LINUX Unplugged - 599: Psycho Shower Linux Power

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

On the eve of episode 600, we introduce our next challenge and explore the new wave of Linux phones.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.FMLiberux – Privacy, Security, FreedomPinePhone Braveheart Linux smartphone begins shipping January 17th - LiliputingMecha Comet - Modular Linux Handheld Computer powered by Open-Source Software — The Comet is a handheld Linux computer that brings extensibility in hardware and software adapting to your needs.Mecha Comet - Modular Linux Handheld Computer by Mecha Systems Inc. — KickstarterSupporters of Chromium-Based Browsers — The Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers will provide a neutral space where industry leaders, academia, developers, and the broader open source community can work together to support projects within the Chromium ecosystem.Wine 10.0 Released With Native Wayland Support, Better HiDPI — Wine 10.0 brings more than six thousand changes that built up over the past year in the bi-weekly Wine 9.xx development releases.LUP 600 Pacific Northwest Party · Colony EventsComprehensive Audio Stack Improvements for Modern Hardware and SoftwareDetailed AMD IOMMU Driver Development for Enhanced Core SupportFreeBSD Foundation's Sponsored Development Projects for 2024metapac: multi-backend declarative package managerdecman: declarative package & configuration manager for Arch Linux.aconfmgr: a configuration manager for Arch LinuxGeneBean's DotsReplitOliveTin — OliveTin gives safe and simple access to predefined shell commands from a web interface.Open-tv — Ultra-fast, simple and powerful cross-platform IPTV app.ErsatzTV — Stream custom live channels using your own mediaDeepin Linux 25 Goes (Almost) Immutabledeepin 25 Preview Release Note – Deepin Technology Community

Hello friends and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris, my name is Wes, and my name is Brent. Hello gentlemen, well coming up on the show today as we prepare physically, mentally, and emotionally for episode 600, we're going to introduce you to what might be our next challenge. If the boys can convince me in this episode, and there might be a way you can join too. Then we're gonna round it out with a killer pick,

some great boosts, and a bunch more. It's a banger of an episode. Let's make this one really good so that way we can slack off for 600, and's start by saying time appropriate greetings to that virtual log. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hey Chris, hey Chris. Hello guys. Hello. Shout out out there to the quiet listening too. I see our baller booster hybrid sarcasm up there and others getting ready for next week's episode. Just chilling in the quiet lounge. You're always welcome. Just grab mumble.

Join our service. We have details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. Also, I want to say good morning to tail scale tail scale dot com slash unplugged. Go there, support the show and get it for free for up to 100 devices and three users. Tail scale is the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other, wherever they are, secured by a mesh network, protected by a wire guard. This is the ultimate realization of what WireGuard is capable of. It's just secure, it's remote access to whatever you might have, your production systems,

your databases, all on a mesh network, and it's really fast. It's intuitive to set up, but it's also very flexible. It's programmable. You have like a programmable private network for a business or for an individual. I started with my personal plan, 100 devices. I still use that. But now we've also expanded to have a JB business plan because there's so much we can use it

for the backend of JB as well. And it makes all other VPNs seem really old. Like when I hear people are using like no disrespect, but when they're using things like OpenVPN and other proprietary point to point VPNs, I feel bad for them. It doesn't have to be that painful. It doesn't have to be that way.

Tailscale is so much better. Try it for free on 100 devices and up to three users and support the show. Right now, just go to tailscale.com slash unplugged. We're going to keep the housekeeping short this week because we've got a lot of news to dig into. But I do want to mention that we have a lot of details for LUP 600 meetup parties and whatnot.

So be sure you stay tuned to after the news so that way we can cover all that because there's details and logistics and things like that that we don't want you to miss. But let's start with something that is a tantalizing idea, a dream, a passion of the Linux community that seems to never die. And that is a full Linux smartphone. It's called the Librex, and they're promising privacy, security, and freedom. And this is landing the announcement, at least right around the pine phone, sell the original pine phone celebrating its fifth birthday. So we've got a handful of these devices out there, boys. You know this, you know, like you got the pine phones, you got the Librex 5.

Right. But. I mean, it's like you could the Pine Phones, you got the Librem 5. Right. But, I mean, it's like you could count them on one hand how many true Linux smartphone devices they are. And the Librex Next is a new smartphone that uses Librex OS, which is based on Debian 13. Huh. And it's got some, I don't know, are you looking, look at the pictures there,

I'm curious to know what you think of the design It's got an interesting design. I wonder if you notice What kind of jumps out at the top of the phone if you I did yeah It doesn't look especially modern or sleek, but it doesn't look bad. No kind of like an older iPhone I imagine these are pre-production designs as well, right? But it's got all kinds of toggles on the top for Wi-Fi, for LTE, probably, probably other things. Yeah. Mic and camera definitely on there. I saw Bluetooth on there. It's got a RK3588S SoC.

So that's a good chip. Octa-core. Yep. 256 gigabytes of eMMC storage built in, then expandable with an SD card. It has a six point.34 inch OLED screen running at a nice 2400 by 1880 resolution with a fingerprint sensor on the back and Corning Gorilla Glass for the screen. And it has a removable, whoa, removable, I'm going to say it again, a removable 5300 amp hour battery, 32 megapixel rear camera, 13 megapixel front camera. It also has a legitimate LTE modem, they're saying it. It's at least one that I think is pretty considered pretty good.

The Snapdragon X 32, which supports 5G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and the hardware switches. Brent. could this be, if it's true, if it's real, could this be a Brent phone? Well, I've been looking for a phone like this for, I was going to say five years, but I think it's been more like 10 years. I feel like many of us have, but nothing that's come out has been up to snuff. Now this sounds very promising.

It is of course, a bunch of promises at this point. So we haven't seen any development devices. Nobody's gotten their hands on it and it is a crowd funder and I know you have a really good experience with how these go. So a lot of this makes me pause a little bit, although I got to say something in me as tinkling, cause yeah, I would love a phone

like this if it was, I'm usually typically fine with giving up a few popular, um, features to lean a little closer to my ideals, as you guys know. So I would totally go this way. If this got into production, yeah, you've got me hooked. I think the one question I have, okay, so you make a great point that you're willing

to forego a lot of conveniences and sort of quality of life stuff. But my question is, isn't there still a set of Android or iOS apps that are almost at the essential layer Maybe not maybe you can kind of not but I'm just thinking like Maps well maps or I don't know there's is there like a you know an app you need to register if you're like coming into another country or instead of having to You need to register if you're like coming into another country or instead of having to fill out a paper form or.

Boy, you're right. I have to go apps blunking like when I'm traveling quite a bit. Well, I did read on their website here that they're doing like an Android jail. So you can run some of these apps if you needed to. OK, see that would that would work. So Wes, for you, I got a question. Imagine this thing. it kind of lives up to what they say here, right?

