LINUX Unplugged - 587: Triple Fedora Taste-Test

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Fedora 41 is here! We break down the best new features, then branch out for a three-way spin showdown. Which flavor will come out on top?Sponsored By:Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!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 StrikeFlock 2024 Introducing Fedora Miracle, a proposed Fedora spin built on Mir - YouTubemiracle-wm-org/miracle-wm — Miracle is a Wayland tiling window manager built on Mirmiracle-wmmiracle-wm wikiRoadmap - miracle-wm wikinwg-piotr/nwg-shell — Installer & meta-package for the nwg-shell project: a GTK3-based shell for sway and Hyprland Wayland compositorsnwg-shell - a GTK3-based shell for sway and Hyprland Wayland compositorsfast fedora 41 mirrorWhat’s new for Fedora Atomic Desktops in Fedora 41 - Siosm’s blog — With Fedora 41, we are now building two new unofficial images: Kinoite Mobile and COSMIC Atomic. They join our other unofficial images: XFCE Atomic and LXQt Atomic.bootupd changebootupd GitHubcontainers/bootc — Boot and upgrade via container imagesIntroduction - bootc docsModifying Kernel Arguments :: Fedora DocsGetting Started with Bootable Containers :: Fedora DocsBooting local builds - bootc docsfedora-ostree-desktops RegistryAnnual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!asahi-audio - Fedora PackagesAsahiLinux/asahi-audio: Userspace audio for Asahi Linux — PipeWire and WirePlumber DSP profiles and configurations tod rive the speaker arrays in Apple Silicon laptops and desktops.AAA gaming on Asahi Linux — We’re thrilled to release our Asahi game playing toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86 emulation and Windows compatibility. Plus a bonus: conformant OpenCL 3.0.FEXWineDXVKvkd3d-protonmuvmholesaileikosiena's nixtcloudFOSSCOMMEmerald Coast Linux User GroupFedora Media WriterFedoraQt/MediaWriter — A tool to create a live USB drive with an edition of FedoraPreparing Boot Media - Fedora DocsGDM SettingsGDM Settings Web Site — Customize your login screenWeb Appseyekay/webapps source — Install websites as desktop apps, so that they appear in their own windows separate from any browsers installed. This is similar to the "Install as App" feature found in popular web browsers.

We got to get up there. We just got to get up there and do a Brent Tech makeover. Tear out the networking. I keep inviting you. I keep sending photos of the view. I don't know. I know. And now I really am.

I'm trying to get you down here for the diesel heater. So I'm so confused. So I'll go there. You come here. We'll do a house swap. Yeah, it'll be good. Yep. All right.

There's literally moose steak in my freezer waiting. It's got your name on it. What? There's moose steak? What? Do you marinate moose steak? I mean, you could do all sorts of things. Do you, I mean, do you kind of need to marinate moose steak? No, no, no, no.

You do not need to. Yeah? Is it because it's really meaty or? No, no, no, no, no, no. You could sous vide the stuff. Come on. Moose up. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I need to go get a little moose and find out. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. And my name is Brentley. Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up this week, Fedora 41 is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brentley. Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up this week, Fedora 41 is here. We're going to break down some of the best new features, and then we'll brunch out for a three-way spin showdown. Then we'll round it out with some great boosts, a blowout pick segment, and a lot more. So before we get any further, we need to say hello to our virtual lug who's joined us live in Mumble. Hello and time appropriate

greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Thank you guys for being here. Good little group on air and a nice little group in the quiet listening to getting the feed right off the mixer. Yeah, you hear us. We see you.

And a big thank you to our friends at Tailscale. Go say good morning and support the show and get Tailscale for free. Up to Yeah, you hear us, we see you. Mesh network across complex infrastructure protected by? Oh, my God. There it is. That's right. And it's so, so fast. It's simple for end users, and it's powerful for administrators. And you can connect multiple providers or devices all together in one secure network, which you can set ACLs over. You can authenticate devices. You can use your existing authentication infrastructure.

It's really great, and it's super fast to get set up and packaged for just about every distro out there. So go say good morning and support the show and get it for free on 100 devices and try it out. It is the best VPN solution out there I've used, and I have no inbound ports on my firewalls anymore. Check it out at tailscale.com slash unplugged. And thank you to them. I wanted to let you know that there is a local event just in our neck of the woods coming up on Friday, November 8th. It is Siegel 2024.

It'll run Friday and Saturday. And I don't think it's on Sunday, right? It's just the two days. I believe so. Yeah. What do you think, Wes? Looks like it's a's just the two days? I believe so. Yeah. What do you think, Wes? Looks like it's a good one. They got four keynotes. Yeah. There's a Postgres talk I'm hoping to make already because it's all about

temporal data, which is neat. I was wondering if you're thinking about going to that. Yeah, I think I missed the last one. But I'm glad that, you know, especially as LinuxFest is, you know, trying to regain its second life, I think it's important to have another good, you know, local Pacific Northwest conference. We've got a lot of tech and Linux folks here.

We might as well get up and, you know, talk about it. It's a good excuse to take a ride into the city and enjoy some Linux-y stuff, too. Yeah, I think it's at the University of Washington this year, which will be different. Oh, really? At least for me, yeah. You know, in previous years, too, they've had some childcare available as well. I mean, they try to make it as accessible to people as possible. So it all kicks off on Friday, November 8th. So it's coming up really quick as this episode goes out.

And then a little bit further down the road, I'm happy to announce that NixCon is back, but it's back with a new name. It's now called Planet Nix, and it'll be taking place alongside Scale again March 6th through the 7th, 2025, in Pasadena, California. And I guess there's a separate CFP for Planet Nix, separate from the Scale one, which just closed. This one has a submission deadline of December 9th. So if you want to try to get in there, get on it. Ooh, you going to give a talk, Wes?

I don't know what we'd give a talk on. You could just give a passionate speech. We've got to make some more nicks in the studio maybe. Yeah. Sounds like if anyone has any suggestions for what we should talk about, please send them in. There you go. Well, Fedora 41 has arrived, and it's right on time. And like every cycle, there's always something new in here to talk about.

They're always moving things forward a little bit. At the top of the list for the standard workstation spin, obviously, is GNOME 47. Right out of the box, that's what you're going to notice. There's visual refreshes throughout GNOME. You've got the accent colors in there and the new dialogue windows in there i guess enhanced support for small screens too that could be nice it could be the uh gnome 47 experience is top notch and we kind of talked about that in ubuntu 2410 review as well and then west did you say they've also got some new terminal love yeah i don't know how you say it exactly. Maybe Patexis?

But it's a container, I guess container savvy terminal that plays especially nicely with things like DistroBox or Toolbox. We have talked about this, I think as a pick once before on the show. Yeah. And it's also has been in use over in the UBlue land.

Yes. That's I think the episode we talked about it. So this is, this is a container savvy,avvy, container-first terminal. So essentially, I think, in plain language, that just means each tab could be its own contained environment. It is kind of, I wonder how long this will last. We've already had some terminal change over in the GNOME ecosystem.

But from what we've played with, I it as a terminal it is nice it's probably got more features than the new gnome terminal that we just switched to recently it is strange that we're fedora doesn't usually deviate to from upstream like this i think there's some undercurrents of just overall um you blew influence in this release and i wonder you know this might be one of those sites. Wayland is the default everywhere now. Say it ain't so. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. I don't even think X11 gets installed and I'm sure

X Wayland does. Yeah I think you have to install X if you want it on the command line. Or you need to upgrade from 40. And I think if you upgrade from 40 to 41 I think you keep X. Which is what I did. But I never had X on my system anyways. I'll get to that later. I don't know.

What else jumped out? Probably DNF5, right? Yeah, that is a big one. Yeah. And I think to me, it does feel a little faster. I do think some of the output looks a little bit better. They say it streamlines its operation. And I mean, DNF has never been particularly slow for me, but it is nice to see them continue to chip away

and I know people that use Fedora very regularly are very psyched to see DNF 5 land. Yeah I think it's you know it's been in the works for a long time and it's kind of like a piece that even if you're not necessarily excited about like what's the shiny outside of the box feature for DNF 5 I think it lays plumbing for a lot of stuff to come in future improvements that we'll see in, like, 42, 43, etc. Yeah, sort of the same thing with the bootable container stuff. You know, Fedora 41 lays the groundwork for some bootable containers. Yes, a bootable container.

And DNF5 plays a role in that as well. But it's not really fully there yet, right? 42 is kind of when you're going to see all of that supposedly land same with like the new installer anaconda is still the installer for fedora 41 and i believe 42 is the target now for the new installer and so you know i honestly was a little nostalgic as i installed fedora 41 in a vm Because I also did my VM install again, and I upgraded a system. I'll get into that. I was like, this might be the last time I really use Anaconda.

