LINUX Unplugged - 594: 2024 Tuxies

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

It's the fifth annual Unplugged Tuxies; our community votes on the best projects, distros, and desktops of 2024. Join us for the final Tuxies, and the second annual Boosties!Sponsored By: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.FMLINUX Unplugged 542: 2023 TuxiesAnnual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Hello, friends, and welcome to a very special edition of the Unplugged Talk Show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. The boys and I are dressed in our best fits because it is the fifth annual Unplugged Tuxes and indeed the last Unplugged Tuxes. It's the episode we've been talking about all year and you've been waiting for. Your voices and your votes have been coming in for weeks and now the results will reveal in this episode so before we kick off the awards let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug hello mumble room oh hello happy holidays merry christmas all of you in there thank you for

joining us and uh we'll be be chatting more as the stream goes on. Of course I want to say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com. They are the easiest way to connect devices and services directly to each other wherever they are powered by. Tailscale is modern networking

for connecting devices securely to each other all over the place. You can have something on a VPS, your LAN, a mobile device, and you can get up and going in just seconds. It's great for self-hosters and home labbers. It's also great for companies. I started using it for self-hosting. Now I use it for my company. And it's fast. It's really, really fast. We can run listener traffic over our tailnet to machines behind a tailnet. They don't even know it's happening. It's happening so fast. You can use it for free for 100 devices for three users, not a limited time trial, and support the show.

No credit card required. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Go there, get it for free on 100 devices, and support the show. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. This is the fifth annual Unplugged Tuxies, and once again, we've asked our audience to vote on their favorite Linux distro, the best desktop environment, the server distro that beat them all,

and the best self-hosted app of the year, and so much more. Friends, this is the 2024 Tuxies from the world's largest Linux podcast, as voted on by our community. Year 5 begins now. So we're doing a few things different this year. We removed the Hall of Fame, so everything's up for a vote, which was requested by the audience. I think you could say we Hall of Fame the Hall of Fame. That's right.

So everything was up. Totally resets the table this year. We have new categories, new contenders. This year we had 1,587 responses to the tuxes. We think that's a pretty representative sample, so we're going to roll with it. And we'll start the 2024 tuxes with the best text editor of the year, year, year. Are you ready, boys? Let's do it.

Okay. So last year in 2023, coming in in the third spot was Kate. Pretty good little showing there. Not bad. A personal favorite of yours. I've been really loving Kate this year. Only, only just kind of begun to get edged out by Zed just a little bit, but I'd still say I'm using Kate more.

Number two last year was Nano. And number one, which I was kind of surprised by, number one was VS Code. You know, for a Linux podcast, I just, I guess I didn't expect it. If I recall last year, there was some Hall of Faming going on with Vim, right? I was going to say, but we did have a little Vim Hall of Faming, so it kind of explained things. We have some new entrants into the 2024 category for the Best Text Editor and a little bit of a shakeup. So, for 2024, the number four voted top editor by our community was Helix.

Number three, Kate and Vi and Vim and Nano came in at a three-way tie. NeoVim came in at number two with 15% of the vote. Just slightly edging out those other three. Yeah. And with 25% of the vote, VS Code is the best text editor of the year. Again, two years in a row, VS Code. Zed didn't editor of the year. Again, two years in a row, VS Code. Z didn't even make the list.

I just was double checking that. Yeah, and that's why I kind of included number four here just to be like, look, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't about to make the top three. People need to be Zed aware. It is pretty new and the Linux support also took a little bit longer than when it first came out. Let me tell you my favorite feature. Zed Editor

space SSH colon IP address and then colon path to file. And then you hit enter and Zed Editor opens up on your machine, remotely opens up that file and then you are live editing over SSH. You didn't have to do anything else. It is so

simple. And then of course it has all of the kind of markup language format you'd want. And they have some LLM integration as well, if that's your thing. But VS Code, obviously just really a strong tool that has been, I guess, well established now amongst the audience. I honestly thought Vim would win it this year. I really, really did just because Vim was Hall of Fame last year, and I thought that's why it didn't win.

Right. So to see it have a three-way tie with Kate and Nano, does that not surprise you? Well, so I also, I think maybe if we'd counted NeoVim with VI and Vim, would it have outpaced VS Code? People suggested we break it up this year. We did have them combined in the past. Fair enough, yeah.

Hmm, okay. That's a VS Code coming in. I mean, it's 25%, so it's not like it's blow away, but still it's a pretty strong number, 25% saying VS Code. So VS Code. Maybe this tells us about how fractured we all are in terms of what text editors we actually use. Or that we have a lot of really great choices.

That's how I'm seeing this. True. True. All right. Fine, Mr. Positive. Very good. Okay. Well, then our next category.

The best desktop distro of the year. In 2023, the Ubuntu family came in in number three with 18% of the votes. In number two for 2023, Arch, Manjaro, Endeavor OS, Garuda, that family came in at 19%, the number two spot. And we were blown away because it was the first time it ever happened. In the number one spot in 2023,

we got NixOS with 21% of the votes. We were really surprised by that. I mean, I got to say, probably our listenership, you know, is a little self-selecting. Given last year, we kind of pushed hard on NixOS. But I'm really surprised on how the three of those are so close in voting. 18, 19, and 21%. Yeah, true.

All right, let's see how it stacked up in 2024. The best desktop distro of the year in 2024. Ubuntu with 10%, Arch with 11%, Fedora with 14%, Asahi Linux coming in at number two. And the number one distro as voted by our audience is once again, NixOS at 21% of the votes. NixOS. Asahi coming in at number two. Wow. That's crazy.

