes. I mean, we're going to share some of our mistakes. Everyone else who's already boosted and written in, they're willing to share some mistakes. And I think we can kind of all laugh and learn together. But let's start things off with some warm-up mistakes. How about? Yeah, I've been pondering all week about these. And there's some that float up to the surface before you get into, like, the trauma section of your brain. And I think we can start there.

Some of these are a little aged. And so I think maybe it's a good reminder for myself and those of us who've like picked up tricks over the years. And maybe we're still using those tricks and they don't really need to be. But one of them that came to mind for you know, a special partition for home and like defining all your own stuff instead of just letting the OS do that for you. Oh, completely. I would even break out VAR into its own, which would often fill up, you know. Yeah, because it's variable. Well, the problem, yeah, the problem I often ran into was like when you install a system, you're like, yeah, 20 gigs is enough for this, right?

like when you install a system you're like yeah 20 gigs is enough for this right and uh sure enough defining a too small like root partition or something has bigger consequences when you're trying to get stuff done than you realize when you're installing this thing yeah no kidding and the way to back out is often a nuke and pave unless you have kind of a more flexible file system i have also burned myself a mini time, a mini mini time on too small slash boot too small home. I start installing steam games and I run out of space on my home or, you know, uh, I'll fill up my root by installing steam games because I'm like on 256 gigs. My perfect system is a one terabyte or so for a desktop, a one terabyte or two terabyte for the system, which is like root Etsy bar, maybe even boot. And then like another terabyte or 500 gigs

separate disc just for the home. I love it when I can do that. I've got questions. Why so large for the system drive? So that way, if I run it for years, I won't fill it up when I least expect it. I like to give myself a lot of headroom to go clean up and do maintenance. Plus, you can also slice some of that out in the future. Like, sometimes I'll make slash opt its own partition or slash SRV, depending on what I'm doing. So it's nice to have, like, a little extra room

you can slice up in the future as well. Or if you want to, you know, you're trying out a new distro, you want to make some room and install something else on there. There's lots of ways to do this with lvm butterfest too but i don't think we need to get that complicated for the introductory stuff yeah this kind of makes me uh remember something i didn't i didn't listen our doc here which is uh the dangers of dual booting i i remember when i first started i was trying to like dual dual boot Windows and Linux because I didn't want to completely dedicate to a Linux system.

And I think I would advise actually against that as a beginner because that just led me instantly to a bunch of like technical loopholes that I had to go through to make it all work. And then you update one and it destroys the other one and stuff like that. So I think I would strongly recommend like just go all in with the Linux system. Do you guys agree? I don't know that I do. I mean, unless you have multiple machines. If you have multiple machines, then I think, yeah, have an all in Linux machine. But if you only have the one laptop and you're a student or something, I don't know. What if you don't need an application on Windows?

You can do everything on Linux. Yeah, that seems reasonable. Because I do kind of agree with Brent what will happen. You're using it in anger. You need to get it done right now. Perfect example for a new user of this is they just can't print. And if they just reboot it into Windows, the printer is already set up, and they could just print. Rebooted into Windows, the printer's already set up, and they could just print.

And I would argue if you can go into this with this mindset, it is actually better to just stick it out with Linux and figure it out. Now, there may be some circumstances where there's an incompatibility. So obviously there's edge cases to what I'm saying here. But I feel like if you have the escape patch and you can just reboot in Windows and have it working in 45 seconds, when you're in a rush, you're going to always take that option. So you'll never really learn how to fix it because the only time you're ever using it is when you're in a rush. Yeah, but what about the flip side where you hit that and then you're like, well, Linux just doesn't work. I'm rolling it back. I think that's

where people get upset. And it's like you have to appreciate that you are transitioning platforms here and it isn't always going to be easy and there won't always be the same solution to doing things. And you sometimes got to roll with that it's like you have not to bring up the linus tech tips thing again but like i think where linus went wrong and you know he uninstalled his desktop and all of this is he was in a rush and he wasn't in this open mind learning mentality about this is a new chance for me to discover technology again not i need this technology to

do this thing that i expect right now it's like it, it has to be like a, it has to be a mindset thing too. And you know, the way I could do it being impatient sometimes is I break it down into challenges and I'll say, okay, I'm just going to figure this out. I'll spend 30 days figuring this out. And if I don't have it figured out by the end of the 30 days, then I can bail. It might depend too on your general computer comfort level. You know, like if you're not, if you've never had to troubleshoot the Windows boot process or like deal with Windows problems before, then yeah, maybe having two OSs is going to be more complicated than it's worth. But if you feel comfortable doing a little bit of troubleshooting, like you're decent on Windows, you just haven't learned Linux yet. Maybe that's a different setup.

Yeah. And I will say on macOS, especially the modern hardware, you really have no choice. You need to keep macOS. At least the dual booting is kind of handled by the firmware. This does make me remember that, you know, having these situations where you're like, oh no, I'm going to need to, I need to do something. These partitions are not going to work for me. Yeah. Yeah. And that's really how I got familiar with, I mean, partitioning in general, but then also like tools like gparted, you know, like going in there and being like, okay, I'm going to wait for an hour while this resizes on my, you know, spinning rust disc and it shrinks the Windows partition a little more so I

can get more room for Linux. But it's also one of those things where you start having to have an excuse to poke around a bit more on your system, which maybe isn't what you want, but can be an opportunity to learn a lot about Linux. I have another one here that I think is more beginner advice or something not to do. And this might be a little controversial. We'll see. I think it's important when you're first starting out with Linux to not choose a non-standard distribution. I know there's a lot of, especially these days, like YouTube videos that are diving into like the newest, coolest, weirdest new Linux distro doing things a little differently. But as a beginner, I feel like being on the like safe and classic ones.

Oh, I take that back on the on the really safe ones that are popular, like the most popular is a good way to go. Do you guys agree? Reluctantly? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I'm not even sure which ones I would even classify in this category necessarily. But the thing that – the overall takeaway that I have is the further you get away from Windows, the more complex it is to get tech support. And so if you go to macOS, it's slightly harder usually than Windows. And if you go to Ubuntu, it's going to be slightly harder than macOS and et cetera. But yeah, maybe that's not true. I think it depends on what access you have, right? Do you have folks that are not networkable?

Right. It's a good point. But I would say Ubuntu, at least this, maybe not currently, but there was a time, I would argue, where support on Ubuntu might've been a little bit better if you're just having to go to Google to find some problem.

Now, obviously you don't have to know Linux, but if you don't know Windows either, the quality of answers and forum posts for Windows questions is just abysmal. People who really have no idea. Whereas I feel like the time to get the like, okay, maybe you don't want to have to have the experience of doing some weird apt command in the terminal that you copied off Stack Overflow, but you can get to those real fast. Where I think it goes off the rails with Ubuntu these days is, although it's still better than most, is that there's so many iterations now of how to do things that new users will find themselves in a guide that's five years old using commands.

