LINUX Unplugged - 591: KDE Goes Banana

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

The KDE and GNOME projects are working on official Linux distributions, but do we need more distros? We dig into their special sauce.Plus: Wes' top DNS server pick, and it's not one we've heard before.Sponsored By:Black Friday Member Sale: 30% Off for the lifetime of your Membership! Code: blackfriday 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.FMFirst Router Designed Specifically For OpenWrt Released — The OpenWrt One costs $89 with a case ($68.42 for the logic board only) and is hacker-friendly, featuring robust hardware specifications such as a MediaTek MT7981B SoC, dual Ethernet ports (2.5 GbE and 1 GbE), USB-C power, and modular expansion options.Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros"KDE Linux" (codenamed "Project Banana")Akademy 2024 - Saturday 7th September - Room 1 - YouTubeAn Operating System of Our Own - Akademy 2024 - FTVAdrian VovkA Desktop for AllGNOME OS NightlyFitting Everything TogetherShell Yes! | Push the Button2024 Tuxies.Party — New category based on your feedback, and we've cleared out the hall of fame, all distros and desktops up for a vote!Reminder that PlanetNix Call for Papers is still open!Technitium DNS ServerTechnitiumSoftware/DnsServer: Technitium DNS Server — Technitium DNS Server is an open source authoritative as well as recursive DNS server that can be used for self hosting a DNS server for privacy & security. It works out-of-the-box with no or minimal configuration and provides a user friendly web console accessible using any modern web browser.Technitium Blog: Running Technitium DNS Server on Ubuntu LinuxDnsServer/docker-compose.ymltechnitium-dns-server - MyNixOSNixOS Search - Options - technitiumtechnitium-dns-server.nixMembership Black Friday Sale 30% offAnnual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Errands — Todo application for those who prefer simplicity.Errands GitHub Page

Well, I made me a little pre-show purchase. It's been a while. What'd you get? So the first router designed for OpenWRT has been released. It's $89. Only $68 if you just want the board, which might be all we really need. But I got the whole kit. In there, it's got some robust hardware.

It's got a MediaTek MT7981B SoC. Dual Ethernet ports. Oh, excellent. One's 2.5 and one's 1 gigabit. Okay. USB-C power. Nice. Modular expansion options.

Don't know what that means yet, but cool. $10 of the purchase goes to OpenWRT's fund. It's built to be flashable in a way that it should not ever brick. So you can experiment with different firmwares, updates, and it should be safe. Right. I assume this also means the hardware was chosen to be well supported.

So it's not like some proprietary kernel that's locked to a specific version. You got it. And, you know, I mean, a $90, I think it could make a nice little studio firewall. And I haven't had a proper open WRT box in a long time.

And I think they worked with the Software Freedom Conservancy to ship this thing because the SFC made a big announcement about it. And it's pretty exciting. I think it was just yesterday, so it was like Saturday this came out. Okay, well, you'll have to report back because this could be a nice little recommendation for friends and family. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, both the KDE Plasma and Gnome projects are working on official Linux distributions they hope could be your daily driver. Do we really need yet more distros? And what is the special sauce that's going to draw you in? We'll take a look at that. Plus, later on in the show, Wes has been using a DNS server and tool that I think you are going to draw you in. We'll take a look at that. Plus, later on in the show, Wes has been using a DNS server and tool that I think you are going to love because he's been talking to me about it. I'm like, yes, let's talk about this on the show. It's awesome. And then we'll round it out

with a great pick, some great boosts, and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's bring in that virtual lug. Time appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. Hello. Howdy. Hello. Well, greetings mumble room. Hey Chris, hey Russell. Howdy. Hello. Well hey. Welcome in. And hello up there in quiet listening as well. Nice to have you here.

And a big good morning to Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. It is the easiest way to connect your devices directly to each other wherever they are, whatever network they're on, whatever OS they're running on, whatever architecture that OS is using and it's all protected Thank you. like me no more inbound ports on any of your firewalls build a flat network and use tailscale go get 100 devices for free try it out tailscale.com slash unplugged and thank you to tailscale for sponsoring this here program tailscale.com slash unplugged

Well, we have some news to get into this week, boys. In fact, maybe the biggest distribution news since this podcast has started. Whoa. Don't you think? I mean, think about the scale of this. It's huge. Well, let's hear it. And it's building on trends that we have been talking about for a couple of years. This week, we want to talk about KDE Linux, codenamed Project Banana, and GNOME OS.

KDE Linux is a new creation. GNOME OS has been around for a while, and it's evolving into something they hope can be your daily driver. Now, on September 7th at Academy 2024, there was a talk given by one of the co-creators of KDE Neon, and they talked about the reality of building a KDE Linux, an operating system of their own. And it is now gathering a bit of steam. It's got a wiki, they're putting things together. There's some early ISOs. Neon remains a thing. But this is a whole new endeavor based on Arch Linux with an immutable layer approached design. You might be asking, why not Neon?

Well, Neon has worked really well as a way for people to test and try out KDE. But Neon, ironically, suffers from using LTS. Yeah, kind of the initial idea, right, was we'll have a rock-solid based system, let the Ubuntu LTS do what they're good at, which is making a rock-solid system that you can just kind of rely on to have hardware support and just work where you need it to. And then, you know, they could focus on shipping the latest KDE software on top. Yeah. Now, the thing is, as KDE Plasma moved on and they needed new features in the underlying operating system to support them in Plasma, they ran into issues that ironically would break the LTS promise.

An example they cited in the talk is Pipewire. They wanted Pipewire before Ubuntu LTS had Pipewire because they needed to build Plasma with Pipewire support. Yeah, I think at least here on the show we can sympathize with that one. Yeah. The other one, the other use case that kind of registered with me is they've had hardware vendors approach them saying we want to ship a plasma desktop so then they say okay well you could go get open susa with plasma and they say well we already have an open susa laptop we want a plasma laptop well you can go get this kde neon yeah but it's kind of late in the development cycle and you don't have the drivers for our new laptops

and i think and they were really in the spot where they wanted to recommend something that hardware vendors could use directly or users yeah and it seems like kde neon uh never really got to the point of being quite a recommendation i mean you know you can if you want but like what really shined was in allowing you to test the latest kde yeah and that's what i'm running here and it it has been a little brittle. I have to be honest. It's broken actually right now. So it has been brittle at times. That's right. We were going to do something about that last week. Yeah, it's the package management stuff.

It just breaks from time to time, about twice a year. You know, they also kind of stressed in the talk that because you run out of, you know, you need, you end up needing things that just aren't packaged or versions too old in the LTS. You know, now suddenly you're having to maintain those. And the whole point was to allow someone else to do that so you can focus on the KDE stuff. So KDE Linux, or aka Project Banana, will have three target use cases. Testing Edition, built from Git Master and released daily. Enthusiast Edition, which ships released software and release to users on upstream KDE schedule. That's another problem is there's no distro that really syncs to KDE schedule because KDE

schedule is not exactly fit or set. And then there'll be a stable edition, which ships only the released on a delayed schedule based on a TBD quality metric for everyone else. So testing, enthusiast, and stable edition. And that stable's kind of new. I mean, it's not new to KDE distros out there, but, you know, from the project itself, because, I mean, maybe there are now neon ones, but at least for a while, you kind of you just kind of got either

really, really fresh or really fresh. Yeah. Now here's the architecture. Because you might, this might sound familiar to you. It's going to be based on Arch. It's going to use immutable areas like user and other places. It's going to have ButterFS for the file system. It'll have a read-only base like SteamOS or Fedora KinoNite

or SUSE, COPL, or whatever it's called. It'll do atomic image-based updates, A-B rollback functionality. With system reboot, I believe. System reboot, yep. Apps will be flat pack based, Wayland by default. I think there's also support for confined snaps.

Okay. This sounds a lot like, well, UBlue or a lot like Silverblue or what Valve created because this one here in particular is Arch based. Are you picking up a trend? Yeah. sounds a lot like, well, UBlue or a lot like SilverBlue or what Valve created. Because this one here in particular is Arch-based. Are you picking up a trend? Yeah.

