LINUX Unplugged - 597: Cache My OS

Episode Date: January 12, 2025

We're taking on some of the toughest critiques of the Linux desktop, then taking a look at CachyOS and what makes it feel like a million bucks.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.FMWhy Linux is not ready for the desktop, the final editionWhy Linux is not ready for the desktop, the final edition | Hacker NewsWhy Desktop Linux Matters, Even If (Almost) No One Uses ItColony EventsCachyOS — Blazingly Fast OS based on Arch Linux — CachyOS is designed to deliver lightning-fast speeds and stability, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable computing experience every time you use it. Whether you're a seasoned Linux user or just starting out, CachyOS is the ideal choice for those looking for a powerful, customizable and blazingly fast operating system.CachyOS/linux-cachyos: Archlinux Kernel based on different schedulers and some other performance improvements.firelzrd/bore-scheduler: BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer) CPU Scheduler — BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer) is enhanced versions of CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler) and EEVDF (Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First) Linux schedulers. Developed with the aim of maintaining these schedulers' high performance while delivering resilient responsiveness to user input under as versatile load scenario as possible.oracle/bpftune: bpftune uses BPF to auto-tune Linux systems — bpftune aims to provide lightweight, always-on auto-tuning of system behaviour.Annual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Self-Hosted Toronto Crew -- Meetup2 · GathioAmazon.com: Wi-Fi Smart LED Controller | WLED Pre-Installed | Internal Antenna | Designed to Control WS2811 or WS2812B 5volt Smart LEDs : Tools & Home ImprovementCryptomator on Flathubcryptomator on GitHub — Cryptomator for Windows, macOS, and Linux: Secure client-side encryption for your cloud storage, ensuring privacy and control over your data.Flatsweep on Flathub — When you uninstall a Flatpak, it can leave some files behind on your computer. Flatsweep helps you easily get rid of the residue left on your system by uninstalled Flatpaks.BufferBuffer on Flathub — Celebrating transience, Buffer provides a minimal editing space for all those things that don't need keeping. Designed for keyboard workflows on desktop.

Hello friends and welcome back to your weekly Linux stock show. My name is Chris, my name is Wes, and my name is Brent. Well hello gentlemen. Today on the show we're going to take on some of the toughest Linux desktop criticism yet, give our responses. Then we're going to take a look at Cache OS and get into what makes this distro so different than the others. And some of these things you'll probably see show up in a distro near you in the future. Then we'll round it all out with some great boosts, a bunch of good picks and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual

lug. Hello, mumble room. Hello, everybody solidly into 2025. Now it's nice to have you around. We got a good showing in that mumble room right there. It's nice to see you all. Thank you very much. And a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale, Tailscale.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to get it free on 100 devices and three different accounts. Seriously, it's great.

It's a secure, remote way to access all of your systems on a flat mesh network. I'm talking your applications, your individual servers, your mobile devices, all protected by waggle. That's right. And it's really fast. And how long it took West to say that you'll get it set up, you'll get one machine installed and it's intuitive. It's really easy to use. And if you're in the enterprise, it is so straightforward to plug it into your existing authentication infrastructure. There's ACL systems you can map to your access groups. It's, it's really, really great.

And there's all kinds of organizations using these big organizations, people like Instacart, Hugging Face, Duolingo, they've all switched to Tailscale. The JB backend runs over Tailscale, my personal stuff, all on Tailscale. There's so many different ways you can use it too, but really just get started at tailscale.com slash unplugged, give it a try, get an get started at tailscale.com slash unplugged. Give it a try, get an idea of how it works. It's very intuitive. You get a sense of the capabilities

and the advantages of having a flat mesh network, and then you can build it out from there. And the personal plan will always be free. You just go to tailscale.com slash unplugged to get it free on 100 devices and to support the show. Tailscale.com slash unplugged to get it free on 100 devices and to support the show, tailscale.com slash unplugged. Let's get into this one, boys. Why Linux is not ready for the desktop. And this is the final edition.

This has been kind of a yearly tradition by the author, and this is supposedly the last one. This year, Brett kind of baited us with this. Yeah, yeah, I sure did. We've mentioned these once or twice before. And this year, the author kind of took a new tack. They say the previous iteration was too technical, too long, contained a lot of controversial points. So in an effort to save end users before they make the mistake of accidentally switching to Linux,

they have rewritten it this year. So the non-technical folks can get a better sense of how deeply flawed desktop Linux is and prevent making a mistake like switching to Linux. That's essentially the sentiment there. And we could get to a lot of these points, but there's one that I think cuts deep and is probably the one we need to talk about the most. Because I think it is the gotcha centerpiece argument for this blog post. We'll link to the entire thing in the show notes. But here's the key line.

Regressions are introduced all the time because Linux developers spend very little to no time checking that their code changes don't cause regression or breakages outside of the problems they're trying to fix or features they're trying to implement. In other words, it's thousands of people all scratching their own itch. They don't know if they're stepping all over each other. They're all shipping it and then Linux maintainers are packaging it and squirting onto your file system with no thought or care. That's the implication, right?

And that maybe you could have two different folks pulling in two different directions is the implication. Well, more than two. Thousands of people pulling in and also, so thank you, Brent. Yeah, it's more than two thousands of people. And also what is said here, it's baked into the cake. It's inherent to how Linux is made. You can never fix this ergo.

Linux will never be a fully functional desktop operating system. That's the implicit statement here or implied statement. I was going to say, I'm not it's not entirely clear to me. What does Linux developers encompass are we talking about like? The desktops everything we're talking about the kernel specifically for these for regressions and for this argument The other thing I will just say as an addendum which doesn't solve anything or really talk to it But to my mind from the software development side I would think I mean to some, like the amount of hand regression testing one can do, if that's

what they mean here, is always going to be limited. And I mean, probably if anything, this is an argument for like better automated testing. So that's the only way you're really going to make that work at scale, at least with something the size of learning or complexity. Say we focus on the desktop for a second, and we're just kind of, you know, staying in the desktop space. How is this not true on windows or Mac OS? These developers are all scratching their own itch. They're developing applications that could often have feature overlap. Well, I guess at least maybe not the application layer,

but at least for the core OS component you have. Presumably, you know, people who can't have oversight over cross-cutting concerns and have meetings between different teams in a way that is more difficult than open source? Yeah, for sure. And, you know, there is, okay, so I think that's where there is, what you just touched on is the hint of truth to this criticism. Is we've, you know, this is one of my go-to examples.

Apple shipped an entirely new display server in one OS release, right? It's taken us 12 years to migrate to Wayland. Apple shift APFS in three OS releases, we still are using extended four everywhere. They, there is this kind of coordination of, well, we have the metal API now, we need to rewrite the entire desktop stack to the metal API.

So desktop team, that's what you're doing this summer. Congratulations. And we don't really have that in Linux. But look where we're at. And I think you could argue we clearly haven't needed it. And I think what I don't like about this argument about regressions are introduced all the time because there's all these different competing ideas.

It's sort of silly. It's kind of like, it's like, it's sort of thinking that either people are patching each other's code or overwriting each other's applications memory space. It kind of implies that it's this sort of everybody's just riding to the same heap and like you can all get mixed together and things can go sideways when in reality, you know, you got a toolkit, you got APIs, like everybody's just kind of right into like an API at one level or another. If you if you extract that broadly enough, like it's,

there's not like a lot of overlap here. It's not a lot of damage is happening. If you're using GTK and you know, you're using the XGD portals and you're doing this stuff, like where's the overlap here? This is sort of a silly argument at its core. And the reality is, is that there's probably all kinds of regressions that absolutely do get introduced. And then just as a matter of course, get fixed over time as well. And so just sort of the history of the desktop kind of shows out that this hasn't really been a problem.

