LINUX Unplugged - 574: COSMIC Encounter

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

The COSMIC desktop is just around the corner. We get the inside scoop from System76 and go hands-on with an early press build.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.FMSystem76 tips Fedora Cosmic spin for 2025 release with Fedora 42 — It looks like System76's exciting new Rust-based Cosmic DE will get an official Fedora spin in the upcoming Fedora 42, potentially giving Linux users with bleeding-edge hardware an official way to try Cosmic.Pop!_OS Mattermost — An excellent place to engage if you want to bring COSMIC to a distro near you.iced — A cross-platform GUI library for RustSmithay — A smithy for rusty wayland compositorTesting COSMIC — The easiest way to test COSMIC DE currently is by building a systemd system extension.Membership Summer Discount — Take $1 a month of your membership for a lifetime!Portal:Kalpa - openSUSE Wiki — openSUSE MicroOS Desktop Gnome was renamed to openSUSE Aeon, and the Plasma Desktop version is being renamed to openSUSE Kalpa.pop-os/kernelstub: A simple EFI boot manager manager for LinuxAlpaca — GTK App to Chat with local AI modelsAlpaca on FlatHub

It's been a long journey to this week. The Cosmic Desktop is just days away as this episode comes out. And I was thinking about how we got here. It started, right, System76 shipping Ubuntu. And, I mean, you could really say the first die was Cass when Canonical announced they were wrapping up Unity and switching to GNOME. And System76 had to really kind of process what they're going to do about that. Yeah.

Then decided that they would ship GNOME, but with their take on it, and they kind of evolved that over time. Extension after extension. Yeah, and really kind of created their own spin of GNOME through extensions. But like we've all seen, you can only get so far, especially when you don't have a standard extension API to use. Yeah, I don't know that you could tell from the surface, but I've got to imagine there was a lot of pain in the maintenance there. So you look at the kind of decision tree, like, okay, so this isn't working, but we still think this is the right direction to go.

Do we capitulate and do less extensions, or do we go down the rabbit hole and create our own desktop environment? And then if we create our own desktop environment, what technology stack do we use? What really, if you're going to build something today, would be the correct stack? And it's been two years or so of this process. And now we're finally here. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Payne. Mr. Brantley is out trekking across Canada this week with no cell signal, but we still have a packed show for you. The Cosmic Desktop is just days away. We just got done chatting with the development team, got all the details that we could possibly ask, and then kicked the tires on an early press release of

Cosmic. So we have some surprising things that we've learned, our thoughts on this new desktop environment and kind of where it's at, sort of set the expectations, and then we'll round it out with some great boosts, killer couple of picks, and a lot more. So time-appropriate greetings. Mamba Room, hello, hello, y'all. Hello, hello, guys. Hello, Chris and the rest. Hello. Hello. It's really nice to have you all here. Got a good little group on air and a good little group just listening up there in the quiet lobby,

getting the low-latency Opus stream straight from the mixer. And a big good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. It is the easiest way to connect devices and services directly to each other wherever they are. Try it for free on 100 devices and three users when you go to Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Replace that legacy VPN infrastructure in just minutes. You got five devices. It'll probably take you like seven minutes

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Tailscale.com slash unplugged. All right, so we're asking for a friend this week. No particular reason, but what's the craziest thing you, yes, you, dear listener, have ever ran in a container or maybe come across someone running in a container? Try to get your answer in for episode 575. Boost it in because, well, let's just say your answers might be on theme next week. No particular reason. The craziest thing you've ever run or seen run in a container. Boost it in and tell us.

thing that you've ever run or seen run in a container, Boosted and Telus. Also, looking for the overall possible take on a Toronto meetup at the end of August. Really soon, just a couple of weeks away. I'm going to be there. Alex is going to be there. Brent's going to be there. It's a big party that Wes is going to miss. Unfortunately, we're going to miss you, Wes. But maybe we'll do a little meetup. I'll tell you more about why we're going to be in Toronto. And I'd like to know, so boost it and tell me if, you know, you'd be down to clown in Toronto towards the end of August. And is it going to be stupid hot? Because that'd be really obnoxious to leave the very tepid Pacific Northwest. But I'd do it for you, listener, if you want to do a meetup.

Let me know. So this week we attended the Cosmic Desktop Press Briefing by System76. You know, pretty interesting because they gave us a pretty straightforward presentation of some of the overall features that we'll get into of Cosmic. But then they answered some questions that I think have been on our minds for a while. Cosmic, Computer Operating System Main Interface Components. So that's what it means. You like that? Yeah, that was actually pretty fun.

I don't know, about two years later. It is alpha right now, and as you're listening to this, if you're listening when it comes out, it'll be just out in a couple of days. So it sets your expectations accordingly. These things are a huge task. But the basics seem to be there. It's alpha in terms of releases. But feature-wise, it's already kind of comparative to a lot of minimal desktop environments like XFCE or LXQ.

It's offering that and more already. It's already competitive in that space. Yeah. if you use it, it feels like a desktop environment. Maybe not as fully wrought as your Plasma or Gnome's just yet, but like a recognizable desktop environment. And I think it's worth pointing out, this is coming out at a time when both Plasma 6 and Gnome are really strong. Strongest they've ever been. Great, great releases, great sets of features, real refinement.

So the primary competition has never been in a better place. So our expectations are pretty high. And they demoed the workspaces. They talked about vertical workspaces, how you can span displays or per display, and there's touchpad support for swiping between them. The window snapping stuff looks pretty good and the stacking where you can kind of group them

with like a Super S. Yeah, I like that in particular. All that looks really good. They have a good launcher, pretty quick. You know, you can, in launcher, you can do the question mark, you can get help. You can run commands directly from the launcher like command line commands

and you can also do basic math calculation. They also have an app launcher that shows you the icons. It's not full screen. It just pops right up. All this stuff is really quick. And they also built in support for right-clicking on app icons and choosing to run on the primary GPU. You know, if you have two GPUs in your system?

That's a nice touch. I have to imagine that would also work with an eGPU, something I want to play around with, because I haven't busted out the old eGPU in a long time. But, man, if you built it into my desktop environment where I could just right-click and run an app on that eGPU, that'd be pretty sweet, assuming I could find a Thunderbolt system. Where I think they've put a lot of work, very, very clever, and I think it's going to get

Cosmic a lot of attention, is the theming support. Wow. Wow. I mean, of course, you got your standard light and dark modes. You got your accent colors. You got to have accent color. You can adjust the background window color. You can separately adjust the sidebar or container background, you know, like where you have

your list of discs and stuff. You can set that color. You can tweak the the sidebar or container background, you know, like where you have your list of disks and stuff. You can set that color. You can tweak the active window hint color. You can style. You can set different styles all over this place. Of course, icons and all that kind of stuff. But what is essentially built into the theme selector is a character builder. It's a theme editor almost in itself.

