LINUX Unplugged - 606: Goodbye World

Starting point is 00:00:00 Brent's got a bang for us. What's he gonna do? 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, we just got back from Planet Nix and boy do we have stories to share, guests joining us, and insights from our week at Planet Nix.

Starting point is 00:00:34 Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before we get into all that shenanigans, I want to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug, Hello Mumble Room. Hello, everyone. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, Mumble Room. Thank you, Sir Vincent. Hello, Brunch. Nice to have you there. JupiterBroadcasting.com slash mumble, if you wanna get in on that action

Starting point is 00:00:52 when we're live on Sundays. And a big good morning to our friends at TailScale. TailScale.com slash unplugged. That's where you wanna go, TailScale.com slash unplugged, to support the show and try it for free on 100 devices, three accounts, no credit card required, not a limited time thing. I mean, you must be on the free plan, Wes, right?

Starting point is 00:01:12 Indeed. Yeah, it's great. And then what we did is we all started on the free plan and we love it because you get a flat mesh network that is protected by. Waggle. And it's very quick to set up and get going. I mean, if you got five minutes,

Starting point is 00:01:24 you can probably get it running on three machines. There's clients for, I think, everything at this point. I'm not kidding. It was the easiest thing to get running on FreeBSD of all the things I tried. And it's true for Nix too. It's like a one-liner in Nix, and you got tail scale working.

Starting point is 00:01:38 So we all love it for our personal home labs and our networks, and then we started using it here at Jupiter Broadcasting. And I think that's true for a lot of our listeners out there because it is an enterprise grade system. I mean, there are just tons of companies out there, ones you've heard of that

Starting point is 00:01:52 are using tail scale for their backend infrastructure and you can bridge. What would be otherwise very complex networks like multiple providers, multiple data centers, VPS is on premises, mobile devices. You can bridge all of that into one flat mesh network.

Starting point is 00:02:07 That's why companies like Duolingo and Hugging Face and Instacart love it. So try it out for yourself. Get it for 100 devices for free when you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged. Well we're back in town. Last week was our eBPF special while were away, hard at work covering and capturing all of Planet Nix. And I felt like we kind of found a pretty good groove for our Planet Nix and scale coverage, don't you think? I think we didn't overdo it.

Starting point is 00:02:35 There was a lot to take in. I mean, I think we went to more talks covering a conference this year than we have for the last five conferences. Maybe put together. Did you enjoy the trip? Oh, very much. It was, it was, um, you know, as always, it's great to see Linux folks on the

Starting point is 00:02:51 ground, the people that maybe we don't always hear from, but make it out to an event or are here, especially at scale where you have all these mini conferences, we kept running into folks. They're like, oh yeah, I'm here. I do database work in my day job, but, uh, yeah, I'm going to take in some Planet Nix. Yeah, that was great. And then aside from that, it's just,

Starting point is 00:03:07 how often are you in a nice space, a big room, and you know everyone else around you is either interested or probably already knows what Nix is. Or wants to know more. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. It's the one time where I don't feel like I have to sort of pre-apologize for how I'm about to explain what N Nick says to someone who's like half interested.

Starting point is 00:03:26 Bren, I don't know how you feel, but I got home and I thought, you know what? I was reflecting on the trip. There were some tough moments for sure, but I don't think I'd rather do it with anybody else. Like we as a unit have really got this worked out, right? And a big shout out to my wife, Hedia, who does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the booking, figuring out where we can stay and all the logistics there. But Bren, you're a big shout out to my wife, Hedia, who does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the booking, figuring out where we can stay, and all the logistics there.

Starting point is 00:03:47 But Brian, you're a big world traveler. Don't you think we've got, I think we've got a good tight little group now for covering these things. Yeah, I think we have a pretty good routine going. We got the, you know, we do an Airbnb and all hang out, and that gives us a little bit of downtime together between all of the extra coverage that we do during the day.

Starting point is 00:04:04 And we, like, we didn't even have to this time talk about who was gonna do what. We just kind of know our place and our positions and who's gonna handle what part. And a huge thanks to listener Jeff, or producer Jeff, I should say, who just helped us throughout the entire process. So thank you, Jeff.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Absolutely. Thank you guys, always fun. And it was nice to be able to have Jeff there with us because he's always he's always down to help in whatever way we need to get the production done. And I was really glad that we had kind of figured we kind of settled in a routine because it meant every night we got the clips processed and you know labeled and collected. So we're finally at that point now where we have pretty much everything sorted by the time we get home. And then there's just a little bit of, you know,

Starting point is 00:04:48 final polish to put on things. And let's say we've definitely tried it the other way too. Yeah. I like this way better. Yeah. And then also I have to say a huge thank you to FLOX. Check them out at flox.dev. They not only sponsored this year's Planet Nix,

Starting point is 00:05:02 but they also made it possible for us to head down to Pasadena and bring you all the action. They didn't ask us to cover it in any particular way. They just facilitated us to get down there. They worked with us whenever we had questions or want to know who was who. I think they're really going to be something special going down the road.

Starting point is 00:05:20 What you have is this complexity of Nix, and Phlox is all about simplifying it for developers. And so you get reproducible, you get portable dev environments that are powered by NICs, but you don't have to have the learning curve. And what we heard from folks at Planet NICs is it's perfect for maybe there's like a NICs person in your company, and you really think the company could benefit from the workflow, but people don't want to relearn a workflow.

Starting point is 00:05:46 So flocks lets you manage and share environments effortlessly with people that already have an existing workflow. And so you can just focus on building great software instead of wrestling with how to get everybody learned, learning NICs and NIC setup on their systems. They've also solved a lot of the, you know, like, I just need to work on a Python project and I don't want wanna learn the six different ways you can make that happen in stock Knicks. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:08 So, yeah. So, a nice way to get started real quick. It is, and of course they got an eye on, you know, group workflows and working in the enterprise. So we're super grateful for their support, so check them out at flocks.dev, see how they're bringing the magic of Knicks to everybody and a big thank you to everyone at FLOX

Starting point is 00:06:24 for making it possible for this episode. Now, FLOX kept a pretty serious schedule. You know, people were there to get things done and we're fine with that. We're there to work too, gosh darn it. But it was often an early start. Oh, good morning. It is about 6 a.m. and it's Thursday

Starting point is 00:06:50 and Planet Nick starts at 9 15 a.m. But you gotta do the LA travel math and the getting your registration sorted math. So really, we're probably out of here about 8 30. So I'm gonna go take my really awkward shower and then I'll be fresh and ready for all the people. How exciting. Oh my gosh.

Starting point is 00:07:09 So I think I'm the biggest Airbnb critic on the planet because I've never really stayed in an Airbnb I've liked. And it's always in part because of the shower situation. Why is the shower always so weird at the Airbnbs we stay at? And this one was no exception. Like the getting ready area was out in the public hallway. I think part of it might be that stock showers

Starting point is 00:07:31 kind of generally suck, right? And then as you identified, a lot of these Airbnbs, especially in today's market, they're like second homes or properties and so they're not necessarily lived in or have been lived in. And so if you just get the stock shower and no one's taking the time and the budget to get you a bathroom remodel, then that's what you get.

Starting point is 00:07:52 But that's not why we were there. So, you know, got the job done. We got the bodies cleaned and the stank off of us, so that way we could go sit down and attend the keynote of Planet Nix. It's just about time for the kickoff of Planet Nix. We've got our seats and Brent brought a gigantic backpack. How much food is in there versus gear?

Starting point is 00:08:13 It's probably 50-50 and most of it's for me. I don't know what you guys brought for food. But. Yeah, well you didn't bring us food? Oh. No, no, no, no. Never. Now Wes, do you have something to take notes with over there? I have my phone and I have LogSeek. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Starting point is 00:08:25 no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, like a perfect use case. And I was doing the old handwritten thing, and Brent always is watching for potential guests. And so you take our notes and Brent's observations when he's been fed, and we kind of have, like, after different talks, we kind of go off

Starting point is 00:08:55 and, like, do interview strikes. You know, it's like we, this person gets done, or that person, so we're not only watching what talks are happening, but then we're thinking about it on the flip side of, okay, so who is available when and where can we find them? Because you can show up just at the end of the talk, you can catch them in the room. Hey, you could just step outside for a few minutes

Starting point is 00:09:12 and do a chat with us, that kind of thing. So we're both trying to take in as much information and we're trying to strategize who we wanna talk to next. The keynote was pretty good. And there was a moment where Ron from Phlox talked about why Planet Nix, and I thought I'd share that with you. A journey into Planet Nyx. So this is a little sneak peek. I don't know if we have any Magic the Gathering fans out here. I'm kind of a geek on it. We're going to do something. You'll see in like

Starting point is 00:09:37 30 minutes. But otherwise, Planet Nyx. So Nyx, obviously it's Nyx. The other fact is that for years we've been trying to reinstate Pluto as a planet. It hasn't been really successful. One of its moons is called Nix, right? That's why Ilco called Nix Nix. You can ask him later about that. I won't stand for this. We don't fact check on this platform.

Starting point is 00:09:57 The thing is we're starting a mission to try and reinstate Pluto as a planet and then eventually have a real moon for a real planet called Nix. That's why we call it Planet Nix. I can get behind that. I think Pluto deserves it. It's been hanging out there a long time. See, I feel conflicted because I'm on Team Dwarf Planet, but, uh... I know, yeah. It's one of our biggest rifts. It's tearing us apart.

Starting point is 00:10:19 Ha-ha-ha. Isn't a dwarf planet still a planet? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe that's where we can find common ground. There was also an analogy made that I thought was pretty good. Ron calls Nix kind of like his mom's veggie goulash. And this is how he explains Nix to his family. The way I like to think about Nix to folks that are not Nix initiated or maybe not super technical is like veggie goulash.

Starting point is 00:10:43 So I have very mixed background in my heritage. So I had a, I had a great grandmother from Poland and she would make this amazing veggie goulash. She sadly passed away a long time ago, but the recipe lived on, but everybody has these kinds of recipes that they kind of pass from person to person in the family. It's ink on paper. It tells you what ingredients you need. It tells you how to put it in.