So I kind of enjoyed it, because it's at a really good spot, especially if you're just kind of going with all the defaults and you know where to click done and all those things, because some of the buttons are in different places than you might expect. And when you're used to all of that, it's been a really great installer. And I hope and imagine that when I install Fedora 42, I'll be using something entirely new. Well, I think there's some exciting stuff happening with the spins this time around. We have a new Miracle spin, which I'll get into a little bit later. But that spin is

running the Miracle Window Manager, which gets its debut this time around. later, but that spin is running the Miracle Window Manager, which gets its debut this time around. I heard friend of the show, Neil, had something to do with that one. I'm sure we'll hear all about it at some point. That said, KDE Plasma Spin, Fedora Kinoit gets the 6.2

of Plasma, which I think is nice and modern. Yeah, 6.2 is great. It's a great Plasma. I also just thought that, because I tried Kinoit, and I'll touch on that later. But, and I'm already running 6.2 on my current ThinkPad NixOS desktop. But just out of the box, something about, and I don't even like, this is petty, but I don't even like the default desktop wallpaper this time. Sometimes I do with those races, but it's not my favorite.

I actually did like it this time. But there's something about the Plasma 6.2 dock. Yeah. With the Fedora logo and the little bit of blue it just a little bit of pass-through color yeah really pops yeah it does look good i agree so this fedora feels like it's really setting up for like a big 42 like there's a lot of nice things in here like here's an example and this is probably where i have the most FOMO with this release we are seeing serious progress on nvidia drivers now you can have the proprietary nvidia driver and use secure boot and you can set it up through gnome software yeah that's like

on fedora on fedora right thank you like that the thing. That's what you used to go get other distributions to do. Right. And so they're continuing to push that forward. And I'm just, I'm feeling FOMO because while I don't think it's there yet, I can see within a release or two of, you know, so another year at most, we're going to have a really smooth Wayland, Secure Boot, NVIDIA experience. It's like it's almost there. It's not there quite yet,

but it's there where like the leading edge distributions are starting to push for it. And we saw this with Ubuntu as well. And so, because as I have been in the back of my mind, you guys know, and I've talked about just a little bit on the show, for a few months now, I've kind of been looking at pricing a new rebuild of my PC, and every time I get to all of the specs and I look at the GPU prices, it's just ridiculous. And if I want anything that can do AI,

it's like I'm kind of stuck in the video world for right now. So maybe in a year Linux users won't be in this weird situation where they have to decide between a well-behaving, performant, stable desktop or something that can do CUDA and other AI workloads. Maybe you could have best of both worlds with whichever graphics card you go with, and even if that's an NVIDIA. But you see the beginnings here with the integration with Secure Boot now. It's getting closer to just you don't have to have this funky one-off setup when using a video card. Now, we do have a question for you, the audience,

with our recent, well, this episode's Fedora 41 overview and also our recent coverage of Ubuntu 24.10 out. We're curious, are you switching to these new releases? You know, we do, and we do all sorts of crazy things on them, but we're curious if you're switching to them on your machines. And for those who aren't switching, do you find value in the coverage of these releases,

the way we're doing them? Boost in or write in and let us know. This spot right here, this could be yours. If you have a product, a business, a service, and you'd like to feature it on Linux Unplugged, email me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com.

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this episode you got some value from the podcast please consider participating in one way or another and now back to the show well this time around i got quite distracted with the spins that are available again. I don't know, it's spin season here for Brent. And the Fedora Miracle Spin caught my eye, since it's kind of new and fresh for Fedora, and the Fedora family, if you will. Now, if you are not familiar with Miracle, it's a tiling Wayland-first window manager built on top of Mir. Mir being that modern C++ library for writing Wayland

compositors that Canonical has been working on for a while now. Miracle itself, written primarily by Matthew Kozarek, who works at Canonical and on Mir full-time with the team there. So someone who knows what they're doing. The project does disclose some goals, which I thought was good to get into. They want to be a tiling window manager at its core, very much in the style of i3 or Sway for those who are familiar with the intention to be a compositor that is flashier and more feature-rich than either of those compositors, sort of like SwayFX. Another goal is to be compatible with i3 from an IPC perspective, in the same way that Sway is. There's a bit of compatibility between the different Windows tiling managers, which is nice to see.

And to create a flashy, cozy tiling window manager that absolutely anyone can use, similar to Hyperland, but with less focus on expert users. And lastly, to be a flagship example of full featured windowed manager built on top of Mir. So a lot of interesting goals there. Yeah, fascinating. And it's really neat to see this outside the Ubuntu ecosystem as well, right? For people that don't recall, Mir was created as an alternative to Wayland by Canonical for a period of time when it wasn't clear if Wayland was going to get across the finish line. When it became obvious that Wayland was getting across the finish line, perhaps because

in part of competition for Mirror, Canonical pivoted to making Mirror a Wayland client. And so we have seen this in certain areas inside the Ubuntu ecosystem, but this is a Fedora spin. It's probably worth pointing out too, you know, Canonical gets a lot of flack for not invented here syndrome, but here's a case where they, yeah,

they explore their own way, but they ultimately switch to the consensus. Yeah, there's a really great talk given by Matthew at Flock 2024, where he kind of describes how, yes, he works full-time at Canonical on Mir, but this is a side project, a personal side project, which means he could use what he's an expert at, but also make it applicable a little bit more widely than just at Canonical, which is nice to see. You know, as a dev, that sounds really nice. You kind of get to push forward on the core parts

and then use the functionality you're implementing at your day job in personal projects. Awesome. Well, and if it does meet its goal of being a flagship example of a fully featured window manager on top of mirror, then I think everybody wins, right? Brings more attention to all the projects. I'm excited you looked at this and I'm kind of curious to know how it went, what your observations were. Yeah. So my very first observation is right on the GitHub page. It says, this is still experimental, please, you know, know this in advance, but also please send in, you know, bug reports and that kind of thing. So

it's early days for the project. And yet is an official spin a Fedora, which I think is a really interesting balance. And I wanted to know your feelings on it. So currently, it, it's a 0.3.7 and they say the goal is for the 1.0 in about December to be feature complete. Uh, they do have a really nice roadmap as well, where they define, you know, stage one,

we're going to do this and stage, you know, uh, so there, I guess just completed stage three being the 0.3 with stage four, a bunch of things happening. Um, but they seem a little

behind on that timeline. So I, you know, December is written. I don't think that's going to happen, but it got me really curious because, you know, Fedora has a bunch of spins, uh, some of them more far more mature than, uh, the miracle, but it's really interesting to me to see a project like this be accepted as an official spin so early in its development cycle and at first i was kind of worried about that i was like wait wait this isn't polished at all what's going on here but really it's getting a bunch of new eyes on the project it's getting the project to i don't know fit into the ecosystem early on in its life and i think actually it might be a good thing. Yeah.

It's either telling that the process to become a spin has become more streamlined. And so it's more straightforward to do that. And there are a lot of spins now. It's getting a little bit much to keep track of. Or it could be that people involved with the project see a potential and maybe a particular use case for this. I mean, this is an interesting beast, right? Using Mir like this to kind of handle some of the Wayland stuff is fascinating.

And to call it the Miracle Spin kind of calls back to the beefy Miracle, but also plays with Mir. I'm really loving the name i think they nailed that tiling window managers are very popular right now and so to have something that is a little more approachable and ready to go out of the box seems like a pretty good product positioning um so like i don't know if it's for me and i i don't know how useful you found it, but I know you could argue they have too many spins already, but I'm kind of happy to see it. And I'm glad it's not like a multi-year process and that they can kind of get under that umbrella from the near beginning. Yeah, I mean, we hear from our audience all the time, you know, you guys got to try tiling window manager.

Just give it like a month or three, right? And you'll eventually be cozy in it. three, right? And you'll eventually be cozy in it. And so I've always been interested in like a purely tiling environment because in Plasma, I'm using the tiling functionality all the time, but you know, I'm mousing around and stuff like that. But what I found kind of nice in Miracle is that right now, all the keyboard bindings are there to move windows around in a tiling manager, as you would expect. But like I mentioned in this fourth stage, they're working specifically on using the mouse to kind of open up the user landscape, let's say. So for someone who's just coming into a tiling window manager using the mouse to do things is a little bit nicer to,

you know, learn the ways. So I thought that was really nice for a project like this. I mean, they're not the only ones doing it, but it is essential to onboard new users. So, Chris, I wonder if you tried something like this, if it was like a smoother onboarding and you didn't have to dive into the configuration files to get what you wanted. Yeah, absolutely. I've been sort of waiting for a Fedora Hyperland spin, but I'd be totally happy to give Miracle a spin. When you're using it, Brent,

like the file manager and that stuff, are these GTK applications? Are they Qt applications? Like what, taking the tiling aside, what are your day-to-day applications?

Yeah, I saw mostly GTK-based apps. So, you know, Tuner is a file manager you know and love. Or hopefully you love apps so you know tuner is is a file manager you know and love or hopefully you love hopefully you know oh so it's using sunar tunar is that you said it called i said tuner but maybe i got it wrong i mean who knows i call it sunar because it looks like tor right it's like i don't i don't know things you read but never say out loud there were familiar applications that

even if i haven't used them you know recently i like, oh, yeah, I know that's the file manager and stuff. So as far as I understand, it uses the NWG shell, which is the GTK3 based UI for Sway and Hyperland that they're using. So it feels very kind of GNOME Unity-esque and having GTK3. and having GTK3. So I thought it was familiar enough in that respect. But of course, me being sort of new to tiling, different enough for me to really have to slow down. But there's a learning curve for about anything.

