LINUX Unplugged - 619: The Trouble with TUIs

Episode Date: June 15, 2025

We spent the week learning keybindings, installing dependencies, and cramming for bonus points. Today, we score up and see how we did in the TUI Challenge.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. Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMLINUX Unplugged TUI Challenge Rulesdarnir's TUI Reportzee — A modern text editor for the terminal written in RustHelix EditorBrowsh — fully-modern text-based browserddgr — 🦆 DuckDuckGo from the terminalRanger - A VIM-inspired filemanager for the console — Ranger is a console file manager with VI key bindings. It provides a minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy.Joshuto — Ranger-like terminal file manager written in Rusttenere — 🤖 TUI interface for LLMs written in Rustelia — A snappy, keyboard-centric terminal user interface for interacting with large language models. Chat with ChatGPT, Claude, Llama 3, Phi 3, Mistral, Gemma and more.kpxhs — Interactive Keepass database TUI viewerkeepass-mode — Emacs mode to open KeePass DBgocheat — A beautiful customizable TUI Cheatsheet for keybindings,hotkeys and more in the terminalcastero: — TUI podcast client for the terminaltextual-web — Run TUIs and terminals in your browsertodoist: Todoist CLI Client. — Todoist is a cool TODO list web application. This program will let you use the Todoist in CLI.gomuks/gomuks: A TUI Matrix client — A Matrix client written in Go using mautrix.orf/gping: Ping, but with a graphimpala — 🛜 TUI for managing wifi on Linuxcmus - C\* Music Player — cmus is a small, fast and powerful console music player for Unix-like operating systems.systemctl-tui — A fast, simple TUI for interacting with systemd services and their logs.tdf — A tui-based PDF viewerrainfrog — 🐸A database management TUIjqp — A TUI playground to experiment with jqandcli — A 2FA TUI for your shelliamb — A Matrix client for Vim addictsparllama — TUI for ollama and other LLM providers.russ — A TUI RSS reader with vim-like controls and a local-first, offline-first focusytui-music — Youtube client in terminal for music (lightweight youtube client)wiki-tui — A simple and easy to use Wikipedia Text User Interfacetuifeed — 📰 A terminal feed reader with a fancy uiyazi — 💥 Blazing fast terminal file manager written in Rust, based on async I/O.vault-tasks — TUI Markdown Task ManagerDon's TUI Challenge blog — #TUIChallengeShyfox's TUI Challenge resultsHimalaya — CLI to manage emails, based on email-libjellyfin-tui — Jellyfin music streaming client for the terminal.Alacritty — A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.apple/containerization — Containerization is a Swift package for running Linux containers on macOS. Containerization is written in Swift and uses Virtualization.framework on Apple silicon.Pick: somo — A human-friendly alternative to netstat for socket and port monitoring on Linux.

How much caffeine does this actually have? Not enough. Let's do a Simon Sainey sip. You ready? Here we go. Oh you guys. Three, two, cheers. Oh, it's so sweet. It's sugar free! Oh, that doesn't mean it's not sweet. 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, we have spent the week trying to figure out how to exit apps, install dependencies and try to earn a few bonus points because today is the conclusion of our TUI challenge.

We're going to score up how we did and own up to it live on the show. And of course, we'll read some of your challenge reports as well. Then we're gonna round it all out with some great boosts, some picks, and more. So before we go any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual log. Hello Mumble Room!

Hello! Hey Chris, hey guys, and hello Brent. Hello, got a nice tight crew on air and hello everybody up there in the quiet listening stadium in the special seats. Brent will be serving hot dogs later. Don't forget about that. They're veggie dogs, but still good. And a big good morning to our friends over at Tailscale.

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Just get started at tailscale.com slash unplugged. I don't have much in here. Just a reminder, there are a few calls for papers open. We have those linked in last week's show notes. And I just wanted to say a happy Father's Day. Hey, happy Father's Day to you. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there, really. Doing the show on a Sunday. So I did my Father's Day festivities last night. It was nice. And we're going to have the leftovers for lunch today after the show.

Oh, hey, yo. Yeah. So you'd say, you know, it was a good meal. We had some steaks and we have some leftovers. So for the last seven days, we've been living in the terminal, trying to do everyday tasks. And now have more gray hairs. That is true. And many of you listening have joined us.