And I would argue that the way software is actually made Means it's not really a big problem. These are not problems that we really have. Yeah, you can have Conflicts at like the dependency level for an application like libraries. You can have API version differences But you have that with every system. I was gonna say I'm not sure if it really matches my experience Which doesn't speak for everyone, of course But just okay if it really matches my experience, which doesn't speak for everyone, of course, but just, okay, maybe sometimes on like a bleeding edge rolling release or if you're doing KDE neon, sometimes there are small regression or something, tweaks or bugs or changes and then is changed again a couple point releases later that happens. But I don't, you know,

if we're retargeting this for non-technical folks, I don't really think that that's the dominant issue with people in the Linux desktop. Or even a big issue. That's a really good point. I was going to say, oh yeah, I've run into some aggressions on the Linux desktop, but that's because I'm running unstable or tumbleweed for the last couple of years. And those always get fixed very quickly. Right.

There you're making a conscious choice, right? You're like, I value the updates more than these occasional regressions are costing. I also value helping find the regressions so that people like my mother who's running desktop Linux doesn't run into them, right? And so she hasn't- Putting that bug field to good work.

Right? She hasn't run into all the ones I have, but I certainly have run into a couple this year. But that's a conscious choice to run things that are super, super bleeding edge. But that's not the focus of this article at all. So here's how it kind of gets, I think, the takeaway. And this is a comment on Hacker News that I feel is reflective. I'm not picking on anyone.

Well, somebody on Hacker News in the comments writes, Linux will quote, never be ready for the desktop, end quote, because of the problems that this development process causes that we just talked about. Developers of software for Linux, not to mention, and here's the key one, and I think this is the normie takeaway that is incredibly wrong. Developers of software for Linux, not to mention kernel developers themselves, do not have the kind of funding that Microsoft has to test on a truly staggering number

of hardware configurations. On the opposite side of the spectrum, they don't have the luxury of supporting a comparatively small set of hardware combinations like Apple has. And this is a common normie like, well, how could Linux ever compete with Microsoft? Microsoft pays people to write drivers.

Microsoft pays people to do testing. How could they ever compete with that? Linux doesn't have that kind of money. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Linux kernel development works. I promise you, Linus and Greg are not writing network card drivers, right? They are merging code that contributors and often contributors from these companies merge. Developers at Intel are writing the drivers and they're

submitting it to the kernel. It's not the kernel staff that are writing the drivers. And so the kernel staff, it doesn't need to be a two billion dollar corporation or whatever the number has to be in order for them to be able to encompass all of the hardware support required because the individual hardware providers are writing that software and they're doing the bulk of that work. And then the kernel team has to do the integration and some of the testing. But it's a it's like it's this apples to oranges comparison that you will see. Tech people, they're kind of up onto stuff,

but they don't really understand it, kind of fall into. And it's one of the takeaways from this blog post, is this is an unsolvable problem. When you think about it, it's actually not a problem. It's just not how it works. It just works differently in Linux. If anything, to me, it sounds like a better way of orchestrating hardware support,

because those making the hardware are actually putting the software in to support it. Isn't that better? And isn't this kind of where your system 76 and your tuxedos and your frameworks could possibly one day come in? I also wonder at like a slightly longer time scale in some sense. You know, if you if you looked at this five years ago and today I Definitely agree there are many times in areas that the Linux desktop is behind or lacking compared to some of the commercial options

But oftentimes it feels like in many of those were really just fine like we do get them We just don't have them within the first two to five years Actually, I'm gonna feel like that's happening less and less. Cause a lot of the things that are new now are available on the web. True. This was definitely a problem more and more

so over the years. What do you think of this though, this idea that, well, the problem is hardware access. So one of the points that is made in here is the devs can't get access to the hardware. Linux kernel developers often don't have access to all the hardware devices they're working on. So changes to one device may affect a whole other device.

The developer didn't get their hands on. I mean, I think it is true that more common hardware is going to be better supported. You don't really have a way for vendors to ease. I mean, they'd have to fund it or, you know, you don't have ways to set like this is a configuration that some entity decides to support in the way that you can as easily in a centralized sense but we've also seen it go both ways right there are times where Linux supports hardware better or easier than Windows does yeah and I think it's also you could reverse this I find it extremely restrictive to

be an Apple developer because you have to spend $1,000 out of pocket to get any Apple hardware. Then you also have to pay money to get access to the developer program. And then if you want to test on say, say maybe you're gonna make a mobile app so you got to test the iPads and you got to buy an iPad because the simulator simply won't do.

Same for CarPlay if you want to support CarPlay. So now you got to buy a CarPlay head unit. And so whereas Linux will just install on any hardware. And so, you know, you could flip around this access idea around a little bit and say that Linux gives you access to test on any kind of hardware you might possibly want. It also strikes me that, you know, it kind of depends on what class

and what thing you're doing level of professionalism, right? Like, okay, we have experience. I think some of this rings true in areas like HDR and you know multi-monitor 3 plus monitor complicated monitor configurations but at the same time we are just talking about impossible implications of Windows 11 requiring a bunch of hardware stuff that Linux is never gonna require and you will just be able to install Linux on Those systems where Windows will block you out Brent what did you think about this point in here about it's only good for a web client. Yeah, the article

Starts off saying well Linux can work Linux can actually work for your use case, especially if that use case focuses on using your computer as a web client Yeah, as long as you don't need anything more than that. You don't need more than Firefox or Chrome, you're fine, yeah, you're fine. Yeah, which is like the absolute most basic bar that we can possibly hit. But geez, that feels like someone who has not used it,

maybe, I don't know. Look at the things we're doing with it. We're doing the audio production and all sorts of crazy things. I know that's not who the article is targeting, right? Weird. No, it's the mythical new user that is always nebulous, yeah.

But there is a little bit of truth to this in saying that someone who only uses the web will certainly have a good experience. That is true. I think is true for most of the popular distributions. You just... I think it's probably true for most internet-connected operating systems in general. You could use Haiku if you mostly need a web browser. That's actually a really good point. It's not super high praise. No. And then it's like, you know, then we have solutions like so in the past, this article has been updated for years, this supposedly the final version,

and software distribution and dependency resolution has been a, you know, a pain point for this article in the past. Now that we have Flatpaks, here's the take on Flatpaks. Quote, it's crazy to think that they solve software incompatibility in Linux. They just work around it by making the user allocate and run gobs of binary code, unnecessarily taxing their storage, CPU and RAM. Whose RAM and storage has been unnecessarily taxed? What, what?

I mean, okay, does it have to have some run times? Yeah, yeah, so does Java. I think the argument here is, well, you're running a bunch of virtual machines Wouldn't it be better to run on bare metal? Well, they're not virtual. They're just they're more akin to containers, right? They're they're isolated applications. Yes, like you have to pull down like see if it's a GTK app You'll have to pull down a GTK flat pack or if it needs Nvidia support You will have to pull down an Nvidia flat pack. This is no different than how Docker works

These are layers just like how Docker works and yet we don't criticize Docker for this. And I think it's a perfect reasonable solution to software distribution, and it's like just one of these things where, well, they solved it, but it's not good enough. When I was reading this, I also thought about the transition that Mac OS did between architectures. This is exactly how they solved this problem.

That's true. Yeah, they would have an image with both the X 86 version and the arm version in there. Well, you know, it takes up too much storage space. Laptops got 512 gigs basic. Give me a break. Um, so I just, that stuff doesn't really stick for me. Um, but I do think what I do think the article does is it forces Linux

advocates to be like, yeah, okay, there are rough points, you know, there are, which I don't think we're too bad at, but I do think sometimes as a whole, we as a community, we really focus on the positive and good things because there's so much happening, especially when you have a little bit of perspective on it. And so we'll focus on that. And we might not mention that, you know, yeah, by the way, when you go to download something off the website, that EXE isn't going to run.

You know, these things are complicated. You'll have to go get a flat pack. I'm sorry. That's fair. It helps us remember that. Something else stood out to me was the author provided a tiny bit of proof or at least trying to. So in a particular section called accidental Linux security, which is pretty hilarious to me. But

in that section, they said, Hey, I actually had a conversation with chat jippity about this particular section and asked it to verify the validity of my text. And so they pull out a quote saying that, Oh, the verdict is that quote quote ultimately the issues raised are genuine, but not unsurmountable But I visited that chat link since they so kindly provided it and they forgot to quote the part where you know even Chat jippity says hey the text contains some valid points, but is also heavily opinionated contains over generalizations and lacks nuance in addressing the broader security model of Linux. Ha! Roasted!