Starting point is 00:11:09 Maybe it tells you Fahrenheits or Celsius and you do conversion yourself. And at the end of the day, it never comes off as the same thing because recipes are not reproducible. Here's the big but and how I like to think about Knicks. I like to say, hey, mom, imagine you had a magic cookbook. Imagine that magic cookbook was written by our great grandmother. And again, it had all those recipes. But when she wrote down two tomatoes, one zucchini, you know, a little paprika or whatever it is, that magic cookbook actually materialized that exact tomato that was grown in the exact soil with the exact acidity that she had in her backyard

Starting point is 00:11:47 or at the farmer's market, and that showed up in your kitchen when you were starting to cook that veggie goulash. What do you think? Okay, when he first introduced it, I was a bit skeptical. I was like, hmm, okay, how's this gonna work? But yeah, a recipe is a great analogy, right? If you watch any folks who kind of look

Starting point is 00:12:05 at historical recipes, like Max Miller's Tasting History, for example, you'll know that, okay, you gotta figure out what these like archaic measurements meant, often they're very imprecise, but then the next challenge is you even need to figure out like, what were these ingredients they were working out, they might have, working with,

Starting point is 00:12:21 might have the same name onion, but like what variety wanted it to look like 400 years ago and Yeah, you can get that with software too and a lot of you know, what NYX does is make sure you are carefully and most of the time reproducibly Specifying what you need to go in and I I think one of the insights and takeaways I had from Planet NYX this year was what you just described is becoming more

Starting point is 00:12:46 and more something that the software industry is expected to provide to the enterprise. The enterprise wants to know exactly what's in this. They want to know if it complies with certain requirements, and they want to be able to reproduce it and move it around every single time. Right. Yeah, you've seen things like software, bill of materials come along and with enough glue, right? These are areas where since Nick's already is often more specific than you get with something like a Dockerfile,

Starting point is 00:13:13 there's a lot of good primitives to work with. And this is where Ron's chat with Kelsey Hightower came in. Kelsey was on the show just a couple of weeks ago, kind of teasing what he'd talk about, and he went in further detail about his discovery when he finally had a little bit of time to read the Nix white paper. Kind of what you think about Nix and maybe

Starting point is 00:13:31 having kind of a frank conversation about it. Yeah, I read the Nix paper last year. And I was like, look at this, in my view, this buried treasure. And it feels like there was a fork in a road a couple of decades ago where this problem was definitely apparent. Back then I was a big user of systems like Red Hat. I started my career on FreeBSD and there was this situation like how do you get more than one thing on a system without them overriding each other or fighting each other. Then I spent the rest of my

Starting point is 00:14:02 career putting one app per VM because no one solved the problem 10 years later. That just came the thing you did. Then we got tools like RVM and the Ruby community because your gym files would literally fight with each other and you taught them to behave. I also worked on tools like virtual ENF and the Python community. And then Docker came out.

Starting point is 00:14:23 And I think Docker leaned into the reality was that no one had solved this problem because every programming language also came with its own package manager and ways of doing things. And then Golang came out and it was like, forget LibC altogether. Build static binaries and we just skipped that entire step. And in many ways it felt like Docker had won, not just because it figured out reproducible software, because it did. It figured out how to match the reality of the way people write software. It's messy. It's non-deterministic. People do all kind of weird things because the focus went from operating systems to applications and Docker became the perfect format for people to get that done and distribute it to each other and so I read Nick's paper after going through this whole

Starting point is 00:15:12 journey is like where weren't you two decades ago when I was at that fork in the road maybe we would have went in a different way and so a lot of my initial feedback has been this ain't usable. When you show, it's like showing people Vim for the first time when all they know is Microsoft Word. How do I get out of this thing? It's like, why'd you turn off your computers? Like that was the only way.

Starting point is 00:15:38 And I did that before, right? To get out of Vim, I had shame. I just turned the whole thing off. Turn my computer back on. I was like, I'm out of there. I'm doing that again. That felt sort of fair. That felt like a fair analogy. It is a bit like showing people Vim for the first time. Yeah, you could subnano for a word, it's the same deal.

Starting point is 00:15:55 Now, he got to your point specifically around, you know, the bomb or the bill of materials and how maybe Nix could improve software distribution even if we stuck with Docker. And so the hands-on approach is like, how could you make Docker better if you had something like Nix in the middle? So if you've never used Docker before, there's this Dockerfile and if you look at people's Dockerfiles, it's like a big-ass bash script the way most people do things, right? Yum install everything.

Starting point is 00:16:28 Download all the NPM modules just in case I need one. And then my app. And then you ship this four terabyte thing to servers and you're like, it's repeatable software. And then you spend half your time scanning, looking for vulnerabilities. We're right back to where we were 20 years ago. If you look at some of the biggest problems in that community, they're literally fighting the same battles we were doing with bare metal and VMs.

Starting point is 00:16:51 They just packaged it in another artifact this time. And so people have worked on slaming technologies where, you know, you try to start the app, look at the system calls, run the S-Trace, and figure out exactly what it needs. You run it in production and you find out you missed one. So we've been doing a lot of reverse engineering and I was like, what if we were able to do this differently? So after the whole solar winds debacle, there has been a rise in interest in secure software

Starting point is 00:17:16 supply chains. And I think now people are open to a different approach. I think people are a little tired of the brute force. And so the promise of NICS is that we can be a little bit more exact. So instead of generating an S-bomb after you built the application through reverse engineering, what if you could be way more explicit upfront? So that's been appealing to me. So I've been looking at like, how do we take the current situation we're in,

Starting point is 00:17:39 especially the one that's baked in containers and then connects, add value to that scenario. That seems like a pretty realistic goal. Yeah, Kelsey had a, I think though maybe one of the high level takes is, you know, be pragmatic and meet in the middle, you know, and a little bit of a reminder of what success of infrastructure type projects looks like, right?

Starting point is 00:17:57 So like, we don't need to necessarily have everything with NICs on the tin, especially in a world that's already gone full Kubernetes, but there's a lot of pieces in that process that could really benefit from either Nix itself or a Nix-like approach. And of course he was asked one spicy question, and that was if you could only choose one, Nix or Docker, which would you choose? Like you mentioned Docker, obviously, Nix or Docker, you had to choose one.

Starting point is 00:18:22 Look at the Nix people, like there's like a church of NICs out there. I have to say Kelsey was like, I'm super excited about talking. I'm like, why you've tied it at big stages? Like, no, I feel this is going to be different. I'm like, hell yeah, that's going to be different. Look, if I had to choose one, I'm choosing Docker and you would say, why would I do that? Think through it.

Starting point is 00:18:43 Most people that are writing code, your whole number one objective isn't the packaging tool nor format. Your goal is to ship something. So if you're a developer, you look at all the things that you can ship to, Heroku, Cloud Run, Lambda, IBM. And then you got to work on a team of other people. And the hardest thing I've seen in technology is to get global consensus.

Starting point is 00:19:08 We agree on something. IP addresses, DNS, Linux as a distribution. That stuff takes decades sometimes. And so the Docker ecosystem is rich. Why is it rich? Is it a better packaging tool than Nix? No. Do people know it? Yes. That cute little well did something. People identify with it.

Starting point is 00:19:30 So when you say Docker, a lot of people understand what that means. You're probably going to have a Docker file that moved the needle in terms of at least knowing how to rebuild software. There's still a lot of companies. Maybe you work for some of them. They pride themselves that only one person knows how to build certain software on a specific

Starting point is 00:19:48 laptop and no one touches that laptop because the only thing that can build a thing. And for a lot of people, Docker moved the needle for them. In the ecosystems rich, there's Docker registries, there's metadata, there's all of these things. So if I had to choose only one, it will probably be Docker. So what would you take away from that? What makes Docker work? It's not one versus the other. It's just this usability curve. It meets people where they are, then shows them what's next. And I've been a part of a lot of technology movements that just focused on here's the next thing. It's like, so what do I do now to go from where I am to that? And you're

Starting point is 00:20:24 like, I don't know, man, delete everything you have and start the right way. Just doesn't work, right? But I'm hoping that the two can find some synergies where it's pragmatic. And I do think Nick's inside of a Docker file for a lot of people will solve the reproducible build problem without giving up the distribution and ease of use for other platform problem. And I think that's probably where you're going to get a lot of new people learning about this technology for the first time. So when you see them, welcome them.

Starting point is 00:20:53 I think it was a good dose of reality to start the whole event. Right. That's the keynote. That's the hey, here's your reality. This is the state of the market. Yeah, puts you in a practical state of mind, I think. And you know, the rest of the day is going to be filled with a whole bunch of Knicks evangelism and tips and tricks and like deep dives into Knicks. Yeah, so why not have a nice little reminder about,

Starting point is 00:21:13 maybe think about what you can take home from this event that will help you even in a non-Pier Knicks situation. Okay, well the first talk is done. Kelsey Hightower and Ron had a great chat. You know, we're shifting things around a little bit. I think it's sort of tradition for there to be some scheduling issues, but you know what, for a new event, not too bad to start a little bit late really. And it was a good chat. I think the room was pretty engaged, lots of good questions. Now the next thing that I'm looking at is actually being hosted by an employee of Anthropic, the folks behind Claude. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's the number one, then password slash unplugged,

Starting point is 00:21:53 all lowercase. Go check it out. This probably would have bought me another 10 years in IT. And this is how I think about it. Do your end users always end, I mean, actually, literally always, without exception, only work on company owned devices and only use apps that have been approved by I.T.? I don't think so. Right. I don't think so. I would love for that to be true. So the next obvious question is, then how do you keep your company's data safe if it's sitting on these unmanaged apps and these unmanaged devices?

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Starting point is 00:23:19 This would have changed the game for me. Go check it out. Support the show. Go to one, the number one password dot com slash unplugged. It's all lowercase. They got a bunch of information up there. It's a really great opportunity. Check it out.

Starting point is 00:23:31 One password dot com slash unplugged. What I really appreciated was Kelsey gave kind of the overall perspective of how we should see the planet Nix and then Anish, specifically from Anthropic gave how to implement this thing. Hi, I'm Anish. I'm a proud Nix user for almost a decade now since college. My claim to fame is that I wrote

Starting point is 00:23:56 the original implementation of override adders, which we all use every day, back when it was four lines of code. But for my career, I've been in the industry almost the same time and I've been really focused on developer experience and developer tooling. Previously I was at Lyft leading their languages team for six and a half years, and since about a year ago, I'm at Anthropic, which is an AI safety research company.

Starting point is 00:24:16 We make products like Claude, as well as we do AI safety research such as Golden Gate Claude. If you haven't tried it out, we put out three 7ths on it last week. It's a hoot. And at Anthropic, I'm on the builds and deploys team. I had high hopes for this talk because you know they got scale, right? And they're solving problems that some of us

Starting point is 00:24:36 have never even thought about. And I will say Anish delivered and he was kind of still new. So he was coming in and discovering some of the issues they were having scaling. When I got to Anthropic a year ago, you know, they told me we used industry standard tools, obviously a lot of Python because it's an AI shop, we're using Kubernetes, and at the time we used one image for everything.

Starting point is 00:24:56 That image was 35 gigabytes large uncompressed. Normally when people talk about a large Docker image, they're talking like, oh, a couple hundred megabytes is big, like a couple gigabytes is enormous. This was another level of very large. There's good reasons for it. You know, ML libraries will monomorphize their kernels for different hardware architectures of accelerators. You have researchers adding things that they needed one time and maybe didn't remove since

Starting point is 00:25:18 then. There's good reasons for it. But there was also just some inefficiency in the build that hadn't been cleaned up. You know, when I got there, I pretty quickly cut out about 20% of it, but there was still a pretty big image left. And this causes problems. Build times are slow, pull times are slow, push times are slow, and we were seeing four-minute times to pull anything, which is really painful. This all meant that the rebuild times were almost an hour. This was slow enough we couldn't run in CI, and we actually had to have a manual process for who

Starting point is 00:25:47 is going to build next. Most of our code is Python, so people didn't have to rebuild so often, so it wasn't too bad. But a few months into my tenure, we had a new, very high priority initiative that required compiled software, where people were going to be changing this multiple times a day. And so we knew that this existing process was not

Starting point is 00:26:02 going to work for us. So today I'm going to talk about our of our story from escaping Docker because it wasn't going to work. Obviously going to Nix. We're going to talk about Nix sidecar, which is the thing I built to address this. And then we'll give some closing thoughts at the end. We have the full link for the talk in the show notes with the timecode. And it's fascinating just when you realize the scale they're dealing with and the limitations

Starting point is 00:26:22 that they had to struggle with across, you with across hundreds of thousands of servers and instances. And he had to build some software to make it all work. It was a really good talk. Yeah, I like this talk for a number of reasons. One, it's very valuable to hear about companies using stuff in production that you don't necessarily hear about outside of talks like this or maybe some user group meetups, that sort of thing, right? There are oftentimes companies are loathe

Starting point is 00:26:49 to share some of their internal work in. Especially really competitive AI companies that you know are moving fast. Yeah, so it's great that Anish was allowed to share all this and he did a great job doing it. You'd never know, I guess that was his first conference talk. Oh, wow, yeah, you're right. First class effort. Yeah, he did right first class effort Yeah, I did it also shows

Starting point is 00:27:07 kind of a journey of how to makes NICS fit and Highlights to me something I love about NICS Which is that you know you don't have to use all of the pieces of it at all times But there's a lot of good stuff that you can deploy Kind of on its own like you can just ship kind of the built files you can include runtime NICS or not And they explored a lot of ways to sort of, you know, Docker files weren't scaling and they tried different mechanisms to try to help,

Starting point is 00:27:31 you know, use NICs to help that. So we've talked about, you can just build Docker images via NICs. So that's one way to do it, but they ran into issues like, you know, you can only have 128 layers in a Docker image. I never knew that, but I guess they ran into that limitation. 128 layers.