Collectively, we've all spent many days in the terminal this week. And I hope that those of you who are listening after the fact are still gonna give this a try and then check in and let us know how you did. We wanna know even down the road how it went for you. So let's start with a listener check-in. This is a great email and Brent, you met this listener.

They're a long time listener and we got a full report. Yeah, this is Darnier who I've met several times in Berlin when I've been there. You guys should go sometime. Oh yeah. There's some great listeners over there. Yeah, we should. So Darnier sends a variety of emails because they sent in their TUI results via Git patches sent in via email to our dear Linux Unplugged. Amazing. But here's the intro at least. Hello JB, very long time listener first. Email though, not your oldest listener I'm sure, but I remember watching the Linux action show on YouTube

back in 2010 and have since followed JB through LAN, Coda radio, self-hosted and of course Linux unplugged. Thank you sir! Amazing. I've been a member for as long as I can remember but never actually wrote into the show. Well, you all finally did it. You made me write in by doing the TUI challenge. This is something very close to me. There's a little bit of a background. I fell in love with TUIs when I did a TUI challenge

about 13 years ago. Back then, my friends and I uninstalled Xorg entirely, living purely in the Linux console, and forced ourselves to find ways to get things done. Amazing. My current music setup with MPD still uses parts of that original MPD.conf, just on a different machine.

Today, I live in the terminal. Most of the TUI challenge, therefore, wasn't much of a challenge, just daily life for me. Only web browsing and music playback are the categories that I usually use a GUI for. However, for honesty's sake, I continue using a web browser at work. I don't have a way around that or around using MS Teams

as a GUI for video calls. At home, though, I've shifted 100% to TUIs since last week. And only web browsing has been the pain in the ass. Modern web is much worse to load in a TUI compared to 13 years ago. That is the truth. I hope you enjoy reading the rest of these emails, which are long, as much as I've enjoyed listening to you over the years. They scored themselves, as we encouraged.

And what I did is I took the two challenge rules and I said, hey, chatbot, make a scorecard out of this. Yeah, you should have known. I should have known better. I was moving quick. You know, I was trying to 10x my productivity. You know, I wanted to be a 10x guy. So but that said,

I mean, Darnier just crushed this, right? Because he got all of the primary points, text editing, email management, web browsing, music playback, file management, task management, system monitoring, and terminal multitasking. And he got all the bonus points. So he has like a score of like the max, 220 I think is the max. It is, yeah.

That's incredible. So right there, I think he's gonna, he walks away right there as one of the winners well deserved This is the challenge he was built for I love that He did this on his own 13 years ago Darn near also left us a little hidden Easter egg in the emails which we touched on in the members feed Which was a really sweet gesture. Thank you Darnier. Yes, and thank you for listening for so long and for finally checking in glad We got you Finally we got you.

Finally we got you. Now, we... uh, hasn't been going as well for us. At times, it's been a little rough. You don't sound so confident. Yeah, and about midweek, I could tell the frustrations were rising amongst me and the boys, so I figured,

it's only fair we gotta capture the bad and the good on the show, so let's sit down and the boys. So I figured it's only fair. We got to capture the bad and the good on the show. So let's sit down and capture this. So earlier this week, we did just that. Yep, so it's mid week and we thought maybe we should do a check-in because at least two out of three of us, I'm not sure about all three of us, are feeling pretty bad.

And I'll say myself, I'm not sure about all three of us, are feeling pretty bad. And I'll say myself, I'm feeling frustrated, like I am beelining for a failure here, and it's not for any of the reasons I expected, which is why it makes me frustrated. You know? So I'll get to that, but how are you doing over there, Mr. Brentley?

Well, I wrote down a couple notes before we sat down to record this, and the very first word in the note is frustrated. Oh, really? But I also added desperate. Desperate. Uh-oh. And then the realization that I, previous to this challenge,

was so cozy. And now I'm very much not cozy. You didn't know how good you had it, did you? I didn't really realize it. I guess I should have seen that coming. But I figured, oh, yeah, I've used the, you know, I use the terminal every day to do a bunch of stuff, but it's rough. What in particular has struck you as the roughest bit?

Well, I've taken something like at least two days to try to choose a text editor that just does markdown highlighting by default. And I think today I might have found one so there's that. It took me a little while to like try to escape out of some of them so Nano's not the only one that... You use an editor right? I thought you were an editor guy now. I built you that custom version of it. Right big Neo Vim guy. Well, there's what I said previous to the challenge starting and my hopes and dreams.