What? How did that happen? Unbelievable. Do you all really have M-series out there running Asahi Linux? I thought I was the only crazy one. Or are we just really impressed with what they've been doing as a community?

Oh, could be. Could be. There is some of that signal in here, too. They have had a great year. Congratulations to them. That's, wow. That almost never happens. Asahi at number two. NixOS still holding its number one position, so the award technically goes to NixOS.

But 18% for Asahi Linux, 21% for NixOS. Crazy. I did not. I did not expect that to happen. All right, moving on. And now the best desktop environment of the year. In 2023, number three desktop was Sway.

Number two was Cosmic. And number one was KDE Plasma. This year, the number one desktop for 2024, with 37% of the votes, is, ladies and gentlemen, KDE Plasma once again. All is right in the universe. This is an interesting win because we removed the Hall of Fame so Gnome was available for a vote. Gnome has been our winner in the past until we Hall of Famed Gnome. Then Plasma finally

pulled ahead. Now that Gnome is out there and everything's available for vote, Plasma still won. And it's a decent lead. 37% of the votes. Hyperland was number 4 with 7% of the votes. Hyperland was number four with 7% of the votes. Cosmic, 18% at number three.

Wow. Strong showing, Cosmic. I guess people are impressed. I mean, they haven't even had a final release. Wow. I'm very impressed. And then Gnome coming in with 23% of the votes for 2024 at number two spot. But congratulations to KDE Plasma.

You guys have just had a crazy great year. Brent, we were just talking like Plasma 6 had gone from strength to strength this year. Yeah, and it was a bit, I think at the start of the year, we were not sure how Plasma would do this year. Because moving to a major new release going from, you know, the 5 series to 6 series. Oh, well, in the past that didn't go so well for the KDE crew. But this time, they nailed it, I think. They had an exceptional release, and everybody seemed to like the direction it's headed in. So kudos to KDE Plasma.

This sort of feels like the signal that they did have a great release, that they didn't botch it. Agreed completely. The fact that they're winning this, and in a decent margin, too, in a transition year like this, that is really respectable. So congratulations, Plasma Project. I also know at 4% Hyperland, I wonder, did that steal some of the folks that had previously been interested in Sway? I don't know. I wonder, too, is Cosmic maybe stealing a bit from Gnome?

Yeah, okay. Right, right. Fascinating. Oh, that could be interesting. I could definitely see that. All right. Right, right. Fascinating. Oh, that could be interesting. I could definitely see that. All right, our next category. We've all got to get work done from time to time, so what is the best shell according to our community? And this is a new question for 2024.

New category. So we don't have any previous entries. Coming in at number three with 18% of the votes is the fish shell. Number two, 37% of the votes, ZSH. And number one with a strong lead with 43% of the votes, guess what? It's Bash. You know what my takeaway from this is? People just use the default? No, that's the more reasonable one. Mine is that we don't talk about fish. Yeah, I was going to say the same.

This result disappoints me because I think fish is such a nice lifestyle improvement over bash. So people, get your fish on. Yeah, it's a good sign. ZSH, also great. 2025 could be the year of fish. I would love to see that come up one day. I mean, look at that. This almost makes me want to do the tuxes again

just so I can see it. I think you mean the fishies. I want to see. Yeah, we just talked about the fish shell and our favorite fish shell integrations. Yeah, best, you know, changelog moments of the year. Yeah, that would be great.

Yeah, our best patches. So that is a new contender, the best shell and the audience voted Bash. Interesting. I mean, it is kind and the audience voted Bash. Interesting. I mean, it is kind of the rock that gets everything else done. I can't say I'm really surprised. I did think Fish would be number two and ZSH clearly coming at number two at 37%, Bash with 43% and again Fish at number three with 18%. So how about that? I will say I'm kind of surprised at the chasm here between Phish and the other two. Like the other two are almost tied for first, ZShell.

I don't know that I've met too many listeners who use ZShell or at least don't advertise it on T-shirts. macOS does, right? macOS does by default. So you're going to have some folks there that are on macOS. And then I could see folks maybe coming from macOS that just want to keep it once they come over to Linux. It's also if you are doing a lot where you really need the posix stuff right yeah yeah yeah then you can and you can configure zsh and it's gotten less and less configuration needed over the years to be you know fish or fish plus plus you just have to do that whereas fish kind of is a little more out

of the box yeah and fish is going from strength to strength. Version 4 is just looking like a banger. New category and Bash at number 1. And we have a new category for our next entry as well. This one is the best power CLI tool. So your best power command line tool. And there was a fair amount of choices here. At number 4 is TLDR with 9%. At 11%, with our number 3 three slot is Zellej. I made Wes say it.

It's a great app. Number two. I'm using it all the time. Oh, yeah. Number two is an alternative, a precursor, and it's a great app as well. Everybody knows Screen. With 17% of the boats, it comes in at number two, Screen. And then the old go-to coming in at number one with a pretty strong 41% of the votes.

It is, without much surprise, T-MUX. Number one with 41% of the votes, T-MUX. I kind of, I don't mean to be this guy, but I kind of feel like this is a fish shell moment. Maybe people haven't tried Zalgy? Well, so the thing is, right, like, I mean, screen is everywhere. For one thing, it's everywhere. But I think T-MUX is now, too.

Yeah. You know, it's almost overtaken screens. I don't know how well screens maintain anymore. And Zalgy isn't. Right. Yeah, that is the thing. But if you got a Nixbox. But like it is, it is worth the work-G isn't. Right. Yeah, that is the thing. But if you've got an Xbox. But like it is,

it is worth the work with Phish. It really is. You and I have done it and then we've combined it with, what's that web, the web sharing of the TTY app, the web? Oh, Teammate. Is that Teammate?

