LINUX Unplugged - 610: Linus' Next Big Thing

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

Apple's software is going rotten, while Linux sneaks up as the better Mac. Linus grumbles through Git's 20th birthday, and we spot a hardware window Linux better not slam shut.Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. ConfigCat Feature Flags: Manage features and change your software configuration using ConfigCat feature flags, without the need to re-deploy code. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMTailscale Community Meetup Seattle — Calling all Tailscale users, homelabbers, and networking enthusiasts! We’re bringing the community together for a casual, community focused meetup in Seattle.POLL: Would you tune into a Saturday LFNW Live Stream?Celebrating Git's 20th anniversary with creator Linus Torvalds — Discover the origins of the open-source version control system, why he handed over the reins a few months in, and what he thinks about adding new programming languages to Git.Two decades of Git: A conversation with creator Linus Torvalds - YouTubeuemacs - Linus Editor — Random version of microemacs with my private modificatonsYes Linus' uemacs is pacakged in NixDebian APT 3.0 Stable Released With New Package Solver & Refined Text UI — This new version introduces a significantly refined command-line interface and a completely new package solver.I Want a Better Mac, so I’m Cheering for a Better Linux — "Apple needs a real competitor, one alternatives such as GNOME on Linux could actually be, if only the hardware rose to the occasion."I'd love to see someone help Linux take the next stepoutdoorgeek's laptop sleep optimized NixOS configRust is easy? Go is… hard?Pick: chat-gipitty: Terminal client for getting answers from LLMs — Chat Gipitty (Chat Get Information, Print Information TTY) is a command line client for ChatGPT. It allows you to chat with your chosen model of ChatGPT in a terminal and even pipe output into it.moreutils' sponge — soak up standard input and write to a file.GitHub - pgdr/moreutils — a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young.Pick: ALttP VT Randomizer — Each playthrough shuffles the location of all the important items in the game. Will you find the Bow atop Death Mountain, the Fire Rod resting silently in the library, or even the Master Sword itself waiting in a chicken coop?spannerisms/ALttPNG

You have one unheard message. First unheard message sent yesterday at 7.15 PM. Hello. Is this thing on? Listen here. I was told this podcast was about vans. Vans that run Linux. Real machines. But all I hear is you kids rambling on about video games and some fella named Steam Dick, which frankly sounds like a personal problem.

I got myself a perfectly good 1998 Dodge Caravan with a Raspberry Pi duct tape to the dash, and I was hoping for tips on how to make VLC stop crashing every time I take a left turn. Instead, I'm getting speedruns, strategies, and nukes. Call me back when you cover real van stuff or at least tell me how to install Arch while idling in a Walmart parking lot. Message deleted. 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, today we'll talk about Linus grumbling through 20 years of Git, a hardware window that may be opening up for Linux, and a look at App 3.0. Then we'll round it out with a really useful pick, some great boosts, and a lot more. So before we get into all of that, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room!

Hi, everyone. Hello, friends. Hello, y'all. Nice to see you up there. And hello, everybody up there in the quiet listening that's just quietly saying hello this morning. I see some old friends up there. It's nice to see you. The Mumble Room is open for every show, and it gives it kind of like this live vibe, like what's really happening now,

and eventually it makes us have to start the show too, so there's that as well. Details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. Our secret accountability club, yeah. And a big good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Head over to tailscale.com slash unplugged and get it for free up to 100 devices and three users. Tailscale is the easiest way to connect devices

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And when you're ready, you might suggest it to your buddies at work. I mean, that's kind of what we did. We started on our personal plans and we expanded to use it here at Jupiter Broadcasting. Thousands of companies out there now use Tailscale the same way. So go try it out for yourself or for a business.

See why we love it so much. Go to tailscale.com slash unplugged. And by the way, special little PSA for you. Tailscale has a meetup coming in May, and it's May 8th. We'll have a link in the show notes. It's one of their first community meetups, and it's right here in Seattle.

We may even have a guest speaker of our own there at the meetup perhaps. It should be a lot of fun. So if you're in the Seattle area and you wanna go to one of their first Tailscale community meetup, perhaps. It should be a lot of fun. Mm-hmm. So if you're in the Seattle area and you want to go to one of their first Tailscale community meetups, check out the link and support the show by going to tailscale.com slash unplugged. One little bit of housekeeping before we get going.

We're kind of on the fence about doing a Saturday livestream, the first full day of Linux Fest. I put out a poll last week, and it hasn't gotten very many votes. It's 60% yes, but 40% nay. It's a little close for the amount of work we're going to be putting in. So send us a boost or go vote in the poll and let us know if you'd like a live stream from Linux Fest the day Saturday before our Sunday show. We're thinking about doing a little different this year

if we do this. We've always done it at a booth before at Linux Fest. And we're kind of thinking maybe this year the live stream will actually be anchored from Lady Joops, the RV out in the parking lot. Some advantages to that, you know, it means we have a little more control over the technical and the audio and the internet.

And based on prior tests, we think it makes for a better live stream. And then what we do is, along with our commentary of the event, what's going on, chatting with guests, inviting people out to come out to us. We send a couple of men in on the scene like a, you know, like a Brent Noah tag team or a me and you tag team, and we go out there and we interview folks and presenters in the booth and we stream that back to the live stream. And if we can, a big caveat there, but if we can stream select audio talk as well.

So that's kind of our ambitious plans if we do a Saturday stream. But we only want to do it if you're going to listen. So boost in or go vote in the poll we have in the show notes. It's a straw poll. It's real easy. And let us know if you tune in Saturday, which is gonna be April 20, no, 26th, right? April 26th on a Saturday, that's whoop. Coming up fast, I know.

It's coming up real fast. So please let us know. Some big, big milestones recently. And one of them was Git turning 20 years old, course created by Linus Torvalds. And to celebrate, GitHub did a interview with Linus, which is kind of interesting, because Linus hasn't always been the biggest GitHub fan.

He's obviously a big Git fan. But they have a kind of a wide-ranging interview. I don't know if either of you had a chance to read it, but it wasn't, I think, anything too new that we didn't already know. Linus is always so humble about his participation in Git. Yeah, right, what, there was actually multiple things going on for the celebration,

because there was like a GitLab interview and then a GitHub video. Yes, yes. It is true, he is humble, and probably for the right reasons, right, because really, while he did give birth to it, he was pretty smart and quick to hand it off and he wanted to go back to kernel work. Yeah, in the interview he talks about basically all the Git functionality he needed was there

in a few months. And then it was just everybody kind of adding what they needed. So that was interesting. And then like you said, he had a video interview with GitHub. And so the text interview was with GitLab, to make this clear. The video interview is with GitHub. And the title was, Two Decades of Git, a Conversation with Creator Linus Torvalds. And we'll link to the full video in the show notes.