And now that we're in midweek, I am drastically changing my expectations of what I'm supposed to be getting out of this challenge. I thought, you know, I had these big dreams of, yeah, I'm gonna learn Vim bindings and that's gonna last me the rest of my life. But I realized there's like, we're trying to change so many of our productivity apps

that all of them have different key bindings and things. And so five days is not enough. Hit pause because that's the observation just kind of watching you fight with some of it that has been a bit of a revelation for for me, because I think I took this bit for granted. Before the GUI pack in the old days before the GUI, every application essentially implemented its same interface and there was some standardization over the years.

But for the most part, especially on Unix, every application had its own UI that you had to discover. And that's why it was really common for people to just live in a Certain application like emacs or this definitely happened with particular business applications You would learn all the hotkeys and everything and just be able to whip right through it once you learned it But every single command line application has its own interface and the discover ability is pretty low Compared to a GUI application where you can just look around discover and click and browse. I remember as a kid playing with the computer that my father

And mother supplied us it was like an old Commodore of some kind. So that's the first computer I remember but I remember on that keyboard they had these like Little helper. I don't know what you call it Oh, yeah, a little like thing you could stick over the keyboard And then it would tell you all the key bindings for that very specific application Lots of those is this a new swag item, you know to go along with the TUI challenge I feel like I need this this week. There you go

We see just a bunch of different ones you could print out and put over your keyboard. Yeah, you know MPV I would use that one So Wes, how is the TUI challenge going for you? Oh, I'm definitely also feeling some frustration. Here I thought, yeah, I spend a lot of time in the terminal, you know, for like the average computer user in 2025. And I still think I do, I almost always have one up. But I also spend a lot of time in a web browser.

And as impressive as stuff like Browse and Carbondle are, I miss full resolution pixels. Yeah. I was trying to do some route planning and, Oh man. You know, something about the mapping applications. They just don't work as good in the terminal. At least not the ones we have today.

Yeah, and the chat bots. Chat bots have been tricky as we've tried to look a few things up. Okay, so here's my frustration. And because I have not been frustrated with the 2E interfaces, I find it to be nostalgic. I remember each application having its own bespoke way I set it up and different ways they implemented ways to input those configurations. And I've kind of been enjoying that.

I mean, I knew that coming in, that would be something I'd have to do, and I've liked that part of it. I could not have picked a harder, worse time to switch to Bluefin. This is, you know, a cloud native... Oh, so this isn't a two-y gripe fast. This is something else. Well, just slightly. Because, I mean, I picked probably not the ideal tool for this job, right? If you want Flatpak applications, you got the world. If you want something packaged by Brew, so the ideal combo in Bluefin is Flatpak for your GUI applications, Brew for your command line applications, and then if you can't find it with brew,

you bounce out to maybe a distro box, which they have done a tremendous job with the you just command. There's like a you just assemble and it assembles a distro box for you in just seconds. There's a couple of different arches there, some of the standards. And then if you want to create one from scratch and just give it an image name, you can do that as well. And it makes it really easy, super integrated, right there is just a tab in my terminal. So to set up a DistroBox, they've nailed that.

But it actually leads to a secondary effect problem. And that is, I have some stuff installed via Ubuntu, because it was available via apt or PPA. I have some stuff installed in my arch distro box because it's in the AUR, but not everything because not even everything in the AUR builds. It's gotten really bad. I would say three out of the five things I tried to install from the AUR, two apps failed to build or a dependency fails to build. So then, my first path is I'll try Brew because I prefer to have it on my local system And then I go to one of my distro boxes. I often have to also

fall down to pip and so pip X has become my friend this week and A lot of times I'm installing and I'm not exaggerating a hundred two hundred dependency packages to say say I want to get a music client 200 dependency packages to say, say I want to get a music client. No, okay. That's, that's 200 dependencies because it's a bunch of Python packages, a bunch of FFMPEG and when it's all done and it's all installed, I run title DL for example, and it says FFMPEG isn't in my path. So it doesn't work.