Are you picking up a trend? Because I'm picking up a trend. I think this is fascinating. Yeah, so Systemd sysextent. Systemd sysextent allows users to overlay developer content on top of slash user without impacting the base system. So this will be a way they'll overlay things on top of an immutable slash USR. Yeah, right. So you can't actually, it's not mutable in the sense that you can touch the layers,

but you can do that cool composition thing and add more layers on top as a system extension. So, I mean, the immediate question that comes to mind is, why don't I just use Silverblue? Why don't I just use the fedora plasma spin? What about kubuntu? So this is their argument. A, number one, it's distributed directly by KDE. And they argue this has several advantages. The chain of responsibility is never gated to a third party. Like they talk about how there's a weird disconnect where they create something and then everybody else ships it for them. KDE and KDE EV can have a direct relationship with third parties,

like hardware OEMs. And they say the last one here is KDE can explicitly recommend it without, quote, picking favorites from their distro partners. They also want to design something that has no packaging knowledge required to develop for it. I thought that was a really interesting aspect of the talk. Kind of stressed like, you know, packaging for the most part is really separate from the actual sort of programming. He had a packed room and he asked people to raise their hand if they've ever packaged software for Linux and not a single person in the room raised their hand.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, there's been some focus here on like, well, let's not deal with that. We don't, you know, if we're shipping whole images anyway, we don't strictly need packages. And it's kind of interesting to see what does that actually look like in practice in the field. You know, it just strikes me, Wes, is something that we've commented on the show a couple of years ago. We have the summer of immutability. We've been discussing on the show that immutable layer-based Linux distributions are clearly a trend that's up and coming.

That's not just us saying that's pretty obvious. plays out is Linux's growth currently is coming from experts, system administrators, DevOps engineers, people that understand containers and composing systems and layers of systems. That is the new audience for Linux because this tooling lets them build systems without even ever having to worry about how to package something. They can orchestrate and design, distribute, build, and maintain systems using the same tooling they maintain their infra with and they deploy their applications with. And now all of that learned skill over the last few years that companies like Red Hat and others have invested a ton of resources

in getting people up to speed on is being applied to building Linux systems. And so we are seeing a plethora and an explosion of these immutable image-based Linux systems because the tooling is becoming available to more and more people. And arguably, it could create a fairly good experience, especially for certain types of systems. But all of these, we're going to talk about NomOMOIS here in a second, they're all really based on this idea that Lennart Pottering published back in 2022 about, what did he call it, Wes, fitting everything together? And the TLDR of Lennart's very long post was hermetically seal slash user,

post was hermetically seal slash user, popularize image-based OSs with modern security properties built around immutability, secure boot, TPM2 verification, adaptability, auto-updating, the ability for users to factory reset, and some common uniform components like systemd. Yeah, and systemd has added a lot to be able to enable this kind of composition, you know, because if you are going to, you know, seal things off, turn things into images, ship file in slash user, now you can say like, oh, well, I can use system extensions to just add this new version over here in a way the systemd understands that I want this to override it.

So, Brentley, I'm curious, your thoughts as a longtime Plasma user, you've jumped around from distributions, but always stuck with Plasma. Would KDE Linux be something you'd consider? And what would it take for you to actually seriously use it? I think it is something I would

consider. I remember when I first got into KDE, I was thinking, okay, what's the most KDE offering out there? And it was a little confusing to find that. I think as a new user back then, I was aware of distributions, but there were so many permutations. You have this distribution doing all of these different desktops, and you can have another distribution doing the exact same thing, but then those experiences were very different. So which one was most vanilla KDE was really the question I was asking myself, and it wasn't always easy to answer that question. Where this offering, KDE Linux, seems pretty straightforward that it's going to be vanilla KDE right out of the box.

And it sounds like this would be more end-user focused. I looked, Chris, you helped me look at Neon a little while ago as a potential option, and it never really felt appropriate for me because it's focused on being a testing distribution. Uh, I mean, I guess that's what you're discovering now with things being a little bit broken in front of you, but, um, so I think this is really attractive and I do think there's a user base for it. I wonder though, if it might cause issues with the relationships they already have with other distributions. Like if you look at Kubuntu, what does that mean for a distribution like Kubuntu? Does it make that project go away?

Does it reduce its user base? Those are things I am curious about and slightly worried about too. I mean, we've been building these relationships for decades now, really, if you look at some of these software projects. So how will that change if this distribution really takes off? I'm curious. I've used KDE Neon for years, because especially at the time when I started using it, you know, I was familiar with the base OS, so I could have latest KDE plus a system that I knew how to deal with, you know? And I mean, we used it in the studio and added all the fancy audio stuff that we needed. I'm curious. I think there's lots of users, probably most users that you could, you know, who don't need to do anything like that with a machine.

It would be, this would be a great fit for. I'm curious what my experience would be like if I want to try to like tweak and push and if there'll be guidance for that or if it's kind of not what they're aiming for yeah yeah they do say they do have a list of things that they are not really going to focus on which is you know kind of i kind of i'm glad they put it out there um yeah make it up front it sounds like they're not going to support runtime installation of kernel modules yeah okay there you go that might limit some use cases. Older NVIDIA proprietary kernel driver, if you have any NVIDIA card that's reasonably priced, probably not going to work. Virtual box is an example. It requires out-of-tree modules, probably not going to work. Of course,

you could always use QMU and KVM. Any kind of vendor-specific kernel module, you're not going to be able to load with this sucker. So it's not every work case, but that's less and less folks as time goes on. It's pretty impressively so. So that's sort of skating to where the puck's going as far as I'm concerned. And I could see it limiting some folks, but as time goes on, less and less. it was like, oh, wow, this is actually a very interesting way of bundling software for that specific use case. But I think we're seeing here how that use case is actually really attractive. You've said a couple times you just want SteamOS so you can run it on your desktop. And is this exactly what you've been asking for? Well, what do you think of this, Brent, as a metric of success?

You know, what if a few years after this KDE Linux exists or Project Banana? I hope they lean into the banana thing. I think it's fun. What if Valve announced like SteamOS 4 or 5 is based on KDE Linux? You're getting prepped for our predictions episode, aren't you? I was thinking a little bit about the predictions episode. You know, just to me,

because I think Valve created something because they had to. Yeah. And now maybe they've invested the time and the infrastructure and it just makes sense to maintain that. But I wonder if the folks at Valve took kind of a 50,000-foot view at it and said, well, if we were to reset the clock, we would just go with this and add our overlay, our stuff on top of it. And, you know, let them do all the hard work because creating an operating system is not easy. Might as well defer if you can. So maybe I think would a benchmark of success be that companies like Valve or other companies start basing off of KDE Linux and KDE Linux becomes a base distro?

I think so. I am curious, you know, I think it was kind of mentioned in the talk, too, that Neon was sort of also always the ugly stepchild of the project because it kind of wasn't super official or loved or like okay yeah use it for testing it could be a nice place for that but this is a whole different sort of like hey this we're making this thing for you to use please use it how do you feel about this being based on arch of all distros you know i think that gives it assuming how they manage it i think that gives them access to lot more modern packaging, which is probably one of the things they're trying to solve. Again, sort of like SteamOS. You recall the Steam Runtime.

I mean, not to draw parallels here, but the Steam Runtime originally based on Ubuntu. And, well, it is now. But SteamOS, now based on Arch. Why? They needed stuff from upstream. they needed stuff from upstream. And you see it here. If this thing isn't going to allow kernel modules,

third-party kernel modules that are proprietary, then you want to be as close to upstream as possible. And we want to encourage driver developers to go upstream. And it does sound like QA is going to be a major part of this effort as well. And shipping things as a whole unit in an image does allow you to qa it as an image which is something you don't get in base art right you just get everything integrated directly with you as upstream updates but the image nature of it really kind of you get the availability and all the nice parts of arch but you can kind of change that part of it i will say it does seem like uh

it's going to be a lot of work so So I think that goes for both of these. So let's switch to GNOME. GNOME OS. So not to be left out, developer Adrian Volk, or Volk, I'm not quite sure how you say it. You got a shot of that one? Brent? Yeah, Brent, you got a shot for this one?