It's, I don't know, about a half hour. And first of all, it's nice just to see Linus outside the Linuxcon conference, Dirk-style interview scene. It's been a while since we've seen anything but that. And one of the things they touch on at the end of the interview is, what is the next big success for Linus? He seems to have a cadence of every 20 years or so,

he has these major projects that he releases that change the world, like the Linux kernel and like Git. And you can tell Linus hates this question and I thought his answer was fascinating. On schedule Linux came about 34 years ago. Yeah. Git 20. Oh, bad question. And so we're maybe five or so years overdue for the next big thing. No, no. I see the other way around all the projects that I've had to make, I had to make because I couldn't find anything better that somebody else did. But I much prefer other people solving my problems for me, right. So me

having to come up with a project is actually a failure of the world, right. And the world just hasn't failed in the last 20 years for me. I started doing Linux because I needed an operating system and there was nothing. That's my needs and I started doing Git for the same reason. I started subsurface, which is my dive log, well, no longer my dive log software, but that was so specialized that it never took off in a big way. And that solved one particular problem. But my computer use is actually so limited that I think I've solved all the problems.

Part of it is probably I've been doing it so long that my, like, I can only do things in certain ways. I'm still using the same editor that I used when I was in college, because my fingers have learned one thing and there's no going back. And I know the editor is crap. And I maintain it because it's a dead project

that nobody else uses. So I have a source tree and I compile it because it's a dead project that nobody else uses. So I have a source tree and I compile my own version every time I install a new machine. And I would suggest nobody ever use that editor, but I can't. I've tried. I tried multiple times finding an editor that is more modern and does fancy things like colorize my source code and do things like that. And every time I try it, I'm like, yeah, these hands are too old for this. Right.

So I really hope there is no project that comes along that makes me go, I have to do this. Yeah. Well, on that note. There's a couple of things in there that stood out to me, that he really only has to build something when the world hasn't solved that problem for him. And so it's kind of a good thing

if he hasn't had to build anything. Yeah, right. I mean, since he, from both Linux and Git, right? I mean, a decade apart, okay, but then in the two decades since then, the world of open source has absolutely exploded partially powered by Git and of course by Linux in a different way. So we just have a there are a lot more other you can use other people's tools because they

are just pushing them out there and it's really neat. Yeah. And then the other thing that jumped out to me in there is that he said he has this horrible, horrible text editor that he uses. Yeah. Yeah, it's a version of microemacs. So these were versions of emacs. So if you imagine back in the day, emacs was like fairly simple, right? It started out simple like most things do.

These days it's quite a robust environment, right? Almost an operating system just lacking a decent text editor as folks like to say. So yeah, he has a random version of Microemacs with some private modifications. And yeah, it's basic. You gave it a go. I did, and my mistake, I popped it open.

It is packaged in X, so it's actually pretty easy to try. I popped it open, but as I do often with V with, with them, you know, I, I just wanted to open a buffer without necessarily saving it. I wasn't intending to keep it. I just wanted to try the editor. So I didn't give it a file name to save. And it appears that you can't actually quit the program without writing to a file.

So maybe because I hadn't totally cleared my buffer. Yeah. But the easiest way that I could figure out to quit was to save written to a file. Maybe because I hadn't totally cleared my buffer. Yeah, but the easiest way that I could figure out to quit was to save it to a file and then I could save and quit. So I just wrote it to a temp file. I mean, I could have killed it or whatever else, but really it just shows you sort of like, okay, yeah, this is a very basic non-modal editor.

What a mind job it is that one of the most advanced important software projects in the world is being run by that editor. This is a lot about all of the stuff Linus has in his head, I think, right? Like he doesn't, he came up in a world before you had LSPs and autocomplete and all kinds of hover and it, you know,

tells you about the data structure in the library that the thing you're looking at came from in all of these modern environments. And yeah, you can still get real work done even without all those helpers. I mean, they are nice, but. Brent, 20 years into Git, it feels like Git and especially GitHub are such monumental successes

that they're just fully integrated into most of the open source world now. I mean, when's the last time you worked on a project that wasn't using Git? Like everybody's using it, it seems. Although I did find it interesting to look at a little bit of the history of version control and it seems like every decade, decade and a half there's a new one that comes around. Maybe Git's the exception to that because it's just integrated so deeply into every project it seems these days. But who knows? Maybe there's an opportunity here. maybe gets the exception of that because it's just integrated so deeply into every project it seems these days.

But who knows? Maybe there's an opportunity here. I mean, I think, is there a reason to come up with something else? And a lot of people, when I was learning Git, said, yeah, yeah, like Git can be better. And there are other projects like Mercurial, for instance, that are trying to do things better. So I don't know. Sure. But you'd have to be so much better, right? Like I think the quintessential question is,

could you have a Git scale success today? In 2028 or by 2030, could something else come along that could be the scale of GitHub with Git behind it? I just, I don't think we can ever see that again. Yeah, do you think we might be past the sort of low-hanging fruit era in that sense? Especially now that we are, right? Git was one of the first of this new class

of like decentralized first version controls. And so that was one of the things that the past versions just didn't even try to address, right? They were much more around like you're at a university, you're at a company and the code lives in this server and you have to be connected. So Git was there at the right time to do that. And so it means most of the new sets of problems

in that mode, it solved. And there are things, right? Like Fossil is a very interesting one. There are, you know, it's based on like a theory of patches. There's several of these that are sort of, they are in many ways better than Git, maybe not all, and not even necessarily just in a porcelain sense. They can be like, they have better merging automatically

because they're smarter about it than Git is. I just, I think it's the one-two combo of you can start your life with Git, you know, you can never be bothered with the cloud or any kind of a remote service, you can just use Git on your laptop. And then one day you start working with a project that's on GitHub and a lot of those skill sets

just immediately translate. And that is such a powerful network effect. And that's one of the things we see in technology and over and over again is the network effect is the item we don't really account for that just seems to be intrenchable. And I don't know, the more I think about it, I don't think you could have a Git

and GitHub combo success story today. I don't think it's possible. No, right, we're past that, it exists now, so it has to be an evolution in a sense. Boost in and tell us what you think out there, or what else it might be. I do think it's funny that Linus was talking down subsurface,

because if you go check it out, there's now been 175 different contributors to the project and over 20,000 commits. So even on its own, it's a pretty decent project. But I was looking at the Git repo, project and over 20,000 commits. So even on its own, it's a pretty decent project. But I was looking at the Git repo, and they have 1,750 contributors, so on a bit of a different scale these days.

Yeah, I suppose so. Something else is on a different scale. APT, Debian APT 3.0 stable has been released, which means we should see it in Debian 13 and Ubuntu 2504. And app 3.0 is one that actually is getting a bit of attention, because it has a significantly refined command line interface, they say, a completely new package solver, and rather noticeable UI enhancements,

including colorized text, a new layout style, and just a clearer formatting overall of the results, making it, I guess they say, easier to understand. And I guess, at a technical level, they've upgraded Solver 3, which is a fully new backtracking system that avoids promoting manually installed packages for removal and handles the auto removal more aggressively. So Wes, you've used Belunked into Appt 3.0. Yeah, that's right. I got myself a Debian container running

And then grab myself the code for the app 3.0 release Managed to get it compiled and then I did the thing where I installed all the generated dev files and overwrote my package manager In place with the new version. Yeah, and it kept working. Oh good. Yeah, so props to apt for that. Yeah, really No, it's nice right right? Like I didn't actually, the part I tried the least because I didn't have like a complicated set of packages to tease apart was some of the solver stuff, but that's really good to see. That's been one area where, you know, things like DNF have really been ahead of apt based systems, I think, right?