And it's, it's these little things that it's like, obviously if I was trying to install the best in class Linux desktop applications and I'm building web applications or I'm managing systems, Bluefin would be a killer solution. But when you're trying to install a bunch of random half supported, some under development, some abandoned TUI applications that some of them are Python, some of them are Rust, some of them are Go, et cetera, you know, or Bash even. It's a real mixed bag and it could not have been a harder way to do things. And I'm sort of saved by the AUR, but so many of them failed to build. So it's been honestly, I've spent a lot of time, for example, I'm trying to get CMOS going, which is a music TUI client. I got that working just great.

Now I wanna populate my music folder with some music. Okay, well, I've been using Tidal for a while now, so I'll go get Tidal DL. And then I go into these rabbit holes of just trying to get a dependency application working so that way I can get the main application working, assuming I can even get the main application working. So not only am I jumping around

between different environments a lot, having to implicitly remember, okay, this application, my email client, I could only get running in the Ubuntu environment, right. But my Todoist client, that is going to be an arch because I installed it from the AUR. But title dl, I ended up installing via PIP in, and this is, and I have to actively think about that

before I launch every terminal app. Maybe you need a TUI app spreadsheet so you can keep track of which things are where. Yeah, I need a matrix, right, I need a matrix. If I installed it via software and things, that'd be fine. So that's been interesting. And then there's been certain things I've installed

like the IRC, AER installed like the ERC email client. Yes, I was going to ask about that. Yeah, this is the one I think because it does give you a two-way for configuring your email options. And much like the beloved Nano, it gives you the commands at the bottom of the screen where something like Neopine, you know, you have to know the commands. So that's been nice except for on all of my Blufen systems, regardless of the terminal application and regardless of the environment, I be local or within one of the distro box environments, the two UI never renders in my terminal.

Doesn't matter. The application never renders. I installed it on one of my next desktops that I still have and it renders just fine. I installed it on one of my next desktops that I still have and it renders just fine. So it's just a lot of weird little edge cases that I'm hitting that make me feel like we're not that far away from this being a bygone era and a way of using computers. And I know that seems silly because some of these are brand new applications, just like the AERC email clients under active development. But it's getting harder and harder to do this. just like the AARC email clients under active development.

But it's getting harder and harder to do this. It really is, unless you're on something that has all this packaged for you. And it reminds me of what a nightmare package management can be, because I'm trying to get one application installing and a dependency of a dependency fails to build, and so I can't get the application running. A lot of that. Have you gotten anything running? Like a...

Yeah, I mean, things that I can run via a Podman or Docker container, no problem. So like my web browser. And I have gotten title DL working, title DL NG, working to a degree, although it can't find FFMPEG. So yeah, and I've got the Todoist client working, so I've got my task management going. Okay, so you're getting a couple points. Yeah, but it's not what I expected to spend my time fighting, you know what I mean?

I just didn't expect that. Well, it sounds like you're spending most of your time learning the OS instead of learning the TUI. Yeah, and really learning the limits of what DistroBox can do too, because I haven't spent. It's probably the most time in it really, huh, using it for real. Especially using it in really, huh? Using it for real.

Especially using it in anger, yeah, using it for real. Like I've always played around, oh, I'll just try this random thing as an experiment. But now I'm like actively using it in multiple different ways and really like, okay, this is a different workflow. So I picked a bad time to switch. I'm not actually pinning any of this on Blufin

to make it clear, because I think it's, you know, if you wanted to do all a bunch of twoies and stuff like that in Ubuntu or Debian box, maybe is a better route to go. You know, this is really a modern desktop experience is what Blufin is. And I decided to go get the most modern desktop experience you could currently find packaged for somebody right now,

and then go throw a bunch of, you know, time machines at it. So I understand, I'm not pinning the blame on Blufin, I wanna make that clear. I'm putting pinning the blame on bluefin. I want to make that clear. I'm putting the blame on me for picking the wrong tool for this particular job. Like I should have just waited until the two challenges over, but I was so excited.

I have otherwise been enjoying it. I want to make that clear as well. But oh my God, right now mid challenges, I can see that I'm not stacking the wins and the points that I thought I would be. Oh boy, I can't believe it. I mean, if I told Chris from the late 90s and early aughts that he was having these struggles,

he would call me an old man and laugh at me. And he would show me how he was browsing the Gentoo Wiki using links and finding things no problem when he couldn't get X11 working and to shut up and figure it out. That's what he would say. Maybe he should have been using Gentoo, I don't know. If you're going to be building stuff anyway, you might as well use a tool that's made for it. You know what? I think it might have worked better.