Adrian Volk? I think it's a silent V. I'm going with the silent V Adrian Vok okay Adrian Vok has a corresponding proposal for the GNOME side and

he has been really kind of cooking on this for a long time but the Talkat Academy did kind of inspire him to make a post about what he would like to term GNOME OS into

which already exists it's GNOME's homegrown distro for testing and development for the GNOME desktop. It is not meant for a daily driver. It's mostly meant to run in boxes. Yeah, right. Hey, run this in a VM. You can use it to, like, develop and test.

Yeah, I mean, I think within the last year or two, they added real hardware support, so you can run it on real hardware. And it is, you know, it is useful to have a sort of standardized testing environment. So that's nice. Now, what's interesting about Adrian, in my opinion, is he has been building something called Carbon OS, which is essentially GNOME OS inspired by Lenart's POST.

Sort of the same kind of idea where you compose the system, you manage it with system D. You make sure it's secure from top to bottom. You make sure user is, what do they say, hermetically sealed. And so he wants to take over GNOME OS and turn it into something that could be a daily driver. And he has suspended working on Carbon OS. And he's begun work on modernizing GNOME OS. I mean, this is still quite a ways off, but he wants a, quote, immutable distro, self-updating, with atomic rollback built from the metal up

to support an unmodified GNOME desktop. And they're going to build the entire system all the way up. So both KDE and GNOME will have their own operating systems, essentially. And it does make me wonder, if done well, will we see adoption? Will we see other distros based on this? But what does it also mean for their current distro partners? It's a good question. There's already kind of, it's not necessarily strictly true, and you can definitely find

lots of ways to differentiate. But I think there's a sense at the high level that like, what even is the difference between some of these things? Oh, it's kind of like, well, what is the, what are the default choices made for you in terms of, you know, desktop environment and customization and plugins that they ship for that desktop environment? Does that even, does this further reduce distro differentiation? Well, and, or does the differentiation come down to ZFS support? You know, Ubuntu just added TPM decryption of Lux. There's so many things that are edge cases. Yeah, right.

With a bigger, fancier distro, maybe you get more coverage of those edge cases. You can play your DRM stuff. You got your codecs. You got your weird esoteric hardware support. what do you think Brent Lee is there is there gonna be kind of like you hinted kind of uh we're gonna go from I guess I have two questions for you Brent are we going now from the desktop environment wars to like some sort of wider distro war to put you know the most hyperbolic spin on it of course and then my second question does it kind of take that competition up a notch or is this or is this just something we're making

up i'm not clear i'm like i don't know how the personality conflicts are going to work out but what are your thoughts like is this going to notch things up a bit i it's i think the main question that I have too is, you know, you change relationships and all of a sudden the trends change too, right? But I did get the sense from Harold's talk about KD Linux that there was a lot of cooperation going on between KD and GNOME even on how to do this. between KD and GNOME even, on how to do this? Or even do they collaborate on the same base OS and just have their individual desktop editions on top of it? So there's also an opportunity for the opposite, which is collaboration to get something like this done. But to lean on your question a little bit,

it's like, yeah, this might start new, quote know, quote unquote wars if you want to keep it nice and dynamic. And makes me worried actually a little bit because – Okay. Okay. Is this the positive spin? Maybe they become a reference spec of sorts, like a reference implementation. Reference spec of sorts, like a reference implementation. Like, you know, when you're going to build a whole bunch of houses, you build a model house,

and everybody tours the model house, and they agree on it, and then they go off and build all the other houses? Yeah, I mean, I guess you will. Here are two prominent desktops. Here are them nicely, or at least in some way, integrated with a lot of components you're going to have to do as well. Can you just lift and shift a bunch of the systemd files and then sort of add your distro stuff on top? Okay. So I got a few questions for the audience. What do you think of this?

Boost in and tell us your reaction to KDE Linux and to Gnome OS. Which one are you installing first? And just our thoughts, your thoughts about our thoughts. Like, do you think this kicks things up a notch?

And also, what would be your predictions on how soon you might be running something like that? You know, maybe a year? What do you think? Boost in and let us know. Now, I want to mention the tuxes are open for voting right now.

Tuxes.party. We've had some good responses so far. We've got some new categories. The number one complaint I see outside the JB community when people try this is they hate that some of the questions are mandatory. And the number one feedback we got from people that are in the JB community is more questions should be mandatory to not skew the results. So it's a bit, it's a bit, yeah, but we got more categories and more questions in there. And join us December 22nd. It's our last two episodes of the year when we'll be recording the tuxies and other things. 509 responses. I think we can do better than that.

Yeah, 509. We can do way better than that. Way better than that. I should mention on that December 22nd live stream, we'll also be blasting sats to our live streamers to help them get their Albie Hub set up or their new podcasting 2.0 wallet if you just got Fountain. Maybe open some channels to a few folks and things like that. So December 22nd is a great day to make it to the live stream.

You'll have two shows, including the Tuxes, and blasting some sets. Also, Planet Nick's call for papers is still open, but it closes in just a few days. Oh, yeah, December 9th. And gosh, it's already December. Yeah, that's so, you know, eight days away, depending on when you're listening to this. But if you've got a next story to tell, go submit a paper. And then, you know, you'll have an excuse to go. And you get to say hi to your boys when we go there.

So link in the show notes for that. And then I'm still asking as well, one more thing. Boost in what you think the big meta story in Linux is this year, like the overall Zoom way out story. This was the year of what in Linux? Boost in so that way we can include your coverage in one of our year-end episodes. And I'm kind of trying to get a feel for what the audience thinks it might be. So the year of what?

1password.com slash unplug. That is the number one, password.com slash unplug. All right, real talk. Do your end users always, and I mean always without exception, work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps? I don't see how it's possible. I've been there. In today's world, it's like herding cats.

It's trying to get everyone to stick to just these very narrow range of applications and approved devices when there's an entire world out there telling about all the innovations out there. Your employees are using their own phones. They probably have their own tablets at home, maybe even extra laptops. They may be using cloud services you don't know about. So the question is, how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting in all these unmanaged apps and devices? That's what 1Password has figured out. It's extended access management from 1Password. 1Password extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device

because it solves the problem that traditional IAMs and MDMs, they just can't touch. It's security for the way we actually work today. And the great news is it's generally available for companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra, and it's in beta for Google Workspace customers as well. So you just got to get started by checking out all the information at 1password.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to support the show, check out the information, and get in touch if you think it's the right fit for you.

I have to say, I think I might still be in IT if I had a tool like this. Try it out. It's easier on the end users, and it's easier on you. 1password.com slash unplugged. Well, Wes, this week you've been flooding us with your excitement about a new DNS thing you're playing with, but I got a feeling it's not PyHole. No, no, it's not. And it's not even AdGuard Home, although those are both great offerings. And I've played with AdGuard Home a bit and I've definitely used PyHole over the years. This is, how do you think you say it, Technitium?

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Okay, not the easiest to say, so it loses on that count. But the rest, I think you might find it interesting. I was kind of looking around just to see what the options were because I was getting a home router build set up after a few years of using other solutions. And Technidium caught my eye, partially just because it was packaged in Nix

and this was going to be a Nix box anyway. And it seemed compelling because, while it is C-sharp and.NET, which is great, that means it's super-duper cross-platform, running on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Obviously, I'm running on a Linux server, but if you've got a Windows server for some reason, have at it. Also ARM, Raspberry Pi.