So I found it surprisingly smooth and snappy. Kudos on them. There are, of course, bugs. There's a bug that uh says my computer battery was at zero percent it just so happened that the computer i was using didn't have a battery so there's that but uh you know it's a small detail i guess that's technically true then well zero 100 it's all the same for that case it just didn't need a massive notification that was all red but so if you can get around. But so if you can get around, like for now, if you can get around those like small, let's call them inconsistencies, then I thought it was a cool experience to dive into. I think the warning that exists on the GitHub page is probably pretty accurate that, yeah, it's early days, but they're moving forward.

So expect a couple bugs, but it's cool to dive in and to try it and see where it's headed basically well what do you think about checking in like in a year from now or so or maybe even six months yeah with that roadmap suggesting December for a 1.0 but then me sort of just mapping where I think they're at I think six months is pretty accurate

you know give it six months and they'll be in a place that is nice and mature and I wonder if being an official spin now will bring some extra eyes some extra development uh you know time so i thought your eyes six months put it on the calendar well there you go the miracle spin uh as brantley says looking pretty good got some room right as it says on the tin now mr west pay you went a little different direction you went with a tried and true kino night which is i believe uh if i recall they're kind of like their silver blue but for the plasma desktop uh yeah that's right so i also got kde plasma 6.2 ah yeah uh looking really nice i did run into like my default download from the mirror

was going real slow but i poked around the Fedora. Only 30 megabytes a second? No, it was real slow. One or two megs. Oh, that's so bad. This was more just to say Fedora is mirrored widely and I was able to find several options that were way faster.

Because I wanted to try KiniWrite and Silverblue. I was getting multiple ISOs here. Wes got fiber, everybody. That's not. It happens to them all. We'll be there, too. Don't feel bad.

When I get fiber, I'm going to do the same thing. So just wait one day. Now, the part I couldn't speed up, unfortunately, is the atomic installer is still pretty slow. I think we remember this when we were playing with the UBlue stuff. You don't get a ton of feedback. You know, it starts off very just regular Anaconda E, and then it does the actual, you know, different setup for the Atomic style.

But it works totally fine. I will say, I did the little trick we talked about recently where I set things up using a virtual machine and then kexect into Kinoite. And man, they are just, I assume this is true for all the Fedora 41 setups, they're just really set up to virtualize

very nicely. I'm using QEMU in the virtual, you know, basically for everything, including the graphics and just no issues, nothing to load, nothing to fuss with, screen just worked super snappy yeah i mean like using the plasma i'm running plasma on the host and there's plasma in there and using either one was basically the same i used uh for one of my installs i also did

the qmu install to the raw disk thing just like i did for ubuntu so i i do the initial installation inside of vm and then i k exec and boot into the physical hardware. And same thing. For this test, I was doing workstation, and I could resize the QMU window, and the resolution would automatically resnap inside the VM. It just worked. Everything worked out of the box. My mouse could move in and out, no problem. That was nice. Now, okay, if you don't recall, the Fedora Atomic stuff, like Silverblue and Kinoite,

they use RPM OSTree under the hood. So OSTree is the part that handles trees, file system trees, like root file system trees, and provides the atomic bits, right? So it lets you think of these not as individual packages, but like a single monolithic tree that you can swap to. You go from one whole system to another whole system, and that's where you get the rollback functionality

and, you know, the atomic guarantees. And then there's RPM OS tree, which leverages OS tree sort of for like the base stuff and providing those atomic parts. But then it bridges over to using like libDNF, bridges over to the RPM side of things. So you can take all of the rpm packages that obviously already exist for the you know red hat and fedora ecosystems and then use those to

construct a file system tree in os tree as the output and then switch between those one of the things that's interesting about rpm os tree is it tries to also enable being able to do stuff you know like at client time not just in the image side like you want to like add on some packages so let's say for instance uh there was um vim installed already but i wanted if you wanted neo vim you can do um you can ask rpm os tree to install that for you and that totally works it is slow so like it has to interface with all the os tree stuff so basically that means it goes and gets the package and then has to build a whole new tree and then like stuff that into the OS tree side of things and then render that out. And then by default, that's set up to be your next

boot. There is the apply live options. You can switch to it live if you want to, but by default, you'll just have to reboot to get that. So you probably don't want to install a ton of stuff that way. And, you know, that's what you expect for this type of setup. That's what's on the tin. Kind of install the core things that you need just as like system level utilities and everything else. You know, doing a toolbox or distro box or install via some containerized system or flat pack or. Yeah, I did want to keep playing with that. I was curious.

So one thing you can do is mount a writable slash user overlay, which basically lets you muck with the system, but in a way that doesn't change any files on disk and will go away when you reboot. Cool. So you can kind of screw up your running system and experiment, but then you mess it up too bad, restart, it all goes away. And then I was curious,

like what if you wanted to like add a driver or something? Oh, yeah. You know, like it wasn't including the upstream you needed for one bit of hardware or like i do the weird like memory device thing that needs a driver that isn't often in a ram fs wait so when you say it was slow you were running it from a ram disk yeah whoa damn that is slow okay if it's slow when you're using a ram disk it's gonna be slow folks that's like it's best case scenario ram disk and fiber just saying yeah yeah yeah and a modern intel cpu ram disk and fiber internet so sort of best case scenario it was really just that install that was

slow yeah okay the rest has been very snappy okay uh i guess we'll know you're right and then like the os yeah yeah installing neo vim. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And then again, you know, you do that, what? You do a lot of that at the beginning of a system. And then once you have your workstation set up, it's sort of infrequent that you install stuff. And even then, like how many, yeah, it's like, it's not really the way you're supposed to go about it. So what you can do is by default, right?

Like the init ramifest that you boot with and the kernel, that's all generated upstream. It comes with the image, the tree that you clone down. But you can use rpm-ostree init-ramfs-enable to allow generating a local one. So there's still etsy-drawcut.conf.d where you can put, like, custom configuration files. So you can go there and add, say, like, oh, I want you to add this driver.

Make sure these drivers are here, whatever other stuff you want to do. And then you can run rpm-ostree init-ramfs-etc-force-sync. And then that will rebuild you a fresh initramfs, do all the things, and you're rebooting. It works, yeah. So that's all possible. Okay. Which I thought was neat.

I'm always just curious, you know, like obviously for most of the intended use cases, it's like a, you know, rock solid, sort of like just out of the go desktop. Or even maybe like a corporate workstation, possibly. Yeah, right. And a lot of this is intended to meet these, sort of like you can build the system in CI once on a build farm and then like push these out. And that's great.

I like that. But I'm curious about like where the edges are, what kind of things you can still do, where you can tweak it. There was also a nice blog post, which we'll link to that was kind of touching on all the stuff that was new in Fedora 41 just for the atomic desktops. There's some new unofficial images,

which is cool. Kino white mobile and cosmic atomic, which I didn't try this time, but I will be trying in the future for sure. That could be a fun combo. There's also other unofficial images, a XFCE atomic and LXQT Atomic. Cool.

Okay, boy. You know, those last two, XFCE and LXQT, now that could be great for a VM or a remote desktop session. Yeah, running on a VPS or something. Something really solid, nice minimal desktop environment

that's easy to stream in a remote session. So one new component is BootUpD. Okay. BootUpD is a small program that takes one new component is BootUpD. Okay. BootUpD is a small program that takes care of updating the bootloader. It currently supports BIOS and EFI systems, but only RPMOS tree-based systems. They're not automated. You've got to kind of do it yourself, but its

eventual goal is to be a OS agnostic cross-distribution update system that can handle stuff like making sure boot slash EFI is set up properly or writing down the BIOS bits that you need for boot if you're not on an EFI system. Like the MBR stuff. Yep.

So it's kind of an interesting, like they're adding more programmability around setting up the bootloader stuff. So now you have like a specific tool. If you do system deboot, it can kind of do this already, but there hasn't always been great options for, you know, like... Not a standardized way, really. Yeah, and especially if you're not using, right, if you're not using like DNF or going about the normal way

of setting up your system where it's going to install some package and that's going to trigger some post-install script that's going to run some other scripts that's going to like call the right stuff to set up the bootloader. You kind of need tooling to do it for you one of the other goals of boot upd is other architecture support which is where things get really sideways fast is when you start going to arm or risk five or whatever like it would be really amazing if boot upd could support multiple package managers if it could be some sort of standard API that understood BIOS, EFI, ARM architecture,

and everything could be just interfaced within a, in a way where package managers weren't so brittle? It's not quite the same, but on the NixOS, in the NixOS universe, they have the idea of a boot spec. When you like build out a system generation, it kind of lists out all the stuff, like here's where you're, here's what the kernel args are, here's what the interim MFS lives,

in the Nix store, here's the kernel. And that way then different bootloader implementations can take that and render it out for their particular thing. So I think it's trying to attack a similar problem from maybe a more broad approach. Also, next major evolution for atomic desktops, which isn't fully here in Fedora 41, but is rapidly approaching,

and you touched on this earlier, is bootable containers. Our little, our pal Bootsy. Yeah. We kind of first started talking about this on the show back in the spring of 2024 with rel image mode. Yeah, from the summit stuff. Bootsy was a big deal at the summit. And then we started playing around with the uBlue family of operating systems.