My other thought is, can you run Bedrock Linux, that Linux that combines a bunch of distros into one? You just put that in a distro box and then you only need one distro box. Oh, right. Right. Smart. one distro bot. Oh right, right. Smart. Onepassword.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase. The number onepassword.com slash unplugged. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow IT. You can learn more by going to onepassword.com slash unplugged.

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Onepassword.com slash unplugged. Well, we're back in real time. It's the end of the week, the end of the seven day TUI challenge. Boys, how are you feeling now? I'm feeling a little better. I think, yeah, I don't wanna give it too much away. I don't think I'm gonna be the champion this week,? I'm feeling a little better. I think yeah, I'm not I want to give it too much way I don't think I'm gonna be the champion this week, but I am feeling better. Yeah, I you know I still miss a

web browser But I am feeling better than when we checked it okay out of the three of us Who do you think is gonna score the highest I? Think it really depends how honest we are yeah, whoa. I mean you sprinted hard towards the end That's what I was going to say. I'm kind of inclined to give it to Brett over there. Uh-huh. I think you're making a mistake.

You were working right up to the start of the show. Yeah. Yeah, you were cramming your homework. So I don't know. I feel like you were trying to cram in on the boney's to get ahead. I may have cheated lots this week. Ha ha ha.

OK, so you mean there may be some penalties? Like, I may have pushed hard because I needed the bonus points I got you So, um, you know, I'll just to remind everybody the TUI challenge had a few categories along with points You needed to conquer text editing email management web browsing music playback file management task management system monitoring and for bonus points, terminal multitasking. And then some categories also had additional bonus points available.

So how did you do with Text Editor? Well, as you're in that clip, I kind of wanted to find something that just worked out of the box. And it turns out from that day forward, I did. I found an application called Helix that I really liked. I wanted throughout this challenge to learn some Vim key bindings. Not all of them.

That's ridiculous. That takes years. But I did learn a couple. And Helix uses them by default. But Chris, as you and I love using Nano, it gives you like a little cheater bar at the bottom when you open the command palette to try to type in a command.

You can like tab complete those, but also just like makes them discoverable for you. And they're kind of like regular language commands too. Yeah. That helps. And it gives you the shortcuts as well. So it's a good discoverability for the shortcuts. So I found it a really nice balance between learning a new thing, having that like handicap, I guess,

of that little panel that helps me out, and also being able to change the themes fairly quickly. Because I did one thing I really discovered I wanted was Markdown highlighting that wasn't super complex to get out of the box. So I think in that regard, I found a happy place, and maybe an editor that'll stick with me. I did try a couple others.

Like I mentioned, I tried NeoVim. The right decision was to give up on that. I also tried something called Z, which is written in Rust, supposed to be a modern text editor. I didn't realize it uses EMAX key bindings, and I got stuck in it for quite a while. So I eventually got out of there and never touched it again. Hey, that's supposed to be a Vim thing, okay? I'm going to try out Helix after the show.

I didn't really go outside of my comfort zone when it came to text editors. I just felt like that was a category I had solved. But then watching you use Helix, and I tried it quickly, I'm like, oh, I might, even though I didn't really use it for the majority of the challenge. You're switching after. I might, yeah. I think so. I was quite happy to find it.

And I don't think all, well, maybe not most of these tools will stick with me, but I think Helix might be the one that don't get to stay. What about the email tool? Because you and I used the, you and I went the same route, we used the same email tool. I think we all did. Oh, yeah, right.

Yeah, we all three did. Right. So ARC, or A-E-R-C. We talked about it earlier. We all three went with it. And I had initially just the weirdest problem where it would not render on my terminal. Rebooted the system, resized the terminal, and ran it again, and it worked.

So after we recorded, I was able to continue to use it without having to do anything fancy. So I don't know why it wouldn't work initially, but it did eventually. But where I went wrong is I asked an LLM how to set up, because I had just gotten that working in the web, in the browser, in the terminal. I'm like, well, let's try this.

First of all, arduous. Second of all, didn't work, couldn't render properly. So I couldn't really read the instructions very well. Oh no. And it sent me down this route best I could tell of setting up like an app profile under Google Workspaces and then generating like a project and then enabling OAuth 2 and then generating OAuth keys

and client IDs and client secrets. And all the stuff from Brent was like, you don't. And I was told, because I'm like 15 minutes into this. Yeah, I was outside tinkering on something and came back in like 20 minutes later. Between trying to read it off of the terminal web browser and then going through the Google Workspace. I was so frustrated I had to take a little walk.

