LINUX Unplugged - 569: Our Plasma Panacea

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Why we think Plasma 6.1 is the desktop for people who like to mess with computers.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!1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management 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.FMMarknote - KDE ApplicationsMarknote 1.3 - KDE Blogs — Marknote lets you create rich text notes and easily organise them into notebooks. You can personalise your notebooks by choosing an icon and accent color for each one, making it easy to distinguish between them and keep your notes at your fingertips. Your notes are saved as Markdown files in your Documents folder, making it easy to use your notes outside of Marknote as well as inside the app.Spokane Meetup - No-Li Brewhouse, Sat, Jul 13, 2024, 4:00 PMNo-Li Brewhouse Menu10 best beer gardens in the US where you can quench your thirstKDE Plasma 6.1 Desktop Environment Officially Released, Here's What's NewPlasma 6.1 - KDE Community — This release introduces explicit GPU synchronization support for NVIDIA users and triple buffering support on Wayland for smoother animations.KDE Plasma 6.1.1 Desktop Environment Released with Various Bug FixesLUP 552 — Plasma 6 is out, and we've been giving it a go. What's new, our thoughts, and the lessons other desktops should learn.KDE Plasma 6.1 Performing Much Better On Older Intel Integrated GraphicsFixing KWin's performance on old hardwareplasma6-desktop package versionsplasma-desktop package versionsKRdp on GitLab — Currently, the main client that has been used for testing and is confirmed to work is the FreeRDP client.Open KRdp Bugsappiumtests: test adaptive panel opacity (!2324) · Merge requests · Plasma / Plasma Desktop · GitLabWhy the next GNOME Release will be one of the Best EverMembership Summer Discount — Take $1 a month of your membership for a lifetime!GathioJB Events Gathio hosted by HybridSarcasmGitHub Issue: Can't create events — An unexpected error has occurred. Please try again later.Crossover: Run Microsoft Windows software on Mac and Linux | CodeWeaversFUTO Keyboard — Your keyboard shouldn't connect to the internet.FUTO Keyboard · Wiki

I've been trying out Marknode. I think you gave it a go too, Wes. I did. And it's a little text editor that lets you use Markdown and organize things into notebooks. And you can set individual like little symbols and icons for each notebook, which is something I really like. And it just stores them simply in your documents folder as Markdown files. I think it's worth calling out. It's kind of like a WYSIWYG though, right?

Because you're not writing raw Markdown. a WYSIWYG though, right? Like, cause it, you're not writing ROM markdown. It gives you buttons and like a whole little toolbar to kind of assemble stuff, add images or links or whatever else without you having to do the markdown yourself. So that's a great point because that's actually kind of how I stumbled onto this is looking at a local encrypted note solution for the wife for a couple of days or a couple of weeks, I should say. And I set her up on the Plasma desktop. So I thought, well, I'll take a look at this because it is cute and it fits in with Plasma really well.

Cute as in cutie. And it just sort of follows the whole design philosophy of current Plasma desktop. So it seemed like it would fit really nice. It would seem cohesive for her. Kind of just enough structure. We're doing Lux on her partition. So if it stays in our documents folder, that's encrypted and all that.

And it was the actual, like, I really want her to do a format that is extremely portable so we're not locked into any system because what we've found, as she's done her practice for like a decade, all these systems are proprietary with their own proprietary data

and we're just sick of that. We wanted something she could own and control. Yeah, you got some database file that you can't read or do anything with. Yeah. So having it all in Markdown was really nice. But, you know, are you going to are you going to teach somebody Markdown in a day? You probably could, but it's nice to have that kind of stuff in there. I did a little stress test and I put our show notes for this episode in there. And you know what? Actually, it was pretty readable and worked. I think it didn't. The, you know, the capability set of the Markdown system we're currently using

and this wasn't 100 percent. I think it even might have had some, the, you know, the capability set of the Markdown system we're currently using, and this wasn't 100%. I think it even might have had some stuff that, you know, HedgeDocs doesn't, but it was good enough to read. Hey, so it took the whole doc? Yeah, I think you can get some real work done is what I'm trying to say. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent.

Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, are you truly free if the desktop you use isn't? We're looking at the latest and greatest Plasma desktop. They've done a ton of work recently. And we'll make the case for why we think it's really great and worth another look if we haven't tried it out in a little bit. And then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, a killer pick, and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's say hello to our one, our only, Byte Bitten in the Mumble Room today. Hey, Byte, how's it going? Hello, Lou.

Hello. It's just you he's the lone warrior we got a few folks up and quiet listening too because uh this is a breakfast lup we're going a little early right now we're getting things in the morning because uh we're making a little bit of room for editor drew so mix it up this time yeah we're mixing it up also good morning to the friends over at tailscale hello friends tailscale.com unplugged tailscale is the easiest way to connect devices and services directly to each other wherever they are, on whatever platform,

whatever OS, ARM, Intel, whatever it might be. You can install Tailscale in just minutes and use it up to 100 devices for free. When you go to Tailscale.com slash unplugged, replace that legacy VPN infrastructure and I mean you can do it in just minutes.

Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Wes, it's happened. We have picked a location for the Spokane meetup. Yes, we have. Ran it past you and Brentley. And I think we have a real winner. Now, I know all the locals probably have an opinion, so I always feel a little nervous,

but we are officially announcing the No Lie Brewhouse. That's N-O-L-I Brewhouse on Saturday, July 13th, 2024 as our Spokane, Washington meetup location. It's rated number three of the best beer gardens in the entire United States. What? I don't want to miss this. You got to come, Wes. I got to come.

It's on the river. It's gorgeous. It has a lot of indoor space and a lot of outdoor space. So whatever way the weather goes, we're set. Got lots of local drinks. I went down the rabbit hole of watching videos about this place on YouTube. And like, oh my gosh, if the crew here isn't super passionate and they go on about how everything's sourced locally, everything in the beer is local, you know, like the hops

are, you know, the local famous hops. It's just, it's just great. So we'll have links in the show notes for the menu if you can make it. Please do join. I've updated the meetup, meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. Well, Chris, just for your info, I'm going to officially say this week that I'm going to attend. Oh, I thought that was it already. Oh, wow.

Wow. Geez. Great, Brent. Okay. Just so you know. All right. Okay. Good to know.

Good to know. Well, thank you. Now we just got to talk Wes into it, you know? We could caravan. You'll caravan. It could be fun. I love a good caravan. You could have a walkie. You know, we could be. Let's see if It could be fun. I love a good caravan. You could have a walkie.

You know, it could be. Let's see the walkie really sells. It's so much fun. It really is. It really is. And OK, before we jump into it today, I have a weird but actually very serious question. And I'd love if you'd boost in and answer this. Are you a daily driver of desktop Linux?

One of the debates we have here is how much of the desktop we should cover. Because honestly, if you think about the real user of Linux, most of them are SSHed into Linux at scale. Now, that doesn't mean that's what our particular focus is. It doesn't mean that our particular passion is there, but we always do want to kind of try to take into account what everybody out there, maybe you're listening and you're perfectly happy on macOS or Windows, but you just love knowing about Linux. We'd love to take temperature. So do you daily drive desktop Linux?

And if you do or don't kind of give us a little background, like maybe you do, but not every day. We'd love to know. We're just taking a little audience survey boost in and we'll collect that on next week's episode. Thank you very much. All right. Why we want to talk about Plasma. I think when something like this happens in the free software world, we need to take a moment and acknowledge it. Plasma has been building out now consistently for a while.