They also use bootable containers and bootc so as we've been saying right now silver blue and kenoite they're using rpm os tree not using bootable container stuff but they're planning to transition to using bootc so so the entire desktop is going to be a booted container yeah wow that's so crazy. Like, you're going to live in a container soon. It's turtles all the way down. I haven't looked into it for this update. When I last looked at BootC, it was mostly still targeting containers, images made from RPM OS tree.

I don't know if that's been broadened yet. But right now, the basic idea is, you know, you're still using RPM OS tree to, like like leverage the RPM ecosystem, build yourself these atomic images, but you can just take that atomic image that you built with the OS tree stuff and then stuff that in an OCI

container image. And then you can leverage like Quay or Docker Hub or wherever you go to push container images and then pull that down. And then once you've pulled it down, you can just extract it and now you have have an OS tree image, you know, like directory, just like you have any other way that you'd get it. So then all the tooling can just kind of work from there. And I guess the advantage, right, for corporations or whatnot, is they have these

pipelines where they're publishing these things and they're pushing them out to systems. And so to make it bootable means that you could have a fleet of servers where you could publishing these things and they're pushing them out to systems. And so to make it bootable means that you could have a fleet of servers where you could push these things out and then they switch over and they boot from that image. Yeah, if you're already building containers, the ecosystem, the stuff you need is the same. So BootC kind of just knows how to interface with the RPMOS tree generated images and knows how to go pull the kernel and interim MFS or run tools from inside of it to generate those and then tie it up with the bootloader that's been installed on the existing system. Yeah. But it's like you were

saying earlier, feeling more UBlue influence here. Like, would this even be happening if UBlue wasn't out there showing them that it can be done and is being done? It's a good question. And I'm happy to see it. It's not a criticism at all. I think this is, in fact, kind of a beautiful way that free software can work. It was neat that it was so easy to get going, too. So, like, I was on my RPM OS tree version, and I did the RPM OS tree install bootse, got that rebooted, got that there. And then you just sort of tell it to install, and you point it at a Docker repo. And then you just sort of tell it to install and you point it at a Docker repo. Just like you would put in a Docker compose file, you know, like the image, the repo and image name.

You just tell it like, hey, make this my system. And then it does it and it queues it up for the next boot and you reboot. And boom, now you got a boot C system going. One thing that struck me, I haven't, there's like a lot, I want to play more with this. It's all fascinating. It does kind of feel like this is taking the image approach like to the next level you know where rpms tree added that kind of like client side stuff i don't know how prevalent that is on the boot c side of things at least now i get the feeling at least from the docs i could find that it's it's going to push you even more to the like well you need to if you want a new inner mfs you

build a new container image that has the inner mfs that you want which you can do locally so you know the the new version of like doing local changes to add your own driver is forking from the image you downloaded adding you know rebuilding inner mfs on a new layer and booting that which is totally fine and if you're already familiar with containers that's probably easier to deal with than a lot of other ways about handling that setup. So this is what I think you and I find interesting about this. This is not necessarily our preferred way to build a system, but the reality is there is a ginormous industry of professionals that have been trained on container workflows. And it's been the focus of Red Hat's training now for quite a while. And one of the

things that was clear at Red Hat Summit this summer is they are just extending container workflows to everything. And what it does mean is that people who are not Linux systems experts are still, at least to some degree, have access to the tooling that allows them to assemble Linux systems, maintain Linux systems, patch Linux systems in a way that they can just use the tools they already understand and don't have to learn and become a Linux person. Yeah, it might feel like a lot if all you've ever done is apt or regular DNF,

but if you're building container images all day and shipping those and stuff... It's easier, actually. But for us, we've come at it from the old days where you're a system administrator and you build it up and it's like, well, why are you containerizing all this stuff with all these layers? Because that's the workflow that Red Hat's been training them for the last decade. And now you've got a whole industry of professionals that know what containers are and how they work and snap into their workflow. So it's fascinating to see them kind of position this to make this available to these types of professionals. Well, and I could see a version where, you know, I was complaining about the installer and that doesn't really matter. You don't install it as much. You know, I'm installing a bunch of them right now to review them, but otherwise you probably don't need to worry about it so much. But I would hope that eventually there'd be a streamlined process. You might be able to do it today. I just haven't looked at all the underlying

pieces, but with that boot up D stuff and Bootsy, like, could I just, you know, boot up whatever old live CD, format myself some Fedora partitions, use boot up D to put my bootloader on there, and then use boot C from the live environment to download the container image and then write out that for the new system, tie up the bootloader stuff, and be done. You know, just like, there we go. I think so. I think so. That seems great. And you could just bypass the slow installer. Yeah, that would be the type of installation you and I would prefer, I think.

And I think you could do that. I don't know if we've actually tried it. I don't think we have tried it, but I think you're right. And as these tools develop, I think that's, you know, the flexibility and, like, the neat things you'll be able to do are just going to increase, which I'm excited about that. Yeah, because it's sort of fun because you just boot any other OS, any other Linux OS, and then you just take over. That's always great.

And, you know, like I think part of the thing they were waiting for CI to catch up because they needed the new images generated with DNF5 and with BootC built into them. And those were being pushed to some other repo that wasn't the official one. I don't know the details, but it's coming. Now, once you've got the Bootsy stuff, you can switch to a UBlue image, no problem. You can switch to that unofficial cosmic atomic build, no problem.

It's just one command and a reboot. There's advantages to that. I'm really glad you tried out the Kino Knight and dug into that, Wes, because it makes me feel really good about where they're going with all this. Now, did you have any problems? Did anything break?

Did anything not work? Was there any negatives in your time exploring? No, not really. No, it's pretty much rock solid. Yeah, that's nice to hear. Well then, there's just one left. You'll have to wait just a brief moment to find out what I deployed. This spot right here, this could be yours.

If you have a product, a business, a service, and you'd like to feature it on Linux Unplugged, email me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com. I'd love to talk to you. I think it'd be great to have somebody out there in the community that sponsors this show. I'll make a great deal, too, since it has been the ad winter for a little bit. But if you don't have a product, if you don't have something to sell, you can still support the show. The new annual membership supports all the shows on the network. I'll have a link in the show notes.

You get access to all the shows for every podcast, their special features, and their ad-free feeds. And you get one month for free with the annual membership. Of course, you can just support this show directly at linuxonplug.com slash membership. You get the ad-free feed, which is all tidied up by Drew. Or you get the bootleg, which is everything. And we pack a ton of extra content into that, extra news stories and discussions, stuff that's just for our members. You get access to it either way, with the annual membership, with the Jupiter party, or when you go to linuxunplugged.com membership. You can also boost, of course.

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who like to kind of, instead of do the ongoing thing support at the value they feel is worth at the time. That's the whole idea with value for value. I won't take any more of your time. If you enjoyed this episode, you got some value from the podcast, please consider participating in one way or another. And now back to the show. Now, Chris, we each went in directions maybe you didn't expect.

And, of course, Wes did some crazy stuff. But I know you have some crazy stuff in you, too. What did you get up to? I did kick around the standard workstation version, which is great, of course, this release. But I looked up the Asahi project and I wanted to see if they had officially released for Fedora 41. And it looks like it's not actually sanctioned yet. It hasn't been fully like blessed and released yet. They're still just kind of monitoring things.

So I went ahead and did the right thing and just upgraded right to asahi 41 and that a boy it was absolutely smooth and this is my second major upgrade of the os because i think i started with fedora 39 maybe even 38 but i know i started with 39 brought that sucker up to 40 use that about you know two three times a week so pretty frequently for the whole release and now i've brought that up to 40. Use that about two, three times a week. So pretty frequently for the whole release. And now I've brought that up to Fedora 41. And literally not a single error, not a complaint about any package conflicts. That's great. Nothing.

And really simple cleanup afterwards and everything like that. Of course, now I've got Plasma 622 or 6.2, I should say. Not 22, 6.2. Use a Wayland of... I will say, you know, if you are going to be doing this style of in-place major version upgrade, TNF's probably the package manager you do want.

It's nice, too, because then you can be like, hey, I'd like to review all of the new config files and see if I should merge them. And sure enough, two of them in there were fixing CUPS problems, and that was really nice to see. So this is on my apple m1 max macbook it's a 16 inch from 2021 it's got 64 gigs of ram and it's got uh the m1 max ice storm processor so it's it's a good amount of cores i don't

actually know what it is and then with asahi linux you're using Linux 6.11.0-400. And it's got full graphic support. But even a bigger deal, boys, is I can finally use my speakers. Wow. Were you super choosy on what you played first? YouTube and searched for music and then I went and I listened to some podcasts and I just kind of did a sampling and I installed some games so it was like I wanted to hear the range of it because while this has been around for a minute now I felt like the 41 time period was when it was safe to finally install this because when they first started developing this it turned out that they could destroy the speaker that you could drive it way beyond what you should be able to and blow them out and some of the first development tests they immediately blew out the speakers on their macbooks yeah

unlike i guess some of the other ways the m systems work like this time you got like a really raw interface to just be able to do whatever you want with the speaker and then it turns out that what there's like mac os software running that's actually handling making sure things eq right and transients aren't don't go for too long and too loud and so turns out that there's a lot of lift being done in software to massage the sound and so it's not fully working yet for all of the macbooks but a lot of the m1 m2 series you're pretty much set and mine was as well So there was just a package called Asahi Audio, Asahi-Audio, that I had to install. And it took care of everything. It sets up the wire plumber DSP profiles that you need because it's an array of speakers in this stupid laptop.