And now everything's a snap, so those things aren't going to apply. Yeah, that's a very good point. But I think you are right, Brent, to point people to places, you know, it's like the five paragraph essay in a way, right? You kind of got to learn the very rudimentary structure of like what you're working with, have the most support available, be doing it the way that everyone knows and is going to assume and isn't going to be like, what is going on here? Yeah. Then you can start really tweaking things. Go the direction where you have the best support structure. Okay. Okay. Well, in that way, can we each come up with a distro or two that we would recommend? I mean, you're coming in absolutely stock fresh to Linux. I'm picturing like DHH, right? He's

Ruby guy. He runs 37 signals. He's developing software. He understands syntax and language. And you're coming in absolutely smack fresh to Linux, give me an argument why that person shouldn't adopt NixOS. I can't think of one. Because if you're going to learn anyways from the ground up, and you already understand functional programming, and you live in Ruby. I think the one tricky thing, I think NixOS can be deployed as an appliance really well for folks that aren't going to tinker with it. But what's the willingness to do so? I think especially one area, unless you want to go containers or toolbox or distro box kind of tools, I think sometimes development in particular can be a bit of an edge case because there's just a lot of tools that assume

things are writable and you're running stuff that only developers are using. Yep. That was my number one thinking too, is that assume things are writable and like you're running stuff that only developers are using. Yep. That was my number one thinking too, is that they were pulling down something and trying to just run it is so foreign, but it does seem like somebody like, like him would probably be able to figure it out. But yeah,

that I think is it, that is its weakest point. And I don't know how you would solve that other than maybe the entire user session is essentially running inside a fake Linux shell. And so every application just thinks it's on a regular Linux box or something. I don't really know how you solve that problem. And there are setups. It might depend on what you're doing.

If you're already using stuff like dev containers or you're familiar with DistroBox and you don't mind setting some of this stuff up or doing development in a virtual machine that's on top or something. Yeah, or container. Yeah. But here's my point. And here's the point I was attempting to make. It is not necessarily any harder to learn than RHEL or

Arch or Gentoo or Debian if you're starting from scratch. They're all completely foreign concepts from the way, say, Windows works. Right. You're not upset that they changed the file system layout on you if you never knew what the file system layout was. Right. Exactly. So it's kind of like, I mean, that can be true

of functional programming in general, and it makes sense that it applies to Nix. It's like if you're, if you know the regular way, it's, you have to unlearn before you can learn. Exactly. Exactly. That's the whole thing. That's why I can't get Mike to try Clojure. In this weird, ironic way, it'd be

easier for somebody who's, granted, technical and probably a developer already, to just make the switch on board directly to Nix. Outside of that, Brent, outside of that, I teeter between Fedora and Ubuntu, I think. I was going to say Ubuntu 16.04. 16.04. Classic Ubuntu. What about you? I sort of feel like I used to have a better answer for this i used to like quite a few years back just like lean on mint pretty heavily these days i hear a

lot of really great successes for new users on pop os but i hesitate because i'm not sure there's like a really obvious answer. Like Ubuntu is a really great suggestion, but these days, I don't know. I feel like they've been slipping a little bit. I'm not sure. So I don't, if I had to choose one, I'd say like Ubuntu or Pop! OS, especially Kubuntu if, you know, because I think KDE is really a good mix for a new user who kind of wants to dabble a little bit and learn things. So that would be my suggestion. It feels like Ubuntu still has the highest

do random X task without having to get into the weeds factor. I think there's other areas that Fedora has things beat, especially in maybe some of the more modern desktop features, depending on which LTS and release cadence you're at or in between? I think part of where my answer comes from is I also think of the user who isn't as technical and they need GUIs to do updates and stuff like that. And that feels to me like where NixOS would fall down a little bit more. At one point, we might have said elementary OS. What do we think about that right now?

Yeah, I think, you know, pop os didn't come to mind elementary os haven't come to mind because i don't have a lot of recent experience with them i think when cosmic comes out i'm definitely going to spend some time with pop and try to try to get a sense of that be nice if the cosmic desktop did kind of evolve into this almost um cinnamon type sweet spot where it's powerful but also easy. Somewhere where Plasma is kind of reaching towards right now. 4.12 Linux boosted just a moment ago while we were live and said his Linux mistake was not being patient enough when using a desktop environment and then leaving the desktop environment

the first time it gets frustrating. I've stuck with Mate and I'm very happy now. That I also have done. Oh, this doesn't work and i'll just switch desktop environments and you never really kind of became an expert so i kind of you know that has slowed down for me over the last five years or so but early on i think that ties into two things it's one your earlier point of like you do there's gonna be points where you're going to have to stick you have to either pre-prepare or be willing to be flexible where

you're going to just there's going to be things that don't work there's going to be things you have to figure out you need to be prepared to handle that you know you flexible where you're going to just, there's going to be things that don't work. There's going to be things you have to figure out. You need to be prepared to handle that. You know, you won't, you're going to have to figure it out on the ground, but just know that that's coming. Don't let it get you too frustrated or too down. I think it's too early right now, but I wonder if the UBlue style of distributions maybe will be an answer we could give here in a couple of years with a little more mindshare. That could be interesting. Something that we'd feel confident in recommending. Yeah, I think that's where we're at.

We're like, well, we could suggest these things. It's sucky we don't have a better answer for this still. 4.12 also makes me think one thing that's really easy to fall down the rabbit hole of is the customization. You have desktop environment options. You have a ton of tool options. You have desktop environment options. You have a ton of tool options. You have shell options. If you're using Plasma, you have a thousand checkboxes

and dropdowns to play with. It's easy to get a little sucked into that. You kind of forget that you're trying to actually use a computer for things or feel like you need to learn all of those things before you can keep advancing in what you're doing. So be careful with configuration. Yeah, beware, resist that temptation,

take it slow there. I feel like we all feel like maybe, or many Linux users feel like they had a phase where that was what they were doing with Linux and then either keep doing that or evolve into another phase of like, okay, now I'm playing with this subsection. Oh yeah, oh, so many times, man,

I've sat down on my computer, I'm like, oh, I'm going to play a video game and I update Steam and the Steam downloads get going and while the Steam downloads get going, I start playing around with other down on my computer. I'm going to play a video game and I update Steam and the Steam downloads get going. And while the Steam downloads get going, I start playing around with other things on my computer. And I just end up keep doing that. And I never play the game. It's a blessing, right? Because here you have a whole new hobby that you get to play with and enjoy that you don't have to spend money on to get games.

Right. And it's a bit of a curse. I've got a few other little quick ones for you, boys. And this is from the perspective of someone who's like just very on the cusp of switching. So maybe this first one is about backups. I know a lot of people who use like just backup hard drives. You know, they got a laptop and they use that when they're traveling or whatever. So they don't necessarily have a NAS set up at home and something like that.

So they don't necessarily have a NAS set up at home and something like that. So my advice, or at least a mistake I see pretty often with someone who's switching, is to have a non-Linux file system on those backup drives. And then you start trying to do backups of your Linux stuff. And all the permissions are wrong. It doesn't have an understanding of all the things you care about there. So that would be a little piece of advice that I've run into a number of times with people I've helped switch over and myself as well. I wonder though, does it depend on what you're backing up?