We have to be kind of skeptical here at this point, but let's just go with this for a second. It's using Posh, I believe, that GNOME GTK stuff that Pures and Mothers have worked on, the adaptive GTK. That stuff's in a pretty good place. It doesn't look bad, I don't think. Apps that you're gonna be familiar with. An underlying OS you can tweak to your heart's content.

You could run an Apache server on this thing if you wanted to. Battery life though, four hours. Is that a deal breaker for you when it's removable? Huh. By the way, that's not their estimate. I'm just thinking, when you've got this RK3588 SoC, and you've got a Snapdragon X32 modem,

and you've got a Linux OS and a 6.34 inch OLED screen, all of those things are on the higher end of power use. So I think we would have to, especially if you're on 5G, I think you'd have to set your expectations to kind of mid for battery life. Yeah, I suppose, I wonder if they were, if they're gonna have good OS level options

for like battery saver mode or other sort of power profiles? Cause you know, if I could put it into like background mode for a lot of the day and just like, hey, every couple minutes wake up for notifications and otherwise kind of sleep. Yeah, it doesn't need to be constantly receiving, yeah, you're right. Especially if I could choose the granularity

or switch the mode pretty easily. Whole every 10 minutes. Not constantly, stop it. That's a great point. That'd be a fricking great OS. It's just like so rare that I need to know. Right now. Very true.

That's, yeah, I think the removable battery is such a nice return. Especially if you could get a couple of them. Keep some charge in your bag. Imagine a travel, like going back to your point about a travel day, like yes, maybe you you could get a couple of them, keep some charge in your bag. Imagine a travel, like going back to your point about a travel day, like yes, maybe you couldn't get some of the apps, but you could bring three of the batteries with you

and this could be your entire entertainment device, your media information, like everything. And you could even install Jellyfin on this. You might feel better about, well, maybe not from iOS, but you might feel better about some of the security risks of traveling too, if you're using a Linux powered phone. Yeah, perhaps. Chris, you've had multiple devices in your life

for a little while, you were doing the dual phone thing for a bit there, do you see this being an option in that respect, like having certain apps on the everyday, always on phone, and having, I don't know, most of your private life on this guy? I was just sort of thinking that, right? Especially if you could keep an older couple gen out pixel that you just kind of have for if you need it for one thing or maybe you take that one when you travel or...

Yeah, like something that has a canard to the other. I wouldn't need to bring it with me if I'm going over my friend's house for the night, right? Yeah, it doesn't maybe have all your passwords, doesn't have all your notes, doesn't have all your pictures, all your history. You know what I was thinking actually is... Especially because I already own several old pictures.

True. You know, like I wouldn't have to like get a new phone to be my second phone. I feel like I still haven't landed on the sweet spot for, I'm going to a relative's house, I'm going to a hotel, I'm going to an Airbnb, and I wanna take USB-C to HDMI, and I wanna put something up on the TV. And, because I just, I had my 10 year anniversary

with the wife a few weeks ago, and we went to a little Airbnb nearby, and I get in there and of course, I didn't bring anything to take control of the TV, didn't even cross my mind. Yeah. And a little portable phone that maybe I had a C to HDMI

adapter that I could run Kodi on or a Jellyfin front end would be really nice. And I've tried to kind of replicate this with the fire stick to not really much success. I don't know, maybe- I like that idea. Maybe the audience has a device out there that's already perfect for this that they could boost it and tell me about.

But I could see the phone doing this, but this is probably gonna be somewhere near $1,000. There's gotta be a cheaper way to accomplish what I'm looking to do. But if it was one of many things it provided for me, I could see getting this, even if it wasn't my daily driver phone, potentially. Crowdfunding is the red flag here.

We have to kind of see how this goes. They haven't actually built anything as far as we know yet, maybe prototypes. We don't have any information on battery life or price. We don't even really know when the crowd funders gonna fully kick off. Like they haven't even said that yet. You can't even go crowdfunding at this point.

You know, I don't know if I've tried HDMI, but the Pixels and those USB-C little docks that have, you know, USB and HDMI on them have been fairly well compatible. Yeah. So if you had the Jellyfin client on your phone connected to your server, you might be able to do it that way.

I don't know if you want to, but. You know, also in this space is the Mecha Comet. And this one is really out there, where like, this makes the LibreX Next seem reasonable and totally achievable, because this is in a whole other level of what they're trying to do. It's a modular Linux handheld, and it's extensible by slapping on different modules.

We've seen these ideas over the past, but my goodness, if this isn't the most slick, elegant version and the dang thing has two USB ports in the side of it, as well as a small ethernet port. I don't know why, but suddenly I love the idea of a phone with a USB port. Heck yeah. And it has these ideas of modules that magnetically snap on and then interface with the device over USB. So they show up to the Linux OS as USB. And they demonstrated this actually functioning at CES.

So it's kind of like what Framework does, but just remove the connector. Yes. And so an example of this is you could, where you might have a keyboard, you could slap off the magnetic keyboard and slap on a controller pad for maybe a Game Boy emulator or maybe a data cable to connect to an external disk.

They have right now a GPIO, I guess, accessory. You could call it a game pad accessory and a key bat, a keyboard accessory. But it's just general GPIO stuff. It's all USB, pretty basic open source, how they make it work. So it's nothing really particularly secretive about it. Anybody could really probably wire up something. It is a Linux OS. They call it Mechanics OS.

It's based on Debian. They say the perk to that is that there's quote, 60,000 packages in the Debian repo that work out of the box. The Mechanics shell is built in Rust and supports GPU rendering on Wayland. Whoa! Yeah. Built with the tools you already know and they list Chromium, they list Docker, Go,

Qt, Rust obviously, Node and others. It is also a Kickstarter, it's a crowd funder, it's a Kickstarter specifically and it's in the pre-launch mode It has not technically launched either They seem to have prototypes Because I watched coverage at CES of like a whole booth of them actually functioning and snapping pads on and whatnot And they have now videos of that up on their website as well So this one's way out there boys They seem busy. They've got a gith and you know, those repos are active.

This might be better for what I'm thinking of, my kind of device, you know, a portable media server, because you could see snapping on a disk. Yeah, this opens it up to a whole other conception than a traditional phone. They do have some use cases here, Chris, that I think will buy you over to if you need. One of them called the car whisperer. You can add a can or ODB port to the comments. Start talking your car or.

OK, the other one here they suggest is build your own tricorder. Well, I was thinking a portable recorder, you know, if you could have a little USB interface that you could snap on to this thing. Because again, it's just USB with power pins and whatnot. It's pretty straightforward. That could, you know, for events with the recording, like audacity running on the little screen. Right.