And it installs a couple of dependencies that are required to do some of the audio processing. And this is where you can have a weird experience because you can have the same machine where you're in macOS and then you boot into Linux and the two sound different. It's the same hardware, but they sound different.

And it comes down to taste. And the team that writes the Asahi audio driver writes on the GitHub here, while it is evident that Apple put immense amount of effort into ensuring these machines have good sound, they tried a little too hard. On top of being tuned for an exaggerated human curve, macOS makes use of psychoacoustic bass enhancements, dynamic range compression, and spatialization tricks to spice up the acoustic profile of these machines. Unfortunately, not only does this color the sound in a way that is reminiscent of early Beats headphones,

Apple actually has a bug in their psychoacoustic bass processor that causes audible artifacts. So this whole setup is quite simply unacceptable for anything but the most casual of listening. We aim to deliver a mostly flat response curve with you might think that the trillion dollar company that literally has a team of audio scientists maybe knows what they're doing. Because vocals stink now. Vocals are muddier. They're not as crisp or clear. And it doesn't sound as good. It works, though.

So I'm very happy. And it's still better than most laptop speakers. I will say it does like the the beats thing and the bass enhancement. That rings true to me. It does. Like just from listening to the new, they do have color. Yeah. But it also strikes me that, like, probably consumers want that.

Well, that's just it. Like, you're probably putting on good headphones or, like, your monitor speakers if you're going to mix and you need flatter. I don't know. Right. A developer looked at this, and a developer said, this is technically not accurate. And Apple looked at this and said,

we're going to send this out to consumers, and we're going to study what their reaction is, And then we're going to fine tune this in an acoustically defined space that is meant to monitor this and hear how and listen how humans hear. And then we're going to tweak this until we just get it just right. And we'll have a team of people working on this for a year. And then we'll send that feedback back to the audio people. And since they have no idea what we're going to come, what kind of conclusion we're going to come to, they're just going to build the system so that we can define it any way we want and we can massage it over time.

So what's your Asahi fork going to be called? Yeah, I know. Right. Asahi, what do they call it? Colorful edition. But you know what? It's still pretty good sound. Games sound fine.

You know, it's really just vocals that I have the biggest complaint with. Am I picking up right that this is powered by Speaker Safety D? Yeah. Yeah. I like that. But you heard me say it. And boys, it's real. Gaming.

Gaming in Asahi 41 is just a Steam package install away. And what's happening on the back end is incredible. They call it the Asahi Game Playing Toolkit. It integrates Vulkan 1.3, x86 emulation, Proton for Windows compatibility, and OpenCL 3.0.

And you just DNF install Steam. And it's installing the Fex emulator, which emulates x86 on ARM like Rosetta does for macOS. Nuts. It's using Wine to translate the Windows API calls and DXVK, and of course VK3D, to translate DirectX to Vulkan. That any of this works at all is magic.

It gets better. There's a curveball in here. Memory page sizes. It gets better. There's a curveball in here. Memory page sizes. Oh, right. So operating systems allocate memory in fixed size pages. And if an application expects a smaller page size than the system uses, they'll break. It's an insufficient alignment of allocations, essentially.

The problem here is that x86 expects 4K pages, but Apple M-series use 16K page sizes. So the nice part is Linux can work with either, but it cannot mix them, but it can virtualize them. So they actually have a teeny tiny virtual machine called MUVM that's passing through the GPU and your game controller devices, all the hardware. And then that tiny little MUVM is emulating 4K page sizes on top of a 16K page size. There's even a VM in here just for the memory page sizes. So you run another Linux kernel with the right page size for x86 to do your translation wow yeah and then effects is emulating the actual x86 to arm calls right okay it's wild this sounds super fragile so it's not fantastic you know um things work though

surprisingly well i'll tell you where what's to work really good is games in your repo. So like Zenotic and Tuxcart and anything that's in your repo that's open source, a lot of the flat packs that have ARM versions, they're going to work really good. But a lot of the Steam games work, too. So after you DNF install Steam and you get it all set up and you turn on proton emulation for all the titles, I played No Man's Sky, Fallout 4 works. I played Race the Sun.

I played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, whatever the latest one is that's essentially Turtles in Time. Played all of those with no problem. A couple of games didn't execute that normally do execute just fine under proton. So I'd say it's like 75%, maybe even 70%. But I'm not like an expert on this, but I believe now with this setup, with this game toolkit, there's actually more games available on the M hardware under Linux than under macOS itself,

which is absolutely remarkable if you think about it because if 60-ish percent of my Proton, 70-ish percent of my Proton games work now on Linux on the M1, well, that crushes the availability on macOS. Yeah. And it's incredible they've pulled this off. Now, I think where this really, really, really hits the actual like full 95% area is when this has had a little more development.

So probably gets even better in Fedora 42 and even, you know, probably there in Fedora 43. So we're looking a little bit out. But also, I think when you got a little bit better GPU hardware, you know, when the Asahi project starts working on M3 and M4 support in 2025, which is what I've seen is the plan, then you're going to have even better, more capable GPUs. But again, I'm on an M1 system here and I'm playing these games and it doesn't feel any different than when I'm playing them on an x86 system. There was one game I played after a while, it got a little laggy. And I think if I swapped out the Proton runtime, I may have had a better go at it. I just used like whatever the latest version was. I was just blown away by it.

I wouldn't even have thought necessarily to try. So it's such a smooth system. Wi-Fi works. Sleep works. Bluetooth works. Gaming works. Screen brightness. Sound and volume control. The hotkeys work, you know, all of the, you know, function keys work.

And I should have you try it, Wes, but I swear it feels like the snappiest version of Plasma. Maybe it's the disc in this thing. Maybe it's the drivers in K-Win. But everything opens a little bit faster, like console and Dolphin. They all appear on the screen just a little bit fast, and it's not just the timing of the effects. There's something different about it.

It's like you can never throw it. It's always delivering. The interface is always snappy, more so than any of my x86 Plasma systems. So in a way, it's more and more becoming like one of my go-to linux systems now what does it need to cross the line where it wouldn't be crazy to buy an m series laptop with the intention of just primarily using a site well at this point m3 m4 support right because if you're spending this kind of money you know unless you want to get used and

get an m1 you're gonna have a good time you're if you were say this kind of money, you know, unless you want to get used and get an M1, you're going to have a good time. If you were, say, to buy used right now and save some money, just about darn near everything works. What you're really lacking are a lot of the native apps. It may be possible with Fex to start emulating day-to-day desktop applications too. I just don't know how to point the tool at that. But it's not just for games. So there's, you know, like so a lot of stuff i'm doing in the browser i have a pin tab for a lot of things which works surprisingly well so i'm not

really actually missing out on much and i end up doing that a fair amount on even on my x86 machines these days and i don't think still there's some things that you know if i'm honest and i was really using this every day so why i don't use it every day is I don't think I can hook up a Thunderbolt dock or something. I don't think I can hook up a bunch of external displays yet. It might be different on the Mini, but I don't think so on the MacBook Pro Max. So there might be a few things like that that are still not there. But if you're just looking, if you were looking to buy a used M1 Max on eBay and you just wanted something that's going to get great battery life,

incredible performance that never gets hot. You never hear the fan. It feels super fast when you use it and it can play a lot of games that you might already have in your library. And you can still do a boot into Mac OS if you need to, like it checks all those boxes. It's just, you know,

the edge cases, you want to start hooking up multiple monitors and you need a bunch of X86 apps. You want to do some AI workload or whatever it might be, or you want to play the absolute latest game that just came out. It's not quite there yet. But what's really nice about Fedora's Asahi spin is it's the premium experience. Right?

That's why I choose to use Fedora and continue to use Fedora and not reload it with something else. Because when they got the game kit ready, it was just DNF install Steam. something else. Because when they got the game kit ready, it was just DNF install Steam. Where like if I'm on Ubuntu or if I'm on Arch or another distribution, I have to go through a whole bunch of hoops. I'm adding repos. I'm doing all kinds of stuff. But the team is publishing and pushing stuff in like an Asahi repo. And so all that stuff that they're working on is just a DNF away from me, all the fixes.'s it's really like the premier way to experience linux on this m1 hardware you can do another distributions and it still works great but you really feel like you're getting you're just like right downstream of what the developers

are publishing so as soon as they figure something out or they make life easier it's like boom it's right there infador and then it usually gets to the other distros too. So this is one of my favorite spins because it takes what is really nice hardware and it makes Linux extremely accessible to them. The installation is really straightforward. It is really solid on the Mac mini, which could make for a great little headless server at this point. mini which could make for a great little headless server at this point and plasma 6.2.2 on this hardware with kwin is so smooth and so clean it's one of the best experiences really really like it and you know of course dnf5 was fantastic a little bit faster a little bit cleaner output um you know it's it's it's rare that i don't go through this process and leave have some criticisms but i really don't because what's what doesn't work and i would say what criticisms i do have

well that's outside the fedora project like they don't determine if element makes an arm version right they don't they don't drive that they don't they don't make a decision of slack makes an arm version it's outside their control they're just making the best ARM workstation out there right now, I think. Just hands down. I think they're making the best ARM Linux workstation out there. And if you've got access to the hardware, it's totally worth a try. So if you give Fedora 41 a try, or if you try out one of the spins that we didn't try, boost it and let us know how it went, good or bad.