Starting point is 00:27:46 And you still have kind of all the same problems you have. Anish was talking about some of the limitations of container D in terms of some of the parallelism that it can or can't do, especially compared to Nix. And again, not an issue for me, but when you're talking hundreds of systems, and so you can't do certain tasks in parallel, it's a killer.

Starting point is 00:28:03 So they were able to switch to just kind of using Nix builds for things and pushing those to a store. And then in CI, instead of having to, you know, use a custom image file, they could kind of just go pull just the files they needed to run that CI job. And with Nix, once you've got the bits on disk, you just kind of need to update your path in the environment so that you know where those

Starting point is 00:28:22 binaries under the weird Nix store paths are. But after that, it works. So they started there, but one thing Docker does do well is if you've already pulled an image and it's already there, it's very fast, right? It doesn't have to do a whole crazy amount of checking, it kind of just starts and launches instantly,

Starting point is 00:28:38 or pretty close. And their kind of custom Nix mechanism, well it meant that build times and a whole bunch of other things got way better, this part still wasn't very efficient. And you know, they're running a scale in the cloud and this was a lot of bandwidth and network traffic being used. Yeah, they got in trouble, I guess, with AWS for using just so much bandwidth and that gives you an idea of their scale when AWS is knocking on the door saying, hey, you're using too much of our bandwidth.

Starting point is 00:29:02 They're also in an interesting place, right? Of course, there's like Cloud and the APIs and sort of the public facing services, but Anisha's sort of on like the developer tooling and build team, and they also have to support all the researchers and internal stuff to do, you know, develop the next product, do safety research, whatever else they want to do internally, which you can bet probably means running a whole bunch

Starting point is 00:29:21 of different models and Cloud instances and the rest. So they needed to both support like deploying to production and sort of a frozen secure environment as well as enabling like developer machines where they're going to want to be able to install additional stuff or customize things. So they looked at a few mechanisms. There's a new RFC for being able to do like a layered store where you have sort of like a base store that

Starting point is 00:29:41 provides sort of the core immutable bits. And then you can add stuff in a secondary store on top. They also looked at a project that's pretty neat called Nick's Snapshotter. And this is actually a plugin for Containerd. And so the idea is when you say, hey, run this image, Containerd runs the plugin and says, here's the image I got, can you run it for me? And then the plugin handles the rest. And so Nick's Snapshotter uses Nix to build all that

Starting point is 00:30:06 and then kind of hands it back to ContainerD once it's all done and set up. And that works really well, especially because it can kind of integrate into the Docker lifecycle. It has all the hooks from ContainerD to know, oh, this container's done. So now it knows it can safely garbage collect the stuff on the Nix side.

Starting point is 00:30:21 But you have to be able to customize ContainerD itself to do that. And if you're trying to run jobs on cloud provider hosted systems, they're running their own ContainerD. Maybe they let you run an AMI and you could bake it in. That's kind of annoying, but possible. But on some instances, like on Google, for instance, they don't even let you customize it. So if you're just running their Kubernetes stuff for your CI jobs

Starting point is 00:30:42 and you need this, well, you don't have it. And so ultimately, Anish wrote Nix Sidecar, which he calls Nix Snapshotter in user space. And maybe a high-level way to think about this is you can kind of just set up your own custom container to support running Nix, but you don't have to use all of the standard workflow. So you can just launch kind of whatever base container you want, and as long as you've used Nix to fetch the right bits onto disk, you can then bind mount just the Nix bits you need into the container. And then, you know, as long as you've started the container with the right command that

Starting point is 00:31:14 knows the right Nix path, minus some details about shareable mounts and kernel features that he got into into the talk, it all just works. And so whether you use, you you use this approach or not, and sadly, Nick's sidecar is not open source currently, but Anish kind of stressed it's like 400 lines of code, because it's really just combining different primitives between Docker, Podman, ContainerD, and the various components of Nick's.

Starting point is 00:31:39 Yeah, and in that result, you bring it all together, and they're moving way faster. And so the infrastructure goes from a bottleneck that's And in that result, you bring it all together and they're moving way faster. And so the infrastructure goes from a bottleneck that's holding up the product and product development in an incredibly competitive space to now facilitating product rollout and product development and testing, right?

Starting point is 00:31:57 It's a massive shift. The IT infrastructure went from a holdup to a facilitator with these changes. I also think it's kind of interesting that, you know, the talk was built as Docker, Docker was too slow, so we replaced it. But it wasn't really a full replacement in the sense that there's, you know,

Starting point is 00:32:11 there's still a whole bunch of Kubernetes and stuff involved. And I think that just goes back to kind of what Kelsey was saying, right? Like there's all kinds of different integration and extension points along the way. And there's lots of places that could really benefit from having Nix involved,

Starting point is 00:32:24 even if it doesn't, even if you're not building custom Nix OS images that you're deploying in production. Another talk that we wanted to attend was the creator of Nix, Elko Dostras, had a bit of, I guess, an announcement and a demo to give on configurable flakes and he had our attention. Okay, yeah, so this is about configurable flakes.

Starting point is 00:32:44 So I submitted this talk proposal and it got accepted. So then I actually had to go and implement it. But as proof that it actually works, I mean, I should say this is very work in progress and there are a lot of rough edges and certainly the design needs to be figured out completely. But yeah, it works. So I'll give a quick demo and then talk a bit more about the details. But yeah, so the goal is to make Flakes configurable.

Starting point is 00:33:17 So up to now, as you know, Flakes are fully hermetic. So you can do things with them, like build them, but you can't pass any Configuration flags to them on the command line so and now you can so here I have a little play explain this to me West why why this is a significant development the fact that you can now You know pass arguments to a flake and whatnot Yeah, okay, so you could use nix to just sort of build a program that takes its own command line arguments But you're doing it totally outside of nix and you can't take advantage of any of the stuff that Nix has, right? You're sort of post-Nix. In a Preflakes world, where you did nix-build, you could pass arguments

Starting point is 00:33:56 into it in a way that Nix kind of supported and knew about. So you could say like –argh, and then you could say like, I want to pass to pass you know this key and value into the program you're running by a next. But it wasn't discoverable in any way. It was kind of just like entirely dynamic. It was a way to pass, you know, just a bundle of keys and values into the build. But without hermeticism, right, it wasn't fully controlled. It wasn't going to be reproducible in any meaningful way. And you either had to look at the code or if there were docs or whatever for what arguments it takes, there was no way to actually like use the system itself to discover it. Okay, then Flakes happened.

Starting point is 00:34:35 And Flakes really put an emphasis on that reproducibility and the hermeticism and like having it be, you know, blocking everything that they can that will be dynamic. Which has pain points, but also a lot of benefits as we've been talking about already today. So this meant that you couldn't pass arguments into Flakes in the way that you could previously. This meant in the language they're using here, they weren't configurable. And this is one of the criticisms that you'll definitely see leverage, especially when Flakes were introduced of like, this design seems flawed, you can't configure these things, we've lost the ability to pass in arguments.

Starting point is 00:35:10 And so this is sort of an approach to solve that. And this is Ilko's idea of how we can solve that. And he kind of stressed in the setup of the talk, he said, you know, I submitted this talk in the abstract, and then it was accepted. So I had to go finish the implementation. So I don't think it's intended to be this, this is what we, you know, the a hundred percent thing to do or like it has to go this way,

Starting point is 00:35:33 but it's presented as an approach to configurability for Flakes. I got the sense we're gonna try this. This is an idea. This is our approach. If this works, maybe people won't adopt it. Maybe something else will work. But it was, to me, it was just interesting to see this,

Starting point is 00:35:48 like you said, answer this kind of original complaint. Yeah, and it also, because there's some tension between being able to have discoverability and configurability and some amount of dynamic behavior, but retain a bunch of the static and eval caching benefits of NICs. And so this, he had a nice little demo of what this could do and stress that where it has trade-offs.

Starting point is 00:36:14 But what seems really neat is you get a new little output in terms of flake outputs, configurable packages. And the setup of them is explicit in the sense that that shows you all of the arguments that it has. So now you could just see, right, I wanna run this program via Nix. There's a Flake.Nix in this random GitHub repo

Starting point is 00:36:33 that we had as a pick on the show. And if you do a Nix Flake show, it will show you not only what you can, the programs you can run from that Flake, but also what arguments they take and a basic set of types like ints or booleans or strings. That's fantastic. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:47 Yeah, I love that. It also works as a plugin system so you can reference the outputs of other flakes. Oh boy. So Ilco had a little demo of just like a hello world, but you could customize so you could say hello Planet Nix or hello Pasadena. And that was an argument you could pass. So that was the configuration bit. But he also set it up so it could have a configurable printer So the default one would just print plain text on the terminal, but let's say you wanted to use something like cow say

Starting point is 00:37:13 Well, you could configure that as the printer and then you on the command line You could say like, you know use the flake for cow say as the printer for this other flight I need to get a great message, a little display. And a really nice way to sort of just hook flakes together via the Nix command. That's what I'm thinking. There was also a little bit there about making overlays, which is how you can kind of add packages or change

Starting point is 00:37:35 packages in Nix packages. You know, like maybe you want to use a different version of the Rust compiler because you need specific nightly features that are enabled or something. Well, you usually do that with an overlay, but you kind of have to set up a custom little Nix that does that, right? Because it imports Nix packages and it has to specify the overlay at that time. Well, as part of the configurable Flake stuff, there's also now an option

Starting point is 00:37:56 to specify an overlay on the command line. So if you just wanted to swap out a package or like add one in there. Oh, that's nice. You could probably do that in a much simpler way. OK. So we'll see, right now you have to go do a configure a specific build of Nix that supports this. So TBD on exactly where it goes, but you can try it today.

Starting point is 00:38:14 It does build on top of Flake Schemas as well, which you might want to check out, which is another possible Nix extension that basically allows for different types of outputs. Right now you kind of have programs, you can have formatters, you can have packages, but you can't make your own output. You can't make arbitrary outputs.