Because the flip side of that- Depends how you're backing up too. Is like, if you're trying to back up files that maybe you want on multiple systems and then you've formatted this EXT4 and Windows or your Mac is like i get what do you there's nothing on this thing you want me to format it for you yeah right that's such a dangerous uh little little thing the problem here is i don't think there's a fabulous answer for the like usb

hard drive situation because if you've got a few you know you got a mac or something or you've got windows and and you're you have the have the one Linux laptop that you're just trying out for now before you move everything else over, then it's not actually that straightforward. So I don't know what the right answer is here, but it's move everything as quickly as possible to one system, maybe, or have a NAS, because that just eliminates that problem entirely. Yeah. Disk format. Who needs those?

And another piece of advice I have here for the very beginner, that has helped me a ton with friends and family members that I switched over, and myself included, is travel with a live USB of the distro that you have installed on your laptop. That's a good idea. Because things probably shouldn't ever go wrong, but they will. And when they do, it's really nice to have that escape hatch.

It almost makes me think of what would you put together as a boot camp? If you could force your friend to sit down with you for a day, you give them a notebook or a folder, and you go through some stuff. I think how to boot into a live ISO and then like mount your actual system to do some work on it. And maybe you need to, you know, true or system D into there and like rebuild your grub stuff or re update your

in it RamFS. I think I'd want something like that on there. I think also part of that boot camp would be showing them how to install packages, or getting things from flat hub because a lot of new users just go to the web and download stuff and they kind of get lost there. So those are some good ones, Brent. The travel USB is a very good one. Yeah. And it's something you can tuck away in your laptop bag and forget about until that moment when you need it.

Just make sure you back up the stuff you put on there so that you can wipe it when you need to. That's a very good point. Now, are we ready for our confessions and deep mistakes that we regret and maybe have a little bit of trauma about? Yeah, all right. Lay it on us. I've got one for you that I'm still dealing with years after I made this decision,

which I feel a little bit embarrassed about, but we'll get into it. So maybe four or five years ago, I was really on this like crusade to help my friends and family switch to Linux because it was so much better for privacy and security and stability and all these things, right? And it worked. Like I helped a lot of people and I feel really proud of that. Back then I moved most of those folks to a Kubuntu system, which they're still using to this day. So I think that's pretty good. And I chose, because these are all laptops that were traveling to various places, to use the encryption that's built into the installer, which is also sweet and worked really well. The problem I'm running into these days is the choices that were made in the installer about boot partition sizes, because most things are encrypted except for this boot partition,

which helps you unencrypt the rest of things. Right. And when it was installed, do you recall, did you use the auto partition feature? Yeah, it was relatively new back then, and I was pretty excited about not having to set up all my own partitions and set up my own encryption and stuff. So, so I remember back then, yeah, it was great. And that option is still in the installers. And I think I've seen it in most installers we've tested in the last couple of years. So as you guys know, I always give it a try. And this is the reason, i i think it's such a wonderful thing for most users the problem i've run into is that this slash boot partition is well it's of a finite size right it's not your entire it's not your entire drive and it's just set uh arbitrarily by the installer

like someone made a decision about how big that should be. The problem I have is I think it's way too small because I've run into a variety of times of like my parents, they're like traveling to Australia and they're in the airport in Auckland or something. And they're like, my laptop won't boot. And it's because this boot partition fills up when they do an update or something because, you know, you get a new kernel and it throws it in there and there's not enough room. So it doesn't ever complete the update and all of a sudden your machine's bricked. Do you remember how big it is by chance? Oh, yeah. This sounds like it's singed into room. He's like, oh, yeah, I've been, yeah, I've looked at this.

I have this like, oh, so much trauma. I have this like file now that's like, okay, when this happens, do this, this, this, because I've solved this a few times. And I try to be on top of it now because they're like these systems that I installed many, many years ago. They're still working fine except for this little thing, right? And I haven't gone through the effort of like reinstalling the entire thing the entire system for them because it's like well everything else is working most of the time so it's a thing i need to consistently look at on other people's machines oh i don't don't do this um but it's about 1.7 gigs when you first install it but every so so I did research this morning because I knew you'd ask me this question.

So I installed a virtual machine with this exact setup. And so each kernel is about like 150 megs. So that's about 10% of this space. And when you do a fresh install, you get about two kernels right away. The one that it came with, the one, and then the one you updated to. So that's already 20 20 of it gone now the i think where this has never been a problem for me personally is i update with the command line and it reminds you to like do an apt auto remove which takes away like older kernels and it keeps just i think three of them which is a totally fine reasonable

setting and so i had i have personally never run into this issue for that reason, but my parents, so when my parents are doing updates, they're using discover to do their updates and they love it. It works every time. And they don't have any problem with that, except it doesn't do the cleanup of these kernels. So, so every, like, I don't know, it depends how often they're updating, but like every nine months or so, either I see them or I decide, oh, I got to go log into their system and clean up a bunch of kernels or their computer just stops working. And every single time it is such a headache. And so this is a decision I made like years ago. That's still biting me today.

So just a warning. I've never heard of anyone else running into this specific problem, but I run into it like with five different people all over. No, it's a thing. And just a warning to people that use the NixOS graphical installer. It'll make your slash boot 200 megabytes, which is like, whoa. Yeah. Two kernels, maybe. I don't know.

What do you boys think the right slash boot size is? I wonder, does it depend? Are we talking like just slash boot? Because that was in the legacy boot. Now there's sort of a hybrid thing. Yeah, does it depend, are we talking like just slash boot? Cause that kind of, that was in the legacy boot. Now there's sort of a hybrid thing where it's like you have your EFI system partition, your ESP. Uh, does that get mounted under slash boot slash EFI? Yeah. Or does this all of slash boot on, you know, different people do different things. Different distros do different things. Yeah. At least a gig, right? Oh, at least. Yeah. I'm thinking

five gigs if you got, I think if you got it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking three, right? Oh, at least, yeah. I'm thinking three. Five gigs if you got it. I think if you got it, yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking three to five. Yeah. That seems right. What about you, Brent? Well, this problem bit me, and it's about 1.7 gigs, almost two. So I'd say double that easily.

Yeah? So four to five gigs? Yeah. It's a lot, but I mean, I guess with disk size today, I mean, the other option is to just break out the BOOTFI and leave BOOT on root. And then, you know, just have a large root. That's the other option there. Yes, you can have setups like that. Yeah.

And as Dan's mentioning here in our chat, too, yeah, so if all you need are just the EFI bits and then, like, the grub config and the actual kernel and interim are somewhere else then. Yeah. And that could be the way to go. But the issue there is that a lot of the auto installers don't do it that way. As I learned when I was testing my different B-Link setups and I went to go rebuild my configuration for like the third time and I got out of space. I'm like, out of space? What are you talking about? It's a terabyte.

And then I realized, oh, the auto installer put slash boot on its own 200 megabytes. Yikes. Yeah. So that's just something to be aware of. You know, one of the other ones we got sent into the show a lot, because I asked on Weapon X, and one of the replies I got from Jeremy was that one day he accidentally pseudo-RMRFed his root directory. Yeah, I saw a lot of people that have accidentally done that or imaged over the wrong disk.

I think we've probably all done that. Lee Ball says, I thought I was in a backup directory when I did an RMRF, but it turned out I had forgotten the.slash and had just gone into varlib MySQL. It's deleted the MySQL stuff. A common one I've seen and probably has been me is, you know, you're doing maintenance on some system. And so you have it under like slash mount. And then, you know, if you're to rooted for a bit and then you're not.