They integrated smarter sort of graph solving problems and algorithms earlier. So that's great. I did try the auto remove after installing a whole bunch of build dependencies for apt and especially from a minimal container setup. Not only is apt just generally faster in 3.0, like quite notably so. Yeah, the auto remove, very snappy.

And you could tell it was being aggressive and like just cleaning up the system, which was great. So, but the thing I keep hearing about is this new colored output, this new columnar display or whatever they call it. Did you notice that kind of stuff? Oh, immediately, yeah. I got another container going side by side

so I can kind of see last generation's 2.6, I think it was, output. And you know how app, it's just not very structured, right? It's more like reading a text log, which is fine if you're a sysadmin, you're used to it. The new stuff very structured, right? It's more like reading a text log, which is fine if you're a sysadmin, you're used to it. The new stuff is structured, right? It's got text layout and formatting and color highlights.

So when you're removing packages, all of the packages you're removing are in red and they're on their own line with like a capitalized thing on the line above and it's tabbed out so it's indented. It's just like, you can actually follow what, you know where to look based on the structure of the text in a way you just did not in the past version. I hate to say this, but I bet that kind of thing had have been in place when LinusNumNuts

was testing Pop OS and he uninstalled his entire desktop, and then he basically slammed the distribution for him being the one to uninstall stuff. If it had been in big red text, jumping out at him, he might have been more inclined to catch it. Yeah, yeah, I think we did see stuff added to make it so it would stop you from doing that more often, but even then it didn't necessarily explain a ton,

and so that has been improved with three, so now it continues to stop you. I tried removing apt with apt to see, and it was like, no, you can't do that. But it was very clear about why and big bold red letters that were like, you just tried to do something real dumb, user, don't do that. Also kind of interesting, I was testing out,

they now have an option to add a comment when you're installing a package. And I don't know, maybe they'll pull them in other places right now. I think the main place it ends up is in the apt history log. But it's kind of great, right? So like if you're working on a new project and you have to install some dependencies,

you can do so with the comment and then later, maybe that's a better way to go figure out like, why do I have this package installed? You could search maybe. Yeah. Hmm, yeah, I installed this when we were monkeying around with XYZ. You know, it's not quite other more declarative systems,

but it's definitely a useful tool to have in your toolkit now. It reminds me of commit comments, just to tie the two stories together, which actually are super helpful when you go back a month, a year, five years, and you're like, what did I do again? OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's the number one, password.com slash unplug unplugged and that's all lowercase one password lets you secure every app every device and every identity even the unmanaged ones

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It's Extended Access Management. OnePassword Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign-on for every app on every device because it solves the problems that traditional IAMs and NDMs just Well, they weren't built to touch That's the beauty here So, you know password management is so important and One Password has the most user-friendly and thus user successful password manager application out They're trusted by millions of users over 150,000 businesses from IBM and Slack.

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It's onepassword.com slash unplugged. And go there and see how this could make a real difference for you and your organization. I know it would have made a huge impact for me. So one more time, it's onepassword.com slash unplugged. Now, Timothy R. Butler over at Open for Business recently wrote a post titled, Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia. In non-Mac speak, that is to say, Apple needs an upgrade to Mac OS Sequoia that's like

its earlier Snow Leopard upgrade to the Leopard OS. An upgrade that's all about how little it added and how much it's focused on fixing things. This is a call you hear in the Mac community every few years. There's Apple, stop adding features and just fix things. Apple has been transitioning toolkits and architectures basically since the iPhone launched. And so it has kind of led to certain apps getting restarted, recreated, or getting updates maybe that are meant to work on multiple platform types

that are not ideal for Mac OS. And there has been this growing chorus of concerns about the quality of Mac software. And Timothy's article here, his first one, was it just took off like crazy in the Mac community. And it was really just criticizing the quality of Mac software and saying that Apple needs to do a better job.

The funny thing is, is he came up with a follow-up while that was still getting rolling, saying, I want a better Mac, so I'm cheering for better Linux. Oh, what? And it's just like, by the way, what about Linux Mac users? Gotcha. And as you can imagine, that also generated quite a bit of controversy. He says that my recent column on Apple's declining software quality seems to have hit

a nerve. So why do any of us put up with software that grows increasingly buggy? One word, he says, hardware. And that's where I'd love to see someone help Linux take the next step. Apple knows how to turn out very good quality pieces of hardware. And he goes on about how much he likes their hardware. He says, for Apple aficionados troubled by the state of Mac OS, the modern GNOME desktop on Linux

beckons as a more faithful implementation of the ideals of Mac OS than the current Mac does. I'm gonna pause there. I believe I was making that point a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about the new GNOME release. You were? I think there is something to it. I'll get, it's not exactly, I don't completely agree,

and I'll get to where I disagree, but he says, GNOME painstakingly is consistent across the different apps and exudes the minimalist philosophy which Apple's hardware shines. Now is a perfect moment for a modern Linux push to take that wind back. What it needs though is to solve the remaining weakness on the hardware side.

He says, of the gains of electronics manufacturing, I'm tired of being stuck between the Microsoft and Apple ecosystems. I would only need to decide to commit the resources necessary. One would only have to solve this hardware puzzle. He finishes up with speculating if maybe Dell or Sony could come in and nail a dedicated Linux device. And he ends with, I say this not as someone who thinks Linux will ever dominate the personal computing world, but as someone who wants to see a spark of creativity and push beyond mediocrity in it again. Apple needs a real competitor, one with alternatives such

as GNOME on Linux could actually be if only the hardware rose to the occasion. I thought this was interesting in a sense where he's almost over the target, but I think he misses it just a little bit. And what I mean by that is, if you were to go back in time and try to convince a Windows user to switch to Mac OS, you might pitch them on the Unix underpinnings if they're a geek. If they're an average user, you might've pitched them on the fact

that it doesn't have the virus problems that XP and Vista does and things like this, just back in that era. But what you wouldn't pitch them on, but yet we constantly put Linux into this hole, you wouldn't pitch them on one-to-one functionality. You wouldn't pitch them on everything you can do today you can have on Linux. And you wouldn't tell them that you're going to be able to get hardware that does exactly what their PC hardware can do when you get a Mac. Because it's just not how it works. You have to make changes. You have to find

alternatives. You have to transition to different workflows for these different operating systems. And if you try to promise anything else, or if you try to make Linux anything else, it's always going to fall short. What do you think of my argument here? Is this, you see, are they off mark? I feel like this is something we've always done with Linux is we're like, well, we can make it the perfect Windows replacement, or we can make it the perfect Mac replacement

if we just had exactly like Apple's hardware, but it ran Linux really well. Like this has been a failed strategy over and over again. It does seem like if you're trying to do the same thing, but you don't have the same setup or, I don't know, incentives, pressures, tools, et cetera. Like, maybe you could argue for, like, a specific project or company that, like, could follow through

on all of the things, reasons why this has failed, and it's maybe not a good idea, but you could probably argue systemically there's reasons why the open source path probably needs to be different than the Apple path. Well, it's different functionality, some of it superior, some of it different, some of it not there.