Yeah, definitely. And just, like, it seemed... PiHole's kind of a whole thing, right? Like, they ship their own stuff. There's, like, their version of DNS Mask buried in there. And DNS Mask also, just stock, also a great option. And so it's kind of like it's an ad blocker first with a side of dns

and dhcp whereas i think technidium is a dns server with a side of dhcp and ad blocking but not that those are not well implemented but you know the focus is a little different yeah it has i guess you'd say more power user dns features but what struck me first is just looking like the package here in x is only a 50-line file. It's basically just one build that says grab the source and build this.NET app. And the module code is about 100 lines, which is really just setting up a single systemd service. So that just struck me as like compared to something like PyHole, which I was probably going to have to run in a VM or something,

this was just simpler for me to understand what was going on. I will say the Docker compose file, about 48 lines. So although there's a lot of comments in there, if you took out all the comments, it's a pretty simple Docker compose, but it's a well documented Docker compose. So either way you go, I don't think it's, you don't have to be an expert in either one of these, either Nix or Docker to get it up and going. And you know, there are a lot of solutions these days too. You have like your sort of traditional things like, I don't know, PowerDNS, like high-powered DNS servers that have DHCP and ad-blocking plugins, which in a way is what Technidium is doing.

But Technidium also is like AdCard Home and PyHole in that it, out of the box, comes with a nice-looking little web UI where you can see graphs and like look at what things are in your cache and what things have been blocked. It's also, while it's not, unfortunately, able to be easily, like, declaratively configured from Nix, which would be nice, it does have a REST API. So I think you could do that, right?

Like, have a pre-start service in SystemD or something like, or a post, or, you know, have some setup that uses the API to restore your state if you need it to. For the most part, functionally, the things I care about, I'm curious if it handles this, is I want decent ad blocking and I want a DHCP server that auto-populates my DNS and I might want like a split DNS setup depending on how I have my tail net.

Can it handle all that pretty well? Yeah, definitely. I mean, so it's definitely got blocking. handle all that pretty well? Yeah, definitely. I mean, you can, so it's got, definitely got blocking. Let's go over here. Settings, blocking. You can do text block. You got a text blocking report. You got all kinds of, you can respond with an any address

or an NX domain or a custom address if you want. And I noticed for blocking too, like you can subscribe to like some popular blocking list. Yes, they've got a quick add drop down for a lot of the common ones, but you can also just put in custom block lists if you want. They've also got, you know, just controls for when you want, how often you want it updated, when the update is, things like that.

And then on the DNS side, they've got pretty sophisticated support built right in. You know, it can be both recursive and authoritative, so you can do whatever you need to there. It's also got a lot of some of the less common rfcs implemented one that i like is d name support uh which is like a c name record but for a subdomain so you can one thing you could do is if you want to like kind of functionally alias without it being an alias being a little more clear of what's going on is you can have a d name record from some internal host name you're using to your TailNet domain

system. Ah, so essentially just ignore what the external DNS resolves as. Yeah, right? So like I have it set up right now that this system's using NetBird so it has by default has like a domain name dot NetBird dot cloud and I have a host

name dot internal mapped to that on the inside of my network. Because most things have that, right? That's like my flat mesh, so that gets internal. So not only does it have pretty good support for setting up, you know, set up a diverse set of zones, forwarding rules, right? You can also have stuff just forward to whatever DNS server you want. It's also got something called DNS apps,

which are basically like DNSns plugins that you can add i haven't dabbled too much in into these examples uh yeah here i'm pulling up the app store it's got an app store yeah there's things like advanced blocking advanced forwarding i think this is where they also add stuff like uh split dns is implemented in here uh there's a weighted round robin if you do want a zone alias they've got it in here uh There's a weighted round robin. If you do want a zone alias, they've got it in here. They've got support for if you want. Let's see here.

Oh, they've got a lot of stuff. Geo distance, geo country, drop request, DNS rebinding protection. Oh, block page if you want a block page to be served up. So presumably, too, if you were getting really serious about it, you could write your own plugin in here as well. Now, I also, so you mentioned a web UI, which it sounds like you're looking at right now, but it also has a command line interface.

Have you messed with that at all? Have you had to use that at all? No, not yet. But I have played with the API, which is just kind of standard-y REST API and works quite nicely. I noticed they also support things like DNS over HTTPS, though. Oh, yeah. They've got, I mean, they've got a lot of that handled,

DNS over TLS, DNS over HTTPS. Do they do, like, recommended built-in upstream DNS servers? Yes, I believe they do. This sounds really nice. I'm looking at your screenshots you included in our doc. It's clean. Simple, easy, obvious layout, really. Huh. Yeah, here, I'm just checking here for the...

Technidium. Technidium DNS server. Oh, yeah, forwarders, so you can configure what DNS forwarders you want. They've got a quick select drop-down with the forwarder protocol, DNS over UDP, TCP, TLS, HTTPS, QUIC. I think they support HTTPdp one two and

three what are you using that uses mqtt i see mqtt oh that would be the hue lights oh oh they're using mqtt to talk back to you i guess so wild okay how about that you can control the forwarder concurrency um it does seem to be i i do not need a super high performance DNS server for my home stuff. But, you know, they talk up on the GitHub that it's based on async IO that can serve millions of requests per minute, even on a commodity desktop PC hardware. Load tested on Intel i7-8700 with more than 100,000 requests per second over gigabit Ethernet. So it'll probably run fine on a Pi then. Yeah. There's also robust support for proxy protocol if you're doing stuff like that.

Latency-based name server selection algorithm that works with the concurrency feature. So, yeah. Also some advanced caching stuff like if you want to allow serving stale records, like if you have maybe, you know, inconsistent internet and you're like, I'd rather just have that old record because I'm not going to be able to get it again at the moment. That is actually a feature I would specifically use. Yeah. Huh. That and being able to have internal systems have their split-owned resolution is really nice. The ability to create custom local network zones, that's sweet.

The DHCP server integration, so that way when a machine gets a lease, its host name is automatically added to the name resolution. It does the reverse pointer records as well. I love that. That is really nice. I'm curious what you would use a REST API for this kind of thing. Maybe graphs? Or I think integrations with things.

You know, like maybe you have a third-party system where you can get, you know, like if you wanted a different way to integrate with some VPN or mesh network, you could pull the list of host names and IPs and feed it in via a REST setup. Oh, that'd be great for getting a server prepped and ready to go. Yeah. Oh, I'm with you. You know, or if you have some like orchestration or automation system that, you know, doesn't

speak DNS but can easily make like a curl command or a Python requests API call. I'm kind of, I feel bad that I haven't heard about this before. It's GPL3. It's been around for years. So I don't know why I have never heard of this before because it looks really, really great.

Like it kind of makes my Pi hole look, well, sort of like amateur hour, which I love my Pi hole. I've had it for like four or five years. But this is really, this is clearly the way to go in the future. Yeah, they do talk up that they also have Raspberry Pi support, right? I can see just swapping this out. You can totally do that. They've got Docker Compose.

There's a Nix module. It's pretty easy to set up, only a few lines. So there's a lot of ways to get started. It did, though, bring up an issue that I was curious how y'all handle. Okay. The ad blocking side. It's great, right? I mean, DNS ad blocking is lovely, can't solve every problem, but it can do a lot.

And, geez, let me tell you, when I'm on an LTE connection, especially when the whole five-person household is on one LTE connection, it's so nice to save that bandwidth. So that's one thing. Well, what's your question? The ethics of it? Are you going there no okay no no um well when you have uh issues so i think last week or two weeks ago we were kind of

complaining it might have been on the members i don't recall uh about the youtube app oh yeah uh specifically losing history yep well coffee or death in the Matrix chat in LUP feedback posted a screenshot. Warning, your watch history is not being saved. This most likely is caused by a DNS

ad blocker or network proxy. To fix this, whitelist s.youtube.com or turn off all DNS blockers and proxies. So they nicely wrote in

and sort of alerted. I haven't tried, I haven't been home since then to test it. He's saying ad blocking could be why sometimes the YouTube watch history is inconsistent. Yeah. And then I was separately from this. I was having an issue where I switched ISPs and my last ISP was still billing me.

They've since fixed that. So it's fine. They refunded me and all that. Woof. Yeah. And so when I first I was looking up all of my interaction records and all that. Woof. Yeah. And so when I first, I was looking up all of my interaction records and all that, right, to make my case. And when I first chatted, interacted with them,

it was just via the online web chat. Sure, yeah. And then I went back, and I didn't see how to get to a web, you know, they had various support pages and like a number, but there was no chat. But the thing never popped up, so you could never find it.