Yeah. You're doing the RM and host at seer. Other at seer. Which one am I working on? You start getting Inception sick. It does make me wonder. I know there exists stuff, right? In a GUI, you often stuff gets sent

to the trash, the recycle bin, a temporary place before it's really deleted. On the command line with RM, we are not so lucky. But there exist tools, various ones and setups, where you can have that in the terminal. But does anyone actually

do that? No. But again, I go back just real brief frame of mind, frame of mind, frame of mind, because when I was very, very, very like maybe my second, third time using Linux outside the home where maybe I'd set it up once, I did this. I RMRF my system. And back then it was a lot easier to do. And I did it in the middle of a classroom in front of everybody in a computer lab. No. Normally this is like a quiet private shame you have at home at midnight. Right. Now, I could have been frustrated and angry that I just destroyed my system, but instead I was impressed. I was impressed that it let me do it. It let me do it. It let me do it. It didn't stop me.

Windows would have stopped me. Mac OS would have stopped me. It would have said no. Chris, like you always say, Windows assumes the user is an idiot, but Linux demands proof of that. That's very true. That's very true. And so that for me was like, oh, this is very impressive. And I decided to look at it as a cool thing to learn.

And then I also took that opportunity to learn how things run out of RAM for a while and what doesn't run out of RAM. I think at the time I had Star Office or whatever it was back then running. And it remained running until I rebooted the system. So some stuff just kept on working. It is neat to see what breaks and when. Chaotic Human on X gave us some info here. I think my most major beginner mistake was something like sudo chone my user account slash.

Yeah, let's just own everything. Because I wanted to not have to deal with file ownership conflicts, though I no longer remember what exactly I did. I only remember that it led to completely destroying my Linux system. Yeah. Yeah. Shown in stuff you probably shouldn't have. And then on top of that, maybe you didn't really take a backup or a snapshot or record what the permissions were before so you could roll back.

Now, a lot of this stuff these days with copy on write file systems and snapshots you've you've got more easy options if you know about them and you've bothered to take that initial snapshot but you know a lot of this stuff it's all ext4 yeah t3 in place yeah you know that's a good point if you started with something like butter fs you got you got your system just work and take a snapshot and you can just roll back perhaps oh man i have definitely done this i think with ssh files for some reason i like i chowned some of my ssh config or something and i remember that ssh quit working and then i couldn't get to the system oh yeah it's real picky about yeah what's your private keys i have no idea why i did it maybe it was a mistake i mean it was obviously a mistake

but um i couldn't get to the box and then i had to go to the console to fix it that's kind of like ken stark's example here thinking oh what are all these files with a dot before them they aren't programs i can probably just delete them yeah that's a big change from windows right windows doesn't have dot files yeah and like you you uh you know enable hidden files maybe you'd be poking around something you see like you're all these things that are just cluttering your home to your, what's this crap? And on macOS, that stuff goes in like application library, whatever, you know, has like those other folder structures

where a lot of that kind of stuff gets stuffed away. So you might not even recognize that's a good one. Those.files have a purpose. Learn what they do, right? Well, I think from all this, I think I have a new rule actually, and I wonder if you guys agree with it. A new install should be today, because we have the technology now, should be a rollback-friendly distro, however you do it. Because I feel like that is like a get-out-of-jail-free card. if you do it via the file system you know with like zfs or butter fs or if you do it with something like nixos that has its own way of doing rollbacks doesn't that kind of go in conflict with uh

kind of using ubuntu advice yeah yeah that's what i'm saying is ubuntu get with it yeah that would be nice like if they just took time shift even. Something. And integrated that. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that would be really nice. There is something especially. Obviously, it's trade-off because, you know, on one hand, you do want to try to keep things as simple as possible for when you are troubleshooting. But that kind of thing, you know, for some people, for some situations, if this is a machine that like you, you know, maybe you don't have very many machines. This is your only machine.

For whatever reason, you just need it to work. Having that ability, you know, even though like I know, even though like for me, I can fix it. I'll figure it out. I can reinstall like these are all I know how to do it. But, you know, you're you're on the bus and you need to get the thing uploaded before you lose service and you just need your computer to work and you hit down, enter and you're back. I conceptually understood what you just described. What I didn't realize would change behavior-wise is how we would be willing to tinker and experiment in ways that just wreck the system but allow us to try new things. Because we knew with 100% certainty that we could reboot, toggle one down and grub, and hit enter. And it was like we never did any of that.

We never did any of that. And from that experimentation, we've been able to try new versions of OBS or integrate pipe wire or just do all these different things that – or Plasma 6 and Wayland and know that if something broke, we could just go right back. And we've had a lot of fun and it's been a great opportunity to learn because we have that option. We just – some of these other systems, they became delicate and precious and we didn't really want to mess with them because we didn't want them to break because they're so important. You know, that's kind of a mistake I was going to share. It's not super specific. I have one from a past work where I was involved in the migration from Ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04. Oh, yeah.

Kind of just skipped over 14, probably for the best, honestly. But, of course, this was the system D transition. Yes. A bunch of stuff changed, including ZFS showing up for the first time. I like 16 was a great release. Oh, wow. 16, huh? Yeah. Those systems, like you're describing, they were really ossified and built around

the notion of the world as it existed. Ubuntu, package repos, everything at 1204. The LTS can be great because it gives you the stability. It lets you invest, but it is all too easy to lose track or just like have designed in patterns that you're really going to have to radically change. Well, and we're struggling with it on our 1804 machine here in the studio.

I have made this mistake. I think probably my biggest pattern of mistakes in the past was mixing repos and versions, trying to get the right packages for what I'm trying to do, mix and matching, creating dependency hell, and then all for maybe a year later, most of the repositories are 404ing, and I can't even update that stuff. So you have that one system that works because you have the versions as they were available then,

and you had to don't touch it, and can you recreate it outside of a DD clone? Yeah, exactly. That was a mistake I made a lot was mix and matching that now i think my approach would be you know a container flat pack or through the next package manager so like on our 1804 system now we don't we don't try to we don't even try to add that feature through the apt package installer because it's all 1804 packages we put nix on there and we installed say new jack from nix or depending what you might do you might do a flat pack or container

that would be the direction i would go now and leave the base package manager pretty simple and all it really has to do is just maintain the base system for as long as possible and then i think you'll have a lot less errors you have a lot less problems and a lot less dependency issues and 404s like i've had especially when yeah all you have is like that base set of packages that are mostly all kind of standalone programs and helpers and admin utilities. It makes the system feel pretty nice and lean. I know we've probably missed some, so don't forget to boost in your mistakes and we'll share them along as they come in. Linuxunplugged.com slash membership promo code summer.

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well we had a bunch more questions come in, Chris, about your B-Link config that you shared. And so here's the first one. Hey, Chris, is this really a minimal setup with all these system packages? It's a good question. Yeah, I know. I know how it depends on your frame of mind. You know, you put it all out there, boys, and everybody's got their opinions. I think if you consider that what's in that config is pretty much the only thing on the system, and it's minimal, right? Because it's not like it's a full Ubuntu install and then I've added all these packages. It's essentially a completely blank install and then I've just put this stuff on top of it.