Starting point is 00:38:31 And Flake Schemas enables that, and so adding the configurable Flake's output sort of depends on Flake Schemas. We have the full talk with the timecode, because they're like eight hour streams. We have the timecode linked in the show notes, and if this fascinates you, it's worth it to just look at the demo that Elko gives.

Starting point is 00:38:46 Yeah, he kind of jokes that, you know, that was his whole talk. He does go into another 20 minutes of more depth, but really just the first five minutes is enough to get that gist of what this is about. Day one, we packed a lot in. It is officially the end of day one of Planet Nyx. In fact, we just got done visiting

Starting point is 00:39:03 the Flock's after party dinner. And I think one thing really stood out to everybody we talked to. They're super excited this is happening, almost to the point where they had a hard time absorbing day one. Yeah, I think so. We were trying to pry out some details, right? Like, what are you most excited for? What were the things that like, you know, really got you keyed up? But I think everyone was just, um, vibing hard on Nick's nerdery. So, um, it's hard to soak it all in. And you had to have a little pizza and maybe a beer or something, something to drink to, you know, relax and let... Yeah, exactly. Figure out what your next flake you're going to make is. I think too, it was like it was like just the final chance,

Starting point is 00:39:47 everybody finally getting the chance to talk to someone else about something that they're interested and excited about that is Nix, right? Because usually a lot of the people here are the only person in the room that knows Nix. And so even when they're at work, they don't really get to share in that. And here everybody knows the language

Starting point is 00:40:02 and they get to talk about it. Much like it was when I went to the early Linux Fest. Yeah, right. You don't have to assume like, oh, you've got the NT experience. It's you don't do explain what Linux is. Here, you don't have to explain what Nix is or compare it and make a bunch of bad analogies to other tools. I also really liked seeing a lot of

Starting point is 00:40:20 the folks who gave talks today were here tonight. You could tell that maybe you know, maybe the the question that you had, or half question half comment or like conversation starter that doesn't make sense to ask in a room full of hundreds of people might make sense to ask, you know, while you're both having a bite to eat, and you can see those kinds of connections or different folks working in different companies, all using next in different ways, sharing

Starting point is 00:40:44 tips and tricks. Yeah, and that's what's great is you just get right to the problem solving. Yeah, oh, what do you do? Oh yeah, oh, you solve this? Oh, how'd you do that? And that's every conversation at dinner. It's pretty great.

Starting point is 00:40:56 Hopefully day two is also just as great. So you've wanted to get in on the boosting fun or maybe even stack some sats, but you know there's a lot of crap, grift and scams and crypto, so you've just avoided the whole thing. Your instincts are right. 99% of all of it is just crap. There's a term for it, but since we're in polite company, I won't use it.

Starting point is 00:41:22 So let me tell you how I do it, the services and systems I use. I've been following this industry since before it was an industry about 14 years. And I've really landed on just a couple of really safe paths. The number one thing you need to look out for is Bitcoin only. Wherever you're getting your sats, Bitcoin only. Don't mess with anything else. If you think about it from just a technology platform, every stupid crypto is its own platform.

Starting point is 00:41:47 It needs its own nodes and its own software kit, everything. So the more coins you support, the more just vulnerability surface area you have, complexity you have, orchestration you have. Just go with Bitcoin only. It's deep enough and complex enough that a company should focus on it. And that's why I like River. Jupiterbroadcasting.com slash River is our link. That'll get you some

Starting point is 00:42:10 sats and us some sats. What I like about them is they are US Bitcoin only, proof of reserves. They have zero fee recurring buys. They have free automatic withdrawal to self custody. They give you all the tax information you need. They support lightning. They have a bunch of great security features, and they have a 3.8% Bitcoin interest on cash. And it's a great way to safely buy Sats and then send them to a lightning wall.

Starting point is 00:42:36 That's river at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash river. If you're in Canada, I think the Bitcoin well is fantastic. I've met with these companies. I have used these companies. I am a customer of these companies and I have sat on video calls and had them answer all of my questions. Bitcoinwell.com slash Jupiter.

Starting point is 00:42:56 This is great in Canada and in the US. They're really slick because they do custody first. Everything is self custody. They never even hold your Bitcoin. You buy it and it goes to your wallet or your lightning wallet. That's really slick because they do custody first. Everything is self custody. They never even hold your Bitcoin. You buy it and it goes to your wallet or your lightning wallet. That's really slick and it's great for a self custody setup.

Starting point is 00:43:11 And when you think about some of the properties of Bitcoin, the self hosting and self custody is one of the most powerful aspects. That's bitcoinwell.com slash Jupiter. If you're outside the US and Canada, if you can, I would use Strike, another Bitcoin only company, really solid can, I would use strike, another Bitcoin only company really solid infrastructure run by great people.

Starting point is 00:43:29 Strike is an app and it's available in 110 countries. You buy the stats, then they're on the Lightning Network and you send them over to a podcasting app or your own wallet and you stack. This is not a paid spot. I'm just trying to make it clear to you how I do it. You know, sometimes there are very attractive looking companies out there, like things like Coinbase that really try to lure you in, or Crypto.com. Don't use those. You're never going to hear me plug those or mention those on the show.

Starting point is 00:43:58 It's River at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash River. It's Bitcoin Well, bitcoinwell.com com slash Jupiter or it's the strike app. I have no affiliate link for them, but I still recommend them. And I just want to give you that tip, because if you want to get on the boosting and support the show, those are safe, easy, cheap ways to do it. I think probably strike is the cheapest of the batch and then River and then Bitcoin will. That's my hot tip.

Starting point is 00:44:25 Thanks for listening to my PSA. Well, day two went pretty quickly, but we did get a recap from the night before. Here we go, it's day two of Planet Nix, and the vibe is a little more serious, it's a little more focused, it's a little bit more let's get things done. In fact, just in our walk in,

Starting point is 00:44:43 we're hearing from people that are here with their their laptops and they're ready to take the plunge But I think some of us perhaps stayed up a little too late watching Star Trek too late I mean isn't that tradition Wes and I stay up later than everyone else and then we have our like moments together But Wes you seem to be doing alright. Maybe you paced yourself. I Did yeah, I think you know, I only had one or two beers, had some pizza last night, so. And despite yesterday's Enterprise meeting on, we managed to go to bed before midnight.

Starting point is 00:45:14 It is a great episode. It is a great episode. And then I woke up in the morning before you boys, and it was paused and I finished the episode. Oh. What did I write down our time? We wrote down our time code. Oh, good, so you can go back. Good, you should. You should finish that episode. We wrote down our time code. Oh good, so you can go back. Good. You should. You should finish that one. So we're gonna do the first talk. One of the

Starting point is 00:45:30 things we'll be doing in the first talk of the day is we'll be saying hello to the crowd introducing the podcast and then it's talk after talk and we're gonna try to cram in a few interviews. This one's a busy one. You know, we are not famous people. We are not celebrities of any kind, except for when we go to Nix events and Linux events. And then so I had a chance to introduce the team to the crowd. But most of us, I think probably they're most of them are probably familiar with this. And and we're listening to the shows already. So hello. Hello, everybody.

Starting point is 00:45:57 And one of the folks that we wanted to grab was Ross from flocks because well, we always enjoy chatting with him just even off air. But he had a great analogy in one of these sidebar conversations. And I was like, you know what, boys, we got to go back and get that on mic. Returning to the show at Planet Nix, Ross, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. I have just like a couple of questions for you. Number one is you gave me a great analogy yesterday and I'm wondering if you could repeat

Starting point is 00:46:24 it for the audience now that we have a microphone. And it was the selling seats to people that are already sitting down. Oh, yeah. We're trying to figure out, in the flox and Nix ecosystem, what that barrier to entry is. And more often than not, what I'm finding

Starting point is 00:46:38 is that people are just like, it's not the right moment. And you're like, no, hey, we have this amazing thing for you. It's going to change the way you do everything. And they're like, I don't want to change the way I do everything right now. And I've started to realize that what we're doing is we're selling chairs. We're selling really comfortable chairs. And it's like, it's got a cup holder and it's got a back pillow and it's got a seatbelt to keep you safe and a heater and an air conditioner and all these things.

Starting point is 00:47:00 And that's what we're selling. And people are like, nah, I already stuffed this pillow behind here and I bungee corded my drink to the side and I'm good, I'm good. Don't bother me right now. I'm already sitting down. I'm already sitting down, exactly. And we're like, no, but this chair is amazing. And they're like, you know what?

Starting point is 00:47:13 Catch me on the way back from the bathroom. Yeah. You know? Maybe I'll try it then. Maybe I'll try it then. Maybe I'll stand up and you'll get a moment there and I'll sit down in your new chair and I'll probably find something that I don't quite

Starting point is 00:47:22 love about it because I'd already figured out my old chair. You know? Yeah, and that's when somebody's already comfortable. It's a tough sell. It is, it is. And especially when you're doing something really disruptive like Nix.

Starting point is 00:47:33 You're saying, I'm gonna change the way you deal with all your software? Right. I mean, that's not a tiny thing to ask somebody to do. That's a huge thing to ask somebody to do. And so you have to be really clear about what are the benefits, what are the reasons, what's driving you over that hill?

Starting point is 00:47:50 Like, what is filling your bladder enough to make you stand up? You're ready to go, yeah. And go and then come back and sit down in a different chair. That's great. So then something else that I noticed is yesterday, you had, which was day one as we record,

Starting point is 00:48:03 you had a talk about Nix in the wild. Yes. And I guess I didn't really understand this last time, but you actually have people doing surveys of actual customers, asking them questions of how it's going. Like you're actually collecting data of Nix in the wild. Well, you might say it like that.

Starting point is 00:48:20 I'm saying, I would say we collect stories. So this is an interview process. Kind of probably similar to what you do a lot, is we'll find somebody who's using Nix in the wild and we'll say, are you willing to tell us your story? We invite them onto a call with us. They talk for 45 minutes. We ask them basic questions.

Starting point is 00:48:35 What are you using it for? How did you find it? What is your process? And all these things. And then we write an article. What I wanna do in the future is even more than that. Like I wanna have more data in these articles. I wanna have more code snippets in these articles and more guidance, more quotations. And then I'd love to do some analysis. We have maybe eight or nine of them

Starting point is 00:48:53 now, but when we have like 30, we can start to do some pattern matching. The things we've already figured out are really interesting. We figured out that generally, Nix happens in a nucleus at a company and starts growing from there. We found that generally, it's not the first thing people choose. They see it and they go, oh, that sounds like exactly what I want, but I am not willing to confront that yet.

Starting point is 00:49:14 And then they go and they try a few other things. They attempt to circumnavigate the problem in 10 different ways, and then they come back and go, all right, take a deep breath, let's climb this mountain. Yeah. You know, and so we find that that's a pattern

Starting point is 00:49:24 that people have a lot. That's interesting, my conversations, I've also found that to be the case. Yeah. So that's interesting, you're discovering that. Yeah. I guess what I thought was interesting though is you're probably getting stories after story

Starting point is 00:49:35 of how people are solving problems with Knicks, and I think one of the things that I'm discovering this year in particular is a lot of people here are a little bit more willing to talk about how they're using Knicks in production, and there hasn't been a lot of that. So a little bit more willing to talk about how they're using Nix in production. And there hasn't been a lot of that. So I love the idea of publicly sharing these stories, finding common problems people are solving,

Starting point is 00:49:52 and even maybe some of the code they use to fix those problems. That could really help people just solve the same issue. Absolutely, I mean if you look at the Nix community this year versus last year, notably different. Like the level of conversations, one higher. The things that people are asking about, the things that people are trying to solve are one level more sophisticated.