You could sit there and create your own theme just by tweaking all of the different things they already have built into Cosmic. And then, yes, you can actually export those settings and you could import those settings. So you may see somewhere Cosmic users start sharing their themes, maybe on Reddit or the Cosmic Pop Mattermost, or I don't know where they're going to do this,

but you could see if I had really dialed it in and you liked what I had going, well, I'd just export that for you and give it to you. Absolutely. Really, really impressed how much customization is already built into the graphical environment. Like during the press call, Carl, within a few seconds, just basically made a Unity-like layout. Just tweak this, do this, do that. Boom, now you've got a Unity layout.

They really spent some time on that part of it. And then there's a whole suite of keyboard shortcuts. So if you're a navigate using the keyboard kind of user, you are set. And they built in a pretty minimal tool in the settings to go through and figure out what the keyboard shortcuts are or change them. I was very impressed right from the get-go just in terms of how many things have shortcuts. I mean, even just under the file menus and stuff, they're all over the place. Yeah. It's great.

I mean, if you've got a keyboard, they make a nice keyboard. You might as well be able to navigate the UI with it. I do appreciate that. It's one of the things I used to love about old Windows. They have an MVP app store. It handles finding your apps, removing apps, doing updates. It lets you switch between Flathub or a Debian repository. They have a file browser called Cosmic Files.

Carl says, quote, of all the apps, it probably still needs the most work, end quote. So it's very basic. So I might be pulling in Thunar for a little bit if I continue to use it. Very kind of MVP screenshot tool, but, you know, it draws a box around what you want or you can choose an app or choose a window. Yeah, it doesn't have a bunch of those fancy features like, oh, upload to your image host or whatever. It pretty much just automatically saves it on your file system, but it works.

They got a basic text editor in here. Some of the standard table stakes apps for a desktop environment, they've created and written from scratch. And the key thing to keep in mind is all of this is extremely performant and it's all written in Rust. And so they've used things like Iced and they've created LibCosmic and they have these standardized UI elements also that are all written in Rust. And I tried this Cosmic Desktop on a very low end system,

and it was still impressively, impressively fast. You do need video acceleration at the moment in Cosmic's current state. But if you even have, you know, a generic Intel embedded GPU, it's impressive how fast this desktop is. It doesn't have like this totally brand new raw feel to it. It feels sort of, I don't know, it feels as complete as like an XFCE does. It's like in terms of the apps that are available to it. And they've had to create all of those. Yeah, it kind of feels like, you know, when you're building up a minimal system, maybe it's Arch or you're doing a Debian install,

and you don't do the big package group that has all the GNOME desktop stuff or all the Plasma, and you just get whatever's in that minimal set of minimum viable desktop? Yeah, that's the stage it's at. Yes, yep. And you could slot in other applications just fine. GTK apps in particular, I think they look just fine. Oh, yeah. So what I realized as we were looking at this is this really does make Pop! OS its own Linux now. It's truly its own unique distribution now.

They've got their own installer, which is nice. They've made their own design choices at different parts of the OS. And now with Cosmic, they'll have their own desktop environment. That's a complete unit right there. That's a full Linux distribution. They do other things, right? Like quite different, like they ship that recovery environment

right out of the gate. Yeah. I mean, sure, there's a whole bunch of Debian and traditional Ubuntu things under the hood, but which can be really nice, actually, when you don't have to learn a whole new system. But yeah, the actual end user experience is just getting more and more distinct.

So before we get into our detail and our individual usage, there is the elephant in the room. There's still a lot to do here. Number of settings pages haven't been completed yet. Accessibility isn't baked in yet. They do say it's a big priority for them, though. They want to do little things like frosted effects in the OS interface. They want to support a variable refresh rate across multiple monitors. Nice.

They have lots of refinements and features they want to add to the workspace management. Lots of work to go into cosmic files. They need to add software rendering to the compositor, you know, because that makes it hard to even just test it in a VM. If you're going to use it in a VM, you've got to use it in a hardware-accelerated VM. So that's limiting. More to set up, yeah. Sounds like GNOME boxes works for most people, out of the box, if you will.

I was playing around with it. I was able to get it working with just like QAMU on the command line with Virgil. But yeah, I did take, you know, I had to install the packages and figure out the right flags. So software would be nice. So if you dug around on the internet, you could get your hands on an ISO for a little bit now. And they've been working really hard to add new

features. The plan is around Thursday of the week this comes out, Cosmic is supposed to drop. Now, I would imagine that could change depending on anything with the development cycle. And then once Cosmic is at a 1.0 phase, whenever that happens to be, once we've reached 1.0, currently System76 expects annual releases of the Cosmic Desktop.

Right, and that's not the whole Pop system. We're just talking specifically about the desktop. Yeah. However, you could kind of mix and match there. You could be on Pop OS LTS but still get annually a new Cosmic Desktop. That sounds pretty nice. That could be really nice. It could be a really nice release cadence.

And it also gives it plenty of time for distros to integrate it. So, you know, by February, every downstream distro probably has it. Say you release in January, obviously, just example. You know, so that's you're not left out, really. You're not getting just as the next release comes out. You're just getting the old release. And speaking of non popOS distros, it sounds like we should look forward to pretty great support on Fedora. System76 was very complimentary of the collaboration between Fedora and System76. And it looks like Fedora 42 will have a cosmic spin. You'll probably be able to get your hands on it a lot sooner than that because they're pulling it right from the main branch. They're building it pretty frequently. They're interacting with the Cosmic dev team when there's issues. So you may be able to get it on Fedora 41, but there will be

an official spin of Fedora in 42 for Cosmic. That's exciting. Yeah. And they're thinking it's going to be a really good experience. I'm excited to try Cosmic more decoupled from some of the other pop bits and in particular decoupled from like an apt-based system. Jeremy made a point, the lead developer of Cosmic, that the external dependencies are pretty minimal because it's Rust-based and because even like things like SystemD, they've built in escape hatches so you could in theory run it on a BSD that doesn't have SystemD. There's a lot less work to move something like Cosmic between distributions than, say, Plasma or GNOME, where they have extensive external dependencies throughout

the system. So if you're going to ship the latest version of Plasma, you'll likely have to update a lot of the underlying libraries as well, which has their own set of dependencies, right? Cosmic doesn't really have that. And so as a result of a minimal external dependencies, it does make it easier to package for more distribution. Yeah, I feel like you can see the fruits of sort of, I mean, yeah, all the stuff Rust brings, just the modernness of everything, the simplicity. I even noticed, if you go take a look at some of their GitHub,

they've got instructions for like, how do you test Cosmic? You know, if you want to hack on it, play with it, whatever. The easiest way to test Cosmic currently is if you want to hack on it, play with it, whatever the easiest way to test Cosmic currently is by building a systemd system extension, right? And so they've got like simple, they've got a just command specifically for that so you can just build a system extension, dump it on your system and run it even on

your own system if you want to play with it. And I think that's enabled by exactly what you're talking about. And it kind of I think underscores portability. Jeremy runs it on Redox or Redox, his Rust-based OS that he's created. He runs Cosmic on that and Linux, and then he synchronizes the settings files between the two systems, his Linux machines and his Redox machine or Redox. There's also already work to port it to NixOS. Essentially, one person is doing that work right now.