But it is a desktop. Like some of the, like listen to Jeff's like, why do you have Moonlight in there? What are you doing? I'm like, no, it's so I can do remote desktop into the studio. It's actually, there's a reason for it. And so, yeah, I don't know.

It's, is it minimal? Well, it's not as bulky as like a stock Mint install or Ubuntu install. I feel like also by and large, you know, the way Nix is set up, I'm less concerned. I have less ick about it because it doesn't feel like me installing these things is going to, I'm going to have to go to hoops to get them to like interface and talk to each other and mess things up rather than the reverse of like by default that kind of that happens.

You know, you install a bunch of stuff and you're like, oh no, is there going to be some weird combination of these things or something goes wrong but you know adding more stuff to your to your next setup i don't usually yeah i get that vibe i have that i was gonna see here uh 145 146 something like that i was just gonna give a quick count yeah that's how many packages you've installed it's and it's it's grown a bit but yeah yeah well then then the next question is have you made changes since you posted that config? Yeah, of course I have. I did remove some dupe entries.

Thank you. I can't remember who sent that in to me. So I just reposted it, I think, yesterday. The other thing I did that I didn't have my original setup is I added a real basic out-of-memory killer. Oh, I, I hit the 16 gig wall pretty hard and the kernel out of memory killer just doesn't really do it. And the whole UI locked up plasma became kind of unresponsive and it was my

bad. I had a lot going on. Plus I was building some software in the background. Didn't even think about the fact that I only have 16 gigs of Ram and the system just sort of came to a halt. So can't have that happen. So put a little out-of-memory killer that says when I get to like 95% memory pressure or something like that, or 90% or something like that, start killing. Yeah, it's nice.

We've got good options for that these days, which is cool. That was not always the case. There's a few. I went with the simplest option. Surprise, surprise. But there are a lot of different options. I also enabled Z-RAM. Oh, fun. Yeah, just to kind of. I've been meaning to switch that on. surprise surprise but there are a lot of different options i also enabled z-ram oh fun yeah just kind

of i've been meaning to switch that on this i mean i've used it before but yeah it's like if i'm going to swap might as well make it make it as fast as possible and then i think maybe the biggest change actually now that i think about it i upgraded the uh the thing to the 2405 release of nix that just came out how did that go day one one. Smooth. Flawless. You add the new channel. You update. You do the old rebuild. And I specifically have put in my config,

Plasma 527, because one of the big changes is, of course, the new desktops. Well, I'm not ready to go to 6. After I get back from the woods, maybe I'll go to 6. But while I'm in the woods, I'm staying with 527. It's nice and stable.

But everything else, lots of packages, lots of updates, went real smooth. And I think, I think everything's working. I don't know if I've done a full audio production test, but so far everything I've looked at, it seems like it worked really well. I did have a few config syntax changes I had to make, but I've already made those. And those are in the version I've committed to the GitHub repo. So I'm pretty happy with it. And then the last thing I did, which isn't really a software config, but I love it, is through various means, I've ended up with this industrial Samsung display that I'm using.

I got it for free. It's very used. It's got like a dead spot and stuff, but I don't mind because it's a really great size, and it has a very interesting feature. No power button. If it's plugged in, it's on. Wow. Yeah.

And so obviously great, not ideal at night in a small space. So I have hooked the PC and the monitor up to a Z-Wave smart plug, and I've got it tied in with automations in the morning and the night and whatnot to be able to turn the monitor on and off. I've just really enjoyed getting all of the production gear is now remotely on some sort of IP power switch of some kind, which is just so great. So I'm really happy with it. It's been a good setup. And if you want to go check out my config, I'll try to relink it again. We should get that.

I don't have it in here right now. I should have. Because I think there's some nice changes. I'm still looking for people's suggestions, too. You got any? Have you looked at it? You should look at it. No, but here, I'm pulling it up right now, man.

Give it a gander. Yeah, I'll go. We'll give it a little. Yeah, give it a look after the show, maybe. Maybe in the post show. We'll give it a little peek-skies. And see if you think there's something in there I should fix up. I had a few things I had to change to fix, like, you know, the new syntax, drop X servers, specifically mentioning things.

And I had to redo a few things in there, but I think it came out all right. And now it is time for Le Boost. And Conrad comes in with a row of McDucks. Things are looking up for old McDuck. With 22,222 sats. He says, hey, I've discovered streaming sats. I'm always unsure about boosting in, but I'm glad I have a good way to support the show. I've turned it on for all JB shows.

And he says, I want to love Knicks, but I tested it out and it felt like I was doing it wrong. Do you have any tutorials that you recommend or maybe YouTube videos I could watch for a hobbyist? For a hobbyist, the way of the flake. Okay. Would love to start using it and would like to use it in my home lab. Keep up the good work. Really good getting started resources. I feel like we could use some suggestions on that.

How did we do it? So it depends on, I guess, what you're doing, right? Like, I think having a VM or a spare machine that you can play with NixOS and try to get, you know, your regular setup going is maybe a good way where you can do it, you don't have to worry about it not working when

you need it to, but you have time to figure out Nix, learn the expression language for the stuff where maybe you need to do something where like, oh, I want this package from Unstable, want this release or, you know, any kind of edge case at all. It gives you an area to play with that. For Nix itself, you know, if you're doing anything where you want custom packages to build anything or you're developing your own software, then install Nix on the distro you have and start using it for stuff. That could be the first way to get in is just distro you have already. start using it for stuff.

That could be the first way to get in. It's just, just try you have already. Uh, I really like this Knicks from first principles, flake edition blog post series by Tony Finn. I don't know if that's going to meet this need or not, but if you're trying to get grasp around sort of from bear Knicks up through, you know,

doing stuff with likes, um, it's a, it's really nice series that made a click for me at least. We'll link that. Yeah, let's link that. That seems, that seems really useful. That's a really nice series that made a click for me, at least. We'll link that, yeah? Let's link that. That seems really useful. That's a really solid question, Cronrad, and if anybody boosts in

with their recommendations, we'll try to pass it along to you. Thank you for the row of McDucks. Eric the Red comes in with another row of McDucks. This old duck still got it! My laziness to properly learn Grub has resulted in a rather large stack of eBay ThinkPads running different distributions. I seem to get hung up when an update or new install wipes out the existing entries, and then I have to start over from scratch.

Any tips on how to keep a single machine with multiple distributions running long-term? Hopefully I'm not alone in this quest. Thanks for the great show. You know, the Arch Guide and the Gen 2 Guides could be some great ways to learn Grub. You absolutely could do it in Grub. I feel like, too, there's a boot system, I cannot remember the name of it right now, that you can install that is kind of like

a universal OS boot manager. Do you remember this? Does this ring a bell at all to you? Is it refined? I was going to ask. Yeah, it might be refined. Maybe that's what I'm thinking of. But user Eric, that's a tall task.