I mean, the 5 series after 5.12 was just incredible. And 5.27 is one that you could use for years. They've been going from release to release, making improvement after improvement. Yeah, every now and then there's a temporary regression, but the trend line has been very clear. And for the whole, they've been doing this without blowing up people's setups. Yeah, you can just be a Plasma user and the whole world doesn't get reset out from under you. Yeah, and you've really got to respect that because macOS and Windows don't always get to claim that. The other desktop environments

don't necessarily get to claim that. They've also, over the years, built up an ecosystem of applications like the text editors and the terminal and FTP clients and the file manager and the screenshot manager. Everything that they've built out over the years has a rich feature set while also at the same time this trend line has been going this direction

they've also been reducing complexity by default yeah right used to be you could make yourself a real nice plasma desktop once you kind of got familiar with it or i remember when i first was using it again a couple years ago i had you kind of tweak me up one before i got familiar with it. Or I remember when I first was using it again a couple years ago, I had you kind of tweak me up one before I got going with it. It was like all the knobs and all the boxes were just everywhere. It was like the joke was there was a button for every button.

Right. And they've really cleaned that up, especially in the latest releases, which we'll get to in just a moment. They've really cleaned it up by default. So it's simple by default, powerful where you need it when you want it. And they've managed to do all of this while actually taking the system usage, you know, near par with lighter desktop environments.

Yeah, it's pretty decent in a VM these days, which is nice. I mean, it's comparable with Mate. And, you know, it's really surprising how Plasma can scale itself down for lower-end hardware. And they've managed to develop a very consistent UI. All the KDE apps kind of have this language, like the Markdown editor we were just talking about. They all kind of have this language that they kind of speak now. It's very consistent, and you can really see it when you're using a bunch of Plasma apps. And there's almost like a common set of features you know you're going to get across all of the applications.

Yeah. And some of those in the right applications are nice things like you know you know in dolphin and in kate even if you've never if you've used dolphin you know in kate the editor where to go to turn on the terminal inside the application that's a great power user feature right and these kinds of things have really i think drawn all of us to plasma now more and more as they've just nailed this and i'm not saying it's been perfect the entire journey there's been mistakes and regressions oh yeah of course i mean and there's there's still plenty of bugs even in the latest and greatest releases yeah yeah but they've really done something on the whole very very special here

that um i think you don't even really see super rich commercial software companies now no not necessarily and so i think it's time we talk about plasma and it just happens to be too that six one super rich commercial software companies now. No, not necessarily. And so I think it's time we talk about Plasma. And it just happens to be too that 6.1 and I think 6.1.1 just came out and 6.1.2 is in the wings. That's right. So it just seemed like the timing was really right. 6.1 is that first major release since 6.0 came out.

Yeah, it's probably worth calling that, right? Like 6 had been in development for a long time. It was a mega release that came out at the end of February in 2024 this year. So 6.1 and 6.1.1, etc. on top of that are kind of like the first

time that the project really gets to respond to all the tweaks needed, bugs fixed, etc. from that mega release. Yeah, it was a major rebase to Qt 6 from later Qt 5. And so you can imagine there's a lot to little... It's impressive 6 was as great as it is. I've been using it here on this system since it came out. Yeah, we covered 6, if you want to hear about that release

in particular, in LUP 5.5.2. So in 6.1, you've got a lot of little fixes that are just small things. And then you've got nice stuff like improved system notification. And they've added manual session saving. And I'm wondering, of the group here, do either of you boys, Brent, I'll start with you, use the session restore feature in the older Plasma releases that you got with X? Yeah, I was using it, actually. And it was like a nice-to-have feature.

But it's been around for a really long time in the X window system. And it was like a nice to have feature, but it's been around for a really long time in the X window system. So moving to the 6.0 kind of missed it slightly. But to be honest, like I think since moving to 6.0, I've only rebooted my computer like twice maybe. Oh my goodness. But that's also saying something about the stability of the 6.0 series. It's also saying something about how often you update, Brent. No, uh-huh we'll get to that later okay i'm not quite ready yet all right but i felt like it was a feature that was needing to be missing from 6.0 for a little bit uh but now that it's back i think that's that's great, but not a make or break feature for me personally.

Yeah, okay. I mean, what it really speaks to is just a massive overhaul and continued improvement in their Wayland support. Are you a session restorer, Wes? Yeah, I have been in the past. I think I'm in a similar place to Brent where I don't really rely on it, but I could see maybe especially, right, we've got Plasma going here at the studio, and that's the kind of feature that in an application-specific environment, workflow-specific environment, really could be quite useful.

Yeah, I also was a window restore guy for a while. But with Plasma 6, and I kind of just think I'm going to stick to this, what I've opted to use, and I still really recommend, is window rules, one of my favorite KWin features. Yeah, those are handy. opted to use and i still really recommend is window rules one of my favorite kwin features and you can uh once the you put the application maybe on the virtual desktop or wherever you want it the size you want it on your desktop and then you click on the far hand left menu so the opposite side of the close maximize buttons generally and in there you can access window rules and then you can apply its current attributes as the rules that this thing should always. And you can say, so add its current size, add its current position, add the current virtual desktop, hit apply. And now every time, and you can say only on the first launch, make it always this way.

So I always just do first launch so I can adjust later if I want. Every time I launch Telegram, every time I launch Element, it's always on this desktop in this position. And I actually find that works better than restoring Windows because then I just launch the application when I need it and it goes where I expect it. Yeah, it's a little more declarative approach almost. But it's nice to see that there's also improved support for WireGuard VPNs and a lot of stuff in 6.1. It's worth pointing out just as one of those little things about Plasma that's so great

is that, you know, like all the stuff you get just on the title bar of an application. So not only is there access to the Windows rules, right, but like you can force it to be full screen. You can keep it below or above others. Pin it to all the desktops. Yeah, right. And all of that's available on basically every window whenever you want it. And it's, you know, if you never click that little far left menu, you never see it. It's not in your way.

Yeah, but it's there if you need it. If you never click that little far left menu, you never see it. It's not in your way. Yeah, but it's there if you need it. It's that power you can call upon as perhaps a more power user that you really start to love these features. And as you see them update, so this week as we're recording, I think it was Friday maybe, Plasma 6.1.1 came out. And this was really like a lot of regression little fixes. There's still some more to land in there.

But we're starting to see a bunch of nice features like triple buffering for smooth windows. We're starting to see RDP support, which we'll talk a little bit more in a bit. Nice enhancements, but just stuff we'll get into as we review. But Brent, as we're looking at the list of new Plasma features here, before we get into our reviews, is there any particular feature that's landed in the 6 or 6.1.1 that you would say is the main feature that really grabbed me because I initially had issues with 6 as we noted last time we did this. And we looked at 6 a little while ago and I kind of got off of it because there were a couple of little bugs that my particular hardware was causing, but coming to 6.1 man it feels like everything is super solid so for me that is really the the winning feature in in this particular release

is that everything feels pretty much like 5.27 did in terms of stability but you get all these extra little niceties so not a particular feature of the release itself, but for me, it's the stability. That's the main get. This is the one you can recommend to your brother. Oh, I already did. He's on it. Yeah, we did that this week. So, ching.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. What do you think, Wes? Anything standing out in the Plasma 6 or 6.1.1 releases as we kick the tires this week? I was enjoying playing with the new shake cursor to find it effect. That is nice. You know, other desktop, prominent desktop environments have that.