Yeah, and roasted again here as it continues on, saying the text raises valid concerns about specific user behaviors and usability challenges in Linux, but many of its arguments lack depth and fail to consider the systemic security advantage of Linux. So they just like, kind of plucked the parts that they wanted to to fit the title of the article and forgot to look at the other parts that were countering the arguments. So I'm a little disappointed by that. I was kind of struck that to some extent I touched on earlier but there's like a mismatch. It kind of feels like there are a lot of valid things, but they're not necessarily the top of what my list is either for myself or for like supporting my mom using

Linux, which both cases I think it works fairly well, at least as well as Windows or Mac has, or if not definitely better. Yeah. Over the long term, I'd say better. The other thing that struck me about this is there were at least several items I thought that systems like UBLUE or others have improved kind of remarkably, you know, like directly addressed some of these concerns. Does one example come to mind?

Because I do I kind of had that sensation too when I read it. Now I can't think of an example, but I do thinking dude some of this is already solved but I mean I think a lot of just you know the integration level things reliability, composability, yeah yeah hardware support planned for yeah yeah it's um maybe it's good that the things coming to an end we'll link to it if you do want to read it I like it in the sense of it challenges some of our assumptions but then then secure boot, secure boot was one item. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Good. Good. Fine. There on the chat. Jippity link there, Brent. Yeah. It's funny to see them to see chat. Jippity call map. Well, it's just like, come

on, if you're going to provide, okay, don't trust everything you read on chat. Jippity. But if you're going to provide quote unquote proof that this argument is valid, you know, take the whole proof. Don't just pluck out what you want. All right, let us know if you were gonna write up a criticism for desktop Linux, what would it be? You know, I think if anybody is poised to criticize Linux, it could probably be us. Yeah, roast in your roast. Yeah, yeah, roast it and let us know. We'll see if we agree. And then also just a plug for LUP600 around the corner.

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Lots of great devices, lots of great services, and employees want to get more done. And they also have to do things remotely more than they ever had to do. There's all kinds of devices coming along. I was just looking at a E Ink display. Connects into the company calendar. Put it on your fridge, put it on your wall.

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Onepassword.com slash unplugged. While we're diving into another Linux desktop overview here with, how are we saying this? I think I'm saying it catchy OS, but Chris, you have a different pronunciation. Oh I think it's gotta be it's gotta be Kati OS. Maybe it's Kachi. Cashi! Come on! It's Cashi! It's fast!

Yeah it's Cashi. So Cashi OS is considered a blazingly fast OS based on the Arch Linux distro designed to deliver lightning fast speeds and stability ensuring a smooth and enjoyable computing experience every time you use it. Whether you're a seasoned Linux user or just starting out cachey, I might have said it wrong, cachey OS is the ideal choice for those looking for, quote, powerful, customizable, blazingly fast operating system. Hmm.

Now it does this in a few different sneaky ways that we've explored recently. This is actually kind of what turned me on to this distribution, is we went down the path of tweaking our kernels a little bit, and then the audience said, hey guys, you might check out CacheOS because they're doing some of the same stuff by default, like using the Zen 4 kernel in there and Bolt enhancements.

In fact, I'll talk a little bit about some of the scheduler stuff they're doing as well,, and, and, and other optimize optimizations throughout the stack. And I'm always keen to try something that's kind of turned up to 11. Uh, you know, it's always fun to play with arch and then something that goes, let's turn this knob, let's turn this knob and really optimize for a great desktop responsive experience. I think that would be my number one TLDR here,

is it's kind of, it is like a playground for, you know, long time Linux nerds. There's stuff in here that I think will land in other distributions in the future. So there has been recent improvements to the tweakability of the Linux scheduler. And you can actually now kind of hot swap your scheduler from user space using eBPF.

So crazy. It's crazy stuff. And the scheduler is what's responsible for sort of prioritizing system performance, like disk IO reads and responsiveness of your desktop application network activity. The scheduler is kind of like, you know, the traffic cop for your system.

And so some schedulers are just sort of your basic traffic cop that isn't really prioritizing any particular type of workload. And other schedulers are optimized for desktop gaming, things like that. And one of the things that Cache offers is this graphical interface to access this new tooling. It's only been around for a little bit. And you can just swap out your scheduler options, you can change your options right there within about three clicks,

you can get to it from the welcome screen. I mean, you go right from welcome screen to setting your scheduler options within about three clicks. So I was like, you can see what Chris likes. You know what I was gonna say. So you can see, what Chris likes. I was going to say. So you can see. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that stuff's a lot of fun. Wes, I had, you know, you and I were, we're still running the Zen kernels on our next system.

Indeed. So this had to have been up your alley. Uh-huh. It was already kind of on my radar before some of the audience started typing up about it too. So I made perfect sense for us to try it. Okay. Right out of the gate installer I tried to just the graphical Kalamari's I believe there's another another kind out there although

I did not try it, but you have tons of desktop options. Yeah Including cosmic I tried cosmic and genome and plasma which I think is their default Land I was pleased. Yeah hyperland right? You're also prompted right out of the gate with what kind of bootloader you want, which I thought was kind of nice. And you got grub, system, de-boot, and refined as well as an AI SDK slash refined, which I did had to go look what that was. And I guess it's basically this installation automatically installs all required packages required to have a local AI installation requests from AI enthusiasts I guess it sets up like CUDA and Nvidia stuff for you out of the gate I'm surprised you're not mentioning to butter FS by default. Well, I was gonna get there Yeah, I mean just this is just the theme is a lot of flexibility in the installation options butter FS by default and

Bcash FS is in there as an option for your root file system Yep, did you do that? Yes, actually? I tried better fs first and then in my second install. I went with the cache. I'm not one of your predictions Well, no, see it. What's not default. Oh, it's close. Okay. We'll see maybe if it loses experimental status. Yeah See, I'm not too far. I'm gonna do it. It's probably cash. Yo, I'll see maybe if it loses experimental status. Yeah See, I'm not too far It's probably cash. Yo, I'll tell you As Chris was talking about there's a bunch of performance optimizations They also have you know, like they compile things for more modern target architectures like yeah

Xa 664 v3 and before they do link time optimization They also include like a bunch of other customizations to their kernel. Auto detection of CPU architecture, cherry picked clear Linux packages, memory management tweaks pulled over from Zen. They do in fact actually offer it as an option you can get it. There's a flake for it for Nix OS. So if you don't want to run Cache,

but you want their kernel, apparently that's an option we might have to try. They even have some support to make the RT kernel work with the board. So if you don't want to run cachey, but you want their kernel apparently that's an option. We might have to try They even have some support to make the RT kernel work with the boar scheduler, which is one of their cool scheduler Yeah, the burst oriented response enhancer scheduler Yeah, it's an enhanced version of the completely fair scheduler and the earliest eligible virtual deadline first scheduler Okay, it has it has this burstiness metric. I do like that Yeah, that kind of helps it perform a little bit better Then as you mentioned there's tweaks available right from the get-go things like adding Z RAM specific tweaks or Nvidia stuff for journal D

And system CDL, but there's also just kind of nice extra tooling there I mean it helps you enable system D, OMD if you want. There's other things that I haven't tried before, like a utility from Oracle called BPF Tune. Oh yeah, okay. It aims to provide lightweight, always on auto-tuning of system behavior. The idea is BPF gives us great observability features

so it can continuously monitor and adjust your system. And because it's so fine-grained the tuning can happen at a fine grain too so like individual socket policies individual device policies which is just interesting because Oracle also kind of just finished making the latest version of D-Trace basically we you know D-Trace on top of the EBF. Yeah that's what came to mind. I was also pleased to see that they're moving fast 13th release this year was the one I download yes. Yeah, they have auto F. Yeah

Oh, they've got they've been doing stuff in Mesa to enable rusticle They've got as you were talking about sketch. Yes, T supports. They have xx loader built in yep There's also now gaming and handheld tweaks loader built in. There's also now gaming and handheld tweaks. So there's like automatic setups for Steam Deck. They are using the LAVD scheduler, which was funded by Valve and improves the frame time. They also tested on the ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion, MSI Claw. They clearly care about that. Overall, I think it is clearly put together by people paying attention and who like using Linux on the desktop and want that experience to be great. So even if I don't switch to this, there's a lot of stuff that is inspiring and that

I want to steal for my desk. Also if a family member came to you and said, Hey, I want a Linux box that can do basic Linux stuff and I'm probably going to do a lot of gaming. This could be a serious contender here. Also kind of nice, just like along with the tweak stuff is system management. Thanks. So you can enable profile sync theme. And that's another one. But system update, reinstall all packages, refresh key rings, remove DB, lock their package, gaff, speed mirror check.