Yeah. That's Teammate? Oh, okay. All right, that's Teammate. So Teammate's another option where you can kind of do like a shared command line and then, you know, you layer something like a screen or Zalgy on top of that. It's pretty robust. But I don't think I have, I put it on the list, but I don't use the TLDR app. I'm guessing it's like, it's like a man summarizer, right? Yeah. This was recommended by the the audience and so it is interesting to see that it made it even in the top four of those if we yeah yeah yeah that was a solid audience recommendation i would not have put that on the list if it wasn't

for uh some of the input out there so thank you everybody so number one best power command line tool for 2024 is tmux collaborative cheat sheets for console commands. That's TLDR. Oh, that's TLDR. Collaborative cheat sheets. Collaborative? Oof. Nice. A collection of community-maintained help pages for command line tools that aims to be a simpler, more approachable complement to traditional man pages. Excellent. Okay.

Yeah. Chatroom has an interesting observation here. The top three kind of perform all the same function. So this seems like as a power CLI tool, obviously a safer. Chris, I know you've gotten into trouble before doing updates without TMUX, so maybe that's a motivator. This is a nice example from the TLDR man page

or not me, get up, read me, where if you do man tar, right, you get like, oh, here's all the command line arguments. If you do TLDR tar, you get a bunch of examples of how to do things with a comment explaining what the command does. Jeez, that is nice. That kind of rings a bell now that you say that, but that is great.

That feels like a pick we would have done like five years ago. Probably, yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, so our next category is a return category. So we do have results from the year prior to look at as well. It's a big one. We asked our audience the best Linux server distro of the year. Who really had a great year in Linux server distributions?

Number three for 2023 was AlmaLinux. Number two was Debian. And number one for 2023 was NixOS. Ubuntu was Hall of Fame that year. So Ubuntu was probably going to be the winner, but it was Hall of Famed. It is no longer Hall of Famed. Again, everything is available for voting.

So we have new results for 2024. Are you ready, boys? Yeah, this is a spicy one, I think. It is. Let's start at number five. With 8% of the votes, Arch Linux comes in. You can't use Arch on the server.

Nobody can do it. Nobody can't be done. Arch Linux comes in. You can't use Arch on the server. Nobody can do it. Nobody can't be done. It will not work. Number four. Okay. I'm surprised it's actually at number four. 10% of you voted for Proxmox. Okay.

All right. Proxmox lovers out there. I thought that would have been in the third spot. Coming in, though, at the third spot with 15% of the votes is Debian. Rock solid. Probably does deserve to be right there in the middle of the votes is Debian. Rock solid. Probably does deserve to be right there in the middle of the pack. Totally a great option. This is where the upset comes in.

Because like I said, we did have to have Ubuntu in the Hall of Fame and we removed everything from the Hall of Fame this year. So it was all down to a fair fight. So the question was, where does Ubuntu shake out? Ladies and gentlemen, as you might expect, coming in now at number two with 16% of the votes is Ubuntu Server.

Number two. Our community is wild. That cannot be the average. I am so mad proud of them right now because coming in at number one for 2024 with 27 percent of the votes is nixos unbelievable that is really pretty amazing you know i see a comparison here last

year only got 18 percent of the votes nixos did and this year 27 percent that's almost a 10% jump. Yeah. That is really, really impressive. And, you know, I don't see any of the RHEL-based distros in our top five list this year. Proxmox edged out AlmaLinux. And I just think that's fascinating. And I could imagine a lot of people are running, you know, Alma Linux or Stream inside Proxmox. That could very well be the case. And you can only vote for one. And it is, I think it's a project that we don't talk a lot about because we don't have a lot of hands-on with Proxmox

other than just we take glancing passes at it every few years. We like it, but we just don't. We don't have a lot of expertise with it. This one, I did not expect the best server distro of the year, honestly, to be NixOS. Just really surprised me. I thought with Ubuntu out of the Hall of Fame, it would be Ubuntu again.

Yeah, I mean, I thought Nix would have a good showing. Yeah. Because we've talked about it enough. But like, well. I mean, in our opinion, it does make a great server. Okay, well, why is it a great server, NixOS? I mean, we've talked about it a million times, right? But the ability to essentially describe your entire server via one file or two if you want and then just have it completely be built from that.

And then, of course, any configuration changes you make have to go through a checking process and they won't build if something's not going to work or something's going to conflict. It's extremely good at handling those types of conflicts and of course you've got the rollbacks and then if you ever kind of want to stand up your own infrastructure the ability to take things like the nixos modules and modify them slightly to your content so it works for your infrastructure and then just continue to deploy and build on that is extremely powerful and it's like being able to orchestrate all of that at the os level right so from the disk partitioning all the way up to the individual applications that are running. And then once you solve a problem, you can copy and paste that across your machines.

And you can kind of scale it out to like go full NixOS. You can go containers managed by NixOS. You can go containers managed by some other user space app. So you can do a lot of the stuff that you could do on Ubuntu, but you get the benefits of managing your base OS. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of our respondents, I wouldn't be surprised if they're using NixOS as the host OS and they're running a lot of things in Docker or Podman.

I bet you that's very common, especially because NixOS is incredibly good at managing Podman containers and spinning those things up. Also, one of the beautiful things is the package manager can actually output things like VM images or containers. Yeah, it works really nice when you have a minimum, because you can just turn on

tailscale or whatever your mesh is, right? And get the stuff for Docker and Podman, maybe set up SSH stuff, maybe enable a firewall, and it can be 50 lines of Nix config and then you've got a server going. It can be 50 lines of NixConfig, and then you've got a server going. 1password.com slash unplug.