I think it's a nice accessibility feature. Or even if you just got, you know, you got a high resolution, you got multiple monitors, sometimes it can be tricky to find that thing. Although, I did notice some folks on Reddit, and I ran into this one time, instead of growing, the mouse cursor would just disappear

when you shook it. Uh-oh. A little bit of the opposite effect. Uh-oh. It has mostly worked for me. Let's check right now. Oh, yeah, no problem. Okay.

Big old mouse cursor here. But it looks good. It grows nicely, shrinks back down real quick. So it's like a tiny little thing, but I thought it was neat. It is nice to have that. I mean, overall, you and I have been using Plasma now as our main desktops for years. Do you just have any other kind of higher-level thoughts as a Plasma user about the releases? Yeah, I still have a Plasma 5 desktop hanging around at home,

and it's on the list to get upgraded, but I haven't been in a hurry. The end of the 5 series really has been pretty great, but playing with 6.1 and 6.1.1 the past week or so, gosh, yeah, the difference stands out. I think especially just in the speed and smoothness of the desktop. There's a Pharonix story covering some blogging by the lead KWIN developer

talking about how Plasma 6.1 is performing a lot better on older Intel integrated graphics. And that's what that system is, right? Yeah, exactly. So here's a little quote. In practice, after these changes in 6.1, on my desktop PC with a dedicated GPU, triple buffering is effectively never active and latency is the same as before. On my AMD laptop, it's usually off as well, only kicking in once in a while. But on some older Intel laptops with high resolution screens in particular, it's always active.

And I've been told it's like having a brand new laptop. Wow. K1 goes from being stuttery 30 to 40 FPS to a solid 60 FPS. Nice. And, you know, it's not just in particular, you know, you don't have to have a high resolution screen. Also, that seems like it could be really useful for folks that have integrated Intel and then a dedicated NVIDIA

GPU where there's extra copying going on between the different GPUs on the system to get it displayed and that kind of thing. Triple buffering can help a lot there. So I just thought I could feel all of the little tweaks and changes that have been going in from 6, from 5, even more.

That's nice. You know, because when things like the menu animations and all that are just a little smoother, it really does feel like your computer is keeping up with you versus struggling to keep up with you. Yeah. And like, I'd been kind of just hanging onto that machine

on five because there just hadn't been that, you know, I'd played with six, I was, but like, there just wasn't that much pressure to upgrade. But I think with 6.1, that feeling changes. I will also call out that Xaver Hugel, the K1 lead developer, some excellent blogs.

One here is Fixing K1's Performance on Old Hardware, which is talking exactly about this, but it really goes into some of like the underpinnings of what's going on. And then that links to a fascinating article from a couple of years ago about gaming on Wayland that really breaks down down what a modern desktop sort of like graphic stack needs to look like

to enable performant desktops. So if you're at all curious about the engineering going on under the hood there, it is worth checking out. Yeah, I don't know about you guys, but kind of like low-key, one of the things that I am most excited about in Plasma that I think is one of the most solid bits is KWIN.

And it's had its moments over the years, but it just seems to always be perfectly scaling itself to the hardware I'm on. And they're always pushing it in the direction that seems to be beneficial to the general hardware that I'm using. Very fortunate, I think, to have something so solid at the center of it, of the Plasma desktop. Two other things I liked, just small, and then I want to get into RDP too. There's new edit mode, convenient little edit mode button. And we talked about how modern Plasma has a lot better default, so you probably don't need to edit as much. But it's also now easier to get into a mode to easily tweak a whole bunch of things

about your desktop, which is great. New edit mode is my number one favorite feature of plasma 6-1 new edit mode looks so slick and if you're editing the panel specifically it looks even cooler and when you're adding widgets it's just so well done new edit mode was bullet point number one on my things i like about this plasma release it looks it's so well done i will i will third third that one because uh i was in a situation this week where i was setting up like a brand new desk with new monitors and like a whole new setup that i wasn't used to and uh so i had to like move a bunch of stuff around which i have never and i use that word very carefully i've never moved the panel

off of my my main laptop to a different exterior screen, like secondary screen. And I chose to do that this time around. And the interface was beautiful. Like I usually haven't had to interact with it, but man, it was nice. And I was like, this 6.1, they're nailing it here. So I will third that one. It was a really nice experience. I got to know though, I know you gave the RDP stuff a try. So they've built in remote desktop protocol, you know, Microsoft's open source version, I guess, right?

It's XRDP. They've built into it, and you're supposed to be able to just use any kind of RDP client, and there's one for the Plasma desktop, and then you can get access to the console of your machine remotely. Yeah, okay. So there's KRDP, which is like an RDP server that they've built. 6.1

saw that getting added as shipped by default and as an easy toggle in the system settings menu. So you basically configure a user password. Right now it only supports one. You can configure if you want it to start at login or not, so that's nice. And then you can change the default port if you want, which you probably don't

want to, but if you need to, you can uh and then there's just like a little toggle to switch it on or switch it off i think it's worth pointing out too with this that we're excited because especially now in the wayland future and i've actually only been using plasma six uh six one in particular on wayland um you know you kind of need these things to be integrated um or at least it gets a lot trickier as we develop the proper specifications but having it built into your compositor is like probably going to be the best case absolutely the best case and we've seen gnome working on this for a while and they are shipping it now so i think it's also important in just the you know

keeping up with the with the gnomes is sense to have that in plasma and it's one of the i think the biggest things that's user impacting that we actually lose with X was the remote graphical options. Yeah. And so this is bringing that back at least some way, and in a way that I'm very, for me, the idea of having my production systems available via RDP, say over tail scale,

so if I get on my mesh VPN, I can just remote desktop into my systems using standard tooling, stuff built into the compositor. This is starting to get to be best case remote connection stuff for me. I mean, I'm really excited about it. So how did it work for you?

Ah, that's where it's a little less of a rosy story. Um, okay. You're talking about use any RDP client. No, that does not work just yet. Client options are super limited.

Oh, okay. Um, you need to support H two 64, uh, in particular in Y U V four 20. Uh, so you'll probably on Linux systems.264, in particular, in YUV420. So you'll probably, on Linux systems, need FFmpeg, maybe FFmpeg full. On the GitLab for KRDP, they mentioned that the main client that's been tested and is used for testing and confirmed to work is the free RDP

client. But you probably want version three of that if your repos offer multiple versions. And in my experience, you probably want to use the Flatpak version unless you're familiar with free RDP and how H.264 is found and working on your system. Oh, right, because the Flatpak will just pull that in. Yes, the Flatpak has that set up and working, and I think that might even be the one that the devs are testing with. I'm not sure. I did try other things like thin cast and um remina and non-flatback rdp free rdp and a few other things and the only one that was consistently working right without like having to mess with it a bunch was that flat pack version but you do need to turn

off clipboard support and you may need to like in particular force the graphic mode to make sure it uses uh the yuv420 you You went full troubleshooting mode on this. Yeah. And we'll have linked. There's like a bunch of open bugs. So it's clearly, you know, early days. But it did work. Yeah.

It's one of those features, I think, that, you know, in 6.2, it'll get a little better, right? And yeah, I think that's totally fair. It's a pretty complicated thing. And at least we're getting the interface bits and in the right conditions, you can get it working. That's good. That's good news. Yeah. And it looks like, I mean, the list of open bugs has already changed as I've been kind of tracking it. So I think it's something, you know, now that it is shipped, it seems like something that they are committed to improving and getting working. So it's probably at this point more of

just hammering away at the right things until it becomes a little more stable and reliable. things until it becomes a little more stable and reliable. 1password.com slash unplugged. You know, in a perfect world, end users would only use the meticulously designed systems that IT set up for them. Hardware, software, only approved apps. That's not how it works. Every day, employees use personal devices and unapproved apps. They don't even realize they're doing it.