And Brent, I think it's sort of where the framework laptop, and that kind of stuff feels like a solid alternative to the MacBook ecosystem. It's not a direct one-to-one replacement, but if you're willing to modify your workflow and change things a little bit, it's an alternative that could be very appealing. And I wonder if you, as a framework owner, if you share that. I think I do. Like from what I've seen and using it for the last two years, it's been a great laptop.

And I'm using an older motherboard. So from what I hear, the experiences have been even better with modern framework motherboards. So that's really good to hear. They are ex-Apple people over there creating these. So they have some of that perspective in quality and what people are looking for. There are, of course, a couple issues

because open source software is difficult. So diplomatic. Well, that's the Canadian in me, let's say. But I think this is the most hope we've had in a while. We've seen a couple of manufacturers come around and make developer-specific laptops that could be available for Linux. There's like the XPS, for instance,

the Dev1 and a few others. But the framework, I think, has at least anecdotally found the most success in our circles, from what I've seen. So these days, what I'm seeing at conferences is people with Macs and people with frameworks and the occasional sort of think pad. But- Think pad, yeah.

To me that's a sign of success headed in the right direction, but it's a really tough problem to solve. Can we compare that with efforts like Omicube? Is that relevant here? I was thinking that, or maybe even more so, what Timothy is looking for here is the Pop OS software hardware combination,

because that's what System 76 is going for here. This is true. And then you have a select set of hardware with some options, some range of options. And there's what? I mean, Tuxedo's kinda doing the same thing in the EU. Yeah. So the other thing that's in the back of my mind,

so we have some vendors that are definitely attempting this, but the other thing that's in the back of my mind, so we have some vendors that are definitely attempting this. But the other thing that's in the back of my mind is in October, Windows 10 is end of life. And. Are we gonna celebrate on the show? We should in a way. And I've heard a lot of people out there that are grumbling that are on Windows 10 right now

that don't wanna go to Windows 11 or they can't. There's also, I think, a ticking time bomb in Chrome OS. Google is actively working on Android-ifying Chrome OS, and the new desktop environment is going to be an Android launcher. And it's gonna be Android OS, not Chrome OS. And I don't know if every user is gonna love that transition.

And it feels like, again, that's an area where Linux could be really useful. In my fantasy world, we'd somehow have users become aware of refurbished hardware that is just as good and better than a Chromebook with more ports and functionality that could run Linux, could run minimal Linux. I mean, there's a lot of options out there. This is where I wish we as a show could push in some direction and effect change here. Because with Chrome OS going to Android and Windows 10 wrapping up in October, it feels like this summer is a

Windows Chrome OS expat opportunity for Linux. And I just wish we could reach out and help facilitate the opportunity for desktop Linux. I guess it's the advocate in me still, I can't get over it. But you know what I mean? It's like, it feels like there's a real window here. We've had these every now and then. And I really do think GNOME 47 and forward

is just as nice, or if not better, than the stock Mac experience. It's cleaner, it's simpler to understand, and the default applications have roughly similar functionality. Maybe Apple Photos has a few things that's better, but it also has some UI stuff that's worse, right? So it's like really close.

Do we have to talk about which users we're talking about here? I don't know if anything's changed for the power users on the Mac platform. I mean, not that it hasn't gotten worse. I just mean, I don't know that Linux has significantly involved in all those areas, but for folks that do not necessarily have concrete expectations for like, I'm used to this exact version of the app doing it

this exact way. Sure, yeah. Although I'm gonna push back on your first point. So you might be, I don't know, Wes, I mean, because you don't really got the Plasma desktop. I mean, if they're really a first point. So you might be, I don't know Wes, I mean, because you don't really get the plasma desktop. I mean, if they're really a savvy desktop user, they might pick a different direction than stock GNOME 47.

But assuming they really, the simple unified UI that Mac supposedly offers really appeals to them and they do go the GNOME route. Even if the UI doesn't have like every single feature or whatever they might want, Even if it even if the UI doesn't have like every single feature or whatever they might want the reality is the underlying tools on Linux for so many development workflows are

superior to what you can do on Mac OS and easier than you can get them working on Windows and they're improving at such a rapid pace that It's almost worth something that doesn't quite live up, it's almost worth compromising on the desktop to have access to this underlying powerful set of tools that are first class and now other operating systems are scrambling to be able to support on their platforms, right? Like in this weird way, Wes, for the user you're talking

about that's more technical and maybe has higher expectations on their desktop environment, I think there's at least some of them that want access to that sweet, tasty, powerful Linux stuff where they have built-in CNAMES and they have built-in virtualization and they have all the different package manager options and they can solve all these things right there and run it locally on their system while they're building. Like it's just, yes, you can do it with it's just, yes you can do it with VMs and yes you can do it with containers and yes you can do it with WSL.

But that stuff sometimes months or a year behind, it's sort of bolted on. It's not just sitting right there and being constantly updated by either Canonical or Arch or whoever. Yeah, I do think, it makes me think about Linus and Git a bit in the sense that I think if you're willing or enjoy or are okay with doing a bit in the sense that I think if you're willing or enjoy or are okay with doing

a bit of assembly, a little bit of making it yours, then all of that applies. And so maybe the one place this doesn't necessarily still fit is for folks who are busy enough with enough concerns that they need things that have those parts taken care of in a thoughtful and flexible professional way. But you're right, outside of that, on the modern Linux desktop, we have a lot of the tools. Maybe they're not always assembled exactly like what you need, but the primitives are there.

configcat.com slash unplugged. Yeah, this episode is brought to you by ConfigCat, the feature flag service that helps you release features faster and with less risk. And they have unlimited seats, awesome support, and a very reasonable price tag. We're very excited to have ConfigCat as a sponsor because they make it easy to manage feature flags

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check them out, start shipping smarter today. Go to configcat.com slash unplugged. Well, it's been far too long since we have done an arch server update and yes, our one lone arch server remains. I mean, it just won't die. You keep trying. I saw you with the cottonwood. So as is tradition, when we finally update this thing, we do it live on air. So if it blows up, if our, what is it, six, seven-year-old arch install here? Blows up. Now, here's the problem. We're going back to FreeBSD.

We have not done an update on this Arch server since May 5th, 2024. Hey, it's not technically a year yet. Right. So that means we have a total download size of 1.6 gigs. We're going to have a total install size of 5.9 gigs with a net upgrade of 745 megabytes. Not bad, not bad. But the big number in here, we're going to get a new ZFS. We're going to get a new container runtime. Yeah, we're going from ZFS 2.2.4 to ZFS 2.3.1.

Okay, we're also going to go from Linux 6.6.3 to Linux 6.12.23. Yeah, at some point we switched to using the LTS kernel, specifically for ZFS on this system, which has saved us some of the upgrades that could have been easy just because it was still on the same kernel. We are not so lucky this time. No.