That is the number one, password.com slash unplug. Okay, I have a question for you. I know it's a little uncomfortable, but do your end users always, and I mean always without any exception, work on company-appro and it approved apps things that have been vetted i don't think so not in today's world it just doesn't really seem possible everybody's going to have their own device they're going to have services coming at them all the time there's no way they're sticking to company approved devices and apps your employees are using their own phones and tablets and laptops because it makes them more productive too so when

you try to slow them down that causes friction So how do you keep your company's data safe while setting all these unmanaged apps and devices while still keeping everybody productive? OnePassword has figured this out. It's extended access management. OnePassword extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device because it solves problems that the traditional IAMs and MDMs just can't touch. It's security for the way we actually work today. And it's generally available for companies with Okta, Microsoft Entra, and it's in beta for Google Workspace customers. Go try it out. I think this would have been my secret weapon if I was still in IT today. I'd probably been able to stick in a lot longer. This would have been like a cold glass of water to a very thirsty man in the desert.

It really makes things better for IT, for management and for the end users. Check it out and support the show. Go to 1password.com slash unplugged. That is the number 1password.com slash unplugged. That is the number one password dot com slash unplugged. Well, the Tuxes continue here with best self-hosted app of the year. Seems only right that Brent himself reads number four. No kidding. Not only has he come in, he's been the goat for self-hosted a couple of episodes,

but he's been retooling and refactoring his entire home lab. And it's interesting to see these numbers. In 2023, Home Assistant had 18% of the vote. So that was number three. Jellyfin at number two with 20%. Okay. NextCloud coming in with 28%, which we were going to Hall of Fame. Wow. I don't need to repeat that again.

So this year, though, things have really switched. Next Cloud has gone to the number four position in 2024. It's gone from number one to number four at 11% of the votes. Jellyfin has also slid down one notch to number three with 18% of the votes. Did not see that coming. Did not see that coming. Did not see that coming. Did not see that coming.

And then, rocketing up the charts, out of nowhere, image comes in at number two. Amazing. With 19% of the votes, the Google Photos self-hosted alternative image is just taking the community by storm. taking the community by storm. And then, number one, with 21% of the votes, it is Home Assistant. The Home Assistant Project. Finally! After five years of the tuxes. I think it's been close a couple times. I have been waiting for this moment.

So well-deserved. I have been waiting for this moment. This is a life-changing, family-improving, world-improving project. And they just go from strength to strength. They just recently released the Home Assistant voice preview hardware, so you can do fully local voice control with a $60 puck that has an iPod click wheel on it it that also has a speaker port and it can be used as a media endpoint for streaming around your house and voice commands, all local,

totally private. So happy to see this. And I think 2025 is probably the year you boys have home assistant running too. I feel like it's going to happen. I am. See, this is going to make you cancel the taxuxies just so they keep the win.

I can see it in your eyes. This is it. This is... Oh, man. I remember the first Tuxies. I was so sad to see where Home Assistant was on the list. I mean, Image probably going to be number one next year if this momentum continues. I wonder how much this tells us, too, about where the audience is on their

own self-hosted journey. It's a combo of what the apps did this year, but I think I wonder if it's also sort of like what things people are setting up for themselves yeah yeah and i think google photos is just creepy enough that it makes backing up your photos in a self-hosted way kind of a priority and then i kind of also wonder do a lot of people you know with next cloud being so popular last year like did people have next clouds they have it yeah exactly so nextCloud itself is better than ever, especially this year, I think. Yeah, I agree.

And faster than ever on a self-hosted system. So I think the image value prop as well is obvious. It's a Google Photos alternative that does a lot of the same stuff and you can deploy it on your phones, Android or iOS for backups. Home Assistant is not self-evident why it is so great.

When you go look at it you're like why is chris talking about life-changing family improvement world improving like what is he talking about it's stupid no no it is it literally will change your life and it will change your family's life and it could be for the better and it's a fantastic i think it's one of the most important open source projects out there but it's not self-evident until you start getting into the weeds. So you can email fixmyhouse at chrislast.com Yeah, hey man, I might start up a contracting biz. You never know.

God knows I've fixed enough problems. I'm just so happy to see that. I think this is the category that thrills me the most. Aww. I love it. It is. It's nice. It's great. It's such a good app. That's how much Home Assistant matters really. But it's not our last category. Now, it's the best community chat platform of the year. This is always a tricky one,

because in 2023, Telegram came in at number three, Discord number two, and Element at number one. Well, this year, it seems like things have shifted only a slight bit. Telegram is still holding the number three position, but there's like this other in number four now that's opened up, that's consuming more of the boats, just like something we didn't list. And IRC is on the long tail. Oh, oh, oh. Okay, here we go. What do you got here? IRC tied with Nostra.

No way. For number five. Now, below other, which is number four, but... That's awesome, though, for baby Nostra? SimpleX has 4%. Good to see. So... Yeah.

SimpleX didn't really register on the votes last year, which was a bone of contention of mine because I think people need to take it more seriously. Telegram, though, holding strong at number three, just like it was last year, but with more votes. It had 5% of the votes last year. This year, it got 10% of the votes. Discord, also holding the number two spot,

also now with more votes. Last year, Discord got 10% of the votes. This year, in 2024, Discord got 18% of the votes. So you guys got Discord installed still. Got it. Well, and apparently they've doubled down on it too. I think so. However, I'm happy to say

that our number one community chat app maintains its lead. It had 26% of the votes last year. And this year, Matrix and slash Element, I will say, got 48% of the votes. That might be one of our most, one of the most demanding leads right there. 48% voted for Matrix, which is really good to see and makes sense. It's a big part of our community out there and probably where the link was getting shared around.