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and contractor devices. It ensures every device is known and healthy. Every login is protected. So stop trying to ban BYOD or shadow IT stuff and just start protecting them with 1Password Extended Access Management. Go check it out, support the show, and see the demo. You just go to 1password.com slash unplugged. Yep, that's it. You go there, it solves a major problem that I dealt with in IT, and it's a great way to support this podcast. It's 1password.com slash unplugged. Now, I saw some really great experiences between 6 and 6.1, but it feels to me like that came out really quickly, which of, is nice to see.

But, Chris, there's some stuff going on here, like some plans for accelerating some releases and then slowing that down. Give us a sense of what's going to happen here. Well, these things can always change. But from what I've been told, I think we should expect kind of big releases like this maybe three times a year right now as things get hammered out and fixed. Right. Early 6 series. Yeah, exactly, in the early 6 series. And then they kind of plan to drop it down to maybe two big releases a year as things kind of stabilize. Which, that sounds great.

Totally fine. Every six months, you know, you get some, well, it's a little bit more once it gets packaged. But, you know, kind of a routine refresh maybe every seven to eight months as it gets packaged. I think that sounds totally, totally usable. I imagine package maintainers think so too because it's not a small thing to package. It is not. It is not. So that is nice to see that.

So with that in mind, we're looking at the snapshot where we're very early in the 6 series. And I'm happy to see some of this stuff land, like the triple buffering support. I think it's hilarious that plasma managed to land this. They year, like, I mean, years ago, an employee at canonical created a triple buffering patch for

gnome. I mean, maybe four years ago and they have been hot patching it on the Ubuntu side into gnome ever since. So it's been shipping to all Ubuntu users, but gnome hasn't integrated yet for various reasons. have been hot patching it on the Ubuntu side into Gnome ever since. So it's been shipping to all Ubuntu users. But Gnome hasn't integrated yet for various reasons. They're going to ship it in the next release finally.

And Plasma, in the intervening time, has managed to conceive of the idea, prototype it, develop it, test it, and ship it. Sniped. Incredible. Incredible. There's also a lot of nice improvements to discover. And the reason I wanted to highlight this is because this is how my family has begun interacting with software on their computer is Discover. And one of the things that Discover has added, it's going to, if you, so I have an immutable base for the family members. And then they install things via Flathub inside Discover.

And so it's, you know, I add the Flathub repo. Whatever they search for is essentially searching that and then installs the Flatpak. Well, now Discover lets you swap out a Flatpak that's end of life. And this has been a problem before because you can have developers abandon a Flatpak and then you just have this abandoned Flatpak installed. And now there's going to be a methodology for developers to say, I'm no longer maintaining this. And for Discover to give you an option to swap it out to one that is being maintained. Oh, that's nice.

Huge for what are my family's using? Cause a lot of these are like little game editors and map stuff that just somebody does for six months and then takes off. Also just kind of nice. If you're already in discover, they can now display a banner along the top. There's a major OS upgrade that's coming in the early six series. That's really good to see.

I did a lot of my time in, you know, i mostly didn't do package stuff on the command line this time around it's been very smooth yeah i kind of used to like doing stuff in discover and like in the old days it would maybe work or it would just sort of disappear into the background you're like is that happening that that's gone i'm not gonna lie early discover i thought they should just stop i thought they should just stop working on it. It just was never going to be good. It filled less than an MVP and buggy. And I think now we're actually way past that. And I'm really impressed because I also primarily used Discover because for testing, I decided to go with Fedora Rahe just to have some fun and then use Discover to manage everything.

And it worked great. It really was impressive. But what I want to touch on is what and the message I'm trying to get through to the listener today is that there is a particular user base that I think Plasma appeals to. It's for people who like to mess with computers. And if you like to play with computers, if you like technology, you should really look at Plasma appeals to. It's for people who like to mess with computers. And if you like to play with computers, if you like technology, you should really look at Plasma. And yes, you can set it up for a new user,

and yes, it's simple by default. But let me give you an idea of why I think this is the case. And I think it comes down to project focus and the things developers put their time and energy into. And there's some that are putting time and energy into features I don't want, and I think you probably don't want. And there's some that are putting time and energy into features I don't want. And I think you probably don't want. And there's others that are putting it into things we all want as people who like to mess with computers.

An example of that. And there's hundreds of them in the Plasma desktop. But just looking at the early 6 series. They've done little things. Like when the search index is running. You can now go in the settings page and get an index status in the footer that's so neat i want to know what my computer is doing i want to know what's happening discover now properly tells you when package kit is busted instead of just some ambiguous misleading message that gives me no idea what i need to fix and you could argue maybe we

shouldn't expose some of this to end users i want to know what's broken so I can fix it. Right, yeah, instead of like a friendly error message that tells you nothing, just give me something useful. Here's another thing that landed. Again, something that only computer nerds care about. Plasma's power and battery widget now tells you when a power profile isn't available because it's conflicted with something else you're using like TLP. People go around in circles with that kind of stuff.

Now it just gives you that information. But only computer nerds are loading TLP. Another one. In some cases, it depends on the keyboard, but you can sync your keyboard's colors and your LED colors to the accent colors of Plasma. What other desktop environment is working on that? That's amazing.

I don't have any hardware to try that, but I want to see it in action. And what I appreciate is where they can, they're learning and adding automated testing. So, for example, there was a regression that broke the adaptive panel opacity setting in, I think, like 6.1. So now going forward, they have identified what broke. There's an automated test for that. And so every build will get tested for that adaptive tweak.

That's so great. And they just learn and they make improvements where they can. And they just continue to push forward on that stuff. It's the kind of thing that's going to deliver results, I mean, for the rest of the 6 series, I think. So I feel like this is the desktop, again, for people who like to mess with computers. And you can make it totally appealing to new users, and it is simple by default.

But it's really special that somebody cares about that user base because most desktop environments are not focused on that. They're not trying to create something for those users. And if you're working with your computer, it's nice to have the tools available. You know, it's like the difference between a manual screwdriver and a power screwdriver. And this doesn't take away

from the other desktops, but it's recognizably special when you combine everything we've just talked about. There's something recognizably special happening in the Plasma project. And you don't really need to make that many trade-offs to get all that, right? You don't have to, like, configure your window manager in c by hand to make it do exactly what you want because it's it's kind of flexible enough already yeah and you know i'd love to hear if you think we're

wrong if you think there's a desktop environment that maybe has a better philosophy or a different approach i you know please boost in and tell us and i do want to give a shout out to the gnome project it does look like 2024 is going to be a banger year for GNOME. Yeah. It's been a little sleepy for the last couple releases, but we're going to see HDR stuff land, contributed by Red Hat. Endless is contributing digital well-being

support. The community's been working on accent colors. We're finally getting triple buffering coming soon. Global hotkeys. DRM releases for VR support. Big things coming, really. So, I mean, GNOME is going to have a couple of bangers, too. So this really is an episode that's meant to take away from any of the other desktop environments.