You just use or Reaper even. You could even use Reaper because it's available on ARM. So this is way out there. I invite you guys to go to the show notes at Linux on plug dot com slash five ninety nine and check out the link to this thing, because it's the coolest implementation I've ever seen of this idea of this kind of like Lego kit phone. It's not as modular as like the Motorola stuff we've seen in the past.

It's just really that front end spot where a keyboard would go. There is a magnetic mount where things connect. And so you just can swap different stuff on there. And then it's got USB-C on the bottom of the phone. It's got, I mean, in the versions they show on their website, it's got USB-A on the side and an ethernet port. It seems like you could sell some to just anyone who worked at like a data center or support environment,

just with the, you know, USB-A and the ethernet right there on the side and having a nice keyboard, physical keyboard. Or like, what about Amazon, right? So you buy these as a standard device and then you build a custom snap-on module that's particular to the work case or something like that. I don't know, man, I could see it. Again, not sure I'm pricing, it's a crowd funder,

but these are really interesting ideas. Notable too that I think that both of them are running on Debian. I would love to have you boost in and tell us if you're interested in devices like these still, or have you soured on the idea of a Linux device? And are you willing to go far enough to actually put your money on the line and crowd fund one of these? Boost! Boost in and tell us because I'm really interested in the audience's temperature on this. Before we move on,

just a couple of quick stories to wrap up on. I thought it was noteworthy that the Linux Foundation has launched the supporters of Chromium-based browsers. Quote, the supporters of Chromium-based browsers will provide the neutral space where industry leaders, academia, developers, and broader open source communities can work together to support projects within the Chromium ecosystem. We've seen some, uh, I'd say confusion or maybe some anger in some of the Linux and

open source community over this. I think Brent, you had a take I kind of liked. Well, I have heard a lot of people think, well, what's the deal with Firefox? Like why are we supporting the Chromium-based stuff when we've had Firefox all along? And that's a good question to answer. I don't know who's gonna answer it, but it seems like we need one.

Well, the argument I've heard as well, it has a foundation already, it's Mozilla. Well, I think I'd also, Brent, I think you said this, that the Linux Foundation in a way was sort of dealing with the solving for a future But, uh, Brent, I think you said this, that, you know, the Linux Foundation in a way was sort of dealing with the solving for a future where maybe we don't have a Firefox,

or, you know, we need a healthy Chromium ecosystem because it's gonna be here whether we like it or not. Yeah, but wouldn't the way to solve for that be to support Firefox more? Not if it's doomed. Then it's just a waste of money. Oh, my God, that's dark. Eyes. Eyes. I'm using Firefox right now to be clear.

Am I the only one that just is cooking a little conspiracy bacon on this one? To me, this seems like a hedge that the Justice Department might go through with their threats of separating Chromium off from Google. Ooh, okay, I like that. And then they're positioning themselves to be ready for when that happens.

That makes sense. Yes. I'm gonna go with that bacon with you. Wow, that's rare for Brent. All right, thank you. I like that. What do you think? It wasn't even Canadian bacon. What do you think?

You think it could be like them laying the cards out or I guess maybe another metaphor would be like preparing the deck, the seats and. Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't know if that's the only reason or it's a direct response, but I think that and sort of the wider concerns around that, especially as we've seen, you know, more and more in Microsoft, you know,

there's just like a lot of companies now tied to this code base and a lot of, it's some extent the real economy that relies on it functioning. I think that probably plays a factor, yeah. Short Dom in the live chat also points out Electron's a factor here. True, yeah.

Even if Chrome never got separated out, Electron's such a huge thing now. You'd wanna have at least some, maybe they're hoping to get input or developer influence and build influence over time. I'd love to know. I do think, I mean, the Linux Foundation, for all of its faults, it does seem to do a decent job

of being able to help coordinate and provide some funding and centralize dispatch or whatever for open source projects sometimes. I feel like I'm missing a wider play. Well, Chris, I see a big old join now button on their website here. Maybe we should do some inside reporting. Maybe the unplugged show should become a supporter of Chromium based browsers.

What if we make a new browser and you can just only go to the show page? That'd be great. That'd be so good. And then I just wanted to wrap up as far as news goes with a shout out to Wine 10.0. Ooh, now with native Wayland support and better high DPI support. And I just think this is incredible because the Wine project was started in 1993.

Whoa. They just keep going and going and going. And it is so respectable. 2008, which we covered on this show, I think, at least one of our shows, Wine reached 1.0, and that felt like such a huge deal. And now here we are, 10.0 is out. And I think this is also going to make one of my predictions

about Proton correct in Linux Unplugged, but we'll see, we'll see. It's also like, maybe remind ourselves, the promise of what Wine advertises that it can do seems kind of impossible in practice, you know what I mean? Like, oh yeah, you could write a paper about how you could do that, sure. Right.

But you're gonna keep up with the changes and make real world complicated applications work? Sure, sure, good luck. Like a game? Yeah. Turns out, yeah. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase.

It's the number one password dot com slash unplugged. OK, I have a question for you. Do your end users always and I mean always without exception work on company owned devices and I.T. approved apps? I don't think so. I don't think it's possible. So I think the next natural question is, how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? Well, OnePassword has the answer to this question.

It's Extended Access Management. OnePassword Extended Access Management. It helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Because it solves problems that traditional IAMs and MDMs just can't touch. And it's also bundling one password. You know one password. We've all had those situations where we've seen the passwords under the keyboard,

we're stuck to the monitor, or somebody uses the same password everywhere. You think, god, if they just had a great password manager that would solve all of this. Well, one password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users, 150,000 plus businesses from IBM to Slack, and now they're doing more than just securing passwords.

Now with extended access management, they're taking to the next level. Plus, One Password is ISO 27001 certified, and they have regular third-party audits, and they have the largest bug bounty out there. They just exceed the standards set by everybody else. Secure every app and every identity, even the unmanaged ones. Go to onepassword.com slash unplugged.

That's all lowercase. Again, support the show. Check it out and try it out. It's onepassword.com slash unplugged. All right. Well, we are one week away as we record from LUP episode 600. And that includes all of the awesome-looking meetups that the community have set up. Oh, yeah, I'm gonna go over to colonyevents.com right now. Let's go check them out. Okay, and something that became clear,

and thank you to everyone pointing this out, recently, we've been experimenting with an earlier live time by two hours. But we started doing that just because it, it kind of was working a little better for a variety of boring reasons. But we'd already planned and set up schedules for the LUP 600 event with, you know,

the expectations of the show would be at the time that it's been. For years. For years and years and years, yeah. So just to be clear, LUP 600, we will be be at the time that it's been. For years. For years and years and years, yeah. So just to be clear, LUP 600, we will be live at the normal time, which is 12 p.m. Pacific, here in the Pacific Northwest.