When you're installing multiple OSs like that, they all want to override each other very often. So you would have to become extremely proficient at constantly managing your own grub. Sometimes you get lucky and you'll get like a machine where the UEFI boot manager can detect each one and then it has a little boot selector. Yeah, I was going to say that can be an option where, you know, they've got their own entry in there. And then there's tools in Linux to manage those too if you want to like change default or delete them. It can get tricky too because, you know because some distros are using system dboot

versus Grub, but it's not always enabled by default, but Grub does have OS probing options. So if you did, you know, I installed this new distro, it set itself to be the default thing. Try and make sure that it is at least trying to check. Some are better than others. I think Tumbleweed

is actually very good at this, finding and enumerating all the other systems. Yeah, nix is a tricky one and tumbleweed is pretty great i agree with you there um you know you can't always redo reset that as the defaults like you install a bun to and then what have to have tumbleweed switch tumbleweed back to being what's doing the boot and then have it do its boot repair just scan again yeah there's also a boot repair option in yast i think too which might just kind of like basically do a reinstallation. That would probably be a pretty easy, if Tumbleweed or something is one of your options.

Maybe it should be. The other thing, too, is if you just get, you know, if you look inside a grub file, or you could do it with systemd boot where the config's a little simpler, by and large, you really only need, you know, the path to the actual Linux kernel, the path to the initramfs,

and then what the kernel command line is. So if you can get familiar enough with grabber systemd just to go figure out where those three things live, then you can also always add manual entries. Like, so if it overwrites and it didn't find that one thing, if you can go look at the boot files for the OS you want to boot into, get those details, you can at least make it work.

So you're saying you really just got to learn three key things. Yeah. Now, you know, you will need updates. Maybe you have to manually do stuff or set up script or something, but at least to get things bootable, if you know where the kernel is, if you know where the init RD is, and you know what the kernel command line parameters are, like usually it tells it what the root file system is, you can get it to boot.

A 4.12 Linux boosted in four little micro topics here for us with 3,000 sets. Number one, thanks for covering the next drama last week. I listened to it twice in an attempt to absorb it all. Humans make things complicated. Number two, the live fountain stream has been awesome. I listened a while on a walk last week and really love that. Number three, this is my vote for minimal sounds during the boost section. I know going cold turkey would be difficult for Chris. I prefer the boost content to take focus, though, over

the sounds. And number four, the live feed is the best feed. Subscribe now! Aww. Yeah, we have been live now for months in the podcasting, since scale, right? Since scale, yeah, since the trip to scale. Yeah, with our podcasting 2.0 feeds, you can listen to love live if you're in fountain or podverse and just subscribe we'll show up in there we try uh we don't always succeed but uh try to put a pending

entry before we go live yeah so you'll take a look for that thank you for 12 for that and thank you for the value for the uh nix coverage appreciate that and your vote for the soundboard although at three of those and so it's gonna take more than that to your vote for the soundboard. Although at 3,000 sats, it's going to take more than that to get me off that soundboard, but it's a vote. Moonanite comes in with 3,500 sats and says, I'm experiencing my first live podcast on the train. I'm living

in the future. I think this is the last episode. And he said, I somehow managed to boost while literally underwater. But then the audio clipped out while you were actually reading my boost. Oh! So close. Well, keep trying.

Keep boosting and letting us know how it goes. A train that goes underwater? Do they have wind in the channel, maybe? Yeah, like, do you get to see? Is it? It's probably just dark, huh? Because of the windows, yeah, it wouldn't work with it.

But man, that'd be exciting. Also exciting, Faraday Fedora boosts in with AeroaDux. Who the hell at Microsoft thought this AI screen cap was a good idea? Did they look at what malware was doing and think, let's just cut out the middleman, do it ourselves? I can see Linux market share increasing from this quote unquote feature alone. Yeah, we've been thinking the same, potentially, Faraday Fedora. You know, the other thing that has me kind of like pondering is, let's just say, and this is a big let's just say, I acknowledge, but let's just say these things get big. A lot of these co-pilot PC Plus things sell, you know,

they got the MPUs, you got the baked in stuff for the AI. If it got any kind of traction on the Windows platform, then we would start to see malware that shows up that's like using this. And what would it do? Like would it go through your pictures? Because your user account is going to have access to that stuff. So the malware is going to have whatever privileges your user account has access to. Is it going to run like lots of weird queries and like send them off in the background?

Like what's it going to do? Yeah, it's writing prompts specifically designed to extract all of your most sensitive information. I mean, think about it. Like, once you have this stuff baked in and then something gets run into the user privileges, there's got to be all kinds

of things it's going to be able to do, right? So we're going to see, like, a whole new classification of malware, potentially. I don't know. We should patent it now. This is, like,

official malware in some cases. It's kind of gross. Yeah, it is, basically, because it's stealing resources in the background. Well, VT52 boosted in, to correct us from last episode, with 5,555 sats. Coming in hot with the boost! Hey, I'm just boosting in to point out

that my boost last week was misread. I wasn't bragging about hitting five nines of availability on my home lab, but rather nine fives. Oh, that's a little bit of a, that's a little bit, that's, that's not the same thing. Still, it's in our mistakes episode. So that's gotta be it. There you go. That did work out. VT, thanks for sharing that with us. Maybe that's what you want. You know, here at the studio when it gets hot in the summer, I've just been turning the equipment off.

So not a great long-term strategy. Up times for chumps. Keeps the cottonwood away. That's true. That's true. Legal empty mode. That's great. Comes in with 19,102 sats.

B-O-O-S-T. First time booster. Hopefully I'm doing this right. Well, thank you veryats. B-O-O-S-T. First time booster. Hopefully I'm doing this right. Well, thank you very much. We really appreciate you taking that walk. That really means a lot to us. It says, I watch YouTube to listen to most podcasts at 2.5 to 3x. Whoa.

Three plus. Three plus. My head just blew up. I'm sorry. I have to put my head back together. But for this podcast, I often slow it down to 2.2 or even 1.8 if the content is dense. Slow down to 2.2. That's awesome. I take that as a compliment, I guess.

You know, high signal, I suppose. That's a wow legal. 3X and above is... I got to try it after the show just to experience that, you know. He goes on to say he wraps up some sound effects are short and sweet but I'm tired of the Spaceballs good movie but it's such a jarring disruption to the pace if you decide to keep them would you think about shortening them I don't the Spaceballs one is my favorite

I could maybe see shortening it yeah but I really like the Spaceballs ones it makes me chuckle a lot especially if we get a row of Spaceballs boost then we have a series of them which is that effect is fun yeah but taking a consideration for sure the other effect is fun, yeah. Taking into consideration, for sure. The other thing is, I mean, send in your suggestions for things you do want to hear. We'd love to

consider them. Zach Attack comes in with $5,555. Ooh. Via the podcast index. Hello. After listening to your experience with Kate, I'm going to give it a try over Doom Emacs. I love the integrated git features, the themes, and tabs.

Need to see if I can get it to format tables and markdown automatically. As for Linux mistakes for first-time users, they are not mistakes. They are called learning experiences. Learning opportunities, yes. Good point. Having said that, when setting up Linux for a non-technical user, always consider things from that user's perspective. Hence why my 84-year-old grandmother is on Mint for now. It's a fair point. You know,

my wife just got a new clinic and now she would like a machine where she can sit and type at and laptops coming up again. And I'm debating what distro to give her and what desktop environment. I'm leaning towards Nix and Plasma because it's fairly customizable. I can customize in a couple hours for her in a way that I think is pretty approachable. If you go with Windows 11, you don't even need a password manager anymore because you just ask the AI.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, that's right. She can recall. Being able to recall all her patients' records inside Windows Recall would be very useful. Very useful feature. Sack Attack, we appreciate that boost. Thank you very much.