Anything in here surprise you, Brent? I think what surprises me because of my own ideals is the Discord. I mean, we don't have it necessarily for every single show and we weren't specific that best community chat platform was only for JB chatting. I mean, a lot of people in other projects are using Discord. So yeah, the self-hosted Discord is pretty big. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I'm just surprised to see this tick up, but obviously people like it. And so choosing it for a community is, I guess, a good choice. But Matrix is better.

It's a network effect, right? I think that's what it is. And I think Discord's network effect has grown. My kids use it now. They didn't used to. For better or for worse. I mean, I think it is so popular for gaming and voice chatting that it does mean you probably already have it. Yeah.

That means if you need support for an app, it's just join this room. That's a good point. That's a little friction. I will say every time I'm not a discorder, every time I try to use it, oh, that interface just really full of friction for me. But maybe that's just a mea problem. And so many pop-ups. Okay. We're in good.

You and me, brother. You and me. And, of course, when you don't use it for a while, then. And so many pop-ups. Okay, we're in good. You and me, brother. You and me. And, of course, when you don't use it for a while, then it always needs to reinstall itself. And you've got to log in. And, you know, because it's very important, you've got a two-factor because it's so important. So, yeah. Anyways, moving on. The best Linux hardware of the year.

2024, we asked you what you thought really stood out. In 2023, in the number three spot, we asked you what you thought really stood out. In 2023, in the number three spot, it was the HP Dev 1. The number two spot, the Framework with 19% of the votes. And of course, for 2023, in the number one spot, the Steam Deck with 50% of the votes. No surprise there. Steam Deck year. So I was curious where this would go since we didn't get a Dev 1 this year and we didn't get a Steam Deck this year. So this category really opened up.

So at the number five spot with 4% of the votes, it is Apple Silicon. Okay. Which does, it's interesting that Asahi registered, I wonder if people were voting just because they were so impressed. Like they're watching it, right? Apple Silicon with 4% of the votes, 5%. Pretty good to see. Maybe it's a year that you could buy Apple Silicon knowing that Asahi would probably do enough of what you needed on it.

Yeah, and also now it's like the M1s are starting to get priced at a pretty reasonable price. True, you can buy used. And they work well with Asahi. So there could be that too. Number four with 6% of the votes, System76. Okay. Good to see. And number three, 8% of the votes, ThinkPad laptops and AMD hardware systems tied.

A little tie for number three, okay. Number two, at 11%, the community's favorite Linux hardware of the year was 1-liter PCs. Oh, that's fun. That's interesting, yeah. A lot of those out there, I guess. Yeah, and you can get them for, what, $100 or something? A lot of those out there, I guess. Yeah, and you can get them for, what, $100 or something?

And the number one for this year with 45% of the boats. Get ready for this, Brantley. This is a smokeout. It's unbelievable. The Framework laptop, 45%, number one. Holy smokes. Unbelievable. That's near Steam Deck numbers. I blame Brant.

I mean, the Framework, they've done some cool stuff recently, right? Like they came out with that RISC-V board, which is kind of an interesting thing for our community, I would assume. And also the just repairability of it speaks at least to me and I would expect to many of our listeners. So you know that 16 has that removable goopoo, right? Uh-huh. Did you see that they just announced an MVME storage module that you could slide in instead? Yes. Oh, it's like 24 terabytes of storage you can put in there.

Neat. Very neat. Talk about a scratch disk. I would love that on a 13-inch. It doesn't have to be as big. It doesn't have to be as powerful. Would love that on a 13-inch framework. Also better cooling and quiet fans.

Really happy to see some of our favorites in here too, of course. System 76, framework laptops, the AMD system is really nice to see them get some love. People still using ThinkBads. It's going to be... I say on a ThinkBad. Yeah. And 2025 could be a whole new set of options for this category.

So it's going to be interesting to see what we see out there hardware-wise. It's going to be all RISC-V. That's for sure. Alright, time for a brand new fresh category. This one was submitted by our audience. It's the best F-Droid Obtainium slash free app for Android that you can get. We've never put this to the vote before, but we want to know what do you think works great on your mobile device.

And I don't think you'll be too surprised by the results. DAVX 5 comes in at number 5 with 8% of the votes. This lets you sync to NextCloud. Yeah, super handy. Very handy. Get those contacts out of Google's hands. And countervents. Yep.

Number 4 with 10% of the votes. Fudo Keyboard, which we're all three users of. Now, this did spawn a discussion, of course, about the license. Yeah, not technically open source. That's never been a tight requirement for the Tuxes. This is free to use, and they'd like you to pay for it, but it's not technically free software. Tie and no response. So, like, nobody voted, and Fountain FM were tied at 11%.

So I'm going to give it to Fountain. Yeah. 11% is number three. Number two, your best app for Android that is free, as in money, Obtanium at number two. I like that. Yeah.

Best Obtanium app? Yeah. Obtanium itself. It is. It is. Super handy. This was the year that you dove into Obtanium, right, Chris, I think?

Hard. And I'm never going back. Never going back. I still use FDroid. I still like FDroid. Yeah. I still have some Play Store apps, of course, because you have to. But Obtainium is almost like a feature differentiator.

It's the example of something iOS will never be able to touch, and it's the exact kind of thing Apple should implement. It's the AUR for Android, in a way. Yeah. Okay, and then coming in at number one, and I don't think this is going to be a surprise to us behind the scenes, but it might be a bit of a surprise to those of you listening. this is going to be a surprise to us behind the scenes, but it might be a bit of a surprise to those of you listening. The number one best Android free app for 2024, as voted by our audience,

by 23% of you, was Antenapod. Oh, that's great. Yeah, good app. And they're slowly adding more podcasting to-do-do features out there, like podcast index integration, cloud chapters, and more. And it's just super fast and reliable.