You are our hero. Oh, I think we owe them. We do. Oh, you're right. I just accidentally slipped into that. All right. All right, time for the Nix Drink. Ah!

All right. So we're going to have ourselves a gin shot chased by a little Red Bull because, you know, of course we are, right? Yeah. To honor the hero, packaging Cosmic for next. There you go. Cheers. And it seems like they've made significant progress. I don't know if you could put it on par with the Fedora stuff, but Cosmic on NixOS is looking really good, so it's worth that shot.

And I'll talk more, but I think ultimately Cosmic could end up being a great fit for Nix users. But you know, when you look at what they're doing here, Wes, you got something that's fairly portable, you have something that's fairly feature complete, and it's only going to get more feature complete. It offers end users a pretty sophisticated desktop that could really be in a fairly short time on every major distribution they might choose. It's kind of an interesting middle ground, too, where, I mean, it is very flexible as we've seen, and it does have a lot of advanced features, but it also feels, I don't know, like it's retained some of the GNOME ethics around making it just simple and intuitive to use.

Yeah. There's some heritage there. Yeah. But yet it is very much its own thing still. All right. So let's talk about what it was like to actually use it. 1Password.com slash unplugged. Go there to support the show and check out 1Password's extended access management solution.

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Those are the ones where you can manage identities and things like that. But then there's those paths that the people actually use, you know, the ones that are kind of like cut through the grass, the actual straightest line between point A and B. That's more like the unmanaged devices. Your shadow IT apps, non-employee identities, contractors that come along, you know, devices you have no control over.

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it out. Support the show and see the demo. Go to 1password.com slash unplugged. That's 1password.com, the number one password.com slash unplugged. Support the show and check it out. Well, it's a bold new Cosmos, at least for Cosmic. You know, we touched a little bit earlier that it's developed in Rust, but I think maybe it's worth pointing out that, you know, up to now, Linux desktop development, and really especially development of the desktop itself has been primarily done with toolkits like GTK and Qt, using languages like C and C++. Now, recently, Canonical has been exploring and using Flutter, which is pretty exciting. That's, you know, that's a kind of a new approach to desktop apps with Dart under the hood. But so far, that's kind of mostly been used to build what you might call

apps. Now, I guess like the installer is maybe bridging that divide, but kind of fundamentally apps and not as much the desktop itself. Right. A bunch is still shipping GNU. And I mean, I like Flutter apps so far, but they do feel like an answer to Electron more than something that I want my entire desktop built out of. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good that's a good way to look at it. So I feel like even with that Cosmic really stands out for just throwing out the last 20 years of desktop development history. But building for what the state of technology is today. So Wayland. Yes. High DPI monitors you know things like just acknowledging where computers are at. What's what memory safe languages where those are at.

So if you're going to throw away the last 20 years of some of this stuff but build for what's available right now, which means you don't have a lot of baggage or legacy. No. And you get a lot of the nice affordances, right? I mean like Rust is great because of its low level and performance and sophisticated type system and the borrow checker and memory safety. But it's also really great because it has cargo and crates, right? It has like a modern language level package manager that lets you assemble things together in a reproducible way that is just much harder to do with C and C++ systems.

It's also kind of just notable that they're taking it, they're taking that Rust approach and marching on down the stack, right? Because you could have a system where you, you know, you use Rust bindings for GTK to develop a new desktop environment. But that's not what they're doing. Right. You know, so they're using Iced, a cross-platform GUI library

for Rust, which they've contributed to significantly. And they're also using something called Smithy, which is the Smithy for rusty Wayland compositors. So, I mean, you've got rust interfacing at the compositor level, you've got rust going on to build out your toolkit, and then obviously they're building

LibCosmic as sort of the features on top of the base toolkit as well. That is a commitment to doing it new. And really doing it the right way, but taking the long road, you know,

they, they could have, they could have taken a few shortcuts and not built all of this. Yeah. Um, definitely. It's really, it's really not,

you know, it's really the idea that they're, they're building for Wayland today too. Like, I just can't stress that enough. They're not a project with all, all of this X11 baggage. No,

they're, they're growing up now. Yeah. They're striking for the modern era now. I don't know. I mean, for a lot of things, it certainly is. But it reminds me of what we were talking about with BcashFS on the show, right?

Like, at the surface level, the features are very similar. But these are both opportunities to take what we have learned in the last 20 years and have a fresh version of it instead of just a fresh coat of paint. Yeah, because you've got to wonder, so what does version 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 look like? And what's the stability story around a desktop that's built this way? Is it much more resilient? Is it much more performant?

It seems so. It seems so, so far, early testing. Yeah, I mean, it sure does feel fast. I mean, it should, right I mean it should right it's a fresh code base it's written in rust but so far it is delivering yeah in a way that I haven't felt in a while on Linux desktop it feels like other

Linux desktops when you turn down like all the desktop effects yeah but it still has like smooth animations and yes and now it doesn't have as much effects as like any of those other ones do in the first place correct but yeah it still retains some of that. It's an interesting mix, right? You're apt to compare it to XFCE, and I think there's a lot there. Like if you were going to build XFCE today. Yeah, because it doesn't have any of the old taste in it, right? It's minimal, but in a clean way that feels modern. Yeah, you would be forgiven for looking at it and going, oh, that's a heavily themed GNOME desktop.

I think you could be forgiven for thinking that. Totally. So it looks a lot cleaner and newer than XFCE, but it has that minimal vibe going on and that high performance. Even in a VM, even in like the installer ISO environment that we were playing with. So I think that shows that there's, you know, already some good fundamentals to build on. I was impressed both with like how just usable it was right off the gate.

I think I could daily drive it. I didn't have a chance to try it on like a mini monitor system, but just on a laptop, I feel like I could definitely daily drive it. There surely would be rough edges, but it would happen. I do think though, there's a certain exacting quality to some of the inner actions or like overly precise requirements where it felt almost a little bit like it reminds me of the Reaper UI in some ways, where like you just you kind of have to be pretty precise in where you click to like get the thing that you want. It wasn't super flexible around sloppiness, I guess.

Yeah, yeah. Which feels like probably just a symptom of like, well, you got the exact version and then you got to build in all of the additional logic to account for sloppy human interactions. But outside of that, I don't know. I'm excited to watch where it goes because even just in the installer environment, I found myself using the auto tiling.

I really like where that is now and I like where it's going. And that's going to be, I think, that alone will be fairly compelling. If you've got that, you know, where you just a quick toggle away from like, I want to manage this traditionally to, I'm tired, there's too many windows, just lay this out, or I know I want, you know, two or three to four up at a time. That alone combined with the portability, I think will be a strong argument. And like we said, it's so smooth. Even on older systems, I really enjoyed that. But what I think we have here is this is the beginning of the hard work now. And I'm sure the team would love hearing that. But there's going to be so much 10% to do.