And Brent was outside cooking. I'm like, Brent, I wish you were inside right now so you could commiserate with me. You're not going to believe what I'm going through. He's like, you don't need to do that. I'm like, what? No, you don't need to do that. Oh. But once it got running, we have't need to do that. I'm like, what? Now you don't need to do that. Oh, ha ha ha.

But once it got running, we have a little admission to make. Uh-huh, it's embarrassing. It is embarrassing. I don't know where you want to start with this one, but you and I both ran into it identically. Yeah. And we don't think Wes did. And I think you need to be aware of this listeners

if you use Nano. Okay, so ARK is quite lovely in that it presents you with shortcuts and it tries to guide you through it. And it has global commands and a lot of them are sort of Vim inspired. Yeah, so I was feeling good. I thought email was going to be like the biggest challenge here. And one of the sweet things about Arc is it uses your favorite default text editor so the compose environment is the text editor you're used to, whatever it might be. Which is awesome. So Chris and I both started

composing messages to Wes in Nano, of course, because that was our default, and couldn't figure out how to actually... Couldn't send it. Get out of the text editor to move on to the next step. You have to exit the text editor and then Arc takes back over and then you're on a review screen and you can send the email. It's kind of like with Git, right? Well, like when you're presented with an editor to edit your commit message and then you quit saving, quit the file. Exactly.

Yeah. Which is a fine way to do it. Yeah. The issue comes in that, well, as you know, Chris, Wes, you might not know this, but to exit nano, you know, you hit Control X. Yeah, sure do. Just get out of there. It says it right there on the screen.

It's real handy. Yeah, it's awesome. Part of the problem, though, is that Arc hijacks that key stroke, Control X, to bring up the command palette. So Chris and I both ran into the situation where we composed our beautiful email and wanted to move on to the next step by just closing the editor. And you can't actually ever do that.

You can't close Nano. Because like you said, it's overriding that Control X to be the global command. And I tried so many things. So you get stuck. You get stuck. And you can never send the email, as far as we could tell, if you're using Nano as your default text editor. So this is where, for me, using Blufin

took a turn to the positive. And where I crossed from feeling like Bluefin was holding me back to where the Bluefin design was actually getting things done for me. And it was when I realized I could open up my Arch distro box and I could change my default text editor in my Arch distro Box to Vim, and I could just compose emails in there and not have to actually stop using Nano on the host system.

But the other thing that's great about the way the Distro Box configuration works is when I fired up Arc, it had all the configuration when I had set it up on the host system, because it's reading my home directory and all my.files. So I didn't have to reset up Arc. Everything I had done on my Bluefin host system was immediately working inside the Arch distro box,

but now inside Arch, I'm using Vim, and then what do you know, I'm doing my emails, baby, and I'm sending emails, I'm receiving emails, I'm replying to emails. It's a pretty nice client. It's powerful. I like it. I do like it, yeah. I think the setup on the Google side was annoying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the actual experience after that is totally fine. Nothing Art can do about that, though. So once we switched editors, how did it work for you? Well, I did the right thing and switched to my new text editor. Oh, so you're using Helix to write your emails? Yeah, my new default. I even committed. And worked perfectly fine after that.

So got a nice little email off to Wes, and he confirmed that, yes, Chris, you and I both got points for this category. All right, we should probably keep moving. Webb, what did you end up actually using here? This is probably where I'm going to have to start getting honest. Uh-oh.

OK, you both had some success with Carbonyl. We kind of teased that last episode. We're great. I could not get this thing going. Really? I could not get it running. Now, I believe since I was running it via Podman. I was also just doing Podman.

You opted to try to not do the Podman round. I tried to nex it and failed quite miserably after quite a long time. Which was very cathartic for me to see after the struggles I went through, I have to say. Yes, yeah. I felt your pain. Yes, you did. For one app, you felt my pain. But I did pivot, and I used Browse, which

was available by default in NixOS. And so I got a quick win there, and I loaded our website, and the images took about a minute to load. But I did get the website loaded. That said, I did not use that browser all week. I could not. So I feel like probably I should be deducted points but given some for at least getting a browser working.