Yeah, and it turned out that when I turned off DNS ad blocking with whatever lists I'd configured at least, the chat popped right back up. So just maybe so it's fine for me, but like sometimes I, it even takes me a minute or a frustrating long time to remember that I have that as a thing that maybe I should test. Yeah. You don't think about it when it's at the network level so much. I think about it more when it's a browser extension. Right. And that made me wonder, like, is this something that I could recommend for a less technical friend or family? Like, I thought about, like, do I want to enable this at my folks' house?

But I feel bad if they're left with broken pages that, like, maybe they mentioned to me or maybe they just sort of think that it's not working for some, you know, they have no idea. Yeah. It could have been working. Here's something where you use the API, Wes. You give them a little bookmarklet or something that just turns it on or off. Now that's an idea. Oh, yeah. Make it an easy little switch.

A button on the browser bookmark bar or something. Maybe a background system disservice that turns it on in the middle of the night again. Because they might not toggle it back on. Right. Yeah. Yeah, so I've definitely had this hit the family once or twice. Yeah. Yeah, so I've definitely had this hit the family once or twice.

And I haven't done a lot of testing yet to like, should I, you know, can I get a less strict walk list? Or whitelist a few things. Maybe only one or two things need to be whitelisted. Right. Family, you know, I think I recall it impacted us once during learn from home during COVID. Something didn't load right. And once for something my wife was doing related to her business, the page didn't load right. And it

does take me way too long to remember that I have pie hole because it very rarely. Right. It's so rare. It's rare enough that you forget. It mostly just works. Yeah. As far as the YouTube watch history, it's possible, but I kind of have pie hole everywhere. So I'm never not watching YouTube without Adblock. And it works most of the time. I don't know. That's a great question. I'm curious what Brent's thoughts are on deploying Adblocking to people that might not be even aware it's happening.

Because you're right. It does break things sometimes. Well, during this conversation, that was my main, like, I guess, daydream was, oh, yeah, I've wanted to apply a pie hole or something similar to my entire network here. But I do share the network with my brother and his wife and they're working from home now. And sure enough, if things aren't working, I know how to diagnose that stuff. But that's not the case for them when they're just trying to get stuff done. And my exact question was Wes's is like, for the few times that it's critical, you know, I don't want to be responsible for this. So I've typically run something like that just for my own devices. But that comes with a whole other host of issues.

So I would love to hear people's experience with this. If people have had this problem. Yeah. That's a great question. I'll tell you my gut instinct is to err on the side of breaking things. And here's why I say it. Yeah. But scammers have moved on, and they recognize that everybody has a mobile device. And one of the best ways to attack a mobile device is DNS and ad crap in the browser. You need to do something that is applicable to mobile browsers and mobile devices and mobile apps. So it's something usually at the network level, at the DNS level, or the ad network level. That's why I think it is worth some kind of

network level blocking because then you're literally protecting every device on the network to some degree. And that to me seems worth the trade-off. Yeah. And the privacy benefits as well. Yeah. But it does also sound like the exact kind of thing you could have a tech guy opinion on, and then you go implement it for real users, and then realize oh crap oh crap oh crap but it also strikes me i just feel this more and more is you know that just the divide between the people with technical know-how and who don't right like we can live a totally different experience where we don't have ads and we have access to whatever content we need and like all the things are we have better bandwidth better internet experiences in general yeah and then other people are left to sort of

suffer with like a free zoom account that cuts them off after 30 minutes and ad spam in every web page. Does it wash out in the end? Because the type of user that you just said, you know, about the better internet experience, we're also the types like you and I have subscriptions to Pharonix and LWN. Like we're more like the type to go support independent media where they're probably more like – I'm just generalizing here. But they might be more like the type to go consume mainstream media and they don't have a way to support mainstream media directly independently. They are supported by ads. Yeah, there is that. Like we are aware that we're doing it.

So it also means we take other measures to make sure we're supporting things that we want to. And I think we probably skew on average towards more independent outlets that have means of support. True. And so if you gave this power to everybody, they might not even be aware of that dynamic. It's a tricky thing, Wes. It's a tricky thing. Let us know what you think. The Black Friday sale is going on for one more week. The feast might be over, but the sale continues.

Use the promo code BLACKFRIDAY when you sign up at linuxunplugged.com membership, or if you want to get the Jupiter Party membership for all the shows and all their special features, or if you really want to stack the savings, grab the annual membership. It gets you all the shows. You already get one month for free, and then you can put the 30% off Black Friday on top of that. And it's 30% off for the lifetime of your membership. It's our best deal we've ever done. It also applies to those of you that want to upgrade to the Jupiter Party membership, or if you want to reactivate a canceled membership. Now, it's pretty sweet, and it only

goes for one more week. By next Linux Unplugged, the sale is over. You can use the link in our show notes for the annual plan. Or if you want to support the show directly, it's linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Promo code Black Friday. And now it is time for the boost. And now it is time for the boost. And our baller booster this week is from Mr. Wine Eagle, who came in with 50,000 sats. Hey, rich lobster!

He's using the Breeze app, which is a real nice way to get started. He says plus one for former user of Arch to NixOS conversion, laptop, gaming PC, and even NAS. Ain't that how it goes. NAS seems like a slam dunk, really does. I'm curious how the gaming PC went, because... Could be a little trickier. I had a bad experience this weekend. I've had really good experiences,

but I had a bad experience with a NixBox on gaming this weekend. I don't even know if it's... I don't think it's because of Nix, but it was running Nix. Sometimes things just go sideways, so... Wine Eagle, thank you very much for the boost. If you want to check in, I'd be curious to hear about your experiences there.

Appreciate that. Menno comes in with the granddaddy ducks. Things are looking up for all the duck. Hello from New Zealand. Loved the 612 kernel coverage. Super interesting and helpful. Oh, good to know. You know what?

That boost means a lot more than you might think. That's the kind of signal we love to get to kind of give us directions to go in the future, and it's exactly the kind of episode that doesn't get a lot of boosts, because there's not a lot to discuss there. It's just what it is. It's a matter of fact.

And so, there's not a lot for people to sink their teeth in and tell us they like it, so then then we miss out. We're not sure how it landed. Yeah, exactly. So thank you, Menno. That means a lot. Appreciate the McDucks.

User 21546541 came in with a Jar Jar Boost. That's 5,000 sats. Use a boost. I recall some conversations regarding training voice models and being able to train your own voice model. Well, Network Connect just released a fantastic video that accomplished this to integrate with Home Assistant for voice control. Oh, I've heard people talking about this. Ooh, neat. Since if I recall correctly, Chris was interested in being able to create a voice model based on his own voice.

I was able to train an Onyx model using the Piper TTS. If there's interest, check out the video the network posted, titled, I Failed in the Last Video. That's such a YouTuber thing. You know what is incredible at replicating my voice is Google's Notebook LM. It does love you. You can give it no sources,

so just say, like, paste, give it null for the source, and then just ask it to talk about ButterFS and Linux as a single host, and you'll probably get me. There's a good chance you'll get my voice. In remarkable fidelity, not only does it replicate my voice, but it even replicates the audio waveforms of our audio to an extent. If you get it and there's two hosts in there, when it switches to my voice, open it up in an audio editor and look at the waveform differences. One looks like a JB podcast.

One looks like something a lot quieter. It's really something. And so my wife, she's planning to ask you when she gets here after the show, Wes, how to get Notebook LM to say things like, I'm sorry, you were right. She wants her own soundboard. I can give her a crash course. So she's going to want a few pointers when she gets back. Chakuka comes in with 2,000 cents. What is the Mamble Room?

Ah, the Mamble Room. Do I say it like that? Do I have an accent? That is the Mumble Room. M-U-M-B-L-E. It is an open source audio chat app that supports different rooms with different permission structures. We have an on-air and a quiet listening room. And it uses the very high quality Opus codec.