3 p.m. Eastern. So that way you can join the Mumble Room and listen along and pop in the on air and give us a little shout. I would recommend showing up early, so that way we can sort out mumble issues and audio issues, which we'll no doubt have and Then for the Pacific Northwest meetup We're not having the meetup at the studio

Because we realized we couldn't really have a party and do the show at the same time as awesome as that would be if that Were a thing that we could do That would make for a horrible podcast So what we're gonna do is record the show and And then immediately after, we're going to head over to the point, which is really close to the studio. So we're just going to walk over afterwards about 3 p.m. at our local time. And we have all the details at Colony events dot com.

But that also means we can accommodate more people since we're not having it at the studio. So more than merrier. Everybody is welcome to join us next week in person, right here in the Pacific Northwest in Smokey Point. Come to the point at 3 p.m. All the details are at colonyevents.com. There is like a whole bunch of events on there now.

It's really awesome to see. And ours for the details is just the one that's listed as the Pacific Northwest Meetup. We'll put a link to it in the show notes as well. But all of them are listed over at colonyevents.com. There's a couple new meetups here. I think I want to do a shout out to. There's a FOSDEM meetup that popped up

because FOSDEM is happening at the exact same time. So I think that's pretty exciting. And also maybe this is more of a PSA. There's one in Melbourne that's happening, which is pretty awesome. But it seems to be happening March 6th, which I don't know, my time math is pretty good, but I think that's a little too late to join LUP 600, so folks who are organizing the Melbourne

meetup, maybe have a look, make sure you're on the right day. Yeah. Although everybody is welcome to continue to use the colony events.com service to schedule meetups forever, just if you want to meet up with other JB listeners in there, and then you could always boost to continue to use the colony events dot com service to schedule meetups forever. Just if you want to meet up with other JB listeners in there, and then you could always boost in or write us and have us give us a shout out so people know to go sign up. We are happy to

do that every time we go to a meetup. Literally 100 percent. I'm not saying 99 percent, not 99.5. 100 percent of the time we do meetups. The people there say, oh, we should do more of this. Even if the guys can't come, we should do more of this. And then we leave and sometimes they do it. But most of the time they just sort of drift apart because we don't leave them with any tooling. But if they said it and we gave them like, you know, here, go right here, go set up a meetup.

I think it would actually continue to create some momentum. So I invite everybody out there, continue to use colonyevents.com after this as well, especially as we get close to Linux Fest and Scale and Planet Nix. If you wanna make some plans around there, that could be really nice too. People could just go there and see what's going on,

what are people doing? I say take and run with it. And we're sorry if there's been any confusion around the timing and all of this, especially because for a bit we were thinking about having our meet up here at the studio, but now we've decided to have it at the pub nearby. Oh, and kids are welcome at our meet up. It is a family-friendly venue as well. Okay, boys. You have been slowly trying to convince me

that we should do a free BSD challenge on this show. That's right. And you've recently provided some documentation to indicate that now may be the time. So, uh, make your case. I will admit I'm on the fence. I think you two are a little bit more pro than I am. I will admit I'm on the fence. I think you two are a little bit more pro than I am. I

Don't know. I think my hesitation is I Have been down this path. I've run free BSD in production, you know I've I've tried it it has been a bit but I've tried it So I feel like this is this is like something I've done and you guys like let's go do this I'm like, okay, but I've tried that and it's alright, you know, it's alright, but that's one of the reasons I'm over here You know okay, but I've tried that and it's all right. You know, it's all right, but that's one of the reasons I'm over here, you know, is because I tried that. So you're saying Prospector Chris has been there, done that and... Prospector Chris knows.

Back in his day, you know, he learned a few things. Well, I think you're a curious fellow, first of all. Oh, okay. And, you know, here you love seeing community-driven open source. Coming in hot and hard. That is what FreeBSD is. And I think a lot of other-

Immediately going for the soft spot, immediately. And a lot of other people have seen that recently because 2024 was like a standout year, I think, in terms of like, there's just been good investments and donations and for free BSD Yeah, oh following AMD and free BSD foundation collaborations and the sovereign tech fund making a big investment The free BSD foundation and quantum lease reach quantum leap research have announced a $750,000 USD commitment to improve laptop support. That's one news item, for instance. And specifically, it looks like AMD laptops.

Dell, AMD, and Framework. Okay, okay, okay. So I think, okay, maybe we don't have to try it immediately. That's maybe a separate case, but just in general, I think there is more and more reason to think that a couple of years ago FreeBSD take is outdated. And for that reason alone, we might wanna make sure that we're current.

I do think that's your best argument. Yeah, I do agree. They're also working on improving their audio stack and maybe creating a graphical installer. Those are big changes. They haven't done that yet. Well, I mean, it's a server of those. I guess it could be fun to not have a, that could be fun.

GhostBSD continues to be developed as well as like a desktop you know, desktop focus. So that's what I was going to ask you is how much like, is this, is this like, do we do free BSD because that's the big one or is ghost BSD the direction we should go because it's desktop folks and that could be a fun comparison. Yeah. Or maybe you could do a mix, you know, I think, you know, I think running maybe free BSD on a desktop or a server would be fine, and then you could do GhostBSD

as the desktop component if you wanted to. That's an interesting idea. But I think it's worth trying to make sure you use it in ways that will test the areas that are being developed and improvements. Okay, you know what? I think that's a good parameter, is it has to be tried as a server and as a desktop.

Yeah, try to get the full sense of how you would use it if you were maybe gonna try to actually replace some Linux. That's fair. Okay, huh. Plus they've been like, they're making a bunch of investments in their build system and security investments and doing audits and they're working on zero trust builds now.

Look at them go, huh? Also reproducible builds, they've got efforts there. I think at one point, at least in 2024, they were talking about maybe integrating Rust. I don't know where that conversation went offhand, but. It'd be interesting to see how ZFS is integrated now that they've had it for so long. Right, yeah, they've got like very nice

boot environment support that you can get going. So we should definitely play with that. And I have become a fan of the centralized config file. And I know that's, I mean, it used to be part of how FreeBSD worked, because a lot of that was just went into one configuration file, which I really liked about FreeBSD back then. Brent, what are your thoughts?

Oh, I'm in. Oh, come on. Oh, come on. Like, I've been BSD curious, I don't know, maybe for even two years now. I mean, people have been suggesting it to us for quite a long time. Yes, we do listen to you, don't worry.

But also with all these new developments, it feels like, yeah, why wouldn't we give it a shot? Hmm, okay, all right. So let's think about some parameters. Gotta use it as a server, see what it's like to host something. Like a home lab thing or a production thing. I gotta try it as a desktop.

On physical hardware? Ideally, I guess. Maybe I'm, I'd like to try both, I suppose. Yeah. Okay, what do you think, Brent? Is there anything, any other things that? Well, one question I have is how long is the challenge? Hmm, hmm.