Kusaria came in with 4 000 sats in total for two boosts the worst mistake installing linux i'd have to say every single time is when i install i forget to enable z-ram or swap ah i remember that i forgot it when i run into that fun bug where your system grinds because the memory page references are stored in swap. When someone says get more RAM and don't use swap. No, you need at least 500 megs of RAM. It's actually noted in the kernel documentation pages about the memory manager. Good to know.

And as far as the dev one system D challenge, I'd say making the dev one NixOS distro is valid. And the sound effects add to the whimsy but don't lose them and maybe add to the diversity of the sound effect that's a good point we did have a github repo going for a bit or a github i don't know issue or something where people were submitting new sound that would be nice maybe one option yeah more diversity and you know we lobby for some new fun versions and and we just see fewer Spaceballs boosts in favor of the new fun boost sound. So, hey, we fired that soundboard guy you hired forever ago. He embezzled a lot. Yeah, that was rough.

And now we're out there. We're looking for help. It's true. True Grits comes in with a Spaceballs boost. One, two, three, four, five sats. That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! It says, I listen to podcasts at normal speed. And much like you, Chris, listening faster gives me anxiety.

I don't need any help with that. I can do that all on my own. That might be it. I got enough going on. It's interesting, though, how some folks do obviously not have that experience. It's clearly individual like for me i discovered it by i was on a i was on a drive listening i'm like i feel stressed out right now why everything's fine and i realized because they sound stressed out and i'm listening to them and i just get all amped up yeah but clearly you got

folks listening to 3x plus wow uh we got uh 7 000 sets across two boosts from an unknown sender. Boost! Yeah, we don't got anything else except to note here that it's from the Boost CLI. Oh, that is really impressive. We have not seen a Boost CLI in a while. You have done it. The full self-sovereign, self-hosted money poster. Well done. We also got a row of ducks from our pal the Golden Dragon. Show mascot. Fine. Firstly, another fantastic episode in the books. Uh, this is referring to the Goldilocks build five, six, four. Secondly, we need a huge applause for hybrid sarcasm.

Yeah. Hybrid has been really helping people out in the community recently. Hybrid is the reason for this round of my boosting. The values I see in this community are totally embodied by him. What a legend. And thank you, JB, for bringing together this great network, community, and everything. See you next boost. Hey, thank you, Dragon. I agree.

Hybrid has been fantastic helping folks out. And he's always available in the Matrix 2 chat. And really a legend. a legend around here. You know, we had a splits fail at one point. He, like, tracked everybody down, made sure they got their split. It's just a great guy. Thank you, Dragon.

Appreciate it. Well, Sully86 has come in with 6,112 sets from Fountain. Hey, regarding Nix, I wanted to start playing with it a bit more, but wanted to see how you were running nix are you running nix os or installing nix on another distro like ubuntu okay let's pause there um both yeah yeah a lot of both actually it's great each and every way but for these systems that we hear us talk about a lot like the ones i've been talking about the

last couple episodes that is a full nix os. Just because what happens is you like it so much as a package manager, the next logical leap is, wouldn't it be great if this thing just defined my entire system? They continue, my first long-running Linux install was OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a Surface laptop too, because it was running like a dog in Windows. I eventually discovered that ultimately it was a hard drive issue. I'm using a Mac M2 Pro, but aiming for that Ryzen framework for a personal driver, especially with the new

screen release. Oh, and by the way, this is a postcode boost. Uh-oh, S-Pain, you better start looking on that map. Oh. Oh, I think I'm going to need to go farther than this. Keep going. Yeah, you're making the corner over there. Yeah, I think I'm going to need to go farther than this. Keep going. Yeah, you're making the corner over there. Yeah, I think that's right.

Because 6,112 sets, that's 6,112. Putting that into the map here. That, I'm guessing, hopefully, is a postal code in Australia, maybe somewhere around Armidale. Hello, Armidale! Thank you for boosting in. We really appreciate that. All right, hand me that map. Let's putidale! Thank you for boosting in. We really appreciate that. All right, hand me that map. Let's put that away.

Thank you very much. Yeah, that new framework update looks pretty choice. You guys see this new one? Yeah. I'm even kind of into the rounded corners of the screen, I have to admit. But what perked my ears up is they've revamped the cooling system in this new framework update.

And it's improved and cooler combined with Intel CPUs that also run a little bit cooler. So they could be significantly quieter laptops now, which could change the situation for me as far as laptops I'm considering. Very excited. It's a great update. Nice transition there, Sully. Thank you for boosting in.

We really appreciate it. Oppie1984 comes in with 4,000 cents just to say boost. Hey, thank you, Opp in we really appreciate it oppie 1984 comes in with 4 000 sats just to say boost hey thank you oppie appreciate it very much boost adverese 17 came in with 5 000 sats after trying found for a few months i've decided to come back to podverse the app is good but one major thing for me is being able to pick up right where i was from mobile to desktop unless Unless I'm mistaken, that doesn't exist for fountain and well, pod versus a JPL licensed.

True. I do love finishing a podcast in the web player that comes up so often where I like, I pull in and I'm like, I want to keep listening. That's one of the great features about pod versus cross platform too. So I can listen on the, on the internet phone or on the Paizo and then finish it up on the desktop. You can even listen

live. Listener Jeff comes in with 17,345 sats. I hoard that which your kind covet. Nice. Thank you, Jeff. Says Chris, your gaming woes kill me. We mentioned this last episode. I hope you don't get too

discouraged and blame yourself for Linux though because every platform has issues. Even the consoles will force slow updates and logins. That is true. The deck has been my fallback for when games that worked perfect for years stopped working on my desktop so I'm sad to hear yours hasn't been as solid. Hit me up next time you have issues.

Two heads are better than one. That is really nice. I had another I had another Steam Deck fail this weekend. So this is the second weekend in a row where the daughter's like, today, or what happened Saturday, yesterday. She says, Dad, let's play GTA, which is adorable. And she's crazy good at driving in GTA at high speed. So whenever it's a getaway time, she's always the driver. whenever it's a getaway time she's always the driver and uh i've had so many problems with this thing since i switched to desktop mode on my 4k television including this weekend when i turned it

on it the local screen and the tv screen wouldn't light up i had to do like a hard reboot and then it like went into this update mode it took forever and it you know i ended up having like disconnect to get it out of the cupboard and do the handheld thing try to figure out what's going on and it one of the times it rebooted it rebooted twice and out of the cupboard, and do the handheld thing, try to figure out what's going on. And one of the times it rebooted. It rebooted twice. And one of the times it went from the big Steam picture mode into desktop mode back. And it was just a mess. We did eventually get it working.

And then we were able to play GTA for a couple hours. And it worked great. Oh, and it lost my login. So then, of course, I finally get the system working, get it working on the TV again, get the controller working again. And I go to launch GTA. and Rockstar had signed me out. I had to log in because I hadn't played since January. So that kind of stuff is annoying. But what are you going to do?