All right, Wes Payne. Yeah. Let her rip. All right. This might take a minute. It might, yeah. So what I think we'll do. I did get some compiling going for ZFS already. Okay good. To try to help us out here. Alright so Wes, you get that thing kicked off. We'll check back in

in a little bit. But we do have some great boosts to get to in the meantime. Four score and seven boost to go. And The Dude Abides is our baller booster this week with 50,000 sats. Hey rich lobster! Nice and short, he says, headset boost. Also enjoyed the game episode. Well those are two very appreciated signals. Thank you very much. Appreciate the baller boost, The Dude Abides, and also that you enjoyed the game episode.

I'm still feeling a little unsure about that, so I appreciate the feedback. And your sats, along with the ones we received in this episode and a generous boost, a direct boost from HybridSarcasm, means we have met our goal to get the headsets, three fancy new headsets, arriving just in time for Linux Fest Northwest.

Ooh, I'm excited to try it. Yes, thank you everybody. Tech geek boosts in with 45,000 sets. I hoard that which your kind covet. Headphones boost. Yeah. Thank you. Loved the game segment. Challenge, Star Trek Armada 2 in full screen mode

without issues for the next time you do a game episode. I am programmed in multiple techniques. Without issues sounds like a hint, like maybe it's very hard. Yeah, the geek goes on to say, I sort of got it working in windowed mode from GOG via Lutris, but there's some minor window issues in the menus.

The gameplay sort of works. So yeah, okay, that does sound like a challenge. Brent can do it though. I would love a good Star Trek game. So speak in my language. Anonymous sent in two boosts with the same message, but for a total of 42,000 sets. Why you gotta put numbers and letters together? Why can't you just go f*** yourself?

Would be absolutely excited for a 2e challenge. I always love to explore new 2es that I never thought would be out there I think this 2e challenge is starting to come together I'm starting to visualize a world where I've got like a dedicated terminal The one I want is not realistic, but I'm starting to visualize it and I think we're gonna do it We've got enough positive messages The one thing I think I'd like to still sort of sort out is execution So it could definitely use tips

on like restrictions, what we can and can't do, if we can break out, those kinds of things. So I'm feeling like we just need to cook that bit up. What happens if we really need to use a graphical website? Yeah, well, yeah. Like, I mean, think about it, like publishing shows and stuff, there are certain things that we have to use web apps for that...

Maybe we're allowed an exception machine, but we have to time ourselves on how much we use it? I don't know. It's just... I don't know. We could do some of that, like, wellness tracking so that, like, you can meet 80% of your time in the TUI, and then the essentials, you get 20% to fit it all in. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Odyssey Westro is back with 25,000 Sats.

Linux or something. Headphone Boosts. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. We got there. We got there. Derivation Ding is boosting with 22,000 SADs. Things are looking up for old McDuck. Headphone Boosts. Yeah! As someone who's boosted in about thoroughly enjoying

highly technical content, I also have to say, I enjoyed the gaming content. Oh, good. Maybe it's the ADD, but I personally think the wide variety is a feature, keeps the show feeling fresh. That is kind of our hope, is to kind of keep it fresh. Mostly you kind of know the range of topics we're gonna be sort of over the target on,

but every now and then we like to do something different. Keep sus on our toes too. Regarding the Saturday livestream, I would absolutely listen to that. If I wasn't already planning to attend in person. Nice. See y'all at what will be my first Linux Fest Northwest. Right on.

Right on. I actually wonder if the stream couldn't be useful for people that are attending too. Like that's something that's been in the back of my mind is if you attend, you tune in, you get sort of the 411 on what's going on. In case you're still hanging at your hotel room. He's asking if you're supposed to sign up for talks? Nope.

It's a very casual conference, so just kind of show up. Show up and do your thing. As Brent says, let your freak- Bus? Caller? I don't know. I don't, because I don't have flags up there, so I'm not sure.

Well, the flyover friend flew over with 22,222 Sats. Ah, fly! Simply says, headset fund. Hey, hey, thank you. We really appreciate that. Somewhat Justin comes in with 4004 Sats. I would love to see a window tiling manager challenge. Yeah, that's another top requested one.

Punishment, you have to disable all window rules, tiling and virtual desktops, et cetera, or you have to just use XFCE for full time. I think I could do XFCE easier than I could do a tiling window manager. I might take that. Yeah, that could make an exception for you. You have to do Tyler. Yeah yeah right. Whichever is most painful for the person. Dang it dang it dang it I

hate that idea. GC boosts in 9,000 zads. Thanks y'all. Also after week two, NextOS on my laptop is still amazing. Hey congratulations. You're doing a good job. Also, listening to Chris blubber on while getting wiped off the map last week was hilarious. Oh, too soon. Too soon. Well, HybridSarcasm shared 10,000 sats with us. Everything's under control.

Loved episode 609. I'm a huge StarCraft fan, and it was a lot of fun to hear you guys having so much fun with it. Also, plus one for the TUI challenge. All right, I'm adding you to the list. Yeah, Brent's got a full-on addiction now. He's been basically playing StarCraft since we hung up last week.

Where do I get rehab? Is there a phone number I can call? Yeah, we had to remind you to, you know, sign off to do the show. Yeah, come on, man. Come on. Brent, hey, Brent, it's Sunday. You gotta, like, take a break here. Turd Ferguson comes in with 2,322 sats. Turd Ferguson! Just says, Putin, Jeff. Just says, Putin, Jeff.

Huh. Huh. PJ. Are you boosting the show this week too? Are you testing node capacity? Yeah, I did. Test for Wes, a little coin for the headset. Look at you contributing to the headset. So what? Full disclosure, Gene Bean was helping me debug this.

It turned out that if you sent my node a boost with the right length between 600 and 1,000 bytes or character, I forget the specific, but basically, under that, fine, above that, fine, but in this right range, there's a bug in the keysend plugin that meant that the stats would not make it to me. So to recreate that, I just kept copying Gene's message.

So that's really Gene's message that I sent like 11 times to the show before I figured out what was going on. Gene did not like the gameplay. He did not like the gameplay. He says, non-gameplay bits were good, but he didn't like the gameplay. So there you go.

It's good to hear from Gene though, through Wes, I suppose. Gene also boosted, so we'll have that later on. Yeah, I just said so many that. Wes Payne. Wes, I am noting most of your tests are also rows of ducks. So good job playing the game. I did send a lot of ducks, yeah. Yeah most of your tests are also rows of ducks, so good job playing the game. I did send a lot of ducks, yeah. Yeah, you did.

Speaking of rows of ducks, 8-Tone came in with a row of ducks. I've heard some rumblings about the R36S and Max in the Love2D community. It'd be very cool to use the R36 to see it gain a little more traction as a target platform for amateur game developers. Yeah, I think the R36 is still the device to have,

although I do like my X with the wider screen. I have it in the bedroom just sort of every night. I pick it up, play a few games. I got video poker on there. It's a lot of fun. It's really simple. No fuss, no muss. I was taking public transit last week, and folks across from me on the train were talking about just I

don't know if it was exactly the r36 oh really but they were legit talking about little hand-held emulator devices because they wanted to get one that's so clearly we're on to something there's something there I think does it run Starcraft you know I wouldn't be surprised if you could actually get it on Starcraft 64 probably yeah it does probably. Yeah, it does have the StarCraft 64. D.D. Smith comes in with 3,000 sats. Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. Headphones.