But we're trying to say, hey, go take a look what's happening over here. There's something pretty special and unique. And they're doing a really good job. Just don't call it the year of the Linux desktop. A big thank you to our members and our boosters out there. You know, podcasting has changed, and we've been calling it an ad winter. I think it's just more of a shift in the market. I hate to say it, but I think niche podcasts that focus on, well, the cool stuff that a show like this focuses on,

just isn't particularly attractive to advertisers that want to reach like YouTube scale. Right. They want the MKBHD audiences. They want a million audiences. They can see the likes. They can see the views. They're not so interested in people that want to talk about the great things about the plasma desktop anymore. And, you know, it's just it's a shame because I know that's a bad decision on their part. But these people don't know, you know, the marketing hands. There's a lot of churn.

Any lessons learned in two, three years, they're lost. So maybe it's not an ad winter. Maybe it's a permanent shift in the landscape. So we could use your support. And if you want to keep us going, we'll keep going for the next 30 years. You can become a member, use the promo code summer and take a dollar off your membership for a lifetime. That's pretty great. We'll have a link in the show notes. That's good for the Unplugged core membership, which gets you the ad-free and the bootleg. Or you can also use that promo code for the whole network. You can also boost. LinuxUnplugged.com slash boost.

Send a little value back to each episode. Use a fully independent, self-hosted network and get your message read on the show. We love both of those methods. Whatever method you choose, we appreciate it. Your support matters more than ever. So it's linuxunplugged.com slash membership and linuxunplugged.com slash boost. A little mini follow-up here. We talked about Gath.io, Gath.io?

I don't know how we want to say that. Oh, yeah, that self-hosted meetup.com alternative. Right. Well, prolific booster hybrid sarcasm stood up an instance for the JB community to try. Really? I was hoping that would happen. Great. Yeah. So you can go to jbevents.hybrid-sarcasm.xyz if you want to check it out. But it's early days and quite alpha. In fact, there's an open GitHub issue that hybrid was contributing to because in the current configuration, you can't actually create events. There may not be that much to try, but it's in progress.

Hybrid, thank you for setting this up so we could try it. So it seems like it's something we need to keep an eye on. Yeah. Otherwise, I mean, it looks good and promising and, you know, I think it's nice because it kind of auto cleans up after itself after the events have happened that might appeal to folks. Do I have to create an account? That was one of the things. No, I don't think so. I got as far as submitting the event. It didn't complete from there, but you don't even have to provide your email. That's really nice because I think that's one of the barriers people have to sign up to the meetups is they don't want to go create an account with meetup.com.

And then there's the flip side is meetup.com has a huge network effect. So you have people that already signed up because they attend other meetups. Yeah, so maybe not having to have an account at all is the next best thing. Yeah, so it's G-A-T-H-I-O, Gatheo. And it's a self-hosted alternative to something like Meetup. And remember one of the features I lacked about it is that it had that auto-delete of events after a while. Right. Sort of self-purging.

And I was really hoping, and maybe this isn't the platform, but what I would really like to provide is a platform, website, whatever, for the community to do self-created Meetups. Meetups that maybe we can't get to, but listeners could self-organize meetups. Right. Because every single meetup we go to without fail, towards the end of the meetup, the conversation turns to, man, we should really do this on our own. We should get together as a group and do this again. This is so great.

We should do this on the regular. And we're always like, yes, do it. Please do. But people go their own separate ways. There's no way for them to do it. If we were there and we're always like yes do it please do but it people go their own separate ways there's no way for them to if we were there and we don't have the bandwidth unfortunately to like help you know tie these together we barely can put them on in the first place but we could say hey all right go to you know gavio.jupiterbroadcasting.com and set up the meetup you all sign up right here you know we could then we could just take action immediately and that would get the ball rolling

because we have listeners all over the world and they are truly the best people in the world. And when you get together, it's electric. And it's really something special. So I'd really like to provide that connection for the community. And if I could host something like Gatheo on our infrastructure so people could go create meetups

and share it with other JB community members. Man, I would love to try that. So if you got a suggestion, let us know. Otherwise, we'll keep an eye on Gatheo. See how it goes. Maybe it does get rapidly developed and by this time next year, it's a totally usable solution. There's only one way to

find out. And now, it is time for Le Boost. It is time to boost. Thank you everybody who supports this production and Boost in. You can now boost from the web at linuxunplugged. time to boost. Thank you, everybody who supports this production and boosts in. You can have boosts from the web at linuxunplugged.com slash boost.

And our baller booster this week comes from Gross Philosophy. Hey, Rich Lobster! 200,000 sats. B-O-S-T. That is incredible. Thank you very much. So I will start now.

I hope I get it right. Let's see. I have been a BSD user since the 90s because it just works so much better than Linux, but your show convinced me to try it again. Linux has definitely improved and has its advantages, but I still prefer BSD overall. Since Chris mentioned BSD, my suggestion for the next punishment... Oh, there it is!

Alright, we'll get to that. Is whoever says it first has to run OpenBSD as a daily driver for that week. Oh my goodness! For the week! Alright, so we're doing a breakfast lup and we didn't want to be trashed for the rest of the day. So I thought what we would do is we would take shots of Red Bull.

So we'll take our first shot here. So Wes, I'm going to pour you a little. All right. I was not that organized, so I'm sticking with the standard here. All right. Great. No, yeah, absolutely. You're out there in the cabin.

Go for it. Oh, yeah, it's Canada Day. Right. Drink up. It's Canada Day. All right. Okay. All right. Cheers, go for it. Oh, yeah, it's Canada Day. Right. Drink up. It's Canada Day. All right. Okay. All right.

Cheers, boys. Cheers. Cheers. Okay. Thank you, Gross. Appreciate it. That does go down a little easier than the vodka, I will say. Oh, rough over here.

All right. You know, it's such a generous boost, though. I do want to consider like seriously trying OpenBSD. And funny enough, I swear to God, when you sent me that list

of OSs that have been updated for 6.1.1, I swear I saw OpenBSD on that list. I was going to send you a comment about it. I think if we were going to do this,

we might need to refactor the rules so that it had to be like the case where we set it in a non-segment or not in the booths. I'm thinking we just take his idea because I don't think for – the first time we mentioned it for a week, I don't think that's really actionable. But what I do think we could do is pivot with it and do an OpenBSD challenge, all three of us. Yeah, bring it on. And run it for a week and then report back on the show. That sounds like fun.

So I'm going to write that down. We'll talk about it after the show, see if maybe... I have a question. Okay. Can you install Nix on OpenBSD? We're about to find out. Yeah, I guess. We are indeed, it sounds like.

Thank you, Gross Philosophy. Really appreciate that. Vamax comes in with 150,000 sacks. Oh. Hey, Rich Lobster. Thank you, Vamax. Okay, so this one has a bit of a context. I think we might have misspoke in the previous episode.

It was my bad. Go ahead. Because Vamax says, I'm here to defend the good name of the University of Michigan. Fair. Which has a robust ethics board, ethical research processes, and anyone with a University of Michigan email can contribute to the Linux kernel. All right. The University of Minnesota emails, however, cannot.

Yeah. Boosting for my family, who are mostly Linux people and University of Michigan alum, who are outraged. Okay. And then once we've moved on from that, thank you for pointing that out. Nick's game replacement idea. Each participant deletes a file at random from their present machine instead of a shot. A la Suicide Linux.

Oh, boy. That's a fun one. Yeah. Maybe you could choose sort of like a truth or dare. Either you take the shot or you delete a file. I'm writing that down too. Truth or dare destruction. That's really good.