We want to hear it. And now it is time for the boost. If you're new to boosting, you can figure out how to send in a boost along with all these other fantastic fellas. Jupyterbroadcasting.com slash boost. We have a little bit of a primer there on how to get involved in the podcasting 2.0 value for value love train. I like that.

Okay. All right. Just randomly go I don't know you know it used to be a bus for Brent but now it's a train it's evolving Jert Sampson is our baller booster he got it on sale this week it's a great one 56,500 sats I like it he says my favorite Soos release

would have to be 9.3 if only because it was my first real full-time entry into desktop Linux. I stuck with it for a long time and I have fond memories of figuring out how to make it work back many years ago when I was in high school. I've been using Linux and listening to LAS

and Linux Unplugged ever since. These days I mostly run NixOS but was on Tumbleweed prior, and that was pretty rock solid. Thanks for all the shows over the years. I love the technical Nix content. And by the way, this is a zip code boost. You just have to change that last trailing zero to a leading zero. Uh-oh, Wes. Yes, zip code is a better deal.

You better get looking. Did you bring the map? Okay. Nope. That's not the map, Wes. Where's the map? Where's the map? You didn't bring the map?

Oh, there it is. He brought the map. I got the fake out. Oh, you faked me out so bad. Yeah, I had my Kindle. You thought that was where the map was, but no. All right, so where is Mr. Sampson? Westpain?

This would appear to be a zip code, a 05650 in Washington County, Vermont. Well, hello, Washington County, Vermont. Can I just say there are too many Washingtons over there? Yeah, we really went sort of silly with it, didn't we? We really did. I feel like, you know, we got like something in common. We both live in a place called Washington, even if it's not the state. Thanks for booting in.

Yes, and I agree. 9.3 was a really, really good release. And as I'm sure you recall, that's when it came in those fold-out CD displays. So you would open it up and there would be CD after CD after CD in there because, of course, it only fit 600 megabytes on there. And back in that era, too, depending on what kit you bought, it would come with a couple of multi-hundred page books, manuals, to tell you how to use it all. It's really something. We'll be talking more about it.

So please do keep boosting in your favorite versions of Seuss. We're collecting them now and taking notes because it'll be very relevant for the next episode if all goes as planned. Isn't that right, Brent? Uh, yeah. Ico Sienna boosts in with 42,021 cents. The answer to the ultimate question. Greetings from Greece.

I've built a NixOS configuration with NextCloud and easy remote peer-to-peer access using Wholesale at Wholesale.io. That's a H-O-L-E-S-A-I-L. Peer-to-peer tunnel for instant access. Create peer-to-peer tunnels instantly that bypass network firewalls, NAT restrictions, and expose your local network to the internet securely. No dynamic DNS required. 100% free open source. My goal is to make it very easy for anyone to self-host NextCloud.

The first version is available for Raspberry Pi 4 with automatic mounting of USB devices inside NextCloud. The code is available on GitHub. We'll have a link in the show notes. Also, next week, I'm presenting it at an open source software conference here in Greece. P.S., I first heard about Nix and NixOS from your podcast. Oh, that's great.

Well, good luck with the presentation. Sounds awesome. Yeah, you know what I think is really clever, too, is just passing USB storage through to a NextCloud instance means that you give somebody Raspberry Pi and then just tell them add your own disk. Yeah, this feels impressive to me. I would love

to see the talk. If it gets recorded, please boost in and feels impressive to me. I would love to see the talk. If it gets recorded, please boost in and send us that recording. I'd love to see it. Yeah. Please do link it up. Now, Crashmaster boosted in

a row of ducks. Simply saying, open SUSE Tumbleweed. Still use it. Uh-huh. All right. Tumbleweed jacket. So we got a 9.3.

I'm writing all these down because it will be relevant later. So we got a 9.3. I'm writing all these down because it will be relevant later. So we got a 9.3 and we got one Tumbleweed so far. Okay. Tumbleweed. I figure we're going to get the majority Tumbleweed, but we'll see. We'll see. Bun comes in with 5,000 sats.

That's a Jar Jar boost. You're so boost. And he writes, I think my longest used distro has been Debian when I was new to Linux. I've used Linux Mint, Arch, and now Nix. Very nice. Interesting escalation there, too. Like the Debian safe haven for a while, which I spent many years in, too, in Debian land. Great way to, like, whet your sysadmin skills, kind of, you know, get used to things.

And back in the day, too, when we didn't have DNF or YUM, apt was so superior to straight-up RPM where you had to self-resolve dependencies. It was night and day. And then, you know, you start looking for something that's a little nicer on the desktop, so you end up on Mint, but then you want something that has a little more access and more fresh packages and a bigger ecosystem. You end up on Arch, and then boom, Nix. There's a path there. I like it.

It's very good. The Immunologist boosts in with 5,556 sats. Everything's under control. Follow-up boost, also known as a faloost. Raspberry Pi OS is the Linux OS which I use technically the longest, but sporadically. First for the RetroPi and since then hosting a NextCloud Snap. I started with OpenSUSE Leap as my first desktop Linux running on my main laptop, upgraded

to Tumbleweed, now running microOS desktop GNOME Aeon since the summer, and I'm very happy with it. Full disk encryption and immutability are both great. Also, it made me finally learn DistroBox. So far, Aeon is my favorite open-sus distro. Alright, I'm writing it down then. Which makes it my favorite overall distro as well, since the only non-open-sus

distro OS I've ever even used is Raspberry Pi OS. That's great, though. Falust, that's funny, the immunologist. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Now, DistroStew sent in an almost Spaceballs boost, one, two, three, four, six Satoshis.

Yeah, let's give it to them. So the culmination is one, two, three, four, five. Since you asked, here's my main driver history. Red Hat for about two years, Ubuntu for seven years, then Arch for 18 years, and, well, NixOS for one year. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. It's been GNOME for pretty much all of it, and I actually miss Arch,

but NixOS has been a fun shakeup. Could always throw in a distro box, I suppose, you know? Can I just say that's a lot of years when you add them all up together? I wonder if Arch would be one of my longest, too. Many, many years. Because it was basically from the Arch challenge to Nix. You can't run a stable system on Arch. What are you talking about? It can't be done, Wes.

It can't be done. Especially not a server. Thank you, Distro Stew. That's really interesting. Seven years out of Ubuntu is no joke either, really. Open source account that came in with a Jar Jar Boost. You're so boost. 5,000 sats.

If there are people in the southeast Washington or within driving distance of Walla Walla, Washington, I would be happy to host a meetup for episode 600. Oh, okay. Open source. Accountant. You know, we're technically with them. I know, right?

Hmm. You know, I don't know if I've... I must have been. I'm sure I've been to Walla Walla, but I don't know if I've been to Walla Walla. Wait, wait, wait. Which Washington is he talking about here? There's so many.

Our Washington. Washington State, right here in the Pacific Northwest. Come on. Right here. The one with the R. Yeah. Brett Boosen with 5,000 sets. You're so boost.

If anyone is in the Fort Walton Beach, Florida area, they can check out Emerald Coast Linux user group at eclinux.org. We've been meeting for over a year now, thanks to JB Inspiration. That's great. Also, all this Nix talk has kind of been getting on my nerves. Sorry. So much so that I had to install it and see what the fuss was about. Oh no, I'm really sorry now.

I'm not completely sold, but I'm enjoying learning new things. Right on. Keep up the great work. That's the attitude, right? It's a journey. It's a journey. And as long as you're willing to walk that journey and enjoy it. The Lunch Fryer sends in a row of ducks.

You guys like that one? Yeah. I've been a Tumbleweed user for a few years now. The combination of ButterFS snapshots with Snapper and transactional updates at Micro OS and OpenQA tested images makes Tumbleweed one of the most bulletproof systems I've ever used. I use transactionalupdates.timer to automatically update my system around midnight and Reboot Manager will trigger a reboot around 4am if there are any updates i wake up every morning to a freshly updated and rebooted system i rarely ever need to run a manual zipper i think we need to see if we can um hire the lunging fryer that's super fancy maybe manage

brent's system yeah there you go that would be a great idea because uh you know that sounds like pretty attractive setup i have to say so i did a plus one here for tumbleweed. Um, and it's nice to hear somebody actively kind of leaning into the butter FS snapshot stuff. Like I know it's a feature out there, but it's nice to hear somebody actually leaning into that. That's pretty great. Appreciate that. Thank you for the boost fryer. I love the too. Now, I'm going to say the next name is Lodmpax. Lodmpax. 2,222 stats. My longest

running Linux was Manjaro. I had that for almost three years, but I moved to NixOS over a year ago thanks to you guys. I'm so sorry. You know, it's worth pointing out, we didn't say only NixOS users right there. Boosted. Changed my desktop, my laptop, and now my home server.