And we have it turned up to a nice bit rate. So it's plugged into our soundboard. It gets a mix right off our soundboard. It goes into Mumble, which is an open source app. And then everybody in there can listen to the show live if they're in the on-air room they can tag one of us in the chat room to let us know they want to say something and we bring them into the show or like if you listen to the member version of the show the bootleg carl was in there talking about what's coming up for stream 10 and he just pops in and we can have a conversation because it's nice and low latency too. Thanks for this.

This is a great boost because, yeah, we totally don't always actually explain what the heck that is and just sort of assume people know. Yeah, it's been around for a minute. Our fault for using it for 600. Well, not quite 600. Yeah, we should do a basics one time, like a Lutz basics episode. Well, PegDot boosted in 3,333 sets. Well, that's very good, buddy. I think those are geese.

I want to vote for the Steam Deck as the best Linux hardware device ever. Hashtag? Oh, ever. Well, ever. I'll throw that in. Okay. So it's not in the tuxes this year because it didn't come out this year. Right. I had to remove it, and it did hurt because I do think it's still one of the very best devices peg i agree with you but we can't this was a i could not really conceptualize

a great hardware list you know it last year we had banger after banger of hardware releases and this year i was the pi 5 um oh, Droid H4? Yeah, the H4. I think maybe that's on there. It hasn't quite been a banger of a year for releases. Doesn't mean there's not good Linux hardware. It's just, you know, implications. That feels like a problem, actually.

Because we were with the dev one and the framework and stuff. All that seems nice. You know, there's lead times. Right. And updates happen only so often. Yeah. Maybe one day, updates happen only so often. Yeah. Maybe one day, Brent.

Maybe one day. Open Source Accountant is back with 2,000 sats. I'll be using the promo code REVERSEBLACKFRIDAYBOYS, which increases my membership by 30% of those dirty fiat coupons. Boost! Amazing. Love it. Thanks, Open Source Accountant.

It's always great to hear from you a zacatech comes in with 7654 sats oh my god this drawer is filled with fruit loaves i enjoyed the graphene os recap as i switched about the same time y'all did oh great no i'm kind of curious what you're using to stream music has uh v, VI music, has stopped working recently. Can't search for any songs, but I'm hoping they get it fixed soon. That's rough.

I hate it when you get all built on a music system and it goes away. Uh-huh. I'm in a bad place, so maybe I should go last. I don't know, Brent? I'm sure you have

some sort of wholesome offline flack-based solution, right? Oh, man. So, you've got me pinned properly, which is that I typically have not had streaming solutions. But our dear, lovely Drew got me onto Tidal, which is like that hi-fi music streaming service. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, oh, Drew, I don't know

if I'm going to use. He's like, dude, I got a family-like plan. Just try it for a little bit, see if you like it. He's so sweet., I got a family like plan. Just try it for a little bit. See if you like it. He's so sweet. And it sat for months, like installed on my phone and I never used it. But then he just like kept sharing great music with me with title links. So it only works like in there. I was like, true. All right, I'll do this for you.

And that was like a lot a year ago, year and a half ago. And you like it. I i gotta say i'm slow to the party it is kind of nice but i'm hesitating because we did just build that new server over here uh that we mentioned recently and i got a ton of music in flax as you know and uh some of the music i've been getting into recently is stuff that's in my catalog from like a decade ago and so i think i can do better i think i can do better but that unfortunately is what i'm using for streaming which is a title i would say no all right totally great better than what i'm doing it's better than what i'm doing wes uh well okay well i i will say

i continue to stack flax. Stack flax. Yes. In that if an artist that I like has an album out and they sell flax on the website, I will try to buy it. I love that. But right now I'm not actually listening to those flax because I'm already paying for YouTube premiums. And I used to use Google Play Music and I uploaded a bunch of flax back then. Yeah. So I've kind of just been stuck on YouTube music even though I have issues many issues with it so this has been a journey i also have youtube premium and i find that youtube well first of all i refuse to use spotify because of what they're trying to do podcast yeah right so

spotify i've taken off the table i use youtube the app, to discover new songs, which it is better at than anything else I've used. I haven't used Tidal. And then what I do is I create a list of songs I've really enjoyed, and this is really where it gets shameful. I go over to Apple Music because, you know, I'm paying for the whole family to have freaking Apple stuff, and they have a fine app for Android. And I go into Apple music and I actually download my best, my favorite tracks in there because they sound so much better than YouTube music. Apple music sounds so much better than Spotify.

I don't know about title, but I can absolutely hear the difference. In fact, Brent and I will sometimes sit here on the stream before we get going and we'll a B I'll be like Brent, which stream before we get going and we'll A, B. I'll be like, Brent, which one is the YouTube music and which one is the Apple music? It's so obvious. Yeah.

You can A, B it even over a remote connection. Are you going to make me start paying for Apple music too now? No. Maybe we should do Tidal. I don't know. And I don't really have the energy or time to like collect a whole bunch of flaxes. And if I could somehow like as i'm listening say like this and it would trigger some sort of download back i don't maybe

whoo you triggered me with this one whoo we need to pinch flat music yeah chris it sounds like you need an app that converts between all of them i don't know if such a thing exists but are you are you like taking the song manually and punching it into the other music so you'll find it yeah yeah that sounds yeah after i've listened to it a few times and it's on my like frequently i just move it over and then when i really want to rock out i play it from the apple music you know you just discovery i use youtube you could play it in youtube music and then use shazam to recognize it yeah and then it'll have a link to apple music oh i know um and yes i have youtube music turned up to high quality. I can barely hear a difference between regular quality

and high quality, to tell you the truth. I don't know. I think it's pretty variable too, depending on where it was sourced from. All right. Wine Hippo came in with a row of ducks. He says,

I noticed running my own Albie Hub requires some out-of-my-budget initial investment. Here's my first boo boost from Breeze. Yay! Well, well done. Nice pivot there. I think that is worth calling out, too, because it is kind of a non-trivial investment to get a lightning server going.

You need at least a little bit to get liquidity started. That's the main thing. Yeah. You're almost pre-paying for future boosts. So if you don't have that that you want to spend on a project, no problem. That's where Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z, really comes in handy. Totally. I think it's nice these days that we have so many options.

You know, for people that really want to dig in deep, they can certainly make that investment. But if you don't want to, you don't have to. And I believe people are connecting AlbieHub to CoinOS, which might be doing liquidity for them. And then you don't have to manage with that at all. I just haven't played with that yet. Well, on the opposite end of the spectrum here, Spectorius boosts in with 5,000 sats. You're supposed!

Via the podcast index. It's so funny, this week's episode was about Albie. I just set that up. Great! Well done. It's really encouraging to see so many in the audience willing to take the self-hosted route. Yeah. We know it's, I mean, boosting in general,

already a hurdle, and then, you know, doing the whole thing, even more so. But like, if we are not the people that will do it, who will? Who will? And it's so awesome that you can. That's so, it's just so incredible. I will say, it's really neat.

I was trying to explain this to my family over Thanksgiving. I'm not sure how it worked, but just, you know, because when you establish a, you're setting up your Albie hub or whatever, and you're setting up the channels, those are on-chain transactions. And so, you know, there you are waiting for the decentralized system to get to your stuff. And then your server spins up and it all works. It's neat. It is. Well, Caveman 16 boosted in 10,000 sats. Did you buy that from a certified vendor? Albie Jim feature, I didn't even know about that, and that totally solves a problem for me. Keep trucking with all those boosts.

And Turd Ferguson from last week's boost segment totally stole my home network name. Why is that my SSID? Turd Ferguson! It's a good SNL skit. That's why. It's a good SNL skit. That's why. It's a good SNL skit. It's a funny name.

It's the first thing I thought of. You know, that is really fantastic. So the Albie Gym feature, just a quick recap, is the ability to essentially create a small hub for somebody else. So you set up Albie yourself, and then you can create, like, subnodes.