You know, if we keep getting enough of these in, we're going to have like a hat with various options. And you're just going to pick one out of the hat and see what happens to you. That's true. That could be another, like a wheel. We could have. Actually, I just found. The next punishment wheel. I just found a legit wheel when I was going through and cleaning out the storage bays in the rv for some reason i think for a meetup we got ourselves like one of those

wheels that you put like things in and then you can spin and we never used it but i haven't amazing it's so random yeah so we could totally use that we could put these on there all right well we'll talk about this we have a lot to talk about. Okay. So, yeah. My apologies to the University of Michigan. When it came out of my mouth, I felt like that doesn't sound right. We were moving fast. We were moving fast. And, you know, I demonstrated an extreme lack of anything east of Montana in that episode in general, if you listen to the member stream as well. So it's a very embarrassing episode, Vamax.

And I apologize, Vamax, and I appreciate the boost. Well, hybrid sarcasm boosted in 42,135, Satoshi. I am programmed in multiple techniques. I'm mixing it up with a mix-up space balls boost. Oh, is that what it was? I guess so. All right, well, here you go. Sneaky sarcasm.

You know what? Here you go. Smoke if you got him. That seems like a sneaky one, right? Yeah, sneaky. Before we move on to the proper boosts, we did get a live boost from Noodles to say, Graphene OS only supports RCS messaging through Google Messages.

Yeah, I was worried about that. RCS is an open standard, but it's hardly supported by carriers by default and usually require either a special carrier app or through Google Messages. RCS requires data as well, meaning it only works over 4G or 5G. RCS is awesome, but not as open as one might think. Here's my question is, could somebody implement like an open source RCS client that you run on your phone and it can take those messages? that you run on your phone and it can take those messages. I think there are VoIP providers, SIP trunking provider type setups that have maybe RCS support for messaging via API,

so that might be another route in the future. We're going to have to play around with it. That would be interesting. I mean, I think overall, though, the development of RCS messaging is going to be a positive thing as it gets rolled out. But it is good to remember that it's not a panacea like plasma, right? Plasma's the panacea. Tokionet comes in with 4,200 stats.

I can't find a way to link my Strike account to send stats, but I guess he had these stats in his Fountain account because he sent that from Fountain. Yeah, I don't remember the exact steps to it, but Strike is now available in the UK after just rolling out in Europe. So we have now over 100 countries But Strike is now available in the UK after just rolling out in Europe. So we have now over 100 countries that Strike is available and you can buy sats instantly. So you don't even have

to hold the sats. You don't have to be like a Bitcoin holder or anything like that. You can just go to linuxunplugged.com slash boost and boost from there and then use the Strike app to scan the QR code. And if it's linked to your account, like your bank account, it'll just do all of that stuff on the back end for you oh there is a way to link it to fountain as well and you can fund a fountain wallet and then you can have like a fountain identity and all that but that's when you really get in the rabbit hole and you start having fun with all the stuff you don't have to do it immediately take your time m nfts that's how i'm going to choose to say that sent us 5 5,000 sats. You're so boost. Alas, no message.

Jar Jar Boost. So continuing right on, Faraday Fedora sent in a row of ducks. Now, I think you should keep the drinking game in some form. Integrating booze somehow can make it worth your while, perhaps. Xylophones, chime could be a sound clip. Only once per show, maybe to keep you guys healthy. Sorry, but look at the first letter of each sentence.

He spells Nix. Nix OS. Now integrating xylophones only, sorry. Clever. I was like, xylophones? Where is this going? Amazing.

That's really great. C Mix Sun Moon sent us a Spaceballs boost. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. Hello, JB Crew. You're constantly talking about Tailscale, and the show has got me using it for personal use cases

for about a year or so now. Hello. However, I have found a use case for Tailscale in my SaaS organization. As of this month, we're running both Tailscale and DNS and our custom headscale control server implementation to do many, many things. So thank you for making my life as an engineer a lot easier. Well, thanks for sending some value back.

We appreciate that. That's awesome. I'd love to know what those many, many things are if you want to send a follow-up. It sounds fascinating. Thank you for that. Farsapian comes in with 5,000 sats. You're supposed. But no message. But thank you for that. Soarsapian comes in with 5,000 sats. You're supposed. But no message.

But thank you for that. So I'll move right along. Red 5D comes in with a row of ducks. I like the control that Nostra gives over your identity and data. Do you think that it competes with Matrix in any way? It seems like it can do most of the same things, but in a more distributed way. Or do they both have their place? Man,

Wes, do you have any thoughts on this? Because, you know, our live chat is a Nostra based live chat. I do think it seems like matrix has specialized more in, I mean, there's just like so much going on with matrix,

but it's also like, uh, it feels a little more like a real time thing than a lot of the current Nostra situations. And just sort of the, you know, given how Nostr works and syncing from relays versus maybe more active, you know, REST pings between Matrix servers.

Yeah, I think the Matrix folks would describe it more as a communications protocol layer. It's not just chat, but it's voice, and it's meant to really be like this kind of back-end mesh between systems. Though, I have to say, I do think maybe the Nostra model is a little better. I wish I could log into Matrix with my Nostra identity.

You know, like I don't... I feel like a lot of this stuff could collapse down a little bit. So we'll see, Red 5. I don't know. Yeah, but I think outside of that, right, maybe in the places that they do overlap, there's probably a lot of times where Nostra seems a lot simpler to just have. Yeah, but I think outside of that, right, maybe in the places that they do overlap, there's probably a lot of times where Nostra seems a lot simpler to just have. Yeah, yeah.

Blogging Bitcoin boosts in with 5,380 cents. Everything's under control. Across two boosts. The first, where can I find your guys' endpubs? ChrisLast.com for me. You know, our show got a little traction on the Nostra social side last week, and one of the questions I saw is, how come I can't find Brent and Wes? Yeah, we got to fix that.

Fair enough. We got to fix that one. Stay tuned. Yeah. He says, thank you for talking about Nostra, too. Yeah, absolutely. We find it really fascinating, and it is a community of really smart people. I agree with you there.

Our dear listener Jeff sent in, oh, a Spaceballs boost. Yes. That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. He says, good grief. These companies' solutions make me never want to connect to the WAN again. I wonder when people will start to understand that stalking is still stalking, online or in real life, companies or individuals.

Yeah, you know, Jeff, after we got done recording, I found another couple of like these identity, commercial identity provider solutions, and they just get worse. And then the Linux Foundation, like on Friday or Thursday of this week, announced a distributed online identity initiative. So they're doing more stuff with that too. They're clearly looking to build, to help build some sort of web of trust solutions. Seems to be a bigger and bigger topic. Our dear Gene Beaton comes in with a row of ducks. I think Nostra is probably fine for something like live chats

that are intentionally ephemeral. But I also think a fundamental way it works is prohibitively large hurdle for any use case that isn't ephemeral. I think cross-verifying solutions such as the rel="me thing used by Mastodon and others are way more tenable. You know, thinking about this, back to the question about replacing Matrix, I think that's the differentiator, right? Like an ephemeral

chat that's attached to a live stream makes a lot of sense on Nostr. But a persistent, always going conversation probably makes more sense on Matrix. I don't know about the, I can't really speak to the way Mastodon does this. Are you familiar with how Mastodon does this? I looked a little bit and it looks like it's kind of similar

to what we were doing with the well-known Doster.json file. But in this case, all you have to do is add a link in your HTML that has a rel equals me attribute. So it is probably a little easier to set up if you're not like doing full self-hosting and you just need to like modify some blogging suite or whatever. I mean, there are several vendors that will give you a hosted solution for known identity. So there is a little bit of an ecosystem around that for a couple of Nostra-specific companies that are focusing on providing some of those things,

like a place to host your images and a place to host your identity. Right, yeah, there are a lot of pieces you've got to figure out or bring yourself or rely on a platform that can do it for you. It's interesting to see it shape out. I decided to do the self-hosted route, obviously, but it depends on your user. High-five connoisseur comes in with a row of ducks.