I hear that story every time, too. I've never looked back. Hoping to give my friends the Nix way of life as well. Love it. Good luck. Dude's on a rampage, and I am here for it. I think that's so good. Thank you.

Moonanite comes in with 2001 such how she is my longest running linux box is a pie hole been running it on a pi 3b for something like seven or eight years now great little box i never had to touch it outside the initial configuration oh boy talk about return on value there for eight years or so. Think about all the ads that things blocked. You know, I think I'm on year four of mine and it might even be booting from an SD card or something. I don't know. It's not a totally like blessed setup anymore, but it's incredibly just runs. It just runs.

And every now and then I log in, I add like a manual DHCP reservation or something like that. But that's about it. Thank you for the boost. Sam H boosted in 9001 Satoshis. It's over 9000! Thank you. Thank you for talking about Audio Bookshelf. I've been running it since you discussed it in Linux Unplugged 547.

And it's been excellent. In surprisingly little time, I had it running on NixOS and imported all my audio books with Libation, and I haven't looked back. Well done, Sam. That's rad. Also, very, very, very happy with my audio bookshelf setup as well still. I think Libation is the better way to go because the metadata extracts from Audible just displays better by default in Open Bookshelf. The Android app for Open Bookshelf has a couple of really neat features,

one of them being that you can go into the settings and you can say that if I start the book after a certain period of time, like 9 p.m., or for me I set it at 9.30, automatically start a sleep timer. Another thing that the Android app does that the iOS app does not do is the Android app, while not every single time, but most often will fade out for the last 10 seconds. It fades out. Whereas the iOS app just hard stops. But all of that together, it's just really so fantastic.

Along the same lines of happy that I am with audio bookshelf, I'm going to mention it one more time. lines of happy that I am with audio bookshelf. I'm going to mention it one more time. It's ersatz.tv and it gives you your ability to create your own live TV stations essentially from your media collection. So I have about 10 channels and they play different stuff. Like I have a Star Trek channel. I have channels for individual Star Trek shows. I have like a 90s TV that's got Seinfeld and Home Improvement. Personal question. Do you have a Linux Action Show channel?

Oh, God, no. No. I cannot stand myself. But if you love an audiobook shelf, you might love Ersatz TV too because I have been really thrilled with it. I do love how every time you talk about Ersatz TV, the number of channels you have goes up. Oh, yeah. Well, because I like i'll be watching the show and i'll be like i'll tune the channel and be like oh i kind of wish i would

have gotten this show i'm like oh i could just i can just make a channel for that show do you have a curb channel yet that's a good idea i like the idea that you are refusing to watch things via jellyfin except via loading them into our tv channels yeah yeah well the stuff that i'm watching sequentially, but stuff like the 90s television shows or Star Trek that I've seen 100 times, it's perfect for that kind of thing. Producer Jeff PJ comes in with 12,100 sets. R2 is my longest running distro,

nearly 10 years on my old system 76 bonobos. But as for Soos, I can't remember what version of OpenSeuss Leap I used, but it was around 27 or 2019. I ran it on my HTPC server, so a media server. I really enjoyed having Yast, but it was slow compared to other distros, sadly. Yeah, especially the post-configuration stuff Yast did, that was slow. Got it for about two years, and I put Arch on that machine. And I just replaced Arch with NixOS last month.

I think maybe we should write a letter to the Arch folks with like, is it an apology? Well done, PJ. Well done there. I like to hear it. I also had for just a brief period of time Seuss on a Media Center PC

because it was so quick and yes, to set up all the mount points for Samba and NFS and just do it all in one UI and you hit apply and it was really nice and I was like, yeah, I'll try this. The one, the only hybrid sarcasm comes in with 5,000 sats. You're so boost! My sats

budget is a bit tight at the moment, so I'm repurposing some sats for a self-hosted boost about NextCloud. But I couldn't just not boost into LUP, so happy Tuesday, as in Sunday. Thank you, Hybrid. And I guess go check out self-hosted if you want to go see what Hybrid said over there.

I tore down my NextCloud install and built it back, hopefully, for the last time, and I cover that in there. VMAX boosted in a Spaceballs boost. Yes, that's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. Boosting in support of episode 600 meetups, a late February brunch with other listeners

will be a good way to celebrate. I set up a little rally instance to organize my little corner of the Midwest and posted it in the Matrix chat. Feel free to include it in the show notes. Oh, we're going to have to go find that somewhere. Nice.

Great initiative. Yeah. Okay. So we've gotten a couple of people now, so I will start getting more serious about organizing the 600. I think we've heard three or four people that are willing to do it. Yeah. That's good enough.

In my book, we may do one ourselves as well. And it'd be fun to like pull them in live on Sunday. Right. The idea is episode 600 on Sunday. We get together, pull people in live from their meetups. It could be a lot of fun. We'll see.

I'll try to get more information and pass it along. Honda's comes in with 8,310 sats. Long time listener. First time booster. Hey, that's nice work. Thank you for taking that journey. I know it can be a treacherous one. They're on Podverse too.

Nice. Thanks for the great content. I've learned a lot over the years. I think the first time I saw Jupyter Broadcasting was on YouTube. It was an episode of Linux Action Show where Chris and Brian were reviewing an OpenSUSE release, which was my favorite distro at the time. The boost amount is my postcode. Hint, it is north of the Arctic Circle.

Yes, zip code is a better deal. Okay, let's get the extended map out. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, this one's just California, which that's not super useful. Thank you, Daz, for that boost. Congratulations on getting Podverse working with Boosting 2. And, jeez, since Brian and I Congratulations on getting Podverse working with Boosting 2. And, uh, geez.

Since Brian and I were talking about OpenSUSE on YouTube, that's a long time, friend. It's a long time. It'd be fun to go see what you thought of, uh, some older releases. And how did you pronounce it? How did you get that coffee stain on the top of the map? You're gonna have a problem. Yeah, it has blotted out some of these.

Yeah. That's not good. Is that coffee or is that beer even i can't tell it smells like whiskey well you know it can be multiple things it's a common spill spot yeah i guess so that is true that is true whoa watch out yeah i opened the wrong side. This is Africa. Boy, I'm getting a lot of options here. Did they say north of the... North of the Arctic Circle, Westbrook. See, that's what's throwing me here, because none of my...

I'm getting Belgium. That doesn't seem right. It's a postcode in numbers, right? So is it in Alaska, but north of the... Is that a thing? What? All right. I think we're going to need some help with this one.

Right? Yeah, but no, I see what you're saying, Brent. I don't think we're going to crack it. I think we finally... This is the first time. My math skills are a little behind. It's been a while, so I'm glad we're back on the whole zip code thing. I will do some practice off hours.

We do love the zip code boost, so and that's, I think, the first time the map's ever been thrown, although there's coffee, whiskey, and beer stains on there, so that could explain some of it. Yeah, after this failure, I might have to make some more stains. Thank you, Mr. Dawes. Appreciate that boost. Thank you for listening for so long, too. Uh, VT-52 comes

in with $16,384. Oh, this is Cajun Spice. Loving this next content. Also, got my first Meshtastic node running, and I see nodes from North Bend to South Tacoma to Bremerton to do Snohomish.

Bremerton is a bit cheaty. It's over MQTT. Oh, you got MQTT working with it as well. That's the way to extend theohomish. Wow. Though Bramerton is a bit cheaty. It's over MQTT. Oh, you got MQTT working with it as well. That's the way to extend the range right there. You know, you guys might be able to make contact. You're right. You never know. Oh, that would be neat.

Yeah. Well done. If you see a NixOS, by the way, then that's me. I, by the way, when we do local meetups, especially like at Linux Fest, I'd like all of us to bring our Meshtastic gear. So this is going to come back up again in the future, too. Okay, and so VT was

the person who set up the BBS at pebcac.lol. Thank you. It fell into disuse and then went casters up, but I'd be more than happy to get it up again and give you sysop creds. Or if you'd rather, I'm happy to consult or help get stuff set up on your own info. Same goes for IRC. I wouldn't mind seeing it running again just so we could take a look at what its capabilities are

and then we can decide what we want to do from there. For what it's worth, the BBS software I was using has an integrated IRC bridge if that's something that you'd be interested in. Oh, boy. And then we bridge that to Matrix. Yeah, and it's a whole big thing. VT, thank you. Yeah, if you do have time to set it up, I wouldn't mind poking at it again

because I think that could be a fun thing we could do for episode 600 as well. Thank you. And thank you for the boost, too. Tomato sends in our third Spaceballs boost. Hell was that? Spaceball 1. They've gone to plaid. Thanks for the Meshtastic show.