And they use your liquidity, but it's totally private. It's their wallet. You don't get access to the funds, and it makes your liquidity, but it's totally private. It's their wallet. You don't get access to the funds, and it makes it really easy for people to get started. Thank you for the boost, Caveman, and it sounds like an interesting story. Lemons comes in with 2,500 sats.

Hi, all. Testing out AlbieHub that I just installed on my own RAID server. Wow! Hope it all works. Thanks for the interesting show. How about that? That is so great.

That's so great. Linux Teamster boosts in with 10,000 sets. With Albie Hub shutting down, I need a new lightning service. I just want something that can send boosts. I don't need it to play podcasts or really do anything else. Just boosts.

I suppose if it did other things, that would be fine, too. I'm not worried about self-custody, really, since it will only have some pocket sets for boosting. Keep up the great work. That does sound like a job for Breeze. And I do think you'll find there may be web-based ways in the future, so you don't have to worry about apps at all. You just go to a web page and do it. I think there's a few different options that are in the works. But I would say try out B-R-E-E-Z, right?

Yeah, at least that way, you know, I mean, then you got a lightning wallet going and connected. The key component is, at least for now, is right, it needs to be able to read the RSS feed. So that's where Breeze sneaks in the ability to add a podcast and you can technically play it, but it's really there so that way you can boost. Well, Kongaroo Paradox sent in a Spaceballs boost. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

That's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Satoshis to say boost. Boost! Yeah, thank you. Jasko came in with 3,000 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. And here is a vote for Void Linux for Distro of the Year. Oh, been a long time since we've heard somebody come in for Void. Yeah, but they're still going.

Jasko, look at you go. Every time I switch away, it only takes a few days before I find myself reinstalling. Nothing beats the lean, mean, green little distro. I've had the same install on my desktop for the past three years, and I haven't had any major issues between updates. Also, Sacramento misses you. The last meetup was a blast. Please come back.

I would love to. Maybe, you know, for scale. Let's get back to the sack. We swing by the sack for a little bit, pick up PJ, do a little meetup while we're there. I love that idea. We should get coordinating on that because we're going to be on our – I would assume we're driving. We may fly.

It may actually be more economical to fly, but – Let's take the train. Oh, that would be awesome. Yes, I'm into that. Probably takes – does it take longer? Probably. Especially with the way Brent drives. Well, I wouldn't be driving the train.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Hey, it's the fuel economy. I did hit records. Yeah, that's true. It's just, you know, they measure thing in moose horsepower. All right. Well, we'll let you know. We'll see.

Maybe we can make something happen in the sack. Thanks, Jasko. It's good to hear from you. Vamax comes in with 16,000 sats across four boosts. Oh, this is Cajun Spice. Okay, just a test boost here, but next up, would consider AlbieHub, but I'm a bit concerned about painting a target on my home lab.

Do you have thoughts on security and things like open ports? Hmm, so here's how we've solved that problem, and I don't know if everybody would solve it this way. We don't have any inbound ports on our firewall, and I don't know how everybody would solve it this way. We don't have any inbound ports on our firewall, and I mean that. What we do have is a VPS that runs NGINX that then forwards the traffic over our tail net to our Lightning node. And that just has several ports. I think it might actually just be direct NF tables for it.

Well, there's an NGINX as well, I think. Oh, right. But just for the Lightning. Yes, there's NGINX for a couple of the web apps, I think. But, yeah, you're right, NF tables. So. Well, there's an Nginx as well, I think. Oh, right. But just for the Lightning. Yes, there's Nginx for a couple of the web apps, I think. But yeah, you're right, NF tables. So it's really simple. And that way we don't have to expose our LAN's public IP, and everything's worked fantastic for months.

Also, I don't know about AlbiHub in particular, but a lot of Lightning stuff has built-in Tor support if you run a Tor. So you can do a Tor-only node. There can be reliability issues there, depending. ClearNet is recommended, especially if you want to do a lot of routing or something, but it could work for you.

Yeah. Thanks for the boost. Oh, yeah, here we go. To anyone considering Breeze, keep in mind the boost character cap can be kind of short. Also, shout out to the self-hosted Discord. Really nice group. That is true.

They really are. And very handy. Now, Gene Bean comes in with four boosts this episode, 6,318 sats in total. This is a tasty burger. I have a Tuxes observation. Best power CLI tool sounds like power CLI would be a great burger. I have a Tuxy's observation. Best power CLI tool sounds like power CLI would be a great option.

Okay. Also Tuxy's best power CLI tool vote is lazy git. Shout out. That's a good one. I like this too. Not only coming up with a good suggestion,

but like helping fill it out. Yeah, I like that. Double the work. Also has a suggestion here for Wes. Hey, Wes, just use Home Assistant OS. It makes Home Assistant super easy and reliable. That's true. It really is their recommended way to use it,

but you know Wes, he may want to do it differently. And another comment. Maybe I'll be saying Gene Bean was right. Well, Gene Bean has one last comment here for you, Wes. Have you considered packaging Pinch Flat for NX instead of just making a flake? Don't get me wrong. A flake is great. Just curious.

With the flake route, maybe the project owner would accept it as a PR. Yeah, true. I'm not. That's a good idea. I'm not opposed to that at all. I should get that flake finished. It's a good reason to make it sort of NYX packagesages style anyway, so that maybe the delta can be small. Yeah.

I like the way you're thinking, and thanks for thinking of me and sharing tips, Gene. Yeah, it's good to hear from you. Gene from Matik's in here with 2,000 sats. Make it so. Chris, I tried OSS Document Scanner about two years ago, and it just wasn't advanced as it is today. So I took a subscription with VFflatscan that I don't regret. However, I just tried OSS Document Scanner,

which was something I recommended last week, and it's much better now. Now, a note about Obtanium. I've used it since last year, but I noticed some apps on the Play Store are now more up-to-date than they are on GitHub, sometimes for weeks. This has at least been true for GreenWallet,

ProtonMail, and VLC. Yeah, isn't that funny? You would think that GitHub would be a place where you'd have the... But I imagine there's a lot of sort of, I don't know if you should call them legacy, but pipelines where the most considered artifact was these proprietary app store updates. And the GitHub is just one of the outputs.

Yeah, right. So much like FDroid has been a secondary, less attended to thing. If you aren't primarily using GitHub in a way where it's like trivial to automate that and you have, then yeah, maybe there's some more work to do. I have GreenWallet and I have not noticed it, so I think I don't care. You know?

I like that. That's a good approach, yeah. As long as I get it within a few months, I think I'm happy. Yeah, you're not missing features that you need to use or whatever. I could see FOMOing for a bit on a brand new VLC that did something really cool, but I'm pretty solid. Actually, I installed VLC, I think, another way. But that's good to know.

I would have defaulted, Jim, just to think that it would have been the latest and greatest on GitHub, but you raise a good point. Okay, so now we need like another app that checks which place has the most up-to-date version with the preference for Obtainium. It'll get the most up-to-date one until Obtainium just has that and then it switches back.

If only there was some sort of really simple way to syndicate information. If only. Red5D came in with a row of ducks. I set up my Albie Hub too when I got that email. Well done. But now I'm wondering if there's any benefit to using that instead of just my fountain wallet, aside from fully controlling it myself. Looks like Albie Hub is configured by default to not route other transactions.

So without some tinkering, there's not even the benefit of making a few sats occasionally from routing transactions. So as an individual who mostly only sends sats, I'm considering migrating away from it. Good idea? No, I think it's reasonable. I mean, Fountain does the work for you. And, you know, if you're really just using it for boosting and streaming sats,

I don't think there's any reason not to use Fountain. Where I draw the delineator is, if you want, there is an entire ecosystem now of not just Nostra applications, but websites that authenticate with your Lightning ID. There is an incredible, and they're good apps. There's a lot of them, and they're good apps. And you can tie them all to your Albie Hub, and you can set budgets for the individual apps. And it is a pretty slick integrated system. Yeah, the one we've played with is there's like a transcription service that just, you know, you pay with sats real quick.