How long did we do the 32-bit? I don't know. Was that a week? And I wondered too, should we delay it so the audience could participate? Like, maybe we shouldn't launch it? Yeah. Well, and also, we may want to ask, Is that a week? And I wondered too, should we delay it so the audience could participate? Like we shouldn't launch it? Yeah.

Well, and also we may want to ask, if we have experienced FreeBSD folks, I bet they will have some pointers to things we don't wanna miss while trying to check it out and evaluate it. Okay. So those are the things that we're gonna need to know. Is like, yeah, basically we're totally noobs to this again

because it has been a long time. So what should we know and what should we try? And are you willing to take a challenge with us? I guess boost in or go to linux-unplugged.com slash contact and let us know. And I think if we get some good feedback, maybe we just launch it in episode 600 next week. And then 600 will be the week we launch it.

And maybe by then we figured out how long to run it. I kind of think the nice thing about if we launched, it'd be nice to just end it in 601. It doesn't give us a lot of time though. We could do an update in 601 maybe. Maybe that's what we do. Maybe we run it for a couple of weeks and we do a midpoint check in 601 and a conclusion in 602.

That could work. Yeah, that gives us a couple of weeks to try both. You know. Make sure we have enough time. Both the server and the desktop stuff. It is nice to see this development happening over there. You know, it's a really great project and it will be interesting to look back at it now

with a Nix lens a bit more than I have in the past. Yeah, previously- Nix is available on BSD, right? I don't know. I don't think so. No, but what I'm saying is, the previous times I tried FreeBSD, I was coming at it from like an Ubuntu user's perspective,

which is totally fine, but I think there's more similarities in the way, you know, you configure Nix in FreeBSD than there would be with FreeBSD in Ubuntu. So there may be less of a culture shock this time. I don't know, I could be totally wrong, but that's my suspicion. Why have you never tried it, Brent?

Well, I remember poking around at GhostBSD and even Hello Systems when we did the 32-bit challenge because those seemed to be some of the only ones that supported the very odd CPU that I had in the machine that was sort of dropped off in my front door. But I think mostly it's just because we've never done a challenge. I don't really have a better excuse than that,

to be honest. Well, this'll be great. So this'll be your first time. I know you've must've run it before, Wes, right? Oh yeah, I've had a couple FreeBSD servers over the years. We've probably tried it once or twice on the show years ago. I think we must have, yeah. This'll be, okay.

You got me with the, it in New Year's thing. It has been a really, I mean, it's probably been pre-10. I think FreeBSD 9 was the last time I tried it. Yeah, I even, for a little tiny bit, I was renting a dedicated server. Really? From Hetzner and running FreeBSD on it. Just because you wanted to, or?

Yeah, well, I was trying it and experimenting. I dabbled with it before, and I wanted to get more of a sense for, you know, really running it. How did it work? Worked well. Yeah. It had like, I think four disks in it.

So, you know, had ZFS going and I did eventually replace it. I think ultimately at that time it was in a Buntu box running LexD with a bunch of containers. All right. Well, boost in and let us know if you're in on the free BSD challenge and if you have any guidance for us as well, which we can incorporate. And then we'll officially kick it off next week. So you don't have to do anything yet because we're going to incorporate everybody's feedback, set all the final parameters next week, and then officially launch it.

Well, we got to do it because we already got hybrid. Hybrid's in. All right. So, you know, if you want to be cool like hybrid, join us. Episode 600 is next week. Can you believe it? It feels like a milestone. It feels like a rare one.

Not many podcasts get this far. And if you've been on the fence or been meaning to boost, this is your time. We'd love to hear from some first time boosters and long time boosters to celebrate episode 600. Maybe we'll even put it on the charts. Wouldn't that be pretty cool? Strike and fountain tend to be the combo,

the easiest to get started, the least amount of friction. That's why we link them in the show notes. But there's also things like Breeze. That's B-R-E-E-Z. It makes it pretty simple to get going and you don't need to switch podcast apps. Of course, Episode 600 is also a celebration of our members. Jupiter.party to support all the shows

and LinuxHomePlug.com slash membership to support this specific show and get the perks. We would love to hear from you next week. Let's have a blowout. Episode 600 is gonna be a special milestone, and we'd love to hear from you. And thank you to everyone for all your support. It's just incredible to be at 599 right now.

It feels surreal, and I can't wait for 600. Well, that said, we do have some pretty amazing boosts here, and we do have a baller of a baller in Eric the Red. Yes, Mr. Red writes with his 100,000 sats. Thank you for all the great shows. During the middle of the night, I started to think about how amazing open source software is. Someday, we'll learn to apply these same community-based efforts

to things like energy and investing and be more prosperous. Wow. I hope so. I just updated two NixOS machines that started on 2305 to 2411 with no issues. Nice. That is nice.

Also just did the same. I revived the dead Thalio. Oh, right. Oh, nice. Also, Jess did the same. I revived the dead Thalio. Oh, right. Oh, nice. And went from 23.05 to 24.11. I had to change, I had to comment out, like, the... Something in there I like about enabling sound. Like, you just don't have to do that anymore.

And that was it! And then it was off to the races. It was really awesome. He says, Brent's comment on not distro-hopping since adopting NixOS has been true with me as well Nix OS has been a great desktop operating system. Oh glad it's working well for you Yeah, I I know and I that's why that that that take that we covered Where was like even even experienced Linux users shouldn't use it on the desktop just felt like it really missed it

I really missed it. Yeah, there are a lot of things that it got right But and you know what like I also for many many years, was very happy with Arch and Fedora and Ubuntu as my desktops. So it really just depends on what gear works for you. And thank you very much for being our baller user, Eric the Red. We really appreciate you. And you got in before we clicked over to 600.

Thank you very much. Turd Ferguson, moose said, with $88,222. Turn Ferguson! I was going to write a blog post about how Windows isn't ready for the desktop, but no one would read it. Oh, burn. Coming in hot, Tur. Coming in hot.

I hate building PCs. Well, our dear producer Jeff boosted in two boosts for a total of 28,888 Satoshis. That's right everybody, it's that time of year again. Happy birthday. He says, I find it hard to recommend any particular distro to people these days. It really depends on their backgrounds.

Wait, Chris, it's your birthday. Happy birthday, Chris, he says in his second boost here. He says, I wish I could join live today, but I'm busy earning that fiat S coin you heard it s coin so I can buy more sats Yeah, you go you got to mine it somehow right either directly or in the fiat mines Thank you producer Jeff, and I agree every distro is it's like Yeah, a personal recommendation based on their work and what they're doing

and what their expectations are on a computer and how they're going to use it. Right. It's a personal thing these days. I know it's weird to say that because Windows and Mac OS are supposed to be one size fits all. But I mean, right. People have preferred tool brands. So is it that surprising? Oh, you're right. There's so many different like electric drills and whatnot. That's a great perspective, Wes. Hybrid sarcasm comes in with 27,500 sets. He's a good guy.