You know, there's just so much of that last little bit to get it across the final stretch. And there's a lot of different user bases that each have a thing that's like, oh my gosh, you don't have that implemented yet? I can't use it. So it's good to see the fundamentals are really solid because it feels like there's a good base to build on here.

One question that I was kind of trying to think, and I don't know if I have a good answer for this, but I think as a power user, I'm excited and it feels like, if this is alpha, then beta and eventual production release are going to be really nice. But what timeline,

what do you think is actually needed to get it to ship for the non-power user System76 customers? That might be sooner than later. That might be sooner than us because we're the ones that have all these little edge cases that we need solved. Yeah, how far is it for the person whose brother told them, oh, you need a new laptop, go here, buy it from System76? Next release, I bet. I bet. I mean, they move pretty quick, and they have a lot of

ideas for stuff they already want to build to finish it off. They're not just sitting here going, what do we do next? They've got a whole list. And I think for power users, though, once they add this, it's... Maybe another comparison we should be making, lightly, is Cinnamon. Hmm.

Because it sits between Plasma and Gnome in terms of its power user features. It's definitely got more power userasma and Gnome in terms of its power user features. It's definitely got more power user features than Gnome. I don't think it has as much as Plasma, and that's sort of where Cinnamon sits as well. But there's a really cool aspect to the way that Cosmic stores your configuration, and I think for power users that are using something like Nix or Ansible,

this is going to be really attractive. So your config files just live in.config slash cosmic. And then there's a bunch of pre-created subfolders. And then when you go into those subfolders, they're essentially empty until you've changed a setting in one of the built-in apps or built-in settings. Yeah, so like as an example, I toggled on military time. I usually like that on my systems.

And then, so there's just a little file under that config structure called military time with the value true in it. Yeah, yeah. Super accessible, open, positive sync. Easy to modify. Easy to backup. Easy to preset up with Ansible or something like Nix.

Yeah, totally. And then the state of applications, like some of their state information lives in.local .cosmic, right? .local.cosmic, and then you can just, same thing with that, you could sync and config that. And they've already pre-split this out, right? So they have

a conception of like, this is configuration, and this is runtime state. So if you want one and not the other, you can have it. And you very well might. You might want to sync all your config and leave the runtime state per machine. Exactly. And not all the desktop environments, in fact, most of them do not separate that out. So I could see that being really appealing to guys like us who might just sync that.config slash Cosmic folder. Or, you know, maybe when you're installing Cosmic Nix, you can go in there and you can set up a bunch of stuff inside the Nix config.

Or maybe there's going to be a Universal Blue Cosmic where you can set up all this stuff. Yeah, right. I mean, they make it really easy there, right, where you don't even need necessarily a fancy build system. You can just have a little script that sets up the folders. Yeah. I mean, it's too early to say, but they seem to have a good design philosophy. They seem to have a good design philosophy. They seem to have a good feature philosophy. And then they have a team that's managing this. That already puts them kind of at a top tier open source desktop project level. And they have, right?

I mean, like they have a, there's a real world impetus because they have customers, real customers paying them real money to like provide a usable product that they have to design around. And that means they also have years of input from the things that those customers care about. But I checked with our crystal ball before we went on the air, and it's still foggy where this really ends up long term. It's hard to see because you want Linux.

If you're coming to System76 and you know about Linux, are you going to want a one-off desktop environment? Or are you going to want, I want Ubuntu? Right. But if you don't know about Linux and you just want a good computer, well, then you probably don't care if it's got Cosmic. You don't have any expectations about what it's going to be. And I just wonder how that impacts.

I wonder if that tracks in the future, if that's even a problem or not. Or, you know, people that know Linux know they can just swap desktop environments so they don't care. So it's just going to be interesting to see how that sort of works out for them and where they take this in the future. But it does seem like... How well does the default position do to people? Does it take off from there?

Yeah. Do people route around it? Do their own customers find it compelling or is it something that people on the internet like more? There's just so many unknowns right now. But we're entering a new era now, both for Pop!OS and just for Cosmic. And the fact that the two are separable, I think, is going to be key. I don't think I'm ready to go back to an Ubuntu base, but I might be ready to use Cosmic.

I was going to ask, what would it take to DC Plasma for you right now? I don't know, because I'm very, very, very happy with Plasma. I've sort of reached a really good spot with Plasma. So, like I said, the bar is pretty high. That said, the performance always does get me. And it is really fast and smooth. And if they add a few more Plasma-like features, you know, maybe.

One thing I didn't see a lot about or get to try myself was, like, game mode type things, game performance. I could see it. I don't know if it is now, but I could see it eventually being strong there. Yeah. I do kind of prefer gtk applications you know i prefer the plasma desktop environment but i like a lot of

gtk apps yeah and those gtk apps they look really good on cosmic there's there's more work upstream needed to make cute apps look as great and work as great on cosmic and i don't even know if that upstream work is going to happen so So they stand out a little more, but also this is just the same in general. Like Qt apps. They're Qt apps, yeah. Yeah, they're Qt apps. They're generally not as well designed.

Sometimes they have more features, but they're generally not as well designed as some of the newer GTK apps. And so I do tend to like the GTK applications on the Linux desktop. And so a very GTK-like environment might make sense. I guess it's really to kind of see where this goes. What about you?

What would it take for you to actually use Cosmic as your daily driver? Yeah, good question. It's close. I think alpha is a little too early even for me. Yeah, that's fair. Maybe first release, maybe beta if it is looking really nice. I wonder how far off something like a remote desktop would be. Maybe beta if it is looking really nice.

I wonder how far off something like a remote desktop would be. That's not like a critical feature, but it's one I would look for reasonably soon. I feel like definitely the file manager. I mean, I could use a second, you know, like I could slide in Thunar or maybe even files or something. But I'd really like to see what they do with the file manager because I'm not thrilled with files. I'm not thrilled with Thunar. Dolphin's all right, but something really brand new and fresh and fast

and lean and mean that's got some good features, my body would be ready for that. So good console, good files. Yeah, I could see it. I feel like we're at the, I don't know, six months.

Like, give it another six months. Yeah. And it'll be worth checking in on again, definitely. Yeah, definitely. If you listen to this show, you're probably pretty observant. And if you've listened for a little bit, you've probably noticed that this spot right here usually has a sponsor in it. In fact, pretty much for the entire run of the show, Linux Unplugged has been totally sold out. Every now and then we'd, you know, maybe have an opening and we'd rotate somebody in, but we get to be really picky.

It was actually kind of a great position to be in. Now we maintain that pickiness, but it's not really too many people knocking on the door for this spot. The podcast ad market has collapsed. The CPM is what they call it, which really is clicks per thousand, basically downloads per thousand, has declined for the last two years. The rate at which podcasters can charge has declined for the last two years. So podcasters are making less money while things like the cost of doing business and cost of living and inflation have gone up, like what? Maybe 15, 20%? And the podcast billing is down about 8 to 10 to 20%?