Yep. These are all kind of things that, you know, if you're a regular art user, you would be encouraged to do just on the command line, which is totally fine But you can get a little access to a lot of the power In a very simple and easy interface. It's a very curated distribution as well And after you choose your desktop like Wes said they have all of them The only tweak I would make at that screen is I would love to see in the description the version. Like, you know, because if it was like the absolute latest version of XFCE,

I might've just gone that route, but I wasn't sure. But they have all of them, like whatever you want, it's got it. That was pretty neat to see. And then after you've chosen that desktop, it takes you to an additional packages screen. And then like, so if you wanted to install Thunar or something individually, you absolutely could or one of their meta packages.

I tried Plasma, of course, and I had Plasma 6.2.5 installed. They use the nice clean breeze theme by default, but they do have a cache OS Nord theme pre-installed if you want, which is kind of nice. I kind of like it. And the Hello Wizard we mentioned really just sets you up. It kind of gives you a scope of what their tooling lets you do. Gives you access to their kernel manager, which is one of my favorite features in cache OS. And I love to see this in some of these distributions where they try this.

Really easy to get access to Nvidia drivers and things like that. Our new favorite app, Butter FS Assistant is also pre-installed. Oh great, nice. And it makes it really easy to just get access to popular apps because they have one app that just is like, here's a bunch of popular stuff. And so Discord, Telegram, Element, Slack, all that stuff. I imagine it's probably mostly a flat hub front end

that installs. But what you're left with, and I tried this in a VM and you know This is not a VM desktop. I Was able to get plasma working, but it's just you're not gonna you're gonna get the best experience on hardware It does virtualize just fine though. Well plasma at least yeah plasma You know market well for me cosmic work well for me But it's interesting when you put it on physical hardware you do kind of get a sense like you're eking a bit more out of The system I'm curious Wes. I imagine you probably K exec there on the old ThinkPad.

Did you notice, because for me, the system I did on the fan state is always pretty steady. Did you notice any difference in temperatures and stuff like that? No, not directly, but I am already using the Zed day to day. Right, right. So it probably has at least some of the same optimizations. No, it ran really nicely on the hardware though. The people that are putting this distribution together are really following the cutting edge

of the cutting edge of performance development and desktop enhancement. Like they are, this has gotta be like a think tank of the folks that are sort of the most current on the stuff that you can put together and make a screaming desktop package. And that's really where I think Cashy OS really shines, is the expertise of this group that understand these things

and the combination of things, and then give you options to turn on even more stuff, it's impressive. And there's not a lot of distributions that are focused on this particular thing. There's some, but not a lot of them. None of the mainstream distributions. And these guys, I think they could sell their talents as a consulting group, because they're really focused on the right stuff.

You know, Chris, when I was going through all the features and we were just talking about many of the tweaks they're doing, it reminded me a lot of the sensation I got when I first read through all of the technical prowess that Graphene OS is doing, especially in how they're taking some really fancy security modern features and adding it to even Google's own hardware. And reading through this list of features reminded me a lot of that. And it feels like sort of the same type of people with the same type of passion for the goal of the project who are Clearly deep experts on on what they're implementing and it's a breath of fresh air The graphene OS comparison is an interesting one. Yeah, it's like it's a good example of another group of people that really seem to know their stuff

That have put it together and they've made a package for the rest of us and you know We've been following some of these things but they've been thinking about it a lot longer and a lot deeper than we have. So you kind of get like some of the stuff we've recently talked about and more in just a ready to go package. So of course, we'll have links in the show notes. Did you know we have an annual membership program now you can put your support on automatic with our annual plan and you get one month of membership for free. We'll put a link in the show notes, you get access to the Jupiter Party membership, it gives you all the shows, all their special features including this here humble show and one month of it for free when you sign up for the Jupiter Party annual membership at jupiter.party or for the annual we'll put the link in the show notes. And now it is time for the boosts. And now it is

time for the boost. Oh, and indeed, hurricane nerds is our baller booster this week. They came in with 234,523ster! Now he says hi all. Or they say I'm dropping off a load of sats to say thank you for everything you did in 2024. Also please consider this boost as my vote for setting NeoVim as the default editor of the show. Not Vim. NeoVim. You have any objections there Wes? As someone who types nvim all the darn time know it Yeah, I figured you'd co-assign that if you're curious, please do check out github.com

slash hurricane HRN SD whatever PDM will pulling in the show notes. That's always Nick's and Nick's and Neil Vim fun Nick's okay. We'll check out. Thank you. Yes. Thank you very much for that. I'll have something to look out. Hey, I have an observation. Okay. I think this makes Hurricane the very top of the list for the boosties so far in 2025. Yes?

You're right. First baller, yes. Baller of the year, top booster of the year so far. Races on. Yes. Thank you very much. It's nice to hear from you and I hope to hear from you again. You can always set up Fountain if you're migrating off of Alby or something like much. It's nice to hear from you and I hope to hear from you again. You can always set up Fountain if you're migrating off of Alby or something like that.

We'd love to hear from you. Short and sweet boost from Distro Stew. One hundred and twenty three thousand four hundred and fifty six cents. Hey Rich lifestyle! Or is that like a super space ball? I was wondering about that. Oh you know what? Here we go. Smoke if you got em. There you go. Happy new year. Thanks for all the great show.

Thank you, Mr. Stoo. Nice to hear from you. Thank you very much. Well, the Linux Teamster boosted in 45,546 total stats across three boosts. I hoard that with your kind. I'll be dipped. First boost here, for a Pi project, PiKVM is a great option. There's a kit that will mount it on a PCIe bracket, so it's all self-contained. Ooh, the kit includes the add-on board, including power over ethernet.

So you just need a Raspberry Pi, a microSD card, and either a PoE or a USPC power supply. Something to think about. Nice. Yeah, I like that a lot. Second boost here, 24,409 SATs. In addition to the Tuxes at the end of the year, have you considered doing a usage survey?

Or perhaps alternatively in these days. It could be nice in about June or July as an episode. So instead of picking who had a good year and what is your favorite, the usage survey would ideally be multiple choice, and listeners would select all of the options that they use. Add a blank box to the end that could help generate ideas for the tuxes later on. Love you all. I like the idea of kind of like a mid-year kind of thing, cooking up some ideas.

I don't know why, but the phrase in my head is Jupiter picks garage sale. Oh, okay. I was thinking like, Summer Sizzle, you know, like a tropical sound and theme, and we all wear Hawaiian shirts that day. Done. Final boost here, spending the last of the sats in my albie, and I just wanted to say, Libro.fm

is a really great audiobook alternative to Audible. I've had a subscription for a few years now and it's great being able to download DRM free audio books legally for the same price as audible really is a great feature. Great tip. Thank you. L I B R O dot FM. For those of you migrating off of Alby, uh, I'll remind you too that you can send your sats. I mean, we're happy to take them, but you can send them to breeze or fountain mean, we're happy to take them, but you can send them to Breeze or Fountain FM as well.

Because also, oh, thank you for the boost though, Linux Teamster, and I hope we keep hearing from you. Kongo Paradox, Kongaroo Paradox, that's how you say it, came in with 32,332 SATs. Do you guys know when the Albi wallet will stop working? Completely forgot to set up Albi Hub before leaving for a week-long holiday. Okay, well don't worry, don't worry.