Starting point is 00:50:15 We're starting to see, I think, people having real production use cases. I agree. People who've gotten to day 1,000 and they're like, okay, here's the day's the day 1000 experience and it's not what I thought it was gonna be It's it's more vibrant and more interesting and more challenging but also more more more valuable Yeah, and you're not hearing people say we got to this point and now we're sick of it We're bailing what you're hearing is we're gonna continue to use it. We're gonna go even further. Yeah, they're like we're waist deep We were in it Thank you, Ross. Thank you

Starting point is 00:50:43 Well, we always love chatting with Ross and getting an update every year, but we also got to see one of our favorite listeners, Olympia Mike was there taking in the Knicks, but also showcasing one of his newest Knicks projects. Man, this is wild, right? If you think about, I was thinking about this in the room, we went from the summer of immutability,

Starting point is 00:51:05 and I was like, what are these guys talking about, this Nix thing? And now we're sitting here, what, two, three years later, at Planet Nix, you know? Which is just wild. Are you blaming us for your trajectory? Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:18 I think I had a slide dedicated to blaming you guys for my discovery of Nix OS. So what are you doing with NixOS these days? So, oh boy. Well, I'm doing a bunch of stuff. So I just got done finishing my talk on building a Chromebook replacement with NixOS, which is basically, I almost named it NixOS for your mom, you know, because the idea is like setting up

Starting point is 00:51:39 NixOS for a general user, basic user to use. But like NixOS for your mom, I was like, ah, I might not get approved. So you decided on a different name? Yeah, so basically, people that want a Chromebook-like experience, but without the creepy Google stuff, right? They just want it to be automatic. They just want everything to work. They want everything to be one click install.

Starting point is 00:51:59 And so yeah, I've built that with NixOS and I've been deploying it out there in the real world for friends, family, and local people. And yeah, so I give a talk on how I did that and hopefully get more eyes on the project. Cool. So tell us a little bit more about why you built this, because it sounds like you have a project in which you're

Starting point is 00:52:17 giving back to the community. And that was kind of the thrust to use Nix to make your job a little easier. Yeah, absolutely. So if you were to look at a heat map of Linux users, there's probably a giant red spot in Olympia, Washington. And that's because for the past five years, I've been getting donation computers from people, people

Starting point is 00:52:36 that are just, hey, I have this old laptop sitting in my closet, don't know what to do with it. And they give it to me. And I've even buddied up with like school districts and companies that are getting rid of old hardware and so they know that I'm a safe place to bring it because I securely wipe everything before anything goes out and and some people want data off their drives or whatever so what I do is I take these machines and I Linux them up and donate

Starting point is 00:53:04 them back out to the community. And what I was doing was doing Linux Mint because Linux Mint is, you know, love it or hate it. It is definitely the most friendly environment and UI for somebody coming from Windows. And overall that worked great, but I noticed there were some issues with Linux Mint, people not doing updates, a little package confusion stuff. And so what I thought was, what if I built this in Nix and was able to rebuild Linux Mint in Nix with all the upgrades that I wanted to do?

Starting point is 00:53:37 And I did. You said you basically built your own distribution, but I would imagine Nix enabled you to do that in a way that you would have never considered doing without it. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Linux from scratch or even back in the day, before I discovered Nix, how I did this was basically like Arch shell scripts.

Starting point is 00:53:56 Like install Arch and then run this script. It sounds scary already. It sounds scary already. Yeah, yeah, sure enough. And yeah, it never bit me, sure. I'm lying. Yeah, it sounds like a little bit of pain points, but also just you mentioned you're now taking care of 400 to 500 laptop.

Starting point is 00:54:11 Yeah. So I have, there's probably at least four to 500 of these, I call them Nixbooks out there in the world. And many of them are in my house as well. So I have my kids, I have my parents, they're all using Nick's book. And it's just, it's fantastic. It really is that perfect zero maintenance, open it up and it just works. All the updates are done for you. You just never need to worry about anything.

Starting point is 00:54:38 And it's just that all the guarantees and the security that you get with Nickix for a general user. I mean, it kinda is perfect. It was great to see Olympia Mike. He had a great talk, and we wanted to wrap it up with Ron, who we started this adventure with Ron, who is co-founder of Phlox and of course the chair of the NixOS Foundation.

Starting point is 00:55:00 And we wanted to check in with him a day after things just to see how it had gone for him and now that he's just attending regular old scale, what's it been like just with the average folks who are coming for a general Linux convention? How do you feel the first Planet Nix went? I mean, I think it was incredible. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:18 Right, I can only speak for myself or just the energy in the room, but seeing over 300 people standing room only on two tracks, workshops, talks, all that, I think that was incredible. You know what I noticed, and I wonder if you picked up on this, is it felt like both in terms of talks

Starting point is 00:55:33 and in terms of attendees, people were talking about how they use Nix at work, more out in the open, like we're using it here, we're replacing this with Nix. Did you see more of that? Did you hear more of that this year? I 100% did, and I think that was the thing when we intentionally really tried to communicate

Starting point is 00:55:49 with Planet Nix. It's gonna be a bit different, it's gonna be a bit more Nix beginners, Nix at work, doing that, and I think it was received so well that that's kind of the ecosystem that showed up here, right? We have a good mix of advanced contributors, but also a good mix of folks that finally felt really comfortable, you know, being able to talk about, hey, I

Starting point is 00:56:10 just want to bring it in. I'm not an expert. What do I do? And I love those conversations. Yeah, because you walk away with like real solutions, like, oh, that's how you fix that. Like, there's been a couple of conversations where people just had breakthroughs, like, oh, that's how you're doing that? Oh, what a brilliant idea because there's always a lot of ways to solve problems Exactly exactly and I think it's look I mean think about it. We're a pretty tight-knit community. We're pretty extreme Technical community it must be and it probably is Kind of scary to come in and say hey, how do I do this thing for a commercial reason?

Starting point is 00:56:42 Right open source, that already has a little bit of friction, so when you're like, all I wanted to do is to solve a problem at Apple, at Anthropic, at take name of presenter that attended this year. I think it's kind of scary, and I'm really happy to see that folks were talking about it. I think it means that we kind of removed the barriers a bit

Starting point is 00:57:03 and opened our arms a bit wider for folks like that. So put your flocks hat on. We're standing right here at the flocks booth in the scale side of the event and the expo hall. What's the average scale attendee interest been in flocks and the solving problems that flocks solves? I think we're seeing the transition, right? We're seeing kind of that we were here two years ago, actually at a Knicks transition, right? We're seeing kind of that, we were here two years ago,

Starting point is 00:57:25 actually at a Knicks booth, right? Because we hosted the first Knicks booth ever at scale two years ago, and folks were coming by and being like, what's Knicks? Now, folks are coming by and being like, oh, you're that, are you that thing that bridges all the gaps that I currently have with containers? And they're coming to us with a,

Starting point is 00:57:42 hey, I want to, I've started to use this instead of Homebrew, or this has improved my life over here. So that's a really amazing feeling, right? You're kind of, folks are starting to that discovery phase and the excitement phase, both about Nix and about Phlox, and I'm seeing a lot of scale attendees who are not specifically from the Nix ecosystem

Starting point is 00:58:02 come up, recognize, mention already being, looking into it, which is always a more lovely, deep conversation. It's such a great opportunity because the conversations are so high bandwidth, so you just get so much more context. That's something that I really appreciated about us being here is I feel like

Starting point is 00:58:18 we just understand a lot more about what people are working on and what's really kind of on the front of people's mind right now, what they're thinking of. Like just the bandwidth you get in these conversations, it's so much richer than the online communications. I almost wish we could do it more than once a year. I do too.

Starting point is 00:58:34 I think that would be lovely. I mean the fact that we can, you know, user, a person, an attendee shows up and is like, here's my problems. Show me how you solve them for me. And what we do is like crack open a laptop and you know the person leaves with like a holy cow. I think I got this licked. I can solve this. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to get not in person, not face to face. And that's incredible. Well, Ron, thank you. Thank you for bringing us

Starting point is 00:59:01 down here and thanks for putting on a great event. We really enjoyed it. We're going to do it again next year with you guys, so I'm excited. Awesome, awesome. All right. I hope so, you know, because before we went down, it's like, oh, is it worth it? You know, we could probably do a lot of this just remotely, but man, is it so worth it?

Starting point is 00:59:13 Just things to figure out, the context to get the insights. All of that is just, is really super worth it. I know you agree? Oh yeah, I mean, even just at the event as well, the energy, I think I've taken some of that back home, especially because they had this great setup in the common area with all these tables, including little switches and power outlets.

Starting point is 00:59:33 And you could see a lot of people getting work done, and I was just itching. I was like, I didn't even bring my laptop. Because we were getting interviews, I wanted to get some NICs done. And Brent, I wonder if you noticed this too, but it feels like there is an ecosystem assembling here with different vendors providing solutions built on top of NICs done. And Brent, I wonder if you noticed this too, but it feels like there is an ecosystem assembling here with different vendors providing solutions

Starting point is 00:59:47 built on top of NICs. That's been kind of fascinating to watch too. Yeah, it seemed really exciting that the ecosystem is maturing even from what we saw last year. And Chris, you mentioned this quickly that it seems like the corporate world is now okay to share what they're doing with NICs.

Starting point is 01:00:03 And we heard sort of in the hush hush that there's a lot of businesses who are household names really that are using Nix and maybe aren't willing to talk about it right now, but are being sort of convinced to talk about all the really neat things they're doing with Nix and NixOS. So I thought at least from a perspective of going from last year to this year and seeing where that trend is going, I think we're in for a good time here. Now you heard some of our biggest takeaways from Planet Nex. We, of course, have so many more, and it's a treat if you're in person to grab those.

Starting point is 01:00:38 But we also have a little treat from our community. So the first one was we had a little invitation by System 76, longtime friends of the show, to do a little laser tag. And this was not planned, they just invited us last minute. And Chris, were you up for this at first? I mean, I was in full, let's watch MacGyver mode.

Starting point is 01:01:01 So, you know, you think about it, you start your day 7 a.m. ish, and which means you're really up 5.30 So, you know, you think about it, you start your day 7 a.m.-ish, which means you're really up 5 30, and you're eating breakfast and you're getting out the door at 7 a.m. And so to get through this, plus all of the walking around all day long and doing interviews, I thought,

Starting point is 01:01:17 well, what we'll do is we'll have a super chill evening, we'll get some sandwiches, and we'll watch the first episode of MacGyver. Hang out, relax. And to make this possible, we were trying streaming, but the Airbnb connection was a bit spotty. So Wes facilitated by quickly standing up a local jellyfin instance.

Starting point is 01:01:36 You know, you should really just carry a jellyfin with you at all times. I agree. I think lesson learned. And Wes, being a longtime, perhaps lifetime MacGyver fan, of course had the means and necessary access to get us the MacGyver files. So we had ourselves a night planned.

Starting point is 01:01:53 And I was pretty committed to this idea. You might say it's what carried me through the day, perhaps. It was my shining star, my light at the end of the tunnel to get through the hard day. And we, no joke, we get home and we start talking about dinner and, you know, Wes has got the laptop running and we get a text message from Emma from System 76. And she's like, guys, you gotta come out.