Behind the scenes when we publish this show, AntennaPod's a great test app. AntennaPod's one of the first things we open. Make sure AntennaPod gets it. Make sure Castomatic gets it. Then we check out Fountain. We launch different apps, but those ones are so great

because they've always just gone straight from the feed. So we have just but a few more. Yeah, these last two are the freeform answer ones, so it gets a little more interesting. Here we go. I will note, too, just as a technical point, these are no longer percents, and now we're talking about raw response counts.

Okay. And the first one is... The best open-source project this year. 2022, number three was Proton. Number two was Mastodon. In 2022, number one was Home Assistant. So that's interesting. The Home Assistant did make it on.

Oh, yeah, right. I remember that year it made it number one on one list and not the other. Was Mastodon, did the Twitter ex-Elon purchase happen in 2022? I bet. I bet. And then in 2023, Image finally made it on like a, hey, there's this new project this year. NextCloud came in at number two. Super new then, though.

And Home Assistant again got like the open source project title. NextCloud, strong showing. Yep. But we have kind of a shakeup for 2024. And this is pretty interesting. Jellyfin coming in at number three, getting the respect it didn't get in the previous category. Image rocketing up the charts, and

Home Assistant dominating yet another category. Home Assistant coming in at number one, voted best open source project of 2024. So this is a little bit more of an open category. Things like Graphene OS were in here.

Ollama was in here. Even Firefox and Audio Bookshelf were in this category. So this was a little bit of our broader category, one of our broader categories. But, I mean, Home Assistant didn't just win by a little. I think they crushed 2024. That's the only conclusion here. They did, especially because you see Home Assistant, if you added the 7, the second row, and to the 46 that it got earlier, it really crushed it. I mean, Home Assistant crushed it.

Yeah, what square is different? Oh, there's an extra space. Okay. Why? I should have trimmed that. Isn't it interesting we haven't gotten this signal? I guess we do talk about it quite a bit on self-hosted, so I'm glad we covered it there. But, oh boy, I can't wait till you boys try out Home Assistant.

That's going to be fun to talk about. Well done. And they had a great year. And Nebuchadnezzar has expanded. They've launched the Open Home Foundation, and they're putting things like ESP Home and some of the new products that they're launching under this. And it's a community foundation, and they're open sourcing the specs for the stuff they're building. It's really good stuff. It's like an example of how to build a modern open source powered company that has,

you know, a budget to actually pay some employees and stuff. So it's definitely worth checking out. If you're not a home assistant user, that's my last pitch. Now it's time for the best newcomer project. In 2023, Hyperland was a newcomer at number three,

Asahi, number two, and Image was the best newcomer, brand new baby. And you're not going to be too surprised by the results this year, I don't think. For newcomers, it's great to see that Cosmic is number three on the list. Not too far behind at number four was Searching, so that's kind of neat. Pinch Flat at number two.

Wow. That was a late introduction to our radar even, so that's made an impact, I think. Yeah. We are all loving Pinch Flat, which if you're not familiar with, you can point Pinch Flat at a YouTube channel and have it download and extract all the metadata information,

save it on a file server, and make it ready for Plex or Jellyfin to play like it's local media. It's pretty slick, and it's how I'm watching my YouTube at home these days. Pinch Flat is. And it's an Elixir app, which that's fun. Oh, that is fun.

And of course, the number one app this year, as voted by our community for the newcomer in their life, Image. Image by a mile, actually, by a good lead. And that makes sense. Again, I think as I described earlier, it's a product with an obvious value proposition. And if you know a little Docker Compose foo, you can get this up and running too. So I do not feel like I'm surprised at all seeing Image here at number one.

And 2024 was the year of the Image NixOS module too. Yes. And also the year that Image got more sustainable funding from Fudo folks. Yes. That's key. Very big year for Image. Wow. Big, big year for Image. too yes and also the year that image got more sustainable funding from foodo folks yes which is really that's key very big year for image wow big big year for image and um one of those probably you should really check out i think the other if you're listening to this and you want to have some projects to try out pinch flat um and then i was really pleased to see didn't get a lot but albie hub got some votes and meshesh Tastic got some votes as well.

Oh, and you know what? Kind of tied across the line there along with those is Audiobookshelf. Nice to see that too. Yeah, that long tail there, there's a lot of ties there. And I think those are all really good projects. It's sort of all kind of split the votes there. Pinchflat's the clear signal though, I think from this list. Cosmic, not surprising because they're really kicking butt this year.

We're really getting some fun with some real you know tangible results pinch flat though was tail of the year recommendation coming in strong and if you haven't looked at image yet well home assistant pinch flat and image I think are the takeaways from the tuxes this year you gotta go try them out

that's a lot of fun we always really enjoy this thank you everybody who participated and voted we couldn't literally do it without you nope we really appreciate it and it's a lot of fun we always really enjoy this thank you everybody who participated and voted we couldn't literally do it without you nope we really appreciate it and it's a ton of fun linuxunplugged.com membership i don't really have anything for this i just want to take a moment and tell you how much it means that we've had people sign up put their support on autopilot and make the show sustainable through this crazy ad winter, which now is an ad apocalypse. I'm hopeful that maybe, you know, in nine months to ten months things will turn around.