And there's less ads to go around. That's why I'm a big fan of the boost, and that's why we've been advocating this for now for almost about two years. Linuxunplugged.com slash boost. You can boost from the web there's no middleman there's no surge in marketing because you know interest rates go down all of that kind of gets abstracted away it's the value you get from the show you give back to the show it's value for value and when we get sats on this end as a business we can choose to sit on those sets and we can sell them for a pretty tidy little profit if we need to. Because even with Bitcoin on sale right now, as it were, it's still up something like 50% year over year.

I mention that because as a business, we can kind of be tactical. We can say, OK, we can sell now, we can hodl now, and we can beat inflation. We can beat the fact that ad rates are down. And it comes directly from our audience, So it makes our audience the biggest customer. There's no company we have to go to to ask for the funds. There's no sponsor that feels like we got a little too political this episode. So we're not going to sponsor anymore. None of that really happens. It's just whatever makes the audience happy. It keeps us going. So there's two ways to support us directly. Linuxunplugged.com slash boost. You can boost from the web now. You just need something like Strike or Cash App to send those sats over lightning. Or support us every month with your fiat.

We love that too. It's linuxunplugged.com slash membership. That gives you some nice ongoing perks as well because there's still a nice traditional system around that where we can generate you an RSS feed for a specific version of the show. Maybe you like the ad-free tight version. Don't have to hear this anymore. Or maybe you like the full uncut version of the show with a lot more content. That's the bootleg. Both are available to you. We really appreciate that support. So it's two ways to do it. Linuxunplugged.com slash boost and Linuxunplugged.com

slash membership. We can beat the ad collapse and we can keep on going directly supported by our audience. If you think about it right now, there's never been a better time to experiment and test this technology out. We're at a great phase in technology and networking. You can even play with this right as podcasting's at this stage. So I'm pretty excited about the future and we appreciate your support. Linuxunplugged.com slash boost and Linuxunplugged.com slash membership. at linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Booster Graham. Hybrid sarcasm comes in with 47,024 sats across two boosts. Hey, rich lobster!

Getting the baller boost on sale today. Oh, yeah. First, we've got 42,024 sats. Oh. That's a fun one. Any chance we can get a year-to-date boost total? I'm curious about my current standing for the 2024 boosties. Oh, very special request. Okay, we'll come back to that.

Also, he's listening live. So strange to hear the host at 1x speed. You don't think 1.25 is so fast until 1x sounds so slow. Maybe we can slow down a little. Or speed up a little bit. Speed up. All right, so how is old hybrid sarcasm

doing in the boost ratings there, Wes? Oh, pretty darn well. Okay, for total amount boosted so far this year, in first place, we have got deleted with 1.6 million. Which, I mean, thank you, gosh.

Deleted, you're a rock star. And then, sarcasm in second place with 895,000 sats. Ah, not bad. And Vamax pulling in third with 333,000 sats. Very nice. That's our top three boosters of the year so far. Thank you, guys. Come back at the end of the year, we'll have a proper boosties celebration.

The full boosts. Also worth calling out maybe that our buddy Gene Bean is currently the top booster in terms of just amount of individual boosts with 66 boosts. Heck yeah, Gene Bean. B-O-O-S-T. Somehow I got in next at 32. That's you testing small boosts. Testing the node. And then hybrid is number three.

26 boosts so far this year. Boost! Thank you, hybrid. There are people we love hearing from. You know, thank you everybody who does boost in there, but it is great to hear from you all. You and I are, you know, often boosting in 2 just to test the nodes and stuff like that. Apparently, I sent in 25,000 sats testing the nodes this week.

You made yourself a baller. I know. I moved nodes. I migrated to a new node. So I was very much just testing as things went along. I wanted to make sure it worked. Adversary 17 comes in with 23,015 sats. You're so boost.

Across several boosts. Everything's under control. He writes, oh, this is a very, okay. So he says we probably shouldn't read this on air because he's very nice to us. He's very, very nice. A series of super sweet boosts to each of us. Yeah, really very nice, very kind direct messages to each one of us. He says, but you don't have to read those on the show.

I just want to send some encouragement to each one of you personally. I wish I could help out more by taking some of the workload and managing the infrastructure you guys have set up, but my own time is very constrained at the moment, so these messages will have to do. Absolutely. You know, that's part of the value for value model, is time, talent, or treasure,

and most of us are very, very, very, very, very low on free time. Yeah. And maybe we have a little more treasure. Either way, you can support. We appreciate that. Thank you, adversaries. It's always great to hear from you. Bobby Pinn comes in with 20,000 cents. Coming in hot with the boost! Plus one to the Gen 2

challenge. Alright. My network admin swears by Gen 2 for everything and he finally wore me down. Really? I'll be switching from Arch to Gen 2 for at least a little while. Really? That's fascinating. I haven't heard a story like that for a while, but in 2024, that's great.

And Brent not being here, we could probably just peek for him. Yes. And say that it sounds like the Gen 2 Challenge is probably definitely kind of on. I think it has to happen. Yeah, it seems like it's on. Thank you, Bobby Penn. Appreciate that. Bronze and Ring comes in with a row of Dux 2,222 sats.

Following up on the Blue Bubbles boost, I got a late 2014 Mac Mini with 250 gig sats on there from eBay. $99 shipped. Okay. I turned on fast switching in macOS, fast user switching, and it serves multiple users. I configured it in my Pi KVM, and I'm adding it to my USB HDMI switch.

That's a brilliant little thing. I'm assuming by that, Bronson, you mean you've got multiple Blue Bubbles users too because you can use... Smart. With fast user switching, they could all be logged in. Right. Got Blue Bubbles running for them.

And then you put it on the Pi KVM. If anything comes up, pull it up on your Pi KVM. Yeah, right. That's the way to do it. Or reboot the box and... You know, because really, these things are not meant to be left on all the time, acting as servers.

So using something like Pi KVM to stay on top of it would have helped my situation when I was traveling and it just like shut off. Just turned off. Oh, well, it looks like I sent in 3,333 sats for Brent's Gentoo Moosey Bank. Make it so. All right.

But BHH32 sent in 5,000 sats. You're so boost. I actually do use Bazite on my Steam Deck. Okay. It's been flawless, and I've had it on there for months. I also used Aurora for about six months and really liked it. What I didn't like was how opinionated things like the Terminal were, but eventually switched away from it.

You know, it's interesting because I think you and I would also use the term opinionated for some of the design choices there, but the developers themselves consider it not opinionated. And, you know, you compare it to something, I don't know what, but there's other distros that go extremely hard on design and whatnot. So I guess it's just a spectrum of opinion. It's nice to see.

I almost view it as like a smorgasbord to go look for them. Like here's a bunch of great modern Linux tools. I probably don't want to enable all of them personally, but like I want to take the ones that make sense for my workflows. I think to the target user for a distribution like that is looking to have a lot of these problems solved. I want to just have XYZ tool. I want XYZ environment and I just want it to work. And so choosing some of these individual design choices help just eliminate the overwhelming kind of, oh, there's so much to do for the end user. So I think it's appealing to those folks, and I'm glad they got something like that.