Starting point is 01:02:16 You gotta play laser tag with us. And I'm like, no way, not gonna happen. We just are about to get our lazy on. And then like the next message from Emma is like, tell Chris it'll be a lot of fun and he should do it. She knew I was gonna say something. And of course they graciously paid for our tickets. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:34 So we're like, all right, let's do this. So we pile up in the rental car that we had and we set off to the laser tag place. Ironically, we beat them there because they were delayed by an ambulance. So we started warming up by playing some air hockey, you know. And I had surprisingly good luck at the air hockey for some reason. I don't know what my deal was with that. That was about the extent of my luck for the night.

Starting point is 01:02:55 Then the System 76 crew showed up and Carl and team, most of the team were there. Real part of the team. And we were kind of concerned because they play laser tag on the regular at this massive facility in Denver. And you know, I think I last played as a teenager. Yeah. I had never played until this moment. Neither did I.

Starting point is 01:03:15 And my wife, Hedia, who was with us had never played. So we were total beginners going up against a crew that plays on the regular. And it showed in our first round. We didn't we didn't do great in our first round. And you could tell the system 76 crew thought they had us. They were feeling pretty, pretty good. And I'll be honest, I was a little nervous. But what I realized as the games progressed is the boys just needed

Starting point is 01:03:40 to get their laser feet at first. And once the preceding games got on, I discovered that my two co-hosts are absolute psychopath killers that not only can work as a team as one killer brain, but also work independently, and they're absolute murderers. And I'll tell you, quite honestly, audience, before we went into this trip, I figured,

Starting point is 01:04:01 you know, in a hypothetical situation where we're all walking around packing heat and we got into some sort of like old West gun showdown, I thought I'd be the one there, you know, in a hypothetical situation where we're all walking around packing heat and we got into some sort of like old West gun showdown, I thought I'd be the one there, you know, crouching behind a car shooting while the boys, you know, went and got help or something. No, no, disparagement meant. But I didn't figure you'd be the ones that'd be doing the killing. I thought that duty would fall upon me.

Starting point is 01:04:16 Of course, I've thought of this. However, now that we've played laser tag, I realized I'll be the one running for help and you two will be the one doing the murdering. And I'm going to and I'm totally safe. You got my back. I was surprised and ultimately it meant that our team came out victorious and we beat the seasoned laser tag system 76 crew.

Starting point is 01:04:37 Go team JB. You know going into this, system 76 made some big promises to try to lure us out. They, what was some of them? Number one was- I do believe some launch keyboards were promised, right? They were for the top performers, and well, Wes was the number one top performer across all rounds that we played, and your dear Brent was number two.

Starting point is 01:04:58 Killer. I just like lasers. Yeah. And shooting people apparently. And turns out I placed number two. Yeah. Yeah. You monster.

Starting point is 01:05:09 And the other thing they suggested was the loser would show up on someone's podcast and admit that they had lost. And I don't see them in the mumba room. Do you see them in the mumba room? No, I don't think they're here today. That's okay. They're probably still hurting from their loss. They're thinking, how did those lazy podcasters beat us,

Starting point is 01:05:28 us Denver hikers? That's probably what they're thinking, right? Everybody hikes in Denver, right? I think so. It was a lot of fun. And we really enjoyed our time seeing them. They also made it to our meetup, which was a blowout success. Thank you, everybody.

Starting point is 01:05:42 We had well over 100 people make it. We told the restaurant there would be 40, and there was a bitout success. Thank you everybody. We had well over 100 people make it. We told the restaurant there would be 40 and there was a bit more than that. Yes. Ha ha. And so they quickly opened up another wing for us and we had an overflow room and it was a- Yeah, they did a great job dealing with our mess.

Starting point is 01:05:58 Anish from Anthropic made it, Carl from System 76, Noah from the Ask Noah program. Of course, Alex from Self-Hosted made it. Olympia Mike was there, C from the Ask Noah program. Of course, Alex himself hosted, made it. Olympia Mike was there, Cessna Mike was there. Our pal Gene Bean. Yep, yep. Hal 9000. Yeah, yeah, I got to meet Hal 9000.

Starting point is 01:06:13 It was really great to put some names to faces. Those meetups are always really good for that. And they said, we're welcome back, even though we blew it out. They said, don't worry, don't worry. We'll make it work for you next time. So maybe we'll do it there again. They were super accommodating, even though we way it out, they said, don't worry. Don't worry. We'll make it work for you next time. So maybe we'll do it there again.

Starting point is 01:06:26 They were super accommodating, even though we way, way overwhelmed them. But we had so much fun. And it went on for hours. And then the next morning, we had conference hard. And we've covered all of that. But because we're pros at this now, we had scheduled ourselves a little bit of downtime.

Starting point is 01:06:44 So that way, we could enjoy the fact that we were in Pasadena, California, while the weather's nice. But what do you do? What do you do with your free time? You got your boys there, but everywhere you go, it's traffic. And the tourist thing would be to go to the beach.

Starting point is 01:06:58 And our first thought was, well, maybe we could just do something to torture PJ, you know, take him to some really touristy thing he hates. Mm, right, so if we can't actually go enjoy ourselves, at least we could make him suffer and enjoy that. But, you know, we threw a couple ideas at him to just kind of see how he'd respond, and he was, like, cool with everything.

Starting point is 01:07:19 He was like, everything. He just rolled with the punches. So that wasn't gonna work. But since now Jeff, myself, and my wife were all awake, but you boys were still sleeping, well, I have to be honest, we started scheming. Woke up Brent, didn't tell him why Loaded him up, hit the road to buy Oh Lord, that bang bus blew Rusty van, but it's gonna be good news Batteries dead, but the engine's true Brent's got a bang bus. What's he gonna do? That's right. We loaded Brent up into the car, Brent and Wes, and only kind of hinted what we were doing. And out of all the things that were available to us, Jeff's mom's house was pretty close to our location. So we thought, let's go down there. We know that Jeff's had this van parked there that he's been trying to get Brent to buy for ages,

Starting point is 01:08:27 but we don't truly know the state of it. We think it's in good condition, but it'd be really good to get our eyes on it. And then, hey, wouldn't it be fun if we just for a couple of hours tried to get this bus, which is a van, parked there for six years, if we could get this thing running again? Wouldn't that just be a fun adventure?

Starting point is 01:08:44 And sure enough, as we're pulling up, we're like, hey, Brent, look at this van. Brent, check this van out. And his eyes went wide. I was so clueless at that point, because I, you know, how this typically goes when we get together is we just have some free time, someone makes some crazy decision about where we go,

Starting point is 01:09:01 and then I just, I don't know, Wes, you and I are pretty agreeable. We just tag along for whatever crazy adventure is gonna happen. And I had zero until the moment we pulled up to this thing. Zero idea this is what we were going to do. And then it all just hit me. Holy, this is the van that Jeff's been sending me photos

Starting point is 01:09:20 about for the last two years, trying to convince me to take this thing off his grandfather's hands out of the driveway. And this, I mean, Chris, this is your fault. I'm completely blaming you because for years now you've been saying, hey, Brent, you know what you should do. I can't do it because I got kids and big huge rake, but I'm going to live vicariously through you and you should buy this little, I don't know, a van or some kind of camper of some

Starting point is 01:09:43 sort and just tour around the continent just on your own time. And so this has been years in the making, you've been rousing me about this and like some of the first Bang Buss songs are just like continuing that trend of just convincing Brent he should live a different lifestyle. And sure enough, when we pulled up, it was like, oh, it's on. It is on. Yeah. What we saw was a 1990s Dodge B-250 camper van built in Canada and modified into a camper van in Canada, interestingly enough. And it had been sitting, so it's rusted, but it had real potential.

Starting point is 01:10:18 And we are kind of like the Avengers team. We came together, Wes did the audio recording, Brent and I started going through the RV features of the van, and we kind of quickly came to realization that, you know, it wouldn't be too hard to see if this thing's functional. And so PJ came in clutch because we needed a little electrical work since the thing had sat for five or six years, the battery was beyond dead. We couldn't jump it. We couldn't charge it. But we needed to know if the motor turned. And so Jeff breaks out the old drone battery. I mean, I'm talking like something that fits in the palm of your hand and starts wiring it up to the van.

Starting point is 01:10:53 This is what we've been waiting for. Bubble bubble worries. Go ahead. Okay, turning on. Do it. Crank it. That's way more power. Crank it. There we go. It's smoking, but we got it. Yeah. Okay, kill it Brent, kill it. We're good. So we I think we're looking It's dead now Brent. I think we're looking at a voltage issue. Yes battery battery's dead, but it turned Oh, yeah, so the starter's not getting enough power. That's cool. It's already warm. Just a little bit. Dude it was smoking Yeah, well that's the wire that yeah It's all we needed to really find out for sure Yeah, that's great. That's good news for the starters in out for sure. That was great. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:11:26 Yeah, that's great. That's good news for the starters in perfect condition if we can get enough voltage to it. So we could run to one of the auto stores and pick up a battery. And we did just that because the thing is, it was like in pristine condition under the hood. The oil, it was just changed before it was parked. Yeah, service before it was parked. How often does that happen?

Starting point is 01:11:47 Brand new transmission fluid. Brand new transmission fluid in there. And so we knew it now would turn. And I think PJ was like, oh, we could just call it good there. And I'm like, now that we know, let's go get a battery. And so sure enough, we load up in the rental, we go get ourselves a $180 California battery, this thing's a big old V8 with a starter that just requires a ridiculous amount of power. And we put a little bit of starter juice right down into the mouth of the engine, right into the carburetor. So that way it's got some fresh juice to start with.

Starting point is 01:12:19 And we roll the dice to see if it starts. What do I need? We're gonna crank it, you ready? Yeah, crank it. What do you need me for? I'm just letting you know. Whew. Are you ready, Brent?

Starting point is 01:12:30 It's a bit airy in here, mate. Fuck off. Yeah, you're gonna get a lot of dirt. If it turns, it's gonna blow a lot. The dog house is open inside, so it's right at Brent's legs, like right at his knees. We can put it back on. Are we ready?

Starting point is 01:12:44 Yeah, we're ready. Here we go. Sounds good. Oh ho ho. Yeah, yeah! Yes, give it some gas, right there, little gas. Yes! Yeah, keep it going,

Starting point is 01:13:02 because we're gonna start getting the shit gas now. I'm gonna get the pump up. Yeah, it's good. It's good. Breathe it. Woohoo! I did get a little dirty because it blew all over me because the engine's in the cab, which makes no sense to me. Yeah, well that's why it's got a doghouse.

Starting point is 01:13:19 It's sweet, you can just touch it while you're driving down the road. Well yeah, you gotta go to the dock to do everything. You wanna go? Okay, we're starting to get a little belt squeak, but not bad. Yeah, it's a little dirty. It's sweet, you can just touch it while you're driving down the road. Well, yeah, you go to the doctor, everything. You want to go? OK, we're starting to get a little belt squeak, but not bad. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:13:31 Well, yeah, right. Like, I mean, Star Trek, they got an engine room. You just got your engine room in your cab. Yeah, right there in the cockpit. It's actually pretty handy. So the whole story is in this week's episode of the launch, and there's a lot more to it. Weeklylaunch.rocks.