It inspired me to get some equipment as well, which is derived. So far, I don't see much, but I do have a nearby friend who wants to try a node too. So I'll have someone to talk to soon enough. I do like the idea of having local meetups for episode 600, by the way. I'd be willing to try to organize one in the Paris region. Oh! Are we saying like Paris, Paris? Is that the only Paris we're talking about?

Or is there like a Paris in Wisconsin or something? That'd be great. Do you mean if there was a Paris in Wisconsin? Is that the only Paris we're talking about? Or is there like a Paris in Wisconsin or something? That'd be great. You mean if there was a Paris in Wisconsin? Well, both. Okay, great. That's amazing. Yes, all right. Okay.

Maybe we should ditch our local meetup for that one. Yeah, all right, boys. I'm in. If you guys don't mind, I think we pull one up. Mr. Cospilin, he was under the 2000 SAT cutoff, but he's on topic here this week. He writes for 999 SATs. I've been running SUSE as a daily driver since the Windows XP era. I started with a desktop setup on a Pentium 3 666 megahertz machine with 256 megabytes of RAM.

Wow. Wow. Yeah. Over the years, I used it first with VSFTP, then no machine, all while utilizing port forwarding. Later, I repurposed the machine as a firewall, opening ports up for VSFTP and also for no machine. Throughout this time, I consistently chose SUSE as my desktop and server operating system. On my desktop, I'm currently running Tumbleweed, just like my mom started using this summer.

Meanwhile, I'm running Leap on the server side. You know, I don't think we had anybody say they were actively using Leap right now, but I'm writing Leap down, Kost. We got one Leap. We'll explain why we're writing these down next week. He goes on to finish up with, I take the fun in automating my server setup through AutoYast installations. Yes! Every new version of Leap triggers a fresh AutoYast install for me.

Even for fun, I've set up some diskless XMRE miners, which is a cryptocurrency mining program on Tumbleweed, accessible via Pixie. Each update prompts an automatic AutoYast run with my virtual machines, and I do 99% of the time I deploy with PXE installs.

That's pretty cool. I wish we were using Pixie and network booting more in the studio. It'd be pretty neat if all these machines in here could just reboot and deploy a fresh new image after an update's come out. That's a pretty slick setup, so I wanted to pull that forward. Can you give us, new folks, a little primer on AutoYast? What is it? It sounds cool. Yeah, well, it's a pretty slick setup. So I wanted to pull that forward. Can you give us new folks a little primer on AutoYast? What is it? Sounds cool. Yeah, well, it's what it sounds like. It's

an answer file, and then AutoYast, I think, maybe it's just Yast, runs that and does all the automated installations and answers the questions, creates the users, selects the packages, you know, that kind of thing. So you can do automated SUS deployments. Okay, I've attempted to repair my failure slightly

oh so you brought the map back out yeah i did yeah i actually never put it away i kind of just hit it from you that's how more stains go jeez wes ow uh yeah okay so uh kobblevog in norway i believe hello hello kobblevog so you were over there mapping the whole time. Yeah. It's a village municipality in Nordland County, Norway, shut Southern shore of an Island in an archipelago up way at the top in the Northern bit of Norway.

Cobble. Vogue. Cobble. Vogue. I don't know. Well, shout out to probably butchering that, but shout out to big cobs,

you know? Yes. Zip code is a better deal. Thank you for the zip code boost. Appreciate it. Alright, well that brings us to the end. It's a little bit shorter this week, but we're still grateful for everybody who participates. We had 38 of you turn on those sats

as you listen and just stream those sats and you collectively stacked 88,097 sats for us this week. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that. When you combine that with the boosters, we stacked a humble, but still not too bad, 304,771 sats.

Thank you, everybody who participates in this. This, of course, is tremendously fun for us to hear from you, following up on these things, provoking new conversations and new entire directions in the show. Fifty-four total unique people between streams and boosts that are just out. That's connection. That's so cool. It is really cool. And it's been an ad winter for a prolonged period of time. I don't think the show would be here without the Spartans.

I don't think. I know. Without our members and our boosters, the show wouldn't be here. And they're doing, you know, kind of better. They add industry like it seems like it's kind of turning around for some folks. But I am not 100 percent sure that they'll ever fully return to our niche. I think they've just kind of moved on. You got burned on the whole podcast thing. Oh, well, now there's more interesting markets.

They got when especially like the really technically niche ones, you know, and we didn't do this. We never had this problem. But a lot of podcasters overstated their numbers by about 30 percent and they got burned. And I don't I don't see a lot of advertisers coming back to this neighborhood of podcasting. I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong, but I really don't. And part of me part of me hopes that means the value for value model will grow and expand because podcasting is so unique in that no one company owns the podcast platform. It's all RSS feeds. There's hundreds of clients that compete in an ecosystem out there. And each podcast is kind of like its own bespoke business. They're not following one particular model like you might on YouTube. So podcasting is very still kind of unique in that way.

And I think the funding source, it's best when it's distributed and it's from the audience as well. So while it's very painful over the last couple of years not to have sponsors, especially with inflation going like crazy, I'm still kind of excited about this transition we're making. Let's figure this out. Exactly. We've got to figure this out. And I think long term it's for the best. So thank you, everybody, who's a member of Herb Boost In. If you would like to boost in and you haven't done it yet, we have links at the top of the show notes that make it really easy to get started.

Or go to podcastapps.com and pick out one you like. There's probably a podcast app that fits your style and your tastes. So I got a bit of a pick blowout. You stuffed the picks full this week i did i did because number one i think is a pick that people that are looking at fedora should know about and this is for maybe newer folks out there it's fedora media writer it's a tool to create a live usb drive a fedora and when you launch it it makes it really easy to select what version you want. It downloads the ISO in the background, all that stuff, and it just starts automatically

writing it to the disk. But what's really great is they also make this tool available for Mac and Windows. So for somebody who's getting their ISO for the first time, it's probably not something you think about a lot as a Linux user. It's actually kind of tricky for them to figure out, I got to go get a what, and then I got to do what to it, and how do I do that? And then get some other third-party tool to install it. And there's some good ones, but they're a little older, a little less user-friendly. Fedora Media Writer works on Linux, of course, but to have it on macOS and Windows, I think,

is a big deal. And if you're trying out any GNOME-based Linux, but in particular Fedora 41 Workstation, then you might want to take a look at my next pick, and that is GDM Settings, where you can customize your login screen, change aspects about its look, the background, stuff that Plasma kind of has built-in settings to do, but GNOME does not. It is only a Flatpak app too, I believe. I think two of these pics on here are only distributed as Flatpaks. GDM settings might be one of them. Just install Silverblue already.

What are you missing out on? Yeah. So if you wanted to tweak GDM or put your own background or change some of the settings, there you go. And then I got one last one for you. And as you heard me say earlier,

I've been using a lot of web apps because I've been using ARM. And this next app is just called Web Apps. And as you might think from the name, it allows you to install websites as desktop apps. These come and go. This one is a more modern take on it. And so any app or any website you want, you can have it show up as an app with its own separate window. And it uses its own an app with its own separate window. And it uses its own internal browser isolated from the system browser. Just don't call them WAPs. Yeah, they're not WAPs.

But this is nice. I played around. I had one that didn't work very well for me and a couple that worked just fine. So three apps for you. And if you're on ARM or something like that, to be able to take some of these websites that you frequently have to use in the web browser and just break them out into their own window with their own process is really nice and that's what web apps does so three count them three fedora media writer gdm settings and web apps which i will have links for in the show notes well i'm gonna i'm going to definitely keep fedora 41 on my macbook but I suppose you boys, you're probably retooling for our episode next week because we're going a whole different direction. Yeah, we are.

It's going to be fun, though. Do we give a little hint of what we're doing or do we just keep it a mystery? Well, if you're a Seuss lizard, you're probably going to want to listen up. But also, you know, we're going to address a longstanding issue that Brent has had on one of his laptops, and we're going to solve it live on the show next week. So it should be a lot of fun. There'll be a little bit something for everybody. And you still can boost in the distro that you have used the longest, how long you stuck with it, and if you're still using it. And we also are still soliciting your favorite versions of SUSE and OpenSUSE.

versions of Seuss and OpenSeuss. So right now, I have one for 9.3, two for Tumbleweed, one for Aeon, one for Leap, and then we had, I think, one person might have been on... No, it was Leap, yeah. So it's not... It's kind of spread. I guess Tumbleweed has two votes.

It's the only one that has two votes right now. We're looking for the break away from the audience, and we'll explain why next week. You still have time to boost in your favorite version of Seuss, and the distro you spent the most time with. And of course, you can always join us live. You know we will be live next week, as we do every single week. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yep. We do it on a Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.

We're also live in your podcasting 2.0 app of choice, so we'll be pending in there. And when we go live, you can just tap and listen. And, of course, jblive.tv will be lit up, and jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar has that time in your local zone. We usually get in that mumble room a solid hour before we start recording or so, so you can always show up in that mumble room, too,

and listen in and participate. Links to what we talked about today, well, that's at linuxunplugged.com slash 587. You'll also find our Mumble info, Matrix info, RSS feeds, and all that. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of the Unplugged program. I'll see you next Sunday, as in Tuesday, as in Sunday. Thank you.