Yeah. Also, would love if you could get Mr. Dominic on a Jupiter pod, or Chris or Wes could go on New Coder. I love the small business owner's perspective on the happenings. You're supposed. There you go. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Acoustico sent in 2033 sets. Danger Zone! Don't ever make a show about gaming again. Or at least put the technical parts at the beginning and the gaming at the end. I was moving forward 30 seconds until gaming was over. At least this happens once every two-ish years, but keep up the good work and also never gaming

again. You see what I'm saying? You see what I'm saying? Exactly. I don't know. So, okay, I noticed that Acoustica boosted from the all shows, which is cool, via phone. I think, maybe not. Do chapters not show up there?

Because the show should have chapters, which would help in this particular case. That is true. But maybe there's a technical reason that's not working. I'd like to know, I'd like to know. There's Jane Bane, he's back with 13,559 sets. Just pump the brakes right there. Here's some coin for the headsets.

I read the bit about how he hates the gaming. He's testing Wes, and he's testing Wes some more. All right. Thank you, Gene. Feedback received. We will never talk about video games again. No, I'm kidding. Although we don't do very... I think it's actually been more than two years.

I just came up with two years as a random time, but it may have been more than that. The flip side is, of course, we are now mostly a D&D-based podcast, but you know, you get what you get. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're gonna work it in slowly though, so don't worry. Sire boosts in with 2000 sets. More gaming content, por favor.

Also like Odyssey, I've lost, I don't know, 70 plus hours of save file of Stardew Valley recently due to what seems like a sync bug between two PCs. Oh my. That's gotta be kind of crushing. Yeah. That sucks, man. Sorry to hear that.

All right, you got it. We're only going to be talking about gaming going forward. Guarantee it? I cheat. I tease. Thank you, Sire. It's good to hear from you. Sorry to hear about all the lost hours, man.

Well, Menon boosted in 2000, Satoshi's. This is the way. Hey, guys. A small boost towards the headset from your listener here in Bangalore, India. Yay! Aha, thank you! Wonderful to hear from you. Using Fountain to listen to the shows and thanks for all the excellent work you do.

Thank you for checking in, nice to hear from you from Bangalore, and thank you for the headset fund. Appreciate it. Tomado comes in with 5,000 cents. You're so boost. I enjoy the variety of shows and styles recently, including the gaming silliness. I wouldn't want every show to be like that, but once in a while it's fun.

Yeah, all right. Yeah, well, every show can't be like that because if we do it again, we're gonna lose to Brent. Yeah, no kidding. That was our one shot. You're right about that. Outdoor geek boosts in 5,000 cents. The traders love the vol. OutdoorGeek boosts in five thousand cents. The traders love the vol.

Oh, but actually I think in this case Brent should be boosting them because OutdoorGeek writes Hey Brent, on my NixOS laptop, the KDE indexer would sometimes wake the laptop from sleep about a minute after the laptop was seeming to go to sleep. This config turns off the indexer and then there's a link to a Nix config for you Hey, that's something to look at we do like links to Nix configs. Thank you. That seems crazy But maybe it's the solution. So thanks Kasuri I boosted in 5,000 sets put some macaroni and cheese on there, too Here's my multi-monitor setup.

32 inch, 1440 ultra-wide with a 165 hertz refresh. And an LG dual-up ultra-tall on each side of the ultra-wide running NixOS and KDE Plasma. So just to be clear, that's two portrait monitors and one regular one all hooked up to a VFIO rig. Oh, interesting. That sounds slick. I'd love to hear more about that. Thank you, Curica. That's a killer setup.

WH2050's here with 5,000 Sats. Oh my God, this drawer is filled with Brutalopes. I was catching up on the back catalog and I just listened to episode 551. A listener boosted in asking about using the quest with glasses Well, I haven't heard any more on the subject. So I thought I would mention I struggled with this until I discovered you can get Prescription lenses with adapters that snap over the quest screens place. I got mine is out of China

So the Tarzan might not be worth it, but you could do a bit of search next or search. X. How do we say that? Search ng, you know, there we go. Something besides Google to go see what options are out there. W H. That's great. Good to know. I'm glad to hear you can get prescription lenses. Sounds like it just might be a little bit how you go about it. Fuzzy Mistborn Moosin with 2500 sets.

Just pump the brakes right there. You must construct additional by-lans. Love the episode makes me want to go install StarCraft. And you know StarCraft 2, that was an excellent trilogy as well. I think that bit's for Brent. I think Fuzzy should do it. I think he should do it. Give in to the StarCraft side.

Sounds like maybe secretly we should start a little JB server and just whoever pops in gets beaten by Brent, right? Meat for the grinder. Well, Simon boosted in 3,333 sets. This is a tasty burger. Hey Chris, you love some SNES, right? And gaming. Yep.

And Zelda 3? I do. Well, how about co-op link to the past randomizer? It's amazing. Maybe something for Linux Fest Northwest. So this is a real thing I did not even know exists. There's a website, I'll have it linked in the show notes. It's amazing. And I think we should take a look at it after the show.

Simon, you have opened my eyes to a world I did not even know existed. Thank you very much. And it could be the perfect thing for Linux Fest Northwest. Producer Jeff is here with a row of ducks. And he says, happy West Day. Yeah, that's true.

It was a birthday week. That's right everybody. It's that time of year again. Happy birthday. It was a birthday week for Mr. Payne, our very own. And PJ boosted in to say thanks, or to say happy birthday. Yay! What a producer.

What a guy. Did you have a good day, Wes? I did. Although, you know, really, with Linux Fest coming up, that's the real day for the month. Alright, alright. Caffeinated Linux boosts in with 2006 Satoshi's. Longtime listener, since the Lunduke on last days, but first time booster. Oh, congratulations. Thank you.

Wow. It's been a minute since we heard from a long time. See caffeinated often, you know, in a chat room or something like that. So it's good to see you on the boost. I missed the first perfect opportunity, the first boost on 606, because that was about roughly when I first got started with Ubuntu 6. 6.10 works though, because 6.10 was the release. I got my USB Wi-Fi adapter finally working.

Yeah, Ubuntu 6.10 was a solid release. So here's 2006 bits in honor of two great releases from 2006. Oh, I see. He's got a math to it. I like it. I am programmed in multiple techniques. Also love hearing the deep dive and gaming episodes, and would love to hear more. What did he say? Right then. Let's get ourselves settled in for a wee deep dive.

Well, thank you, caffeinated Linux. It's really good to hear from you. That's awesome. Well, BHH32 sent in 10,000 sats. Live long and prosper. Here's my contribution to the headphone fund. See you at Linux Fest Northwest. It'll be my very first Linux Fest and I'm super excited for the cosmic and the start your own business talks.

Plus my 12 year old daughter is excited for the blender for beginners talk. That should be good. Also, if the community's interested, I have a new blog post for the community that may be interesting. And I talk about a controversial topic. Rust is easy and go is hard. I have a link to that in the show notes.

Hey, color meek and trink. Sounds like it's up my alley. Well, you know what, uh, BHH, we look forward to seeing you, and you'll know it's us because we'll be the one with big, fancy, broadcast headsets on. That's right! Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate it. Great way to support the show. And again, all of you who also boosted in below the 2000 2000 Sat Cutoff, we do read them all, of course.