The Immunologist comes in with 5,432 sets. B-O-O-S-T. I use Tumbleweed myself and Aeon for my family. Also with full disk encryption, I think. Capula? Clapula? Calpa. Thank you.

What is Calpa? I mean, it must be a Linux, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm guessing. Just one that I'm, you know, an old man about. Let's do a little Google search. It's an OpenSUSE thing. I knew it. I knew it.

Before I even asked, I was like, this is... Calpa is everything I've ever wanted from desktop Linux, says a Reddit user. Good. Another SUSE project with yet another name that I can't tell if it's just a distribution or what. Great. But he says, if it'd be more stable, I would switch to it since Plasma 6 is must. It's got Flatpaks, CoreOS, and DistroBox are all updated automatically and work together in beautiful immutability. I see. So OpenSUSE Micro OS Desktop, the GNOME version was renamed to Aeon, and the Plasma desktop version is what Kelpa is. Okay.

So it's the keynote for OpenSUSE? All right. Okay. But actually, I'm glad to know about it. Yeah, I mean. Yeah. I'm a little tired of all the names. It's like you're really asking a lot of energy for me to keep all this straight.

It's just a lot. I need like a cheat sheet. Yeah. Jordan Bravo boosts in with 5,555 sets. Put some macaroni and cheese on there too. On a topic related to full disk encryption, I realized full disk encryption on my Nexus laptop had a major attack vector because secure boot wasn't enabled.

So thanks to y'all mentioning Lanza boot, I now have the peace of mind that comes with having secure boot enabled. Heck yeah. Okay. Next challenge, getting NixOS to work with the TBM. Hmm. Hmm. Ooh, for secret management or what?

Yeah. What are you thinking there? What are you thinking there? Tell us what you end up doing there, Bravo. Yeah. I want to know. What are you thinking there? Tell us what you end up doing there, Bravo.

Yeah, I want to know. I think you and I were talking a little bit off air about secrets management, more different approaches. This is true. It could be interesting to chat more. Please do boost it with more details, Mr. Bravo. Yeah, I know you can have the TPM integrate with system D creds and stuff, which is neat.

We got a big old batch of boosts from Gene Bean. Good, good. Coming in with 11,666 sats. Wow, that's three ducks plus a 5K boost. Chris, I don't know if getting all defensive about Nix and the RPMOstery stuff applies to apples is productive. It would do listeners much more good if you evaluate the system on its own merits and then at some point maybe talk about how it's different. Well, that's exactly what I was doing, Gene Bean.

And what my comment there was is that I'm surprised how many people thought they were comparable, that they're not comparable systems really. It's apples and oranges. Yeah. I mean, it may not have worked, but I think our intention there was to try to get that out of the way at the get-go so we could just focus on UBlue as its own thing and avoid direct comparisons with Nix constantly throughout the segment. Yeah. What I was really commenting on was how shocked I was

at how people seemed to think they were more comparable. But he wanted to give us some context on his Gentoo obsession. He says, I was introduced to Linux in 2004 via Gentoo, and at that time you could really tell the speed difference when using it versus a general-purpose distro. It really helped me understand what was going on under the hood. And of course, stage two installs were normal at the time. You know, just the other day I saw a Pharonix article talking about Ubuntu, maybe exploring with turning on O3 optimizations for their builds.

So I think that, you know, you've been waiting for years if you wanted that in Ubuntu. And with Gen 2, like you could have that whenever you want. I've been trying out Fedora Core OS for Kubernetes. I've also been looking at OpenSUSE Micro OS for the same reason. But one thing that jumps out at me about the latter is the use of ButterFS snapshots. You could manage a very large number of bare metal installations across many locations. The OS just gets out of the way. Yeah, I can definitely see the utility there.

Yeah, I love the idea that your system and your package manager is aware of the way. Yeah, I can definitely see the utility there. Yeah, I love the idea that your system and your package manager is aware of the snapshots and it is aware of all of that and it's instrumental in managing that. But it seems like it's also belt and suspenders to have the file system do snapshots as well. The Golden Dragon boosts in with a row of ducks. Hey, and you know what else?

The Golden Dragon! Hello again. My wife and I run a small business called Kitterman Creative that focuses on unique swag for whatever your needs are. We do some 3D printing, some sublimation, stickers, etc. Our web store stinks, but you can

find us at KittermanCreative.com or folks can find us on Facebook under that name as well. Or you can reach out via email at KittermanCreative at g or folks can find us on Facebook under that name as well. Or you can reach out via email at KittermanCreative at gmail.com to see what our rates are. Yep, that's Kitterman

with a K and send us your small business and your URL if you're out there. We want to know if our listeners if you've got a little

small business and you think the JB crowd could benefit a little listener support and listener action. Thank you, Golden Dragon. And we can vouch for those red stickers.

That's true. We have some right here in the studio. They are pretty cool. Vamax comes in with 17,345 sets. The traders love the ball. For Chris's VCS,

Wes mentioned not booting might be because of SecureBoot, and Chris said he had Ubuntu on it previously, and that worked fine. In my mind, that reinforces it as a possible SecureBoot issue. Microsoft signs the shim bootloader for some major distros, notably Ubuntu, allowing them to work with secure boot by default. Let me know if I'm on to anything. I think he is. Yeah, that would make sense.

Yeah, after the show, I went up there and booted and read through it. I'm like, oh, that does look like a secure boot error message. In addition to their desktop experience contributions, System76 also maintains some other low-level projects. I ended up needing something called KernelStub for my Pangolin, which I actually think is a pretty cool little utility. I'm not really sure if it's useful outside the System76 ecosystem, though. Oh, fun. So KernelStub is a little Python app to automatically manage your ESP boot partition. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, I probably could have used that in the partition. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, I probably could have used that in the past.

Yeah. Yeah. Jorrel69 comes in with a row of ducks. Hello, gentlemen. It's nice to be back. Hello, Jorrel. I got sucked into the retro gaming rabbit hole for the last year. I'm trying to get out now.

Okay. I wanted to say that I love Plasma, but I have one big gripe. Oh. The way it connects to SMB shares. Most non-cute apps can't save to it, and you can't open archives or mount images without copying it locally first. So I recently gave up and moved to Cinnamon, but I stayed with Monjaro. Love the show, and a big yes to the Linux desktop. Hey-o. You know, you could probably just install files because what, so the difference, and I agree with you, it's annoying, right, is Plasma's using

KIO, and it's connecting to it, and it does work for other Plasma applications and Qt applications, but what good old files does for GNOME is it just uses GVFS and does essentially a user file mount. And it's stuck under your user directory, and then it's just right there on the file system, and applications like VLC, which is a key one for me, interact with it a lot better. You could probably get the GVFS stuff without any of the GUI layer, too,

if you wanted. Oh, yeah. Or there's a couple of different apps out there that let you just mount Samba shares. My solution, though, was just to use all Plasma Qt apps. Solve that right away. But I do agree that's always – and there has been conversation over the years in the Plasma development team on how to handle that. And so far, this is where we're at with the drill.