But there's no way we would have survived or made it or even have any chance of surviving to whenever this turns around if it ever does. Maybe we get to a point where we don't ever care. So thank you for your support for our members. As a thank you, we have made two feeds available for you. You have the no ads version. So I guess you're not hearing this. Maybe let's put this one in for them, Drew, so they can hear this. Because I just want to say thank you and happy holidays.

And then you also, don't forget, have the bootleg version where you won't hear this. But you might hear an alternative version of this that I'll make up live on the spot. But it has everything else and a lot more. It just doesn't have, like, the best levels and sound because, you know, that one isn't edited by Drew. But you get two options like the full raw live stream or the nice tight no ads version still edited by Drew. We do that as a thank you to our members.

It really means a lot to us. So you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash membership if you'd like to sign up. And of course, there's the Jupiter Party membership. Jupiter.party if you want to support all the shows and get access to every show's special features. Happy holidays and thanks for the support. Well, and now it's time for the second annual 2020 for Boosties. It's our way to say thank you to those who have supported various productions at JB all year. Yes, thank you, everyone.

This is a moment for us to just stop and say, you are the gosh darn best. And this year, we received 1,768 boosts from 530 different boosters. I think that shows that it's really become a big part of the show. Yeah. And that's using open source software

and a peer to peer payments. There's no strike or visa or MasterCard taking a cut in there. There's no PayPal I have to go to and say, please, PayPal, can I have my funds? And then will you please take three days to transfer them to my bank account? And when you boost us, the sats all individually go to us immediately. Like the guys don't have to come up to me after the month and try to square up and like i you know worry about me screwing them out of some of their sats and editor drew and all the projects we often put in the splits they all get it directly to their wallet i mean it was also right we were able to fund pj coming up here

by putting him in the splits well and i know it's been a minute, but if you will recall, that's how we got to scale. So true. I know it's been a long time, but we funded our entire trip, the fuel, the food, the Airbnb, all of it. The stakes, like nobody had to pay us. It came from the audience.

It was really awesome. And we got to go to the first NixCon because of our boosters the entire thing was really great so yeah and then later in the year we brought up PJ which was also very incredible and in that case we were able to use the split technology to just send the stats directly to PJ. You didn't have to change anything else

it all just kept working. And the audience could review it right there in the RSS feed so they know everything straight and it's just awesome so really cool and along with that, we received 88,004 streams from 323 different streamers out there. That's amazing too.

88,000 different streams, which nearly doubled our database size this year, taking up 3.2 gigabytes of Wes's database. Yeah, hey, it's also on one of your machines now. I'm happy for that, please. That's great. That's double the size of the database than last year. More boosts. For some reason, that's the number that really thrills me the most.

It's pretty fun. So I thought maybe before we get into the totals, maybe we'd talk about the software that's being used here. So let's talk about the top clients for 2024. Number 10 was Boost CLI. Number nine, CurioCaster. Number eight, TrueFans. Number seven, FountainWeb. Number six was Podcast Index. Number five was the Breeze app. Nice. I hope that keeps going up. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really easy way to get started. Podcast Guru at number four, Podverse at number three, Castomatic at number two, and 66,000 of you, 66,000 plus, boosted using Fountain FM, the number one podcasting 2.0 app of the Jupyter Broadcasting community.

And the thing I think that is really attractive to Fountain, besides they have sort of some cutting-edge Nostra features that can be a lot of fun to play with if you want, and a cool clip system, is they host the Lightning Wallet for you. So they do all the plumbing. You don't have to really worry about that. And they make the Strike integration really straightforward. But there's so many good apps.

That is a great list right there. Fountain, Castomatic, Podverse, Podcast Guru, Breeze, True Fans, CurioCaster. And there's some unknown apps in there as well. Sometimes we just don't know. But we still appreciate you supporting us. What do you say, boys? Let's get into the totals. All right. Our top streamers and boosters for 2024. As collected by Wes's very sophisticated node scraping apparatus. I wish it is. It really is.

Digital Apnea was the number three sat streamer, sending 3,086 SATs via stream. Number two was Danistelli with 3,619 SATs streamed to us. And coming in at number one SAT streamer is Gene Bean with 4,558 SATs or streams. Streams. Individual streams, streams, individual streams. Sorry, not sats, streams. That means, just to make that clear, he listened 4,558 times while streaming sats. Wow. Yeah, that's amazing, Gene.

That's a lot of listening, and you are clearly our number one streamer. You know, I just pulled some more fine-grained data on the clients. And for streams, Fountain definitely still dominant, but then Podverse, then Castomatic, then Podcast Guru. For Boost, though, Podcast Index is number two, followed by Castomatic, then Breeze, and Podverse is kind of down the list, yeah. Huh.

Yeah, I mean, the nice thing about Podcast Index is you can do it from the web, so you can keep your podcast app. You just need to have Albie Hub. Yep, it's a really. Huh. Yeah, I mean, the nice thing about Podcast Index is you can do it from the web, so you can keep your podcast app. You just need to have Albie Hub. Yep. It's a really nice pair. Yeah, it is. I have a proposition here.

Considering Gene Bean gets number one in the total streams, can we just, you know, as a community, change his name to Gene Stream? Somebody might think that's the wrong thing, though.

You know? He's taking a bow in the chat room right now, though. Well, there's some more to come. Okay. We have one more category in the stream category. And this is the total stats streamed. Rotten Mood comes in at number three with 183,976 sets.

Squared Triangle comes in at number two with 281,500 sats. And the number one sat streamer with 550,434 sats, it's Gene Bean. Well done, Gene Bean. Thank you very much. Quantity equals quality in this case, brother. Look at you go. That's really great. Wow, Gene.