Your sats aren't going anywhere, but you'll have to probably contact support. So they're shutting down the hosted version of Albee, and they now have a self-hosted version, that's Albee Hub. Although Lightning is just an open standard, Albee was kind of the most convenient. That's why it's sort of on the register here. But I would encourage you to look at something like Breeze or Fountain

because they manage a lot of the infrastructure problems for you. Breeze is a self-hosted lightning node in your pocket. Fountain does all of the plumbing and is not self-hosted at all. And once you have them set up, they're pretty easy to use. So they also recently bought a refurbished M2 Air Mini with 24 gigs of RAM. First thing I did after putting it up was install a SAHI Linux, NixOS style.

Well done. I use it as my primary workstation for my home lab, stuck on Windows for work. And with the display dock multiple monitors now, it works great on unstable. So I had a really interesting SAHI Linux experience over the weekend, and I appreciate you, Kongaroo, for reminding me. It's been really solid.

I have the Fedora version. That's kind of like their main focus. And I've been on Fedora 41 for a minute or two now. And I just decided to do some routine updates. And I did the standard, you know, DNF update and rebooted and got a kernel panic. It's the first time I've ever had a panic on a side Linux and it was during boot. Oh, geez.

At least you didn't have time to open your work yet. Yeah. So I did a, you know, hard power off, did the old hard power on, selected a side Linux again and it booted just fine. So problem solved, I guess, right? I guess. Keep that count going though, check back in with us. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see.

Good to hear from you, Kongaroo Paradox. Thank you for the boost. Producer Jeff boosts in with 28,686 sets. Because I'm the winner. Oh, it looks like we got a couple binary sets here. Oh, I see what he's doing, yeah. I hate building PCs. Oh, it looks like we got a couple binary sats here. Oh, I see what he's doing. Yeah. I hate building PCs.

Farewell Tuxies. You will be missed. Thanks. Jeff also says, boost! I agree with that. Boost! And then, has anyone clicked the donate popup in Plasma 6 yet? They've made it very easy to support them.

My prediction is that KDE will continue to see substantial support from this and more so as the LTS distros finally get this thing. I like this prediction. Also nice to remember, go donate to your favorite desktop. I bet Plasma does see a good little uptick. I think that's a good prediction. Should have thought of that. I have not gotten the prompt yet.

Does it need to be a clean install? Why have I not gotten the prompt? I think because every Plasma desktop I'm on, I've had before they've added this. Is XOS disabled the prompt? And I'm wondering if maybe, no I think maybe it's like one year after the update I get it.

New installs and one year after maybe. I'm not quite sure if I remember the details on it. But have you guys gotten it? No. Yeah. Right. Have you seen the pop up? I have not, but I imagine there's a command you can run to get it.

You're probably right. Maybe boost in the system. D donate D right. Thank you. Nice. Thank you, PJ. Well, we have a boost here from droopy Draco with a great username, 6,700 sats across two boosts.

Oh my God. This drawer is filled with Froot Loops! Well this first one is for 5,000 Sats, I know. You know what that is, Chris. Oh, I do. You sup boosts! That's a Jar Jar boost. Offloading while changing wallets, can't think of a better place to store these little Sats than with JB.

Aww, thank you, that's a good guy. He's a good guy. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy. Thank you. Appreciate that. Nice to hear from you, Draco. Have we heard from Draco before?

I don't know. That feels new. I like it. Thank you. And I'd be interested to know if you're sticking with Castamatic and doing the Albeho thing, because I think Castamatic is fantastic.

I like it. Thank you for the boost. Planet Ace comes in with 8055 Sats. Well, I used to sometimes use distros like Xoran OS, which can be based on an LTS release, and then I'd be running an old kernel at the time. Like you guys, though, I like to have the latest or near to the latest at the time. So I went for the Lycorix kernel or the Xmod kernel. Sometimes I just, sometimes it's just a curl command away.

Xenmod is more aimed at gamers, but seems to work okay for me. And sometimes more performance means a little less battery life. So there's a trade off. Security minded people will need to trust the vendors, of course, due to the nature of what is being installed. I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas

and best of luck to 2025 regards Ace. Thanks, Ace. That's a great message. And, uh, I agree, you know, you definitely want to be mindful that when you're installing some of these super tweaked out, you know, everything turned up to 11 distributions, which we love. That does mean there's more hands touching this code, just something to be aware of. I don't have any reason not to trust these people, but I think

ACE gives us a good reminder. Appreciate that. User 88 or who I like to call IG 88 boosts in with 15,000 cents. Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. OK, music report. I've replaced V.I. music with Outer Tune primarily and Spotube for those Spotify. Hmm. All right. OuterTune, huh?

Yeah. It looks like it's a Material 3 music player with YouTube music support for Android or from InnerTune. God, this is so great. This might pull me back a little bit to YouTube music, unfortunately, but it's essentially it's an alternative to the YouTube music app. Yeah. And Kotlin looks pretty nice.

Yeah. Wow, OK. I had not seen that, and that is sweet. We'll have a link to this in the show notes. The other one he recommends here, SpotTube, an open source cross-platform Spotify client compatible across multiple platforms utilizing Spotify's data API in YouTube. Oh, this one's in Dart.

All right, it's another desktop UI that also works on the phone. Like, look at this. BSD4, let's check OuterTune. We're trying to do more licenses. We are trying to be better about that. GPLv3. So we got two open source ones here. Thank you very much.

That's those are two totally new ones to us, 88. Appreciate that. Oh, also, 88 says, Hopefully this worked. I used River to fill up fountains that I linked with my Nostr account. Oh, nice. We're reading it now, so it definitely did. Nicely done. Well done.

River is great. Well done. And the nice thing about River is they support lightning right out of the gate. You know what I mean? On chain one? Yeah. On chain is for plebs. Odyssey West is in with 5,100 sets.

Never tell me the odds. And he writes, this is a test boost through fountain FM's live chat And yeah, by the way, I agree using boost and zaps would be a great way to meter the gauge for the future tuxy suggestions Maybe boost is suggest a new topic and zaps to gauge the interest It'd be awesome to bridge it with matrix and have a live chat with it to bridge the matrix and live chat future chats yes, I Think it's totally possible for us walking backwards to bridge those chats

because the live chat is just essentially a JSON blob. It's real easy to get to. We will see. As far as the tuxes go, a lot of decisions to be made. We have some things we're considering and then also we're waiting to gauge everybody's interest. Just kind of still collecting that feedback. Thank you though, Odyssey.

It's always good to hear from you. Hope you're doing good. Whomever whiz boosts in with 11,001 sats, which I think is a binary boost and also links us to a tiny CC link that says binary solo and has a flack in it. All right, let's give this binary flack a play. You ready for it? Oh, there's a few in here. All right, I'll just pick the first one. See how, let's see how we like it. You wanna try it out, boys?

Yeah. Binary solo. Okay, all right. All right. We got the couple though. Let's try the last one. Let's see, let's see. This one's one second long.

I like the length. Zero, zero, zero, zero, one, one, one, one, one. That's pretty fun. That's not bad. I'm gonna give that one the old download. Well, now, zero, zero, one, one, one, one. That's pretty fun. That's not bad. I'm going to give that one the old download. Well, now I want to know what the other one's. Yeah, OK, we'll do one more. Let's do the second from the last here.

This one's also one second. Good lengths. Nailing the lengths here. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one, one, one. That could be good if there's multiple binary boosts, I suppose. Thank you, whomever. I know it took a little bit of work to get that to us.

I appreciate that very much. Well, Otterbrain came in with 2000 sats simply to say happy holidays to everyone. Happy holidays to you, Otterbrain and everyone out there. Kicking off 2025 with the bank here at the unplugged program a lot coming up. Thank you for the support. I'm going to say Leche-ment. No, this is so bad. No, I'm going to say... Le Chément. No, that's so bad. I'm going to say Ice Element.

What brand? Give it to me. It's French, so I think it's Le Clément. Yeah, of course it's French. Le Clément comes in with 12,247 Sats. I don't know if there's any meaning. But I like it. It's his first boost ever.