And I had a keyboard hooked up, so it was easy to fix. He goes on to say, failure circa 2011. I had a hyper-threading Pentium 4 system as my server, quote unquote, running MP3 stream wrap. ISO DLR, you know, for downloading ISOs, of course, automatically. Minecraft server, it was running Debian with VNC and had it fully set up with port forwarding. I used VNC locally as well as learned by that time that if I pressed the shift key via VNC, the PC speaker would beep.

That's cool. I love the idea that you've, like, remoted in from somewhere else and you're pressing shift a bunch as you're doing your admin work and just someone else in the house is having to deal with that. 100% have done things like that. 100% have. I will sometimes get home and the wife will be like, this machine was making a lot of noise while you were gone. And I'm like, oh, I'm sorry. The man himself, a hybrid sarcasm, comes in with a row of ducks.

Love those duck sounds. The legend. Thank Hybrid Sarcasm, comes in with a row of ducks. Love those duck sounds. The legend. Thank you, Sarcasm. T-Bueno Berra came in with 7,777 sets. I am programmed in multiple techniques. Fancy. Even though I get tired of Nick's everything, it has interesting characteristics that I may be able to incorporate. But how about taking a look and comparison to Gobo Linux?

For example, the file structure differences, ease of use. Would love to see that. This has crossed our mind. I don't know if other people would be interested. I've looked at it and thought, I don't know if there's enough out there that would like us to do this. So I would love a couple of plus ones on Gobo Linux before we dug into it, but I'd be willing if there's interest in the audience. Yeah,

it's a modular Linux distribution and it organizes programs in a very different way. You know, instead of user bin and Etsy and all this, each program gets its own directory tree, keeping them all neatly separated and allowing you to see everything that's installed in the system. That seems neat. I can see the appeal there. You know to see everything that's installed in the system. That seems neat. I can see the appeal there. You know what I mean? I can see the appeal. Thank you everybody who boosted in above the 2,000 sat limits. We appreciate it. We had 19

boosters and we stacked a modest 151,902 sats. We really do appreciate that though. We had a banger week last week, so thank you everybody who supported this week. We would absolutely love to hear from you and love to get a boost from you. If you got some value or also by boosting, you increase our position on the charts so new people find this episode. Particularly right now, people are looking for Linux podcasts.

Help us get up on those charts by boosting as well. Helps the discovery a whole bunch. Also, shout out to all of our SatStreamers. We really appreciate you. And of course, our core contributors and our Jupiter Signal members, who we appreciate and get to listen to our live streams in all the times we screw up. You found our pick this week. Ah, yeah.

Let me introduce Delphin. Delphin is a native client for Jellyfin. It's got a fast and clean interface with an embedded MPV-based video player. I love MPV too. A desktop app to pull in Jellyfin is really nice when you're casually kind of watching while you work. I haven't tried this, but it supports the Intro Skipper plugin, if you want to give that a try, and the Jelly Scrub plugin to show thumbnails while scrubbing through videos. So it's, I mean, it is kind of, you know, a relatively lean experience,

but it's got some of the features, the usability, quality of life stuff that you might already like. And, I mean, anything using MPV for playback, you know it's going to be good. Yeah, and they got a Star Trek The Next Generation album in their screenshot there, so, you know, that's also good too. This is really cool, Wes. This is a nice simple app, and it gives you a native way to play Jellyfin content on your desktop, so you don't have to have yet another browser window running yet another application. And you know what makes it even better?

Two things. Written in Rust. Oh, it is, huh? That's right. I was wondering about that. Actually, I hadn't noticed that. I thought you would have led with that. Taking a peek here at the repo.

I'm behind the times. And, yes, it is already packaged in nix ah there it is there it is just about everything is packaged in nix but you can get it with um on flat hub too yeah it's easy peasy yeah it looks really simple and lean in fact i'd probably for my system i'd probably go flat hub since i'm almost all cute based and i think that's a ttk app i think i'm gonna give a side plug, just a little extra. I got two little quickie plugs in here. Number one is RustDesk Flutter. Listener Jeff sent me his Nix config and I noticed RustDesk-Flutter in there. RustDesk

is a fantastic remote desktop application, but the regular RustDesk has a ton of dependencies and on like Arch or Nix, it takes forever to build. It's ridiculous. But Rust Desk Flutter installs super quick and launches super fast. I'm not saying I'm a Flutter fan boy but this is one of the first Flutter apps where I'm like, this is a legitimate improvement from the native application.

So I'm going to give a plug to Rust Desk Flutter and then also, our buddy Brent had a fireside chat with the founder of Nextcloud. You guys know Frank. We've had him on the show before. In fact, we've had, I believe, a part of this chat on the show before Brent, but now it's like the whole thing. The whole

banana. Yeah, this is a bit of a look back to a conversation that I originally recorded about a year ago. Do you remember that very first time that we got invited to Berlin to hang out with the NextCloud team? I was lucky enough to be able to go. You boys, unfortunately, deeply missed out. But that trip kind of changed my life.

And this is the conversation that we took little sections of in Linux Unplugged 5.0.3 about that NextCloud experience that I had back then. And it's just such a great full conversation. So I thought, well, you and I, Chris, came up with a way that we could publish this somewhere that would be kind of fun. And that happens to be on the NextCloud podcast. And so it was such a treat for me to revisit that conversation. I just like went back to a time that I just met a bunch of really great people and, and well, now I work at NetCloud. So that kind of set my last year up for some successes. And I think our listeners would really appreciate that whole conversation. So it's, it's out in the wild now just for you.

We'll put a link to it in the show notes too. And you know what? It made me miss the brunches. Made me miss brunch. Amen. Yeah, I agree with that. This was recorded to be a brunch. And I don't know, we got very busy in the last year and kind of forgot to do that.

But it just reminded me, man, I really miss doing them. So I don't know, maybe we can come up with something. Let us know if you'd appreciate some brunch style conversations. I mean, I can't have breakfast with everybody, but we'll try. Yeah. All right. Thank you, everybody. Boost in again with your facepalm moments that we can share with the rest of the class. Also kind of curious on your take

as if you're down for us covering newbie content from time to time. And I'm also curious if you've recently discovered something Linux can do that it's been able to do for a long time. You just didn't know about it. Like recently, I was reminded that sudo bang bang exclamation exclamation will just redo the last command. That's been around forever. Completely forgot about that.

So if you have one of those stories, boost in and let us know or your facepalm moments, we'd really appreciate it. Or why not join us in that mumble room that's live, got a low-latency Opus audio stream right off of our mixer. We have the details on our website over at jupiterbroadcasting.time. We'll be live. I'll be in the woods next Sunday at around, probably around noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Ish. Of course, links to what we talked about today are at linuxunplugged.com slash 565. Find our contact form over there. We always love hearing. Shout out to listener Kate that wrote in today. And I guess you get links to all the other resources. And then don't forget, I mean, what are you? Not paying attention?

There's a bunch of great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. You want more show? Well, there's an option. There's some more show over there. What can I say? I think that's it. I think that's all I got. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program.

We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Well, as in Sunday. Thank you.