Maybe we just need – could there be like a little demon that talks the KIO protocols or whatever and exports it as FUSE or syncs it up in a way the system can understand. Like a KIO FUSE. That's probably a thing, Wes. That sounds like a thing that I've seen, actually. But I'll tell you, the KIO protocol does work really well. I've, in one Dolphin window, opened up a remote server that's here at the studio, say I'm at home. I'll open up the file server here.

I don't know, using SFTP. No, actually, I was using Samba. home. I'll open up the file server here. I don't know, using SFTP. Oh, no, actually, I was using Samba. And then I'll open up another Dolphin window that's Samba'd into a local file server on my LAN, and I'll just move files between the two windows. And I'm copying over Tailscale, over Samba, from a remote file server to a local LAN Samba server, window to window, and it just works.

And I'm really impressed. So you've got to give them props for when it does work well, too. But I do kind of miss having it on the file system. I know. That's a weird thing, but I care. Open Source Accountant comes in with 3,000 SATs. That's not possible. Nothing can do that.

Well, if you can believe it, I'm an accountant. My wife recently convinced me to start providing services for small businesses and independent contractors. Oh, very nice. I have training in working with non-profits and other businesses that require fund accounting. There's no website at this point, but I can be reached through Telegram or Matrix, open source accountant. Neat. Yeah, he was at the Spokane meetup, too. Good guy. Taco Strange comes in with 12,100 cents. What?

That's not possible. Nothing can do that. Scotty doesn't believe it, Wes. Plus one for Gear Lever. My first ever contribution to open source was a feature request for Gear Lever to use app image run on NixOS. Hashtag not a programmer. Well, how great is that, Taco Strange? And here we are, you know, a little time later, praising that work.

Appreciate you. Thank you for doing that. And thanks for telling us about it. Sam H comes in with 11,006 sats. This is the way. This is the way. Thanks for the mention of the outdated Kate on NixOS and LEP571. I was just going back through the show notes and it reminded me to check. I was still using KD5's version of Kate and KCalc. I guess I didn't get any warning when I was building my config. But I'm glad that you guys had time to cover Universal Blue. I like a lot of the ideas, like low maintenance, the curation, and I'm hopeful about the future improvement around BootC.

I do like the, quote, curated desktop, and I like being able to customize that further via container images. I find that appealing. I wouldn't want to give up on NixOS' declarative config for most cases, but I could try Bazite for my VFIO gaming VM. Oh, that sounds fun, yeah. That's for a gaming VM where you've got acceleration? Yes. It does seem like it's early days for Bootsy,

but there isn't any reason we shouldn't be able to rebase between Fedora-based images and Ubuntu, Arch, or even NixOS images as easily as between Aurora and Bluefin today, or is Bootsy too specific between Fedora-based images and Ubuntu, Arch, or even NixOS images as easily as between Aurora and Bluefin today, or is BootC2 specific to Fedora? Okay, so it's all early and I didn't even start looking at this until, what, May when we were checking out the RHEL stuff? Yeah. But from the docs

I've seen, in theory, no. But the current implementation, again, the last time I looked at the docs in the last month or two, it needed OS tree on the inside. So there's some specific bits. But I don't think down the line that that should be. It's not an inherent limitation. That's just the implementation as it is right now.

Right. It's possible, but not as things currently stand, it sounds like. All right. Well, there you go. And then he finishes up with, I'm a little concerned about the reliance on GitHub. If I was going to build my own images, it'd be nice to do it on a local CI server on my tail net. And it seems like you're on your own figuring out that for now.

Yeah, everything he says in those instructions is GitHub based. Yeah, you would have to translate some of the CI actions and stuff for the CI system of your choice, I think. I also get a little nervous about the GitHub reliance, but it just doesn't feel like that's going away anytime soon. I realize it's a slippery slope. I go back and forth. It is super useful. Yeah. Yeah. And it is also a dangerous trap. Thank you, Sam H. Appreciate that. Forward humor comes in with a RoboDunks. Brent, don't do it. Oh, this is in response to the

Gen 2 challenge. All the warning signs are here. Oh. These co-hosts and the audience members are 100% not encouraging you to do this for your benefit. You know you were destined to build your own distro from scratch. Don't fall for the trap. Don't let this happen to you. So, he had to... We're going to have to clip some of these for Brent since he's not here. He had me there for a second. The co-hosts and the audience members are 100% not encouraging you to do this for your benefit.

That's true. Not everyone, though. I think Gene Bean. Gene Bean, you know. All right, Gene Bean. All right, the rest of us, we just want to watch him suffer. But then he loses me.

He loses me. You know you were destined to build your own distro from scratch? Well, that's an even deeper trap. Well, you know Brent doesn't ever want to update, and with a distro you built from scratch, it'd be too painful to update anyway. Great point.

You just build a new one eventually. That's a great point. Hmm. All right, well, thankfully Brent's not here, so he will not hear this discouragement, and we'll make sure he only hears about the encouragement. We got very lucky, Forward Humor. We got very lucky this week.

4.12 Linux comes in with 3,000 sacks. Coming in hot with the boost. I just wanted to let you fools know that all that talk regarding Garmin got me hooked. I purchased a Venue 3, and it has been great so far. I'll definitely pass along more of my experience as it evolves. Oh, great, 4.12. FYI, as a CPAP user for almost 20 years, I use Oscar. It's a tool to review all my device data.

The community is knowledgeable with open information. It has supported all my devices with no issue. Now I can correlate the SPO2 data from Garmin with my Oscar experience. So much data. You don't need to hire like an assistant just to, you know, analyze and curate your health data. not too long ago, well, I suppose it's been about six months now, I got a replacement CPAP unit because the current CPAP unit, or my previous one that I had, which was great, had been killing people. And so they gave everyone who had the killer CPAP a new one. And I hate this new CPAP. I love my old CPAP, hate the new CPAP. And I wonder if it supports Oscar. It's a little black unit with a horrible, crappy little removable water tray. I think it's made by Philips. It's crappy plastic. It's cheap. It's awful and it's bad. But if I could get the data off of it and figure out why I'm not sleeping very well for the last five months, basically almost the entire time I've had it, that could

be useful. So 412, I may just take a look at that and solve my sleep problems. Thank you for the boost. We did have a couple live boosts from Magnolia Mayhem, who chimes in just to say that the Minjaro immutable sounds pretty great. Also, Chris, you were talking like Brent is dead, which thankfully he's not. I mean, until he comes back, how do we know? And then we got a response boost to Hybrid, you know, that hearing us at normal speed, super weird. And then also occasionally I try to reach up when I'm listening live and touch my headphones to skip forward.