And a shout out to all of the Sat Streamers. 31 of you streamed Sats as you listened to this episode, and collectively, you Sat Streamers stacked 40,927 Sats. When you combine it with our boosters, this episode brought in a grand total of 351,847 sats raised for episode 610 of your unplugged program. If you'd like to boost in, the easiest way is Fountain. It integrates with Strike and there's several options there and they manage all the lightning stuff for you and you can boost right in. But there are also some very fun and challenging, in some cases, self-hosted options.

You can get started at PodcastApps.com. So you got the full range to choose from, to boost into the show, to send us a message, and support each individual production. What we love about it is all of this is open source. We run our own nodes. The infrastructure itself is peer-to-peer and free software. It all runs on top of Linux. And of course, even the sats themselves are open source.

There's no middleman. So we don't have to go to Stripe or PayPal. They don't have to take five percent. All of your sats go directly to us. And then the splits are built in automatically. So when you send a boost, a bit of it automatically goes to Wes and Brent and myself and editor Drew, the podcast index, the creator of the application and whoever else we might include

in our splits as well. And that's why we put the show out there for free. And if you get value from it, we ask you support with a boost or become a member and get access to a whole bunch more stuff, including the bootleg and the ad free version of the show. And thank you everybody who does support us. It makes all the difference in the world and it keeps us going. We definitely need you to buckle up for this one because we got two great picks this week.

One, I'm just gonna throw out there as the first that was mentioned earlier, which is the Randomizer game for Zelda. And you can find this, it's on the web. It's like altpr.com. What does Randomizer even mean in this context? Well, it's a playthrough that shuffles the location of all the important items in the game and

Then you can join with a co-player and essentially play like a fresh version of breath of the wild or I'm not part of the wild but legend of Zelda that sounds that sounds Pretty great. It is it's gpl3 It's web poster. You is, it's GPL3. It's web-hosted, you can host it yourself. Self-hostable GPL Zelda, wow. Randomizer, yeah, it is really great. So, link to that in the show notes. But, this week, I think this might even have been

a prediction of mine, but that's not why it's in here. You had a chance to play with Chat Chippity. And it's not me just being cute, it's actually the name of a terminal client tool that lets you get answers from LLMs on the command line. It's ChatGitInformationPrintInformationTTY is what it stands for. And it's a command line client for ChatGPT that allows you to chat with your chosen model in a terminal.

And you can even pipe your output to it, where that starts to seem pretty fancy. It's GPL2, and Westpain, you gave it a go, and actually found it to be more useful than we expected. Yeah, you know, at first it just seemed like, okay, kinda handy way to, maybe you were gonna go ask Jippity something, or Claude, or whatever else, or your local Olam or Open Web UI, and, oftentimes that's just kind of a lot of context switching from the terminal, right? Like you gotta go, okay, maybe I copy and paste bits of the file I'm working with,

or as often happens, like, oh, I want an FFmpeg command, and I don't quite remember this bit because I don't do the flag, or I don't know, I was transcoding a WebM file, but the height wasn't divisible by two, and that makes H.264 unhappy. And I could go pop to another tab and ask something there, or I could just sort of echo my prompt into this tool and have it spit me out the command that I need. So I just kind of started that way. Which also means you could echo the error output and have it start diagnosing for you

right there. Absolutely. Or cat from a log file or yeah. And then I realized, well, why don't I just have it make me the script, right? So then I could just set up a little loop where I echo what I want the script to do. And then I use T to record the results. So I would have it continue the pipe, but also write to a file so I could actually see what was generated because in a test system, I decided I would just start piping these directly to bash or

Python. So I would say like, write me a bash script to do X and then just pipe it to bash. I hope you ran it with sudo too. No, I did not. I was trying this in a semi-safe situation. I would have done it with sudo. Well, yeah, of course you would do it in sudo. And that was kind of fun too because it it felt like it was an experiment in like what kind

of scripts or even applications, especially once I started, you know, I was doing Python and I would set up a little Python virtual environment and I'd give it sort of a standard set of libraries, you know, okay, you can make HTTP calls. Okay, you've got a thing to like use curses to make an interface. And so it became a really easy way to experiment with just how far you could sort of, as they say in the vibe coding world, one shot a command line application. And as you guys saw, I was able to get it to make,

I mean, they were kind of half broken, or like kind of jokes, at least at the start, but then it started to actually be useful. I start, I read, Wes had this whole thread of his result, and I'm like, oh, that's funny, that's cute. And by the end of it, I'm like, oh. Oh, you're actually using this to get things done now. This was actually useful and handy.

I thought this would be a really funny gag for us to talk about. Look at the stupid thing you can do at ChatGPD from the terminal. But as you played with it, I realized actually, this is something useful. I realized that there's kind of a fun duality when you link those up where, okay, at first it was cool just to see what kind of range of output you could get. We were all trying

these AIs and like, oh, you can make it say funny stuff, and look, it made some code that mostly works. But then I was realizing, okay, well, whatever the limits of what it can quickly make a program are, are the limits for the tasks I can do now, right? So I was able to say, like, generate a C program using only the standard lib stuff, you know, that on the Linux C GCC setup, plus FFmpeg, and make a procedurally generated landscape flyover into an MP4. I don't know how to do that offhand,

but I know how FFmpeg works enough to know that the C can just sort of spit bitmaps out and FFmpeg can turn it into an MP4 and do that side of it. And okay, it was kind of half broken and it had a weird line and discolored, but it worked. I was able to get it to generate real janky WAV files that actually played, including some, and then I made some kind of fun,

a custom defrag command that didn't actually defrag anything, but you know, if you ever wanted a way to make your terminal look busy. Yeah, I always do actually. I love it. Even when I'm on a meeting sometimes and I got a screen behind me, I'm like, should I throw Hollywood up on that screen?

I'd much prefer something that's like a fake defrag. I love the way those look. So I spent a little while just trying to see like, okay, how far can you one shot stuff? What wacky utilities can I get this thing to make? I had it make like a multi-user dungeon text adventure game for a little bit, that was fun. But to make it super useful, out of the box,

the stock script just uses ChatGPT, but I've been using OpenRouter more and more lately, which is sort of a facilitator to all different providers and APIs, so you can plug it in. So it's really easy to just hack that in, so I could use OpenRouter instead of having to use straight chat GPT.

How did you hack it in? Well, for the most part, they're APIs compatible. Oh, yeah, okay. OpenRouter talks like chat GPTs, open AI, whatever, API? Exactly. Okay. And so our PIG already had enough support to choose different models, right?

Because there's already different models on the chat GPT side. And then so you can, I just hacked in in a different added a new parameter to it so that you could add your own URL for the API provider. And that was enough. So which made let me you play around with different ones, which was kind of great. And then I wrote a tiny little helper script for myself, mostly because you can set a model that you want to use. And then you can set a

system prompt. So I found it was useful to have a system prompt that just reinforced, I don't want comments, I don't want to preamble, I don't want you to say, okay, here's your answer. I don't want markdown code blocks and back ticks, I just want the raw plain text output. So eventually after trying a little bit, I stumbled onto something that mostly worked for that.