You don't have to log in. There's no account besides the Lightning integration. It's just connected and authorized by my Albie hub, and I can just send them an MP3, and they transcribe it for me. It's great. But if you're not participating in that ecosystem, and you really just want to be able to boost and stuff like that, let Fountain do the heavy lifting, brah. They're going to give you a LNURL lightning address that works with apps like Strike and Cash App, and they're going to handle the liquidity for you, so they make it real easy.

So that would be my recommendation, Red. Thank you for the boost. Watsi boosts in with $12,345. Yes, that's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. From Fountain, in fact. Hey-o. All right,345. Yes, that's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. From Fountain, in fact. Ew. All right, all right.

You convinced me to try Home Assistant. Oh, good. It is awesome. Self-hosted on a Hyper-V server I was running with Tailscale so I can get to it everywhere. Good. Just need to sort out the DNS now.

Also, have you found a DIY option for a Skylight Frame calendar app or something like that for the kitchen? I have not tried to solve that problem. I have daydreamed about that. I'll tell you my kind of not as elegant hack is I have several tablets that are throughout the home that are used to control the Home Assistant interface, and each tablet has a custom dashboard for that room. And so I could see doing a Home Assistant interface, and each tablet has a custom dashboard for that room. And so I could see doing a Home Assistant dashboard that just has the calendar embedded,

and there's a lot of options there. And that might be really simple, because I could just tie into any back-end ICS file or probably even a Google Calendar or something like that if you wanted to. So that could be a way to solve it, but there's probably a lot cooler ways to solve it. If anybody has any suggestions, please do let us know.

Hybrid Sar sarcasm comes in with 5,000 sats. You suppose! Well, what do you think about my workflow using NextCloud for Markdown note-taking? He emailed into self-hosting about this, too. There is a couple of nice ways to use Markdown in NextCloud, and I have a

Notes app in there that I use everything I document in Markdown where I find it to be kind of not as ideal, but it's still usable, but not as ideal is when we're looping in a third party for one particular episode. And so what we use, and you could run this, or you could use something built into Nextcloud, is HDocs. They're HedgeDocs. And it's a really nice app that you can self-host that has a simple little database, and it is a real-time collaborative markdown editor.

I think I prefer it to some of the real-time collaborative options in NextCloud, where NextCloud to me seems like would really shine, is if you're working with the same group of people a lot, you all have credentials, and you're kind of already in the NextCloud world, that's where it really would plug in nice. And then you could take advantage of all the other things like user account permissions and sharing and some of the quick action

workflow stuff. So that's where NextCloud I think would have a notch up, in my opinion. All right, boys. I love that we had a small boost from Moritz from Albie. He listened to our Albie Hub episode. That's great. Making sure things work. I also see some folks sending some bug boosts for Fountain.

Yeah. Okay, good. I'm still, I have a weekly meeting. I'm now up to weekly again. So if you have any bugs, boost in and they'll be catching them. So I'll grab those for later. Thank you, everybody who boosts in. That's everybody above the 2,000-sat cutoff for time.

We had 53 of you stream sats as you listened. So you sat streamers helped to stack 55,588 sats. Now, when you combine that with the good folks that also chose to boost in, we stacked a grand total of 238 sats, 238,000, I should say, and 691 sats. Not like a huge barn burner for us, but not awful either.

As we round out the year, we appreciate these more and more. Of course, all of these will be going towards the boosties as well, which will be coming up later in the year. The part I like. Total unique senders, 74. That is great. Those are rad audience members that we're like, you know, interacting with. 74

of you that really make a big difference. If you'd like to participate, you can just get something like Fountain, Fountain FM, and then top it off with something like the Strike app, just suggesting a few easy ways to go, and then you can start boosting right away. But, if you'd like to go the self-hosted route,

go listen to our episode last week where we talk about Albie Hub and the whole thing. You can hear people are getting going. The whole thing can be self-hosted using an entirely free software stack. And of course, thank you to our members who support us with their support on autopilot by becoming a member. That Black Friday sale is still going too. You can check that out at linuxonplug.com slash membership. Now I got a pick for you, speaking of NextCloud, that I have sort of

helped round out the replace iCloud functionality. And one of the things in iCloud that I have sort of helped round out the replace iCloud functionality. And one of the things in iCloud that I thought worked really well is you could set a reminder on your internet phone and then over on your Apple Macintosh, you could open up the reminders app and the same reminder would be there. And my goodness, if you were brave enough, you could even go to the reminders webpage in iCloud. Guess what? That same reminder would be there.

And you can replicate this with several Google services. You could use things like Keep. You could use things like Tasks inside Gmail and whatnot. But I don't want to use the Google ecosystem. I wanted to solve this using my NextCloud ecosystem. And I want to be able to set a reminder on my Linux desktop and then mark it done on my Android phone. That's my goal. And that's where Aarons comes in. Aarons is a to-do application that is fairly simple. It lets you make multiple task lists.

You can add, remove, and edit tasks and have subtasks. You can manage all of that. You can have accent colors for each task. And you can sync it with NextCloud. Drag and drop in there. It also imports ICS files. So this really works. And I use it on multiple machines, all syncing to my NextCloud. And then I use TAS, the open source TAS app that I think you can find in F-Droid, which also syncs to my NextCloud. And then I use TAS, the open source TAS app. I think you can find it in F-Droid, which also syncs to my NextCloud on my Pixel 7.

I like this app. I'm trying it right now. I'm just making some notes for what we got to do after the show. And it's really smooth. Yeah. Yeah, you can use it without NextCloud if you just want to use it as a local task app. Aaron's will just work locally as well or sync to another CalDAV provider. app. Aaron's will just work locally as well or sync to another CalDAV provider. But it is give it your, it's so like, just give it the URL of your NextCloud server and click sync. And then

it pulled in all of them. And then I just went through this for the day and mark stuff off. And then I checked on my phone and sure enough, boop, boop, boop, boop. Yeah. And it didn't make me, which is nice. It just let me like, just start taking, making things. But yeah, here over in the settings, there's the sync provider. You've got NextCloud or CalDAV. Okay. That's easy. Yeah. It's a GTK application, but I have had no problem using it on my Plasma desktop and fired it up also on my GNOME 47 desktop, and it just looks right at home. It's the good kind of GTK application, I think, where it's like minimalist, but in a very effective way that does not feel like you're deprived of features, you know? From the screenshots here, it looks super nice.

And the one thing that sticks out for me the most is the download size. Under eight megs. It's refreshing to see an application that's just super lean and mean. That is refreshing. Of course, it probably depends on some flat pack dependencies that are like 300 megs, but that's how it should work. Once you have that stuff installed, you only need it once, right? And don't worry, it's packaged in... Arch? The AUR? Probably, yeah. Let's check, let's check. Amazing.

All right. Well, so you got to check out the Technidium DNS server. It just sounds absolutely amazing. Okay, yes, it is in the AOR. Of course. Keep your ears peeled for more news on Project Banana, a.k.a. KD Linux and Gnome OS. When they're shipping something that's getting close,

you know your boys here are going to be kicking the tires. And then last but not least, please go fill out the tuxes. We want as many represented in there as possible. It is tuxes.party. We will have a link in the show notes. And then last but not least, what was the big thing in Linux this year? It was the year of what? Please boost that in and tell us your thoughts on that because we're stacking those answers for a future episode.

All right, boys. I think that just about rounds us up. So you know what that means. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. That's right. The show is live on Sundays, at least for a little bit longer, almost to our last episodes of the year.

You can find us at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, over at jblive.tv. Of course, we're live in podcasting 2.0 apps as well. Or jblive.fm for the raw audio stream. Plug it into your favorite internet app of choice. Or VLC. Yeah, you can just put JBLive.fm right into VLC

and guess what? You're getting a live stream. And when we're not live, the stream is playing classics from Jupiter Broadcasting. Links to what we talked about, linuxunplugged.com slash 591. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode. See you next Tuesday, as in Sunday. Thank you. Live long and prosper. All right. Thank you, Drew. I think that's everything. Yeah, boys. I believe it is. All right, Brentley. All stopping. Live long and prosper. you you you