Starting point is 01:13:44 Brent joins Angela and I, and we go into the full story but long story short because it ran so good and it actually smoothed out as it continued to run and the engine only has 60,000 miles on it Brent decided to pull the trigger and pick it up. So now we have to actually get back down there and get the thing on the road. Tires are in rough shape, so it's going to need new tires. You know, it's probably going to get about somewhere between 10 and 15 miles per gallon. It's got to get, you know, tidal and licensed. It's got a few repairs.

Starting point is 01:14:18 Brent's going to have some woodwork to do, but the bones are in really good shape, Brentley. This is crazy. This is not what I had on my list. My agenda for Skona scale, Planet Nix, and hanging out with you guys. I didn't expect to come back with a new lifestyle and a new set of wheels, but I gotta say, that was super fun to work on this thing with you guys.

Starting point is 01:14:41 We had a great time. Wes, thank you for sneaky grabbing a bunch of audio. It's reliving that moment when it just first started up is like, yeah, that's gonna stick with me for a while. But Chris, you and I have, well, I think a big project coming up where we're gonna head back down and really get this thing going, put new tires on it and make sure it actually rolls

Starting point is 01:15:04 because we didn't actually get the chance to try that part of it, and somehow get this thing back up to Canada. And Jeff's going to join us too. So early May, is that what we decided? May 1st, I booked the trip and we're going to fly down to LAX. And then with Jeff's help, we're going to get back to his mom's house and we're going to try to get this thing on the road as fast and feasible as possible and we're gonna be doing shows,

Starting point is 01:15:29 we're gonna be doing LUP and other shows from the road, from the van. Which is gonna be interesting because the interior needs some work. It may or may not work. Yeah, well, we're gonna find out. Instead of restoring it to normal, you just restore it to studio.

Starting point is 01:15:43 Yeah, well, and you get it. Basically, basically if the bones are in good shape the other stuff We can figure out so our thinking is if we can get it from LA to Sacramento where we'll have Jeff chasing us Then it's likely we have a pretty good shot at least a 50% shot of getting from Sacramento back up to Seattle We shall see and we will not have, after we leave Jeff's house in Sacramento, we will have no chase car. So we will be just on our own, and we'll have to be stopping and taking time to do episodes and shows from the van.

Starting point is 01:16:14 It's gonna be wild. And of course, we could always use the help and support, because not only was this episode incredibly expensive to produce, but this wild trip's gonna be crazy. So if you'd like to help the boost, boost in with some BangBuzz support, I got I got a specific clip for those of you who boost in. We have Brinks got a bang.

Starting point is 01:16:34 What's he going to do? And another BangBuzz boost clip. A big, juicy van. Yeah, that's right. So. Mm hmm. Yeah, we're looking forward to it I think it's gonna be I think it's gonna be really great and We'll have details and all of that in the future and you'll know you'll know when we're on the road You know, I didn't just I'm already looking forward to it at a future meetup, you know in a year or two's time

Starting point is 01:16:57 The vans right there. Yep. It's gonna be great Brendal be giving out tours and talking about the wood He rebuilt and where the batteries are at. Probably pulling people in there to do sneaky interviews. Oh yeah, oh yeah, and you know we're stuffing as much Linux into this thing as possible. Maybe we build in a Linux Reaper system, a Home Assistant system's just absolutely gonna happen.

Starting point is 01:17:15 Brent, full Linux in your bag. Bring it on, bring it on. We do have some boosts to get into that help make this episode possible and our baller booster this week is the dude abides coming in with a fantastic 100,000 sets The Dude-A-Bite writes, welcome back. Thank you, dude. Really appreciate that. That means more than ever this week.

Starting point is 01:17:57 That is a great time for a Boller Boost like that. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. And you are our top supporter for episode 606. Adversary17 comes in with 68,000 sets. Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. Also a great boost. You cross four boosts, you know,

Starting point is 01:18:16 some responses to some previous things, which is great. So first up, you were kind of asking, what would you do if you were Linus? Well, if Adversaries was Linus, I would change the version of the kernel to 7.0, and all subsequent kernels would be 7.x forever. Why? Because why not? I'm Linus. I mean, it feels like we're getting there with the six series.

Starting point is 01:18:37 You know how Linus gets once the number starts getting too high, so it could be happening. Would he go with seven forever? Well, he could if he was Linus for a day. In all seriousness, though, I do not know enough to make a good decision regarding the direction the Colonel should take or what adjustments to make. That's why I'm not Linus. Okay, and then on Firefox, I absolutely agree with you, Brent. Why do I compromise experience and use Firefox?

Starting point is 01:19:00 Because it's not Chromium and I strongly dislike the mono browser culture that we have. At first I was disgruntled with the changes Mozilla was making but I value rallying behind a different browser engine than Chromium and if my anonymized data is what it takes to help offset the cost of making one then I guess I'll just have to live with it which is why I'm watching Lady Bird very closely and have been and have even decided to support them financially. Have fun at scale. Thank you. And I think that's a good play. You're kind of like hedging with Ladybird. We also got a little just to feedback on an awesome team dive.

Starting point is 01:19:34 Oh good. Let's go with that was probably the EBPF episode. Yeah. That's a great set of boost adversaries. Thank you very much. And I agree with you. Thanks for the Boost. Now Andrew sent in two Boosts. The first one here, 29,402 sets. Well, I'll be dipped. Short time, first time, but you have a new Linux convert.

Starting point is 01:19:56 Windows hardware requirements got me good. And now Next is giving me quite a head spin, but wow, is it an awesome one. Thanks for all the good work and cheers to many more invaluable episodes. Nexus giving me quite a head spin, but wow, is it an awesome one. Thanks for all the good work and cheers to many more invaluable episodes. P.S. Get the map, Wes, because this is a zip code boost. Yes, zip code is a better deal. Did you bring the map, Wes?

Starting point is 01:20:16 Good thing I didn't forget it in California, because I packed it. It does have extra stains, I noticed. Well, you know, the avocados are so good down there. First time booster and a Linux convert, Andrew Andrew you're killing it. Love it. It's good to hear. All right Wes so convert this. Yeah it looks like okay double checking you got to run the figures. Ideally with Star Trek sounds right. Oh there you go. I see Andrew also like the deep dive but he says we don't have to overdo it. I think that's good feedback thank you all right

Starting point is 01:20:46 where's he at Wes where Charleston South Carolina hey I want to go there some time I would love to do North Carolina South Carolina thing Carolina style meetup let's do it yeah does that mean there's vinegar in the meetup why not okay all right hey speaking of somebody we got to see at Planet Nix and scale it is Gene Bean and he comes in with thirty-six thousand five hundred and ten sats Everything's under control That's right. Oh my god this drawer is filled with fruit loaves Uh, he says if you're gonna use Gentoo don't cut corners

Starting point is 01:21:18 Oh gosh, we got him going just as NixBSD wasn't freeBSD sidestepping what makes Gentoo unique defeats its purpose The point of a Gentoo unique defeats its purpose. The point of a Gentoo challenge is to learn about the stuff other distros hide. That knowledge is incredibly helpful when switching back to any mainstream distro. I mean, can't argue with any of that. I agree. I think he's right about that.

Starting point is 01:21:37 He did love the Rust coverage and the kernel, and we asked if people are liking the deep dives. He said he enjoyed the eBPF deep dive. I wouldn't want it every episode, but once a month, maybe a quarter. This particular one was well done. I really enjoyed it. Keep up the good work. OK, I think that's where we're starting to see a theme.

Starting point is 01:21:50 It's like, yeah, from time to time. Don't mind those deep dives. Just got to buckle up. Right. And then he wraps it up with Brent, Chris and Wes. This, which was twenty five thousand four hundred sets, should cover the beer or cider that I wanted to get each of you during scale. As a thanks for all you do to keep this community informed, it was great getting to chat with you all while we were there,

Starting point is 01:22:08 and I'm seriously looking forward to hearing your coverage of the event. Well, Jade being having lunch with you was a highlight of our event, so it was nice to see you. Hey, on that same thread, Nostromo boosts in with 25,000 sets. Right then, let's get ourselves settled in for a wee deep dive. Have some drinks on me. Hey, thank you. I think we will.

Starting point is 01:22:29 We'll fly over friends sent in a McRoe of ducks. This old duck's still got it. JB BangBus, huh? Well, okay, go ahead and earmark this boost to help fund the interior cameras. I'll watch, but I'll be weird. Yeah, I like oversly over. I'm thinking cameras for sure. I mean, on the outside.

Starting point is 01:22:53 I don't know about the inside. Somehow from the past, I guess I remember from, oh, was this earlier today? It's like the first bank bus boost. That's true. Oh, oh God, you're right. Okay, here we go. A big, juicy van. Yeah, oh god, you're right. Okay, here we go. A big, juicy van.

Starting point is 01:23:06 Yeah, you know, and I like, so people go to interesting places with the name, but of course, the real story behind the name of the BangBus is that we just like alliteration a lot. And Brent's a drummer, right? So he's gonna be, the cameras on the inside are so he can do drumming and livestreams and do collab like Drummond with Producer Jeff.

Starting point is 01:23:24 That's a good point. That's a good point. All right, Sire comes in with 20,000 Sats. The cameras on the inside are so he can do drumming live streams and do collab like drumming with producer Jeff. That's a good point. That's a good point. Alright, Sire comes in with 20,000 sats. Beer boost, sorry I couldn't do the benchmarks on FreeBSD. Okay, I'm keeping an eye on the release notes though to see when my goopoo will become supported. Totally fair, Sire. That seems totally fair. We also got 20k sats from Frigolet, just to say enjoy a couple of beers.

Starting point is 01:23:46 And Zach Attack came in with another 20,000 sats. It has been too long since I boosted in. I remember you guys talked about note-taking apps, and I recently switched from Obsidian with Syncthing to Joplin with Tailscale and Nextcloud. While I don't like the way they format files, I do like how it handles syncing across devices. Made onboarding laptops that I tend to wipe and reinstall the OS on every quarter a lot easier. Also on the Rust in the kernel coverage, I like hearing it. I can tell you guys spend a lot

Starting point is 01:24:22 of time looking into the topics and give a good, fair take on it. Would be curious on what you guys think about the latest Firefox controversy, and if it's gonna cause you to jump web browsers. Also, big shout out to everyone from Michigan. We did talk a little Firefox in our live stream members show today. And I think we're going to keep watching it and we'll probably do further coverage in the show. That's a good question. At the same time, I don't think any of us are going to stop using it.

Starting point is 01:24:51 That's true. That is true. Thank you Zach Attack. Good to hear from you. And it's great to hear from Shy Fox who comes in with 20,000 sets. I'm on the wrong coast to join you all. So instead, here's to a good time. PS, my first computer was a Pentium One that we won in a department store raffle. Oh, what an area. Amazing. I wonder if that one had a fan on it. Some of the Pentiums that first shipped didn't have fans even though they needed them. And so if you got a really early Pentium one system, you might have, because you have to understand the 486 and 386 systems, while some of them started having cooling till the very end of the 46 line and 386 systems while some of them started having cooling. Till the very end of the 486

Starting point is 01:25:26 line they're still selling some of them without active cooling if you can believe it. The good old days. But the PENIUM 1s was a little bit tougher. That's a great boost. Thank you Shy Fox. Good to hear from you. Tomato boost in with 12,345 cents. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. I really enjoyed both the EBPF show and the coverage of the Rust in the Colonel mess

Starting point is 01:25:50 a couple of weeks back. Hope you lads had a great time at scale. Thank you, Tomato, we did. Nice to hear from you. Amitra Hat sent in 4,500 cents. Longtime listener, core contributor, and first time booster. Hey! Thank you on both accounts.