He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy. Yeah, he is. Who's ready for LUP 600? The Central Florida Orlando listening party has secured a location. Nice. Well done.

All the deets are at colonyevents.com. Even Mike from Coda Radio has RSVP. Wow. Isn't that great? Isn't that, it's so great. I think Hybrid has more pull than we do. Yeah, sounds like it. All you wanting the remote meetups to be able to join

on Air Mumble via LEP 600, quick shout out to the check-in or something like that. Oh, oh, he wants us to give one. Yeah, and Hybrid's trying it today too. So ideally you go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash mumble, you get the mumble app installed, and then you get a microphone and you get headphones on, and you get in the quiet listening,

or there's like a joint queue actually, and we'll kind of go through and make sure your mic's working and then we'll bring it in. So I think what you're saying, Chris, is for LEP 600 we'd love to hear from a variety of the listening parties happening. Just a little quick report on what the scene looks like, and who's that?

Yeah, and in that case, maybe it's a USB microphone and a pair of headphones, if possible, and then people can come by, or maybe headphones aren't possible, I don't know. But yeah, that would be perfect. We'll see how it goes. It's definitely an experiment. Thank you, hybrid.

It's always great to hear from you. Why is Papa John boosted with 22,222 cents? Things are looking up for all my duck. Plus one for the tuxes. I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't vote in 2024. I was away from podcasts for a few months and I just getting caught up. The Tuxes finally convinced me to set up image though. What do you guys use for monitoring server stats

like CPU and hard drive temps? Unraid has temps in its GUI, but I'd love to pipe that data into somewhere that I'll actually see it. Thanks for all the great work. I plan on messing around with a cachey OS and maybe even a little bit of Nick's OS sometimes. Oh, wise Papa John.

We would love to hear your thoughts on that. And don't ever worry about falling behind and boosting on an old topic. A, it is good signal for us to know where the audience is at in the listening backlog. So when people boost from an old episode, it's good for us to know where people are at, just from like a content release schedule so we know what our expectations are. But two, a good topic is always worth talking about. So don't ever feel bad about coming in on something from a previous episode. And I would love to hear your thoughts if you do try Cashew or NixOS.

The tuxes I often hear have been how people like to finally decide I'm going to go try that thing. So we are working on something and I'm liking what's cooking. We don't have a full recipe yet for next year's tuxes, but if it does, if we pull it off, it's gonna be different, but hopefully better at a whole new level, I think, right? Yeah, I think so.

Thank you, Wise Papa John. Also thank you, Papa John. Said a second boost just to let me know that my split failed, so just thank you for the info sent a second boost just to let me know that my split failed so just thank you for the info and sorry about that I will rejuggle some liquidity after I got a channel. Come on Wes! I won't be motivated to fix that.

Alright. Well Distro Stew was motivated, sent in five boosts for a total of 20,301 sats. You're doing a good job. Per your year end prediction about a major platform, rolling out a declarative system, I think it's coming. I've been playing with some small, but interesting projects around this. For example, there's a meta pack. There is also deck man and a comp manager. I'll have different takes on the solution, but I like where they're going.

So just checking out Metapack here. It looks like it's a declarative package manager, multi-backend declarative package manager, hence the name. So it allows you to maintain a consistent packages across multiple machines, setting up a new system with preferred packages, with your preferred package managers, makes it much easier. So it sounds almost like a meta package manager,

which seems to make sense. I don't know if this quite qualifies, but I'm inclined to want it to, so I'm definitely gonna look into it. It is active. It's been, yeah, there's people doing stuff around there, and it looks like it's been around for at least two years. And a quick follow-up to our previous boost,

because we totally forgot to actually answer what do we use to monitor things like CPU and hard drives and temperatures. We did. Net data, obviously. Net data for a long time, although there's been some troubling developments there recently.

Oh. You guys on Self-Hosted talked about a great little option that's relatively new with Bezel, right? Yep. I would say the last episode and the episode before that, really the episode before that we get into it, and then we have a brief follow-up at the top of the most recent episode of Self-Hosted.

So the last two episodes kind of get into this topic. Net data's still probably my favorite, but Bezel is a little bit lighter, a little bit more limited, but also just totally free and open. It isn't trying to go for like a cloud monetization strategy. Depending on like retention needs and scale,

you can do like a cloud native thing with the Prometheus agent and Prometheus and Grafana or something like that, or InfluxDB is totally fine too. This is an area I would love to also take in input from the audience. If there's other cool tools out there, some real cool tools that do this that I don't know about, that kind of do the net data thing.

Totally does. There's a lot of options. I know, but there's gotta be some good ones. I am sure the audience has some killer picks in this area. Genebean comes in with a row of nicks. I don't get not touching your Nix config. I'm always using new tools and doing new stuff, and therefore I mess with my config a lot. Additionally, I keep most things in Nix

because my system isn't reproducible otherwise. As a result, I forget to document something otherwise. Yeah, that's true, that's a good point. That is the nice self-documenting. If I set up via my flag, I won't forget about it. You can check out github.com slash genebeans slash dots for my commit history, for example. That's cool, Gene, thank you.

I will check that out. Yeah, why have I not, I still have not checked my configs. Well, I think I was thinking about this because I saw the boost come in. And I think to some extent we were almost saying, you know, like Gene isn't running into the problems that some other folks are seemingly. So we were kind of addressing problems maybe

that Gene isn't having to the same extent. And I do touch my config, but it's mostly like a creative in terms of adding a few packages or tweaking an option on, which felt maybe qualitatively different than what the article we were talking about in terms of struggling and fighting with their config. Actually, I'm debugging or something, which is very different than just adding a package.

I agree. When I was getting the Thalia going again and I just commented out the sound stuff, enable sound. Versus writing a new helper function to set up config for multi-machine or something. But in the last episode, when we talked about when we last touched our configs, I was literally using the last modified date,

which is December for me. And I just think I get to a point where a system is pretty set up and then anything that I add, I either do via Nixshell just to try it out or a flat pack. Yeah, and you do use Nixshell. And I was gonna say,

from seeing some of your Nixconfig, I would say you have already accumulated a lot. Like you probably have 95% of the tools you're gonna use at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I really do. You know, that's the one thing about using it every day for so many years. you're gonna use at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I really do. You know, that's the one thing about using it every day for so many years.

You're going with like the six gig everything installed version of a bunch of you. Hey, it's minimal in my own way. But that's also been the promise of a Nix config was that the things you solved would just pay dividends in the future. So yeah, you put a bunch of upfront time, but then it gets less and less and less as time moves on.

And I've seen that at least to be true in my particular use case. Yeah. I wonder though, perhaps, I mean, I'm looking at Gene's setup here. You know, he, I mean, I think he's just learning and as he learns, he's kind of refactoring and building it better. And so that's why he's touching it more frequently, where I've kind of just been like, oh, it's working. Yeah, that makes sense too.