Microsoft has been doing a great job getting my wife interested in Linux. I need help. I need help, though. Her requirement is that it needs to be able to run MS Office and not alternatives.

Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Keep up the great work. I mean, we're going to assume, right, I think we're going to assume that High Five Connoisseur probably is aware of Office 365. Right. And web office.

That really is worth a go. You know, my wife started this position when I first met her years ago. And now, you know, she's using a markdown editor. So it's a process. But Office 365 did help her close that gap. Now, if that doesn't work for you for various reasons, I'm not probably a big fan of using a text editor in a web browser very much. I could personally vouch for CodeWeaver's crossover product that is tremendous. And it is a really, really nice set of tools on top of Wine and, you know, Wine's bottling environments and scripts that can pull down requirements and

dependencies and all of that. And it started as a solution to run Office on Linux. And it will run the latest local version you can. I don't know what it is because I haven't checked in on it for a while. Along with a handful of a bunch of other applications that might be Windows-specific that you might want to run. They just make it super easy. And the nice thing is they have a summer sale going on right now. So you could usually get it for like $80 or something, $75. And it's like $50 right now. So you could usually get it for like, I don't know, 80 bucks or something, 75 bucks.

And it's like 50 bucks right now. Oh. Not bad. And you can also try it for free. And you get like, I think a limited trial, but you get all the functionality. So you can see what I'm talking about. And then you can just activate it in place, if I recall. Worth a shot.

Yeah. So go get Crossover. I really like what they do. And they've been making software for the Linux desktop for like 20 years. So they figured it out. Simon comes in with a row of ducks. He says, you mentioned that the boost box was down, or a node, or some part of it was down. What happens to those boosts?

When the sending node, when it comes back online, will it pick those back up? Or is it black hold? Forever! I don't remember. From time to time we have an adage, I don't remember if it was our node or what. There was also some issues with our Albi node. Was it Albi? I think it might have been Albi.

Is that right, Brent? Yes, it was. So, the way this works is your SaaS just won't send. So, they stay in your wallet. So it starts there. But the split system makes it so that the other nodes in those splits that are online get their sats. So we have a dual run system. We have wallets that are hosted by Albi, and then we have a self-hosted JB node. So we've kind of got a backup system that way.

So one is always up. We've kind of got a backup system that way. So one is always up. And when your boost comes in either to the Albi node or to our node, you will get credit for the full amount you attempted to boost. And that's how we always credit it. It's not your fault that maybe one of the nodes was down. This is a rarity. It really is if you consider how many boosts are coming in across all the shows.

But it's like with all self-hosted things or new infrastructure, you want to for it so we've kind of gone this route and it works pretty well and so say uh we're doing 30 splits between all of us and one of our nodes is down then you just keep the 30 of those sats in your local wallet so it's pretty smooth bgr nasigi boosted in 2100 sets. All right. Saying great episode. Last episode, Linux plus Noster plus Bitcoin is the way. Oh, you know, I love a good distributed system. You could always throw a little simplex in there, a little matrix in there, a little graphene OS and a little Nix. And you got you got my recipe, baby.

Hey, don't forget email. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Good old email. He's trying to forget email, though. But you know, it was nice to visit Fedora again this week. Still a classy lady. I'll say that.

Lucas Burlingham? Yeah. He comes in with 10,000 sats. Boost! Yeah, he does. Hey there, I've been using Linux since around 2018. It was CentOS 7 minimal install on a 2011 iMac running VirtualBox.

Nice. Wow. I've done the whole distro hopping since and was on Arch for a while, but now I'm on Ubuntu for the whole household. And my wife hasn't realized it yet. I guess that means it's passing the test. I'm wondering, did you do like the recommended sneaky swap, Lucas, where you brought in the Firefox and the LibreOffice on the commercial platform first. And then when you moved over to Linux, just kind of keep the desktop background the same, keep the same applications, put the menu in the same spot. Bob's your uncle, right?

Nobody's the wiser. There was this Windows Plasma theme you were loving a couple weeks ago, right, Chris? Yeah. Man, I always forget the name. It starts with an R. It's great. It looks like classic Windows 7 if you turned off all of the themes. And it's like if you go into Plasma and you search by the top themes and you go like a page down, it's like retrograde.

It starts with an R, and it's the best if you like classic themes, ironically. Nunchuk comes in with 2,325 sats. That's not possible. Nothing can do that. Long time sat streamer, first time sat booster, and it's long overdue. I appreciate the value for value format. This podcast and self-hosted got me hooked on Linux, and now I'm running a Proxmox PMS at home, and I'm running a Fedora desktop at work. Keep up the great work. Thank you.

Oh, and by the way, boys, bust out that map and add my large boost from Twib, and this boost you'll get my zip code. Oh. Yeah, I don't know if you have that handy. Hmm. Well, let's go take a look. Let's go take a look.

So it came in from Nunji. I'm pretty sure that's how you pronounce it, right? Like what? Nunji. I believe so, yeah. Yeah. Like you say it when you're yelling at your kid to knock something off. In slightly Japanese.

I didn't take it there. Did you take it there, Brent? I kind of went there, yeah. Oh, I found it. Thank you, Fenton. 90,000 sats. Hey! Okay.

That's a nice boost. Boy, look at that map. Jeez, Wes. You got to get a smaller map. Yeah. Well, I got to do math. Well, it's got weather now. Boy, look at that map. Jeez, Wes, you got to get a smaller map. Yeah, well, I got to do math. Well, it's got weather now. Yeah, it's part calculator, part math. And then we got 2,325.

325, yeah. 2,325. Thank you. Yeah, so you got to add them together. So that would be 92325. Whoa, whoa. Sounds like a zip code to me. Whoa, jeez.

And I think that would be a postal code in San Bernardino County, California. Hello, San Bernardino. And if we got that right, we could be totally off. Maybe you're in Crestline or nearby. Oh. Okay. Well, thank you. Appreciate it.

Mr. Pibb comes in with 5,000 cents. Coming in hot with the boost. I guess I'll have to check out Nostor even if I don't want a Twitter column. Thanks, guys. Yeah, he got it. He got it. That was it.

That was the message. Yeah, very good. Well, we have another Spaceballs boost here from Magnolia Mayhem. 12,345 cents! The hell was that? Spaceball won. They've gone to plan.

Oh, personally, I love these. I can't say how grateful I am for things like Noster and the like. All this higher level stuff is for naught, though, if Layer 1 is compromised. I'm aware of community mesh nets, but that's a lot to ask for all but the most hardcore self-hosters. Is there even an angle of attack for Layer 1? House-to-house lasers? Not going to lie. I'm ready for steganography.