Whoa, what's he skipping? I don't know. Probably us farting around on the live stream. Yeah, struggling to ingest punishment shots. Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We appreciate that. We do have the 2000 sack cutoff for just time purposes reading on the show. But we have all the boosts on our show

doc, and we read them all. We had 23 boosters across 42 boosts this week, and we stacked 205, 474 sats. Not great, but not too bad at all. Not complaining for that at all. And, you know, some of that might have been just because

nodes were down as I was transitioning nodes. Right. Yeah. Of any of the boosts we've read on a week, this is the one where if we missed your boost, it wasn't intentional. Yeah. There's just been more hiccups than normal. Yeah. There was a couple day period during node transition where we could have missed something. We also, though, have totals for streaming sets. We had 62,543 sets streamed to us.

28 unique streamers out there. Thank you, everybody who streams those sats, too. Just turns it on and sends in the value. We really appreciate that. Bitcoin's on sale for a bit, too. So if you've been looking, if you've been thinking, been considering boosting, now's the time. LinuxUnplugged.com slash boost. You don't have to switch podcast apps.

You just need something like Lightning or Cash App or, I don't know, Strike. Anything that does Lightning. Any Lightning app. You just need a Lightning app. There's a lot of them now. It's really easy to boost from the web. Or jump into the podcasting to-do-do revolution and try out a new podcasting app at podcastapps.com. Fountain is going from strength to strength, and they have a banger of a release just around the corner. Could be your chance, your time, your moment to try out a new podcast app with Cloud Chapters, PodPing so you get an update within 90 seconds of us posting an episode, livestream support

baked right into the apps when we're live. You can use it and much more. You can find it at fountain.fm. How would you like a pick, Wes? I would love a nice refreshing pick. So this one's called Alpaca. And I and Brentley both kind of independently stumbled across this when we were looking to play around with Meta's LLMs. You know, they've got their Llama.

Yeah. Llama 3. And Alpaca is essentially a GTK GUI that sits on top of a LLM picker and integrator. So it has a whole list of LLMs that it can go download and they're very big and then install them. And then it has a nice little interface to chat with it. You can have different stored conversations in here like you can when you're on ChatGPT's website or Google's Gemini or Perplexity or whatever, where it'll store a record of your chat. You can go in there and export those individual chats, grab its answers. Nice, clean app.

And then at the very top, you can select between multiple large language models. So you could throw a question at a bunch of them. And at least on my systems, it's CPU accelerated. I suppose maybe on some it might be GPU accelerated, but not in my testing. It's surprisingly nice. Like we've talked about these apps before. There's a couple of these out accelerated, but not in my testing. It's surprisingly nice. Like, we've talked about these apps before. There's a couple of these out there, including web-based ones, a couple of desktop ones.

None of them, none of them, you guys, are as clean, lean, and mean as Alpaca. It looks really nice. I'm on a Plasma desktop, and I'm still saying it's good. I was going to say, why isn't this written in LibCosmic? What are you doing with a GTK4 Edway app? But no, I mean, I'm just looking at some of the screenshots here and I mean, just a nice clean design, but also it seems like it has support

for a lot of the structure in the conversations, right? Like it's showing you copyable with syntax highlighted code snippets. That's great. Also support for importing or appending YouTube transcripts to the prompt, text from a website and PDF file support. Oh, fine.

I'll give it an install. Yeah. It's one flat pack away, and then it will pull down the LLM you choose separately. Do you know, so I noticed it has its built-in Ollama, but can you connect it to an external if you already had an Ollama? Yes. Oh. Yes, you can, which is really nice. It's in the settings, very simple.

You can have it running on a more powerful system, and then this will connect to it. Might be a way to get acceleration, too, if you need. Neat. Yeah. By default, it won't really have any LLM built in. It's just the UI and the stuff around it, but then it pulls it down,

and it's like the first job you do is pull one down. A little GTK app to chat with local AI models on your own rig, privately. Confidential. I don't know. Right? Confidential. models on your own rig privately confidential right confidential links to that in the show notes at linux unplugged.com slash 574 and wes just about wraps us up i guess by the time people hear this they might be getting their hands on cosmic so very very interested in your take on cosmic and where you think it might be going in the future. And again, we're also looking

for the craziest thing that you've ever run in a container yourself or you've seen run in a container. And try to get in by episode 575 if you can

because it should be on theme for that episode. And then also, I'm still taking the temperature on a Toronto meetup. Would you haul your butt all the way to Toronto for a little meetup?

Toronto? Toronto? A Toronto meetup. Oh, I don't know. The 30th of August or something like that. Maybe the 29th. Probably the 29th. But it'd be the end of last week of August.

I'd love to know. You can boost that in or you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. That's right. Show's also live on a Sunday. Noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv. We got that, same bad station. That's right. Show's also live on a Sunday, noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv. We got that mumble room cooking. You can get details at

jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. Pop in there, get a low latency open source stack to listen to the show, and you can interact with your voice if you choose. You can also just subscribe and get the show whenever the hell you like. And we appreciate that too. That's at linuxunplugged.com slash rss. In fact, all sorts of links at that website. Go over there and find stuff for the Matrix chat, for the Mumble chat, for our live stuff, for boosting, for membership. You name it.

It's at linuxunplugged.com. And then, if you could believe it, there's another website, jupiterbroadcasting.com. Thanks so much for being here. See you next Sunday. I don't think it's putting too fine of a point on it. You know, the Cosmic could end up being, like, the third big desktop environment. I don't think it's putting too fine of a point on it. You know, the Cosmic could end up being, like, the third big desktop environment. And do you think we have room for a third desktop environment? It's been Plasma and Gnome, and then all of the others, for so long now.

Wouldn't it be wild if it turns out there was room for a third big desktop environment? Yeah. Although, wouldn't that, to make it big, does that mean, does that require a capitulation? Right? Does that require some current big deployer of a different system to switch? Or can it be considered a big desktop if it's only deployed by System76? That's a good question. You know, if I'm picturing like that DHH type user, there could be tens of thousands or more that are still yet to come to Linux.

There could be a lot of new user growth that Cosmic just sucks up. You know, so people don't have to leave GNOME or Plasma in like droves. Right. And I guess as long as, I mean, if the spins, et cetera, flavors get attention, if you get like a, you know, is there a Ubuntu flavor that's, you know, kind of stock Ubuntu but with Cosmic? Cosmic, yeah, I bet there will be, right? And if those, maybe that would.

What would be the time scale you see to become a great desktop i mean if you did another two years right you so what about another two years from now it's essentially four years of development i bet you that's it i mean the rate and pace that they're they're fixing and adding and improving if they can keep it up another two years so by So by 2026 or so, it could be kind of baked. And by then, you know, a lot of early adopters have already started using it because all you really need to see is the trend going in the right direction. And if it's fairly easy to update Cosmic once it's out without breaking people's setup, which it seems like it will be the way it's built, the way the config structure works.

Right. That especially probably is easier to back backup or migrate or call problems out or whatever. So, like, if we just see over the next year a trickle of steady improvements that hit Cosmic, that's all you really need before people will start switching over. It doesn't have to be done yet, especially Linux users. Crazy Linux users. We like to front run, all right?