You can be kind of, there's different modes that you end up in. Yeah. And if you're actively developing. Thank you, Gene. I will say too, something that works okay for me is if I'm going to like make a trade off between like I was gonna try to manage the NICs,

but right now I'm gonna just not, is sometimes I'll just leave comments in my, somewhere in my NICs so that they're documented'm gonna just not, is sometimes I'll just leave comments somewhere in my NICs so that they're documented there of, hey, I'm managing this elsewhere. Right? Warning. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I caught my brother with his NICs config, like he was making a few changes and I was just looking over his shoulder and there's a bunch of to-do items in his NICs configs, like, figure this out later. So I think that's a really nice approach, too. Shapiro May, huh? What do you guys think?

Yeah. Shapiro May boosts in with 4,321 cents. Well, I'll be dipped. Hello. Talking about NixOS, have you guys checked out replit.com? It's an online development platform that gives you a virtual machine

with pre-installed Nix packages, depending on what language you want. And it's basically an in-browser IDE. Most of their code base is MIT licensed. I've been using it for some years now, and it's a really nice way to dip your toes into Nix. You know, I've tried it a little while ago. I've used it a few times,

but I hadn't actually thought about using it with Nix. That's great. Yeah, thank you for the tip. I have to admit, slipped my purvey, my purvey. Okay, here's a fun question. Okay, follow-up boost, all right. So about the old to-do list. Do you ever have moments when you're in the shower

and some situation where you just like can't get to your phone or a notepad, and you remember something you have to do and an idea you really wanna capture? Yes. Do you have a solution for that? Showerlydix, please. I've thought about this so many times.

So I do sometimes bring my phone into the shower now. And I have kind of above the shower, I put a magnetic mount. And then I just slap the phone up there, and it doesn't really get wet. And then if I have to I can document it and That's just because I've really lost some good ones I've lost some real good idea babies and I do not want to lose any more idea babies

So I do that but I have thought about the whiteboard thing. I know that's another route people go Brent How do you capture your best shower thoughts? Well, I would say the shower is definitely like my sacred think tank but I've gone full psychopath mode and I got a permanent waterproof marker and I just write stuff on the walls. And so if you saw my washroom, it just is scary. Oh my God, are you serious? Will you take a picture please?

No, I'm not serious. Oh my God, that's good, Brett. I love that visual. But I have certainly thought of it because like really if I'm in this like deep thinking mode, which happens for me all the time in the shower, I want the simplest solution possible. So even the fact of like picking up my phone and having to unlock it with wet hands and then finding the app and then creating a new note that is somehow categorized and then

writing the thing is that's too much friction. So I would love something simple. I've heard of people having just like a, a stick on waterproof note pad that they can have in the shower, just like to temporarily document it there. And then once you've, I don't know, dry off, you can figure out where else to put it. Uh, but I would love to hear some solutions to this because yeah, they're all just vanishing thoughts unless I can somehow hold onto them, which never happens. It is, it is a real shame. Uh, my other one is driving. I'm just vanishing thoughts unless I can somehow hold onto them, which never happens. It is a real shame.

My other one is driving. Again, I don't have a great system for that. I can sometimes capture on the phone. Yeah, sometimes. Do you have a way to capture great shower thoughts? No, I've been thinking about this in the car. I think the car one gets me more often. Yeah, I can imagine you're driving up to the studio.

You got like an hour. You're like. Somehow the shower I have a little, it's like I can, you're driving up to the studio, you got like an hour, you're like. It's not how the shower I have a little, it's like I can, if I'm willing to stop the thread, I can kind of keep the insight. Yeah, I definitely have, when like, rushed the shower a little bit, finished up, and then like, dried off quickly,

got down and just wrote it down, and then got back to finishing up to the whole shower routine. Too much information, but I would love to know how people are capturing that. I'm taking a lot of different sacrifices. Nothing's working. Can you do like whiteboard paint on your shower wall?

I like that. Brad was thinking permanent marker, which I don't have any idea of. But I also don't want it to be permanent, so I don't know. Somewhat Justin came in with 4,000 and four sats. Fun will now commence. It says he just wanted to say thank you for your mention of Bazite. I picked up an Asus RIG Rally.

Oh, that's the machine my son has. On sale and thanks to the show, I already knew I needed some Linux and Bazite was a great option. What a perfect match for that laptop. Those things are really meant for gaming. Good call. The install was fairly easy according to the benchmarks. It seems to perform better than the default OS, which was Windows. That's great. These handhelds are so

fun. Excited for the coverage of SteamOS. Oh man, I'm so excited to see where SteamOS goes to. When it starts getting distributed, which they've kind of been hinting at, we're gonna be all over that. Maybe we could use it to run a server. Of course we're gonna try. Wampgeek boosts in with 6444 cents. Why you gotta put numbers and letters together? Why can't you just go f*** yourself? Hey guys, when I hear tuxes, I always think of the Oscars. So I'd like to suggest aligning the annual tuxes to occur on the same day as the Oscars.

Put our tuxes on and everything? Like we don't already. Right. This moves them maybe away from the holiday season, but it keeps it a night of celebration and fanfare. Pairing the two adds a layer of fun spotlighting open source achievements alongside, you know, mainstream culture. Plus, it taps into the shared excitement of awards season.

You know, the only flaw here is, it actually almost be kind of fun, in a way. It's not a bad idea. To do it the old way one last time, because the Oscars are on March 2nd. Oh. Yeah. But if we could get, because all we'd have to do,

I wonder, could we rejigger the survey a little bit and just do it one last time for fun? Now I almost want to do it. Isn't that weird? What's the cost? What is wrong with me? I want to kill it, and then like, now I want to do it again for fun.

Well, because the stakes are different. You're right, you're right. I'd almost be willing to do it if people are interested. Just ironically, almost, like the spring tuxes. We'll boost it for 600 a week. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Let us know if you're interested, because otherwise maybe I'm just being a jackass.

It really is a stupid idea. But it is, right? It's the dumbest idea I've had in weeks, isn't it? Don't you think? I think it is. I'd have to go check the notes. Come on. You've had a lot of ideas this week.

Both of you. Boy, I've had a bad week, apparently. No. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Outing me right now on the show. Thank you everybody who boosted in. We really appreciate it. Also thank you everybody who streamed Sats as you listen. 38 of you streamed those Sats and collectively y'all stacked 56,449 Sats. And then when you combine that with our boosters, we had forty seven people

participate in the value for value process for episode five hundred and ninety nine. And collectively, we stacked three hundred and sixty three thousand one hundred and ninety five sets for the show. Thank you, everybody, very much. We have links to Strike and Fountain. Fountain is a new podcast app. You can also listen to our live stream. You can see our pending episodes in there.