Well, that's quite the word. I'm ready for steganographically hidden memes carried by carriers. What about the boomers? Very funny. Yeah, you know, so far, TCP IP seems to be still the old go-to. But you're right. You always do need to be thinking about a layer one backup. It's one of my favorite things to kind of fantasize about,

creating some sort of wireless personal mesh network. I think it'd be great. Vake came in with 2,000 sats. Good to see you guys covering Nostrad. Thank you, Vake. Really appreciate that. And the golden dragon came in. And, you know, we do have

a golden dragon boost sound effect. The golden dragon! So my heart is full, and from hearing the special boost sound, thank you guys. Another banger episode. Question on Nostr. How would one set up a store on Nostr for a business? Are there any docks or places I could visit for this?

One of the links I had, and there was a lot of Nostr links in the show notes, is a directory of Nostra applications. And there's a couple like Craigslist or self-hostable stores that people are working on. And the advantage to that is it looks like, so I thought it was 16,000. Latest numbers are now 35,000 active Nostra users. So that's how fast this is moving. When I tried to get the number and then I did the episode and it was already higher. That's how fast this is moving.

When I tried to get the number and then I did the episode and it was already higher. So if you start engaging over there, you're probably going to have a pretty good rate because you're going to have people that are really interested in everything Nostra at the moment, whereas Twitter is such a loud noise floor now. So you might give it a look, Golddred. Go dig through the show notes. I bet you'll find something in there. I think there was a whole directory of applications that looked really compelling. Thank you, everybody who supports the show either through through a membership, by streaming sats, or by boosting.

We had 32 boosters. We do have the 2,000-sat cutoff just for time. I want to thank you all because we stacked 489,137 sats. Thank you very much. You don't really even have any idea how much it means to us. We look at the ad situation going forward and we think it's not a winter anymore. It's probably a land shift. And being able to count on the ability of our community to keep us going just gives us a peace of mind. We focus on the show and the content.

And it means we don't have to sit there and panic and try to take the first advertiser that would come our way. We don't have to sit here and try to come up with stupid t-shirts that are cheap and crappy and try to sell them at you. We just focus on making good content and you send that value back to us. And I think it's a system that's sustainable. We really appreciate all of you. Thank you very much for supporting the show.

It means more than I can convey in standard old stupid words, but if we ever have a chance to Vulcan Mind Meld, I think you'll get an idea. Alright, so the pick today could have been the episode. It's one of those banger picks, and I'm very excited about the future of Futo Keyboard. F-U-T-O Keyboard. You might have heard of them

recently as going in and supporting the image developers full-time. Maybe you've heard of Louis Rossman, and he has an association with this group it is a keyboard that has one fundamental philosophy for android it should never connect to the internet but still have fantastic voice to text predictive text and all kinds of features you expect from an absolutely modern keyboard they're they're aiming to replace the Google keyboard with something even better. So that's like the target level of polish and functionality. Yeah.

Okay. Fully offline. Fully private. This was one of the hardest things when you move over to DraftKey OS is a lot of people inevitably install the Google keyboard. It's a good keyboard. You need something that's functional and usable on your device. They got transformer-based prediction and autocorrect, and the fun thing is

you can kind of mix and match your models, so they have multiple models if you want. They'll come with defaults, but you can go pick more complicated models if you want. That's great. So it does have integrated voice input. It runs entirely offline on device, just like the rest of the keyboard. It's got an action bar in there,

like at the top. It can suggest emojis. It can suggest text. And as you train it, it's learning all locally. It's got a action bar in there, like at the top. It can suggest emojis. It can suggest text. And as you train it, it's learning all locally. It's got a clipboard manager, undo, redo, paste. You can get in there. It's got themes. You can swipe on the space bar to move the cursor and swipe the delete key to delete multiple characters.

You can blacklist suggestions, and you can build your own local list. And you can import any AOSP-compatible dictionary. You've got a big range there. And basic swipe typing is supported as well. So if you're a swiper, which I do very occasionally, one-handed. Yeah, sometimes nice. Yeah, I've only been running it for a couple of days by the time you hear this, so probably not even a full 48 hours by the time you hear this. But, I mean, it looks like the Google keyboard, right?

Like there, you can see I'm in a text chat text chat and yeah it looks nice it looks really nice hit that try doing a voice don't send it because it's to the wife but hit the voice you can see it's a little different this is a test voice call voice message i don't even know what i'm saying and then it renders it right so it's not as instant as the google stuff yeah but it's all local on device and it i mean for me it even, it even gets the commas. I mean, it gets everything. That's the difference between, like, if you have to go edit all parts of the message, then you're like, I could have just typed this.

So you wait a beat after you finish, and then it renders it out. Like, remember when we first got this? I think that's how it used to work. And then the vendors worked really hard to make it real as possible, real-time as possible. But that, you know, it's also creepy and spying. So very excited about the future of this. I think it's also creepy and spying um so very excited about the future of this i think it's in a very usable state and then brent something i think you'll appreciate obtanium is like front and center on how you can install this thing oh yeah you know this really

tempts me because i uh have been using a keyboard called florist board for a while which has a lot of these same features but seems to be a little dormant. And so I've been slowly looking for an alternative and haven't really been happy with what I've seen. But this seems to just come in all of a sudden with like an impressive set of features. So I think I'm going to use this right away, right after the show. They are forking from an existing open source project that's pretty functional. So they're starting with a good base and then they're, you know, they're working on it. And I think they're, I don't know,

but generally they put actual funding behind this too. And they are going to start asking for people to kick back a little bit. They're essentially having a, the source code's publicly available, but we still ask you to pay for it. And it's like, you know, four bucks. And you pay once.

Seems pretty reasonable if you like it. And you don't have to, there's no nag. It's just an option in the settings. I've already installed it and I think it's going to be just my go-to going forward keyboard. I mean,

it's maybe not as perfect as the Google keyboard or as absolutely, like, I think I just have a slightly higher error rate, but I also think as I maybe train it,

it'll get better. Right, you'll probably get used to it. Yeah. It feels like the kind of, I mean, if you're already making the trade-off

for going graphing, this just feels like, I mean, I'm going to try it after the show. Yeah, it's one of those. F-U-T-O keyboard from the Fudo folks. It's really good to see it. Really, really impressed.

And let us know if you try it. Also, again, we're looking to see if you're a daily driver of desktop Linux or if you care, I guess. I guess the core of the question is, do you care about desktop topics? Right, even if you don't use it on the daily, do you want to hear the updates

about what's happening with Plasma? Yeah, these kind of episodes. We're trying to gauge how often we should do these kinds versus I'd say the comparison would be an episode where you build something with Linux, you know, you deploy something on Linux, some application on Linux is solving a problem for you, something like that.

Let us know what you think could boost in. We're seeking that feedback, and we'll try to incorporate it as we go forward. It'll kind of help us tune our coverage. Meanwhile, we'll be back at our regular time next week on Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, as far as I know. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. I'm sure we'll have some doubles coming up and whatnot as the summer is cooking. So keep an eye on jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.

Or if you have a podcasting 2.0 app, we go pending in your app feed. So you'll just see in your list of podcasts, oh, hey, love's going to be live tomorrow. And when we go live, boom, right there in your app, you can just tap and listen. Lots of great podcast apps at newpodcastapps.com. Go try them out. Maybe you can tune in live from it. And, you know, say hi. I don'tcom. Go try them out. Maybe you can tune in live from it and, you know, say hi. I don't know. It could be fun.

Maybe you'll love it. Or you just listen however you care. I really don't. You know what? As long as you listen. Right? As long as you listen. RSS feed.

Yeah. Private feeds. However you do it. Appreciate it. All right. See you back here next Sunday. Thank you. you