Congratulations. Well done. Now I'm glad we pronounced the name right. I got Albie, I tried Foundry, and now I'm on Podverse. What a world it is out there. Continue the great work. This, by the way, is a postal code in Germany. Yes, zip code is a better deal.

Uh-oh, Westpain. Yeah, the old map, it's kind of crusty. I haven't used it in a while. It says, look at the, you got a little map music now, Wes. Oh! Okay, all right, we have one, two, two, four, seven. We gotta get out the European sub-portion of the map, obviously.

Literally dancing right now in the studio. Okay, I think I've got it all right let's see okay I believe it is in the state of Berlin is what this says community price right that it sounds totally accurate I got the latitude and longitude if that helps. 52.5 by 13.4. That that's great. Lankwitz? I'm gonna say yes. Primarily associated with the neighborhood of Lankwitz is what my map assistant is telling me. Map assistant? I've got some upgrades over the holidays. Wow. Wow. Southern part of Berlin. There goes the budget. There goes the budget. Oh yeah, I used your credit card.

It was already pre-filled. Thank you, Ben Warden. Thank you for taking the time to set up that boost workflow. We do really appreciate it. Nice work. Thank you very much. Gene Bean boosts in with 5,781 cents, which includes... Stop it. Get some help. one sense which includes get some help nevermind that's too good we'll ignore the ducks thank you Jean go ahead go ahead go ahead get the ducks too. There's elite and some ducks okay there you go we love jeans I just you know oh this is an older one but asking what I use to stream flax and stuff jellyfin finam has been one that I have used and probably will use again. I don't have a great solution at this moment. I've also done, you know, VLC over a Zamba board too. Okay, Jean also says that

Jean's vetoing the Jean stream nickname there, Brent. Oh, come on. Sorry, Brent. I'll try again. I gotta send more sends. Sorry, Brent. I'll try again. I gotta send more sends. And after sweeping three out of the four categories in the Boosties, it seems only fitting to boost in and say how much I appreciate the work you all do. I look forward to getting my love self-posted and twib fix every week and binging when I fall behind. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to the entire crew.

Oh, same to you, Jerry. Yes, thank you. You know, we've had the privilege of actually meeting Gene and he is just as nice in person as he sounds in his booths too. And I know Gene put in a bunch of work to get Albie Hub and all that going too. Yeah.

We appreciate that and your continued support. Definitely. Thank you, Gene. Nice to hear from you. Well, Tuxies Forever sent in a whole bunch of fours, 4,444 sets. Ah, fuck! Simply to say Tuxies Forever. Okay, it's a vote for the Tuxies, right? a whole bunch of fours 4444 sets. Simply to say tuxes forever.

Okay. That's a vote for the tuxes. Right. Is that our first one? I at least boost vote. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay.

All right. Thank you. Appreciate that. Always like an Aflac boost. VHH 32 is back with 2500 sets. This is the way I personally think that 2024 has been a great year, at least in my point of view for Linux and open source. I'm using image hosted on pop OS and the cosmic alpha desktop four has been great.

I've created and released my first open source projects, but it's two versions. Yeah. Congratulations. I've revamped the spin button widget for lib cosmic. I'll create and have had accepted. Wow. That's great. It I've had it accepted. Wow. That's great. It's even a breaking change PR. How about that?

I made a libcosmic PR at bug fix and cosmic settings as well. It's been a fantastic year for me and for Linux and open source. That is great, BHJ. Getting in at the ground floor, too, man. Amen, and great to hear. Imagine Cosmic being around for another decade plus, decade plus and you're getting another ground floor right now oh that's pretty cool it's great to hear from you too thank you bite a bit in boosts in with 8181 sad hello bite I will only boost bites and bits the brakes

right there fair enough enough. Fair enough. As the glorified booster, you get to determine the boost amount. That is fair. Part of the system. Well, D-Drail boosted in a row of ducks. I think I screwed that up. D-Drail, I'm so sorry. First boost, and it's live.

All thanks to the Christmas gift of Sats. Congratulations. Thank you very much. I started my Linux journey with Debian in 2004, tried Ubuntu, but went back to Debian, then moved to Gentoo in 2006. That lasted until I got a QNAP in 2020 and got into Docker. Oh yeah. right. Nice. And for the last six months, I've got an old Chromebook, a ThinkCenter M700 1.0 liter as a server and Docker host, and my AORUS i9 RTX 4090 laptop all running Nix OS. And well, the laptop dill boots Windows for selecting gaming needs. That's not bad, not bad at all. It's pretty good setup.

I had started listening to Self-Hosed last year and when I got cut up this past spring, I started listening to the old Linux Unplugged episodes, starting with the beginning of 2024 and got to the latest episodes during the summer. Thanks for all the content and have a Merry Christmas and I can't wait to see what you bring next year. Well, thanks for listening.

Absolutely. And we are super excited about 2025. Not only the first half, but I already have a few things cooking for the latter half of 2025 too. I know. We'll see. What? You're doing this backwards, Chris.

I know. We'll see how it goes. You know how it's pretty far out. But same to you and happy new year. Bronzawings here with 2222 sats. That's a row of ducks. Big thanks to Gene Bean and HybridSarcasm for helping me boost after I got my Albie Hub up and running on my server. Merry Christmas everybody. That's great. Go community. Yeah, that's value for value for value. Yeah, really.

And it's so awesome once you get it running, isn't it? You know, I'm talking about B wing, you know, it's so it feels it feels good. Once you get it going Leaky canoe comes in with 12,000 222 cents. Oh, I feel like that should be something. Hmm. Yeah And a ducky. Yeah, it's let's let's give it a duck. Let's give it it. Let's give it one Yeah, it's let's let's give it a duck. Let's give it it. Let's give it one. OK, Chris and BJ are either of you piping any mesh tastic stats through MQTT into Home Assistant. You got any animations? Hmm.

I hadn't really put these two things together. I have been avoiding using MQTT with Home Assistant so far for reasons that I don't need to get into at the moment, but I know something like this is gonna make me break. It would be really interesting to have a way to capture as Joops is going down the road all of the nodes in like a Home Assistant report,

or something like that, or over a map. In Matrix, PJ says, I plan to, but so far I've never got it worked. Okay. Yeah, there's some interesting ideas here. I would like to know if there's any way, Matrix PJ says I plan to but so far I've never got it work. Hmm. Okay Yeah, there's some interesting ideas here I would like to know if there's any way if you okay now I'm really cooking here if you had MQTT going could you have Home assistant devices talk via mesh tastic and then essentially build out a mesh IoT network Using mesh tastic just in your own home. I think you could. Uh, we also have a boost question from, uh, old leaky here.

I'm sending 10 K sats from breeze. However, my transaction history shows less is a note in the split offline. Well, that could be one issue or, you know, uh, in the lightning network, the node sending has to figure out all the routes. So there could have been some other issue in the routes between us or temporary failure. Yeah. It's likely, you know, my node or something didn't have channel capacity, although we got this off my node. So my node got it. But that could be it. That does happen from time to time. And yeah, so those Sats don't leave your wallet

when that happens. Wes has built us a fancy system, though. So we check multiple nodes. So even if one of the nodes didn't receive your message, we're kind of checking that against some of the other nodes that we have and still get that message. Well, Tomato boosted in one, two, three, four, five Satoshis. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. Happy New Year from my fountain wallet. Still using antenna pod for listening for the record.

It was fun to hear your adventures with preempt RT. I'm currently using the Zen kernel myself. And as a former Open Solaris fan, I've been trying to get a more responsive Linux for over two decades now. Word, yeah, I've wanted this too. I feel, that's exactly how I feel. Like I've never, I feel like it's never been built for me.