Using different models, you could tell different ones followed them more or less or whatever. So once I was kind of playing with the one shot thing,, I eventually had some scripts that were actually kind of useful. And I realized that I could then go back through and add comments, either throughout the file or even just at the top. And that acted sort of as a preamble for the rest of the script. And then I could just cat that file and ask it to output a whole, like a fixed thing. Whether I included the errors at the top or I just described the changes I would want to have. And then I used, it's a great little tool called Sponge from More Utils, which just helps, you know, you're trying to overwrite a file, you want to get the contents

of a file, pipe it somewhere and then write it back to the same, but Sponge lets you do that really easily. So I set up a little loop where I would just, you know, I would add what I wanted at the top of the file. I would rerun my loop to send it off to the AI, have it generate a complete output and then replace the contents of the file. And then I could just run it again and see if it did what I want. And you could also ask it to do code review or like, you know, some summarize the file or eventually I started playing around with making a audio visualizer.

But to do that, I was gonna need, I wanted to connect a pipe wire. So basically it would make a waveform visualization from whatever the mic was connected to. I didn't know how to do that offhand. And I knew I would need like the right kind of environments and libraries. So I was able to ask it to generate me a script

or a C, actually it ended up being a C plus plus program of all things. But then once I had that I just added at the top I said make a flake for this and then cat it in and then out popped a flake and I had to do that a couple times and kind of tweak it but eventually I was able to get it so that it you know it had everything it needed and it worked and you then you can just kind of keep going. So I realized that maybe sometimes I would want to update it needed to know both of those files to have a complete context. Like if I wanted to add a new library

that I was using in the C program and I needed it to be provided by the Flake. So I had it write me a bash script that would just bundle files together in like a little plain text way. And then- Sort of create a context. Yeah, so I could then cat that entire file in

and then it could just spit out like, oh, just update the flake consistent with what we've changed in the other file. Okay, so you solved for what I was thinking while you were talking is, God, you know what I would love is some sort of local llama instance. Maybe it's on my NAS,

maybe it's on my best workstation, and it learns and it knows my preferences somehow. And so it knows, oh, he always wants this kind of output. Or it knows my context between projects and that, where you could point a command line tool at your own always learning system would be really something. Absolutely.

And you know, you can, it seemed like you could really easily have like a library of different prompts and modes, right? You have one prompt for code generation, another one for doing code review, another one for doing code review, another one for bug fixing for your particular thing. Yeah, it was surprisingly useful and all it needed was the API set up the URL and API key,

and then it was just a little compiled Rust app, so it was like super fast. And you could give it with different models and prompts. So why wouldn't I want a little helper in my terminal? Yeah, I mean. I think this is a pick that's sticking around. Yeah. I mean, there's probably better versions of this out here.

I know, I mean, it's, you know, the whole vibe coding thing. I guess this is vibe shelling, I don't know. You're vibe shelling, amazing. There's probably better tools in all kinds of these areas already. But what I liked about this is it was all a la carte, right? Like I didn't I was playing a bit with Klein which is sort of like an open source cursor thing It's a VS code plug-in that tries to use a bunch of different AI

Agents to like do this for you So you can tell it to make a change and then it'll first use an agent to figure out which files to pull in To send to the next agent which will actually make the code, and then it'll review those with a cus... All kinds of neat, complicated, uh, tooling that is evolving, but that's all a lot to learn. And the most important thing to me was, like, I have the context. Let me send the right thing to it. Let me kind of control the interaction

and just have the lowest barrier to entry possible. And this, um And this really works. Chat, Jippity, we'll have a link to it in the show notes. Much of a hassle to get up and running? No, not at all. It's just a Rust app, so if you're comfortable building a cargo app, that's basically all you need. Or you could probably ask an LLM to make a plate for you. Oh my god. It's LLMs all the way down. All the way down. Or you could probably ask

It's LLMs all the way down all the way down Oh as the chat room is already asking if they can get a version of your visualizer because they're looking for exactly that so They publish that stuff right? Yeah, maybe one day stay tuned you may never know You said you had good news Yeah, we're ready to reboot. Oh, right, I forgot. Remember how we were updating the server? I got so wrapped up in your cool pic there that I completely forgot we were doing a thing.

Yeah, go ahead, reboot it. Let's do it. Can I get another, I think you're already trying to get there. Do you want what, you want like a? Uh-huh. All right, we've been up for 42 days. Let's reset that. Yeah, let me know when you got your ping going here.

I got it going, I think. Is it.4? Yeah. Yeah, it's going. Well, now it's gonna stop. Alright, so... This is where we wait and find out. Okay, we're getting pings and we're getting replies I should say. It appears the server is back from its reboot. Oh based on the timing it looks like we've yes, we have got SSH.

All right. All right, you're getting in I'm it if the box is up. I think it's pretty busy getting everything started, which is a great sign That is do you have the one thing to check is do we have our ZFS pool? or pools If we have that that's a good sign that the applications will start we do. All right Levi is online. All disks look good. OK, we do not have applications yet.

But the fact that the server is up and the ZFS pools are online, Wes Payne, I think you have the correct answer. Oh, yeah. And I see a bunch of Docker containers started 20 seconds ago. So we are in progress. At some point, this is not going to work. That was nearly a year between arch updates. Unbelievable. Unbelievable that it worked so well.

And as usual, I had started the upgrade without actually looking at the website. Although while it was happening, I did go look. Didn't even check the news. Didn't even check the news. I didn't notice halfway through, it was like manual intervention for Pac-Man 7 required, but only if you had a local repository. So we looked out there. Don't do as we do. So what's the next irresponsible thing we could do in the next year before we update

it next time that should add to this kind of suspense? Is there any ideas out there? Well I mean you can always take some comfort in knowing that I'm constantly adding new applications to this thing. That's true. And new data, so I'm actively using it and adding more applications

that it's constantly having to run. So every time we do this, it's gotten substantially more complicated. I heard you say StarCraft server is what I heard. I like where your head's at, Brentley. Yeah, that way we can set it up in a special way that'll help us out. Oh, now I like where your head's at.

Oh, I don't like this at all. All right, well, boost it and tell us what we should run on our beloved Arch server that should finally be put out of its misery, but we just can't kill. Let us know also your thoughts on if anything could succeed Git and GitHub in the next five to 10 years. And why'll write it with AI and last but not least we want to know if you tune Into a Saturday stream on the I think it's the 26

Or Linux fest northwest and we are still pulling everybody for their thoughts on the gaming content But without with all of that said see you next week same bad time same bad station Why not make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday? Join us at around 9.30 but it's 10am Pacific. We have it over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. And if you got a podcast in a 2.0 app, it just shows up in your feed ready to go. You can plug JBlive.fm into anything that plays an mp3 stream. And of course we've got the Mumble Room too.

That's a lot of stuff. So I just try to run through it as quickly as I can without screwing it up too bad. Links to what we talked about today, Linuxunplug.com, RSS feed, contact form, Mumble info, membership stuff, all of that stuff. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. See you next Tuesday, as in Sunday! So Never tell me the odds.