And there's more features coming to the show soon that will be available to podcasting 2.0 apps. So there'll be even more reasons to listen to Linux Unplugged in a new podcast app. Newpodcastapps.com for all of them. And thank you everybody, including our members who supported episode 599. All right, so for our pick segment this week, we have two picks. We've been really just coming in with the picks hot and heavy recently. There's just so many good apps.

It's mostly a pick-based show, although we do some other segments on the side. I think if anybody skips this, they're missing out, especially the last few weeks. And I think one of you found OliveTin this week. No, no, it came from a booster last week. Oh, oh, oh, oh, and we just, right, and we wanted to make sure we kind of brought it forward

again, so OliveTin is a safe and simple access to predefined shell commands from a web interface and so picture a interface that would work with big buttons on a mobile device or on your desktop and You have just things like ping the internet or check dmessage logs delete old backups Restart a docker container just buttons to do stuff you combine that with a mesh network and bam Yeah, or you know I could see on my tablets there could be like a little like hey restart a Docker container, just buttons to do stuff. You combine that with a mesh network and bam! Yeah, or I could see on my tablets, there could be a little like,

hey, wife, I need you to take care of stuff screen. And it brings this up and there's buttons where she hits a button and it restarts the server. Oh yeah, I like that. Could this be paired with your stream deck, for instance? Could totes, you could totes probably do that. Hmm, I would like physical buttons. That could be kind of nice.

All right. And then this next pick is open TV and I have really been enjoying ersatz TV, which lets me have a television network inside my home. You create custom live channels using your own local media and they show up as IPTV streams and they show up as IPTV streams and you can have different IPTV players that can pull in like the

scheduling data or sats also generate scheduling data. So I can see when Seinfeld's playing and Star Trek, the next generation and Roseanne, and I've got the 1980s Battlestar Galactica on there because it's just great and retro like it's. It is like having your own cable TV network inside your own home. We've talked about it before. And we haven't really mentioned a great way to enjoy this on your desktop.

But I don't want to have to set up Jellyfin just to enjoy. Right, that is, yeah. Or maybe you could tune VLC into one of the particular streams if you're a maniac. OpenTV has been recently rewritten, and they're also making a plea for Open TV has been recently rewritten, and they're also, they're making a plea for contributions

via GitHub, Patreon, PayPal, or Crypto. But it is a desktop app that runs on the various desktop operating systems. It gives you a front end to any IPTV system. Doesn't have to be EarthSats TV, but that's what I'm using it for. Yeah, this looks pretty sleek. And it is a DVR as well.

So it'll import the M3U file and the metadata for the playlist. It'll record while you're watching. It can record multiple streams at once. They have crazy optimize it for super low RAM usage with really fast UI. Okay, well now I wanna try this for me to like record my favorite hits

from your EarthSat stream. Yeah, yeah. And you know, there's also a surprising amount And then I want to try this for me to like record my favorite hits from your EarthSat stream. Yeah. And you know, there's also a surprising amount of public IPTV streams. Yeah, that's true. Especially like Europe news. Like, there's a lot like there's a lot of European news stations that just make an IPTV stream of their station. There's not as many in the States, but there are a couple.

And it's kind of, and there's a couple of public broadcast stations that do it as well. So you don't even have to have any service in particular. But if you have a TV and you want something to watch it and DVR on your desktop, you can use open TV to sit in front of that. And it's just a really nice app that just plugs in to that whole ecosystem. The M3U file, the XML playlist, as well as then also the backend recording. And then they've optimized it to be super fast and responsive.

So it's open-tv, and we'll have links in the show notes over at linuxunplugged.com slash 599. While we're here, license check, what are our pick licenses today? Oh, you're right, thank you. I've been, you know what, I've been really trying to- We've been hit or miss, but we're trying. I've been trying to add them to the notes

I did not add them to the notes this week. Well, I can report on all of tin here Looks like we've got a often is a GPL 3.0. Very very nice and open TV is GPL 2 so we got some very very Fosse picks for you this week. Very nice. Thank you, Wes I I should have noted that in the notes. I need to have like a checklist of picks now Yeah, we maybe we should have to the template. Yeah, that is a great idea. Do that. Well, it looks like your ersatz TV Here's a license. I'm not sure about Z lib license. Have you heard of this one before? Better check the FSF list. I mean, I know Z lib. I like Z lib a lot It's extremely simple.

It's four paragraphs, not even. Really? Yeah, worth looking at. I don't know if this applies, but. I don't know if the SFF would approve. Yeah, see, this is paying dividends already. Remember, we want to hear your thoughts on if you would be willing to crowdfund either the Mecha Comet

or the Librex Nex? Have you been sufficiently burned? Or is the dream of a Linux phone still alive in your heart? I genuinely would like to know. And then ultimately, we need your guidance on the FreeBSD Challenge. Are you willing to participate? What requirements or rules should we follow that we haven't mentioned in the show already? And any kind of notes or details that we should know as Linux guys

that are going to be using FreeBSD for the first time in a long time, or in Brent's case, the very first time. I feel like that's a big thing to bite off, so please let us know, and episode 600 would be a great episode to bring all that in. So we'll try to collate all of that and have it for you, and review it before the next episode. See you next week. Same bad time. Same bad station.

Technically, we're going back to the original time. Noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. So we'll be live at our regular time. And of course, if you're in a podcasting 2.0 app, it'll be in your stream. And well before the show starts, we always open up Mumble. We'll help you troubleshoot your audio issues, you know, make sure everything's working and you get to listen in on the stream too. Plus, I don't know, you know, maybe you don't can't make every live stream. I bet

600 is gonna be especially fun. Yeah. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode. Even if it's not 600, we still had a good time. We hope you did too. And of course links to what we talked about there at slash 599. Thank you so much and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday as in Sunday. Oh Whoa! It's breaking news. That was a news eagle. Yeah, this month Deepin 25 came out, which is a distro. We don't really follow that closely, but they are implementing some big steps towards immutability powered by OSTree.

No! And then their own system they're calling Solid. Deep. It's immutability powered by OSTree. No. And then their own system they're calling Solid. Deepin's going immutable? Yeah. And Atomic. I gotta look this up. Where is this?

You should be able to, it's in the release notes for 25. But yeah, they're mounting the core directories, read only, that's just powered by OSTree, and then they're doing the like, you know, Atomic style reboot into the new system approach. I don't know if it's like for everything, but they're, they're at least starting to adopt it. The solid, the deep and immutable system focuses on the stability

and security of the system. It provides users with a stable, reliable, and easy to maintain experience through the technology, such as read only protection, atomic updates, and snapshot management. Yeah. And it's also got the like, you know, if it fails to boot, it'll automatically roll back to the previous version. It's happening, folks.

It's happening. I mean, it's just a better way to compute. Come on.