Thank you. It's also just kind of neat because we just, throughout the week, we see folks streaming those sets. And you don't have to do anything. I mean, boosting is great and we love that. But sometimes, you know, you don't have anything to say, but it's just a way you can support easily in the background. And it's pretty neat to see them coming in and it's like, wow, there's somebody listening right now. There's something about that that still just trips me out. And, I mean, you were hyping the, you know, the boost in the background. And it's pretty neat to see him coming in and he's like, wow, there's somebody listening right now. There's something about that that still just trips me out. And, I mean, you were hyping the, you know, the boosts in the Lightning Network.

And streams is kind of a unique piece of functionality that's enabled by it. Yeah. Being able to send these tiny little micropayments. Good point. Good point, Wes. Good point. Well, well said. As often is the case.

All right. Now let's get to the boosts themselves. The messages with some stats attached. Number three is PJ, producer Jeff, with 33 boosts. Hybrid sarcasm at number two with 70 boosts. And coming in with 116 boosts into the podcast this year, it is the one, the only, the champion, Mr. Gene Bean. Way to go, Gene. We always love hearing from Gene.

You know, there are a lot of people now, and Gene is definitely one of them. Everybody on this list is like, we're like, where are they? We want to hear from them, and we don't hear from them. We miss them. Yeah, that's so true. It's part of our routine now.

Well done, 550,000. I think if we had a separate podcasting 2.0 specific mascot, it would have to be. Yeah. It'd be Gene. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Okay. And, of course, we have one last baller category.

Who boosted the most stats this year? Out of all of the numbers we went through, who sent the most value back to the podcast? Number three, The Dude Abides with 1,129,311 stats. Wow. The Dude, thank you very much. Incredible keeping the show on the air. Excellent abiding. Your support makes it available for thousands and tens of thousands and tens of thousands of people to listen.

So thank you very much. We really do appreciate it. And we've often enjoyed your messages. Sometimes we just delete them. No, I'm kidding. I'm just kidding. Okay. Number two.

With 2,098,146 sats, is Deleted. Number two, biggest booster of the year, is Mr. Deleted. 2 million sats. Thank you. Incredible. Incredible. Thank you so much. You've helped us survive the ad winter.

This is our moment to thank you. We salute you, sir. And in the number one position, with a remarkable, unbelievably, perhaps never to be achieved again, you'll only see at number one in the boosties, 3,917,358 sats. It is our new boss, Mr. Hybrid Sarcasm. Unbelievable. Absolutely incredible. That's some sort of like Supreme Commander baller boost. I don't know. Yeah.

And remember, Hybrid now, as the victor, has stepped up and made an incredible offer. Who has ever the number one position next year will get a free Jupiter Party membership gifted by Hybrid. You heard it here first, folks. It's a boost up. It's really great. And, you know, I mean, one of the things we've learned is they're doing a lot with Mayo. They are doing a lot with Mayo these days. I don't think we'd know that without your support. And for us,

it was a wild experiment, a wild tech stack that we couldn't believe we were even able to string together. And one of the things that's really remarkable is the timing worked out perfectly. We could not have had better timing. I mean, the only negative is that we're early by a couple of years,

and so we have to take a few arrows for that. But as the advertising market was collapsing and we were making less and less revenue because we not only get – we couldn't raise more, but we couldn't book more sponsors, and we had less sponsors, and the cost to do business is going up, and you guys step in just as that's happening. And Boost was something that protects us from inflation. It solves the problem of missing sponsor revenue. It made it possible for us to do things like go to scale, bring PJ up here, have this weekly dialogue with you,

PJ up here, have this weekly dialogue with you while still also making the podcast viable and not responsible to anybody but our audience. And there's only so, so few opportunities in media to do this. And podcasting is the perfect medium to make it all happen. And the technology stack around that. And some of you truly embraced it and made it possible. And your names will go down in history as making this show possible and viable during this period and perhaps forever. And the stats that you boost in, we continue to put to work. We will leverage them in the future. We can put them on the balance sheet of JB one day if we need to. We can put them into liquidity

for the, like we do now, we can use them as liquidity on nodes. Like there's so many ways we can put them to work right now and into the future. They continue to go to work for us from this point forward. So thank you, everyone. Really incredible, and a huge shout-out to Mr. Sarcasm. With perhaps the best Matrix profile picture possible. True. Also, here you go, Mr. Sarcasm, I got you this eagle.

Thank you so much. here you go, Mr. Sarkez. I got you this eagle. Thank you so much. There you go, everybody. That is the 2024 Tuxes and the 2024 Boosties. All there. All wrapped up in a nice little package for you. And we just want to say thank you, everybody, who participated in that. And if you got some ideas, let us know. Boost it and tell us how it went for you.

If you tried out something in the Boosties and ended up loving it, my bet is you will find something. We have one more episode for you before our predictions. We'll have an episode next week. It is prerecorded, so there won't be a live stream. But just check your feeds like normal and everything will be in there like you expect. We'll be back on the 5th of January recording a double live. So join us then if you can. Could be a great episode to make it for because we'll be doing our predictions.

We'll have two shows again. And for the episode that comes out in the meantime, here's a hot little teaser for you. I got the OpenWRT 1 actually in and I've been setting it up and I got a little project I'm experimenting with and I'll be telling you all about my experience with the first dedicated OpenWRT hardware from the project. So I think that should be pretty cool. But that wraps it up for the Tuxes. Thank you everyone so much for joining us. 2024 has been a blast. We're incredibly excited about 2025, and we hope you keep listening and share it with a friend.

Enjoy the holidays, share it with a family member or friend, and visit the back catalog at linuxunplugged.com. Happy holidays, and see you next week Thank you.