Starting point is 01:26:09 Just wanted to say the EBPF deep dive was excellent, and I'd like to hear more of those such episodes. All right. Right then. Let's get ourselves settled in for a wee deep dive. That's great. This is really good feedback. The boys can attest, before we started getting these messages,

Starting point is 01:26:26 I was telling them maybe we don't do that again. And I was like, oh, this is not looking good. But so far, now that we've actually collected the messages and time has come in and they've rolled in, I'm feeling like, yeah, we'll do it at a certain cadence, but we'll do it from time to time. Thank you also for the membership support. Night62 came in with 12,100 sats.

Starting point is 01:26:49 First off, I love the deep dive episodes. Please keep them coming. All right, it's another vote for a deep dive, boys. Right then, let's get ourselves settled in for a wee deep dive. But I can understand they may not appeal to everyone. Second, I just got back from Scale 22x, which was awesome, primarily because the really great people I met and got to talk with, many of which were from the JB community. Shout out to

Starting point is 01:27:09 producer Jeff, Tech Dev, Eric, Kenji, Carl, George, Kyle from Bazite, and Noel from U-Blue and Aurora. It was also great to meet and hang with the JB crew, Chris, Hadia, Brent, Wes, and Alex. Thank you all for making my first scale so great. Oh, that's so sweet. And I'm glad you got a chance to say hi to folks. That's always what, you know, it can be a little, I know, nerve wracking your first time to actually say hi. But once you start doing it, it just it's smooth. And people there are so easy to talk to.

Starting point is 01:27:37 You'll be surprised. It's all what makes the meetup magic. I agree. I agree. FAB comes in with 10K assets. New challenge idea. Replace as many daily tasks as you can with a terminal user interface. There's a TUI for audio bookshelf, email, calendars,

Starting point is 01:27:55 file browsers, NOSTER, GitHub, text editors, music, and many more categories. Maybe 2025 could be the year of the terminal. You are the year of the TUI. Year of the TUI, you're of the TUI, huh? I think the hardest part would be using them enough to find out if it really is better than just firing up a new browser tab. Thanks for all the great Linux information.

Starting point is 01:28:14 Okay, so that right there, it's funny he said that because before you read that sentence, I was auto completing in my head, the benchmark should be, is it better than a web app? That should be the benchmark. Electron? TUI. Yeah, I'm gonna write that down.

Starting point is 01:28:28 We'll talk about it after the show. A TUI challenge could be fun. I'd be probably more inclined to do it if folks in the audience. That's the challenges we like the most is when you guys also do some of them with us. Could also boost to write in if you have ideas for like key TUI apps that would go well with the challenge,

Starting point is 01:28:44 you know, be useful. Yeah, something we can start looking at to see if it's feasible. It's a great boost. We're going to write it down and talk about it. Thank you, Bean. DistroStru boosted in what looks like a binary boost here. 10,101. Scale was great.

Starting point is 01:29:00 I had been struggling with some Nix configs around Thunderbird and I figured chatting with the Nix geniuses would set me right They were also a little stumped So I spent an hour with the engineer at the Thunderbird booth long story short I learned a lot filed issues on both projects and a pull request I could not make the JB meetup, but it was certainly nice to see you all That sounds like a great trip experience little hands hands on, little FaceTime, and working across projects. I heard a few other folks that did that too.

Starting point is 01:29:28 I had one problem, I went to this booth, then I went to talk to people at the other booth. Might not have solved your problem that day, but got the channels opened. Yeah, we only saw you very briefly, but glad you could make it. Yeah, thank you for the boost. Rotted mood comes in with 18,000, two sats. The traders love the vol. Just wanted to say, I enjoy the technical deep dive in episode 605, Live Long and Prosper.

Starting point is 01:29:48 Well, thank you, sir. It's good to hear from you. And you're doing a great job. You're doing a good job. Can I just say, I think you guys are all trolling me with this deep dive stuff. I mean, you just came out with that clip, Chris. And you know how much I hate the deep dive thing.

Starting point is 01:30:02 You think you're all using it? You think it's me? You think it's me? You think it's me that came up with the clip? I think you're all colluding. You're all colluding to just get me to... Let's get ourselves settled in for a wee deep dive. Mm-hmm. Yep. Still hate it. Ha ha ha!

Starting point is 01:30:16 WH-2025 boosts in with 12,345 sets. Yes! That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage! I got introduced to JB through Self-hosted listening on my commute to work. Once I caught up on the SSH back catalog, I tried out LUP. Now I have plenty of content to stay entertained and informed on my daily drive. So here's a bit of V4V. Keep doing what you're doing. Hope to join you guys at a meetup somewhere sometime. That is awesome. Thank you. That's the idea.

Starting point is 01:30:46 And we really appreciate it, especially this week. Thank you. Thank you very much, WH. Nice to hear from you. We also have a boost here from Magnolia Mayhem, another Spaceballs boost. The hell was that? Spaceball 1? They've gone to Plaid! No message on this one, just a bunch of plaid. Well, that's great. Thank you for the value. Thank you everybody who boosted. We got a bunch below the 2000 sat cutoff for honor.

Starting point is 01:31:11 I think there's one we have to. Oh, we got one? We want to pull one up? Yeah. All right. Kass Peelan boosted 100 sats just to say, love the deep dives more, more, more. All right, you got it, buddy. Right then. Let's get ourselves settled in for a wee deep dive. Ha ha ha.

Starting point is 01:31:27 I hate you all. Ha ha ha. Thank you, everybody who supported episode 606. We had 48 of you stream those sats as you listened. And collectively, you did a nice lift there. You stacked 102,434 sats. When you combine that with everybody who boosted live or boosted last week's episode we stacked a pretty handsome collective

Starting point is 01:31:49 564 thousand nine hundred and six sets We really appreciate it production costs were extremely high for this episode, but we really gained a lot of great insights It's gonna help inform coverage for years to come. Thank you, everybody who supports the show directly with a boost. It's a peer to peer network, all using open source technology. Your message goes directly to us and we collate it and put it into our show notes. You can get sats from River, from Strike, from Bitcoin Well, and then boost them into the show.

Starting point is 01:32:21 We really appreciate it. It's a great way to support each individual production. Or you can set your support on autopilot by becoming a member, one of our core contributors. And we have a link for that at Linux on plug.com and a big shout out to our members. You've got a Hulk of a member special show for you in the bootleg this week. We hope you enjoy it. It's a big boy.

Starting point is 01:32:44 Now our picks this week were inspired by our stay at the Airbnb, because I thought I was being real clever. And this is the first time I've ever done this. I packed an Apple TV. We have a spare one here. Well, it's not spare. It's one that's hooked up here at the studio that's used lightly. When people are over or whatever it might be, we fire up the old Apple TV.

Starting point is 01:33:03 And it's handy because it's signed into my stuff like my jellyfin server and my friends, Plex servers. And it's also on my tail net. So it gets access to everything. So I thought, Hey, I'll be a smart guy and I'll just bring the old Apple TV because we, I know we're going to be watching Star Trek or whatever and it'll make it real easy.

Starting point is 01:33:19 We'll plug it into the HDMI of the Airbnb. And we're good. Well, I did just that, but of course, the genius that I am, I forgot the remote. And we show up at the Airbnb. We're good. Well, I did just that. But of course, the genius that I am, I forgot the remote and we show up at the Airbnb. I'm like, oh, no big deal. We'll use a Wi-Fi app. Well, it has to be on the Wi-Fi. So then we had to make a quick, quick move.

Starting point is 01:33:36 And Brent suggested that I set up my phone to turn on the hotspot and name it my home Wi-Fi. The Apple TV joined that. Then we were able to control it and get on the Airbnb Wi-Fi. But then we had the actual problem of how the hell do you control an Apple TV when you don't have their little Apple TV remote and you don't have an iPhone? And you found a Python library for Apple TV

Starting point is 01:33:57 and AirPlay devices that lets you control things that are iOS TV 15 and TVOS 15 and later. It also supports apparently audio streaming via AirPlay to receivers like the HomePod and the Airport Express. Yeah, it's pretty handy and well, it seems fitting for this episode. It is packaged in Nix. Of course.

Starting point is 01:34:17 And so you pulled that down and you were using that sometimes to control the Apple TV. Yeah, we also found a couple different Android apps, but you know, they're always like a little sketchy. The first one I found, it did work, but it also came with a whole bunch of ads, but it wasn't just ads, it was, you know, like previews of mobile games.

Starting point is 01:34:35 So Brent and I had a setup where the ad would load, and then I would let Brent play the game for a few minutes, and then I would use the remote. Ultimately, there was a couple better apps that did work, and that was maybe a little more helpful for, you know, navigating to open like Swift Fin and kind of get things playing, but it was a little bit much if I just needed to pause

Starting point is 01:34:54 or adjust the volume or whatever. So Pi ATV was great for that. I also looked at ATV Desktop Remote, which is an electron app that adds adds something in your browser bar. Wow. Yeah, in the system tray area, I guess. I don't know if it works on Linux. I didn't actually try it,

Starting point is 01:35:14 but this is gonna be next up for me, which it adds a little graphical Apple remote that you can access from your system tray to control things. And it is an Electron app, and I see at one point someone filed an issue a few years ago around Linux support with Wayland. I guess if Electron works,

Starting point is 01:35:29 and whatever your desktop environment supports the right system tray stuff, it may work. Yeah, if anybody has any other great ways to control an Apple TV from Linux or Android that aren't loaded with ads or scans, I'd love to know, because it was like navigating a minefield in the Play Store.

Starting point is 01:35:44 Oh, and both of those are MIT licensed. Yes, right. Thank you, Wes. Thank you. We try to remember to mention that. We'll have a link to both of those in the show notes. Of course, that's at linuxunplug.com slash 606. Also, just again, a big thank you to Phlox for getting us out to Planet Nix in scale. We had a great time. So many stories to continue to share, and good connections we made, too.

Starting point is 01:36:07 And I'm looking forward to next year already. And don't forget, you can boost in to support Brent's BangBus efforts if you'd like, but also your feedback on event coverage like this, because these are also tricky episodes, sort of like the deep dives. They don't apply to everybody. So we try to frame the coverage in a way that even if you're not a daily Knicks user, you might still find informative. And I'd love to know if we hit that note so you can send us a boost with that or go to Linux on plug dot com slash contact and I also invite

Starting point is 01:36:33 you to join us live make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday join us at noon. Nope we now do it at 10am pacific which is noon eastern see you next week week. Same bad time, same bad station. Except for when we change it. But then we like to lock it in. And if you just have a podcasting 2.0 app, you don't have to worry. We try to mark it pending about 24 hours or so beforehand, and we go live. Boom! Boom! Just live right there in the app.

Starting point is 01:36:59 Yeah, best not to even fuss with the time zone thing. Use the app. Yeah. We do have time zones at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Also, we have our mumble and matrix info there. We'd love to have you join us in those places as well. That's really all you need to know, other than the links which I already told you about

Starting point is 01:37:14 at unplugged.com slash 606, you know, with the Linux in front of me. I think that's it for us. Hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode. We'll see you next Tuesday, as in Sunday! So you

LINUX Unplugged - 606: Goodbye World

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