It's always kind of been built for a generic server workload, for maybe even a web server workload or something like that, but not a desktop workload. Tomato, tomato, you are speaking my language, brother. Wait for those of us who haven't Solaris'd, give it a little bit more here. I want some context. Well, it's just like a car Brent, you know, you know You can have a you can have a car that you get from the dealership That's just a really nice kind of balanced vehicle that'll last you hundreds of thousands of miles

Or you can get one that souped up with the turbo and a bigger air intake and you know Maybe you got better exhaust on this thing and you've really kind of like tweaked the computer a little bit to make it like You know run even harder You know got it. It's kind of like tweaked the computer a little bit to make it like, you know, run even harder, you know, got it. It's kind of like that. Yeah. Undefiable comes in with a Jar Jar boost 5000 sets. You're supposed. This is thank you for another year. Perfect. Thank you very much. Appreciate the boost. Matqua comes in with 2680 sets.

Because I'm the win. 180 cents. Because I'm the winner! Second attempt at boosting from Breeze. This is a postcode boost. No, not a zip code boost as I'm in Australia, but keep up the good work. Australia doesn't have zip codes? I got the postcode! Oh, I learned something new today. Do they not have zippers either? I don't know. Yeah, okay, uh

2680 that looks to be located in New South Wales Well, hello, New South Wales nice to hear from you Hope things are nice down there. It's very snowy in parts of the country here right now Hybrid sarcasm comes in with ten thousand sats That's a spicy meatball. I need to have have that Tuxy's music in my life. Where can I find it? You're on the show?

I think I bought it. Yeah, I bought it. It's like a licensed thing. I know it's good word show music, right? As a 2025 prediction for us too, Jellyfin will release a Swiftfin for TVOS via test flight. And it's really freaking good. Do you know something? So Swift Fin is, as it sounds,

an iOS native Swift-based Jellyfin client that works great on iOS, except they don't have a release for tvOS, where you really kinda wanna watch Jellyfin. Right. So it would be really nice to see that. Thanks, Hybrid. Great to hear from you. Geek Dude boosts in with 10,000 Sats.

Did you buy that from a certified vendor? I primarily use Fish Shell. Okay, that sounds like a certified vendor to me. Yep. My favorite extension for the Fish Shell is Bass. This extension lets you use regular Bash scripts from the fish shell by saying things like Bas source setup dot source.

It also works with modules. With Bas, I no longer have to leave fish to work with Bash utility scripts. Okay, this looks kind of killer. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You got me right there. I Jaws this weekend. Had to do that. Had to do the old up back to bash That's great to know alright, so we'll put a link to bass be a SS in the show notes Bobby pin boosted in 10,000 cents banks or Ponzi schemes run by morons My Linux prediction and hope for 2025 is that by the end of the year you will be able to install actual Steam OS on a computer of your choosing.

To clarify, this means the same OS that's on the Steam Deck. Bazite does not count, but Valve getting hacked and the ISO getting leaked certainly does. We do not endorse such behavior. No, but I like Bobby Pins been slinking that one way or another. This is happening. I'm getting it. I want this to be true. And I think with the brand updating they're doing, I don't know.

I just feel like it is getting close. We'll see. You know, if you listen to our predictions episode, you know, that was kind of a topic we were a bit mixed on. I hope you're right, Bobby. Thanks for the boost. Yukon Kronelius is in with 18,100 Sats. Let's hear it, good buddy. Let's hear it, good buddy.

And he says, since there's been some title and CD talk recently, yeah, guilty, I thought I'd share my two cents on, I think you're sharing your two cents, buddy, on Hi-Fi in general. If you got an old DVD Blu-ray player lying around, that can be your new Hi-Fi starting point. The thing is, you've got to use the optical out on the player instead of RCA. Run the optical into a separate DAC. That's a digital to audio converter.

And then you can preserve the digital source and pass it to a dedicated piece of hardware that will actually do the audio justice, bypassing the cheap DAC inside the DVD player entirely. That is a pro audio tip. The bit I do know, that checks out. What I can follow, I tend to agree. It goes on to say, I am running a WeM Ultra Streamer, which plays title as my Hi-Fi Home Base. It basically acts as an audio receiver,

and then it passes line out to my external amp. I also have a 4K Blu-ray player that I use to play CDs going into the WEM's optical input. Do you think I'm saying that right? WEM, W-I-I-M. WEM. The WEM allows for modularity and customization, and it's a good starting point.

Down the road, I can add a better DAC into the system and I'll get even better sound quality. I know there's some Hi-Fi guys out there that listen a lot. So I'd like to hear your setups. I agree. All right, yeah. It's funny he just boosted this because I was thinking, you know when we went to Tirana?

Tirana. And we were doing our thing over there, and we were setting up the server stuff. And we had an opportunity to listen to some really high-end speakers. And I was just reflecting on how much I enjoy high-fidelity audio, and that when people really spend the time. Just this morning, didn't even know this booth came in. And I was just thinking, I really enjoy people setups where they really spend the time

to get it right and you can hear the nuance in the music so I'd love to hear about some of your setups out there he wraps up by saying I'm considering burning some DVDs with 24-bit 96 kilohertz source out of title nice yeah that sounds right anonymous boosts in in with $2,468. Coming in hot with the boots! Oh, this is a little PSA actually. You get lots of value from JB's shows, but aren't into Bitcoin. You can head over to jupiter.party and pay what you want with your greasy old fiat funbucks.

Do you really love you, some Linux unplugged and maybe a little coder and twib to boot? Well, my friend, did you know that you can always give more than the asking price to show how much you appreciate that crazy good value? Hurry over to Jupiter Party now and show that love. Well done. Well done. Now, I says, ah, go on, live long and prosper. You know what?

Okay. You go long and live long and prosper, you know what? Okay, you go long and live long and You go foster it what I don't know Live long and prosper. Yeah, this message paid for by anonymous boosters for Jupiter broadcast Well ambient noise came in with Well, ambient noise came in with 3930 satoshis. The traders love the ball. Here's a little mesh-tastic check-in. I wanted to include my gate in my home automation, but it's way outside my wifi range.

So I decided to have a play with mesh-tastic even though it's not exactly designed for this purpose. I'm using a Raspberry Pi Pico W with an MT module connected to MQTT to self-host that MQTT server. This communicates with another Raspberry Pi Pico with MT. I guess MT is mesh tactic, sorry. So this is actually sort of exactly what I was just talking about. Is it really? This is incredible.

The listeners had already pre-answered your question. Oh my goodness. So on the other end, he's got a serial connection to an Arduino micro. What? Cool. I was hoping you could use Mechtastic for something like this,

but this is the proof in the pudds right here. Delicious pudds. Thank you, ambient noise. I really think, and I wonder if anybody out there has thought this or has done something similar with a different technology garden monitoring. You could really you know you could monitor the crap out of your garden and you know monitor soil, monitor wind, monitor how wet it is all that kind of

stuff and you know your whole every sensor becomes part of the mesh. And if you let Brent watch he can teach you far. That's true Yeah, yeah, or actually what you want to do is get it all done And then he'll show up and tell you everything you did wrong which would have been really useful at the beginning But now there's nothing you can do about at the end, but he's gonna make sure you know about it What is this? What no nothing nothing nothing Did I take it did I do? Okay, I'm sorry.

Back to the business. Geez, happy new year. Brad comes in with 15,000 sats. Make it so. Use them breeze too, all note. JB fan Toronto meetup, FYI, Saturday, January 11th at noon. Craft beer in the market, craft beer market. Go to The Matrix, we have a team Toronto for the details and a gath.io link,

which... We'll have to snag that. Yes. Brad, thank you for the PSA here. So there you go. If you're in the Toronto area, we had a really good showing at our meetup. PSA, there's another one coming up.

Saturday, January the 11th at noon at Craft Beer Market. And again, there is the Team Toronto at noon at Craft Beer Market. And again, there is the Team Toronto chat in our Matrix chat room. Yeah, I'd like to just reiterate too, if you want to, as a JB community, host these events on our Gadio instance, go to colonyevents.com and you can see them all there.

Zenzilla 94 comes in with 14,000 sets. Woo! I am programmed in multiple techniques. Here's a boost in support of transcripts. The amount of times I've tried and failed to find references to hardware or software that y'all have mentioned on the show is unfortunately way too high.

Okay. Speaking of such, Chris, what's the name of that WLED controller you've mentioned a few times now? Yeah, it doesn't have a great name. It's like it's domestic products. Hmm, specific. Yeah, I think it's, I know, it's like, it's not super useful.

I realize, it's funny, I was just thinking about how I feel like I probably failed some of you out there that wanted to get this. I'll tell you what I'll do though, is I will look it up right now, and then I will put a link to it in the show notes, so you can just click it Because when I when I look at the product name on Amazon, it's just Wi-Fi smart LED controller. All right

Yeah, I'll check the show notes up with that help Good question. It's a good device for anybody that doesn't know what I'm talking about. It's a tiny little board built by a Small business for a family that makes a nice out of the box, fully WLED compatible controller. That is a fantastic way to grab WLED compatible lights off of Amazon, you have the whole set up for under 50 bucks and you can do stuff that the Hughes lights wish they could do.

It's PJ making these, isn't it? Yeah, or you have PJ wired up. With this, there's no solder and everything just connects plugs right in. PJ a J out of business you're supporting I think he could use the you could use this how he could use the help. He's got plenty So sorry don't have a better name for you, but link in the show notes Zenzilla continues by saying Wes Since you mentioned co buzz or however we decided we're gonna say that mm-hmm

I'd like to vouch for the quality of their service I've personally found superior availability and quality on Cobuz compared to Tidal. Also mentioned my favorite tool for stacking flags, Stream Rip. It's a dead simple command line tool, gold standard. By the way, thanks for all the content from 2024. Hey, thank you and happy new year.

Yeah, thanks for chiming in. That's all very useful. Good to hear from you, Zen. Not the one boosted in 10,000 sets You shall all bomb bad Simply saying happy new year Thank you same to you Appreciate that not nice to hear from you and a quick

Thank you to the two device who was setting up up his AlbiHub and sent us 5,000 sats as a test. Hey, that counts. Made the cut. That's a hot boost. Thank you, dude. Appreciate that. Getting that AlbiHub going too is great to see.

All right. That is all the boosts above the 2,000-sat cutoff for this episode. Thank you, everybody who helped make episode 597 a possibility. Screw the ad winter. We continue on thanks to our members and our boosters. We had 48 of you streamed sats as you listened, and a mighty 101,911 sats stacked just by our sats streamers. Really, really thank you for doing that.

When you combine that with the senders, we had a really good showing because this was over a couple really good showing because this is that this was over a couple of weeks. So this is a high number. Just keep that in mind. We had 79 individuals participate in the boost or stream value for value experience. 838 sats. Really a fantastic holiday showing.

Thank you everybody for the holiday wishes. It means a lot to us. Of course, thank you to our members out there who make this possible. Together, you all made episode 597 possible. If you'd like to boost the show, you can do it with Fountain, you can do it with Breathe, you can set up Albie Hub. We have links to get you started at the top of the show notes. And of course, this is, you know, it's a unique thing we're doing here.

This is what I was going to say, is we we're never gonna be some big, huge media outlet doing Linux content, but we can continue and be sustainable, and we can't be fired, we can't be canceled, we can't have like a magazine publisher put us out of work because the support comes from the audience. And that's just huge. And it really means a lot for this particular medium too,

I think. And it makes a Linux podcast where a business lives and dies on the quality of its Linux content possible. It's something really special. So thank you everybody from the members to everybody that boosts. It means a lot. It really does and it keeps us going.

So thank you. Now I got a handful of pics here. I know I overdid it. It means a lot. It really does and it keeps us going. So thank you. Now I got a handful of pics here. I know I overdid it. I was excited. It's the New Year's. I had gifts for all of you. This first one we actually picked in episode 469. I wanted to mention it again though because tax season is coming up and you may have a situation where you are forced to use commercial cloud storage to transfer sensitive documents. And I want to tell you about Cryptomator. I don't like the name, but I like the app.

It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and it is a secure client-side encryption for cloud storage. It essentially lets you create an encrypted vault, then it mounts the cloud storage or you mount the cloud storage and you put the encrypted vault in there. It cannot be decrypted by your cloud provider and it gives you a nice UI to get these things. It's essentially a folder structure that gets compressed and encrypted. And you're doing it all on your machine before it ever touches Google Drive or Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever it might be. Nice. Yeah. So a little reminder that it is a thing. It's easy to install. It's available on FlatHub as well. And I had to use this recently

as I was preparing some documents for the IRS, and this is how I'm securing those documents. And then I can store them on cloud storage and not worry about it. We also frequently mention flat packs that you can install. Just a quick way to share these with all of you. And every now and then you can have some cruft when you maybe tried out an app,'t work maybe it left a few layers

behind. That's where flat sweep comes in. Flat sweep helps you get rid of the residue left by some of those uninstalled flat packs. Wow okay I like the flat pack is solving its own problem here in a way. Yeah use it with caution of course because you're removing data, but I freed up about 80 megabytes on my system. I mean, it's not like we're- How many flatbacks did you break? None, that's just it.

Everything worked, that's why I went ahead and mentioned it. I tried it first on my system. And I figured if it broke, I'd tell you about that too. But I was surprised, you know, and it's funny because of course the criticism is it uses so much additional disk. Well, it turned out about 80 megabytes. I don't know, I'll never, you know, and it's funny because of course the criticism is it uses so much additional disk Well turned out about 80 megabytes. I don't know. I'll never be the same but it's nice. So it's called flat sweep And of course, it's feels flat back and then one last one

Do you boys do this where you have like especially when you have a multi-monitor setup that you're rocking a Persistent text editor that's always there for like a quick pasting or. Of course I have. We've been open somewhere. You've been watching me, where? Got my computer. And you know, some text editors, they like to have a whole library and a history

and they wanna auto restore. They wanna make sure you save when you close the window. And I don't want any of that. I just want a buffer I can dump stuff in, copy and paste out of, and have basically a persistent, low key, simple text editor. That's where Buffer comes in. And this is our last pick of the week. Celebrating Transience, Buffer provides a minimal editing space for all the things that you don't need to keep. It's got a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts because it's designed for a keyboard workflow, as they say.

You close the application, it doesn't ask you to save, and it doesn't save your work. It's gone. It's really meant for like something you just have up on the screen. You never have to use your mouse. You need someplace to quickly edit. It does have a couple of nice features.

It's got a spell check. It's got line numbers you can do in there. I really like it. I've been using it on Plasma and on my one GNOME desktop. It is a GTK application, works just great on Plasma, no big deal at all, doesn't replace Zadrickate for me, but it's kind of this, you know, local paste bin, if you will, a transient paste bin.

It's buffer. I like that. It's made by Chris Haywoodwood and it's up on GitHub and of course it's up on FlatHub as well. And you just have it run in there and never worry about what you leave in there. Like I just have a text editor open. I don't even wanna close it when I'm shutting down.

I just want the process to be killed. And when it opened up, don't ask me if I wanna restore anything. A place to stick stuff that you're gonna move somewhere else. If I want that, I'll use a different editor. If I want something that's gonna restore or something that opens. If I want that, I'll use a different editor. If I want something that's going to restore or something, you know, opens up files of a directory, I'll use that.

Now, my only thought is. How long until you lose a show doc? Oh, yeah, that could happen like a crash. Yeah, that I do sometimes use it to like temporarily, like reformat some stuff I'm going to put in the dock. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I may live to regret my pick, but there you go. Crypto meter, flat sweep and buffer. We'll have links to all of those in the show notes.

And that's it. That's our episode. And we're still soliciting your feedback on the tuxes and your predictions for 2025. So please do boost those in. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And I'm thrilled to say we will be back at our regular live Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over jblive.tv.

You can get that at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar in your local time zone or get a podcasting 2.0 app. And only three weeks left to figure out where you'll be for episode 600. Oh, jeez, Wes. Yeah, we should probably figure that out, too. Where are we going to be? Don't know. But I'll end with this. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'll hope you'll be here all for 2025 with us. We really appreciate you and we'll see you right back here next week. I'm going to go to bed now. Superability breeds superior ambition.