So I don't know what you boys want to give me in this particular category. So web browsing was worth 20 points, but you have to deduct 20 points if you use Firefox or Chrome. Sounds like a big zero for me. Well, I could half that. I'd be willing to half that if we want to do funny math. Okay. Well, this is where you should get honest, because I don't think that you guys exclusively

used the terminal browser. No, definitely, because there's just certain apps to publish our shows and stuff I have to do. Yeah, so I used to, yeah. I tried to do stuff in Carbondle first, and then I would fall back to... There's just certain apps to publish our shows and stuff. So I tried to do stuff in Carbono first and then I would fall back to... Oh, I suffered. The portion of suffering, getting things done on the Carbono was high. So I definitely feel like I paid my pittance. So maybe like, is that a 10 point then? I feel like it's a 10 point for the web browser.

Because we didn't hire a judge for this episode. So all right, you and I both use CMOS for music. I'll talk more about that later in my segment, I think. But you use something that I didn't even bother with for your file management. I'm really curious about your choice of file manager. Yeah, I mentioned two of them, Ranger and also Joshudo, which is just a Ranger-like file manager written in Rust. And I kind of used both 50-50. They're very similar to each other.

I wanted to see what the differences were. They worked amazingly well, very simple to use. They've got shortcuts and all that stuff, too, that you can learn. I tried to stick to using this for file browsing, because I did make that comment in the clip saying, hey, maybe you should lean on a 2I and not just console tools. So I tried to use it as much as possible.

I used it all week and kind of liked it. Even did some shell commands from within Ranger or Josh Udo. And I think this went really well for me. Ranger here, and I think you're going to get some bonus points here for this. Ranger has some neat support for multi-file functions. And if you look at the file management section,

if you perform batch operations, you get plus five bonus points. I sure do. Yeah, you do. And I saw you perform the batch operation. Did you? I did. I witnessed it. What?

That batch bastard. And you do the batch operation. Did you? I did. I witnessed it. What? That batch bastard. And you do the batch operations similar to the Git editing. So you change them in a text editor. So I had my text editor of choice, Helix, going in this. So everything kind of near the end of the week started gelling a little bit more than the frustrations I was feeling midweek. So I'll take the extra five points

Yeah, I think you earned it. So keep track of that I think that the Ranger looks really interesting and it reminds me to say that Since the last time where I actually use these tools in the real world more so than ever vim has sort of become almost a universal Interface for these twoI applications. Not 100%, but 80% of these apps use Vim key bindings. And so it really gives you a multiplier if you just learn Vim key bindings, even the basics, because so many apps outside of Vim are using them now.

That was my intuition coming into the challenge, and I think it turned out to be quite true. There were Vim key bindings in places I never even expected them. Oh yeah. All right, so how did you do on the task management? I never got there. Yeah, I did exactly nothing. Uh oh.

I went as far as opening a bunch of tabs of interesting looking task managers that I could run, but of the terminal applications I thought would, I would learn the most. I decided this was last on the list. It's a big, fat negative 20 there on the points there, big guy. That sets me back quite far. I should have did at least something.

Jeez, now I regret that. Can I just go away for five minutes? But you get the B-top points. So you get points for system monitoring. I'm going to give that to you, which is ten points. Thank you. Thank you. And then did you do any? multitasking on the command line I Realized you know we put this as the last Days challenge mm-hmm, and I did this as the last sort of challenge that I set some time to mm-hmm

I feel almost like this should have been first. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see that was one of the things I realized about Midway into. And then I started using the hell out of like Zelgi tabs and stuff. Yeah, because I opened Zellage, which everybody was raving about.

So I was like, I gotta try this thing. But this was like the hour before the show this morning. And realized very quick, I played around and I was like, oh, this is sweet. And realized very quickly that I had missed out on using this all week. Yeah, and I just have my email up in one of the tabs. Well, yeah, why not?

So I did get it running, I did kind of fall in love with it very quickly, but I did not use it in anger. So I don't know, you guys are gonna have to judge what that's worth. No, you tried it You got some multitasking going so you get 30 points. Oh from that And then I see in the bonus category you tried an LLM app. You tried some password apps Can you give me a quick rundown on how that went? Yeah, I found quite a bit of success yesterday I was griping about it, but I found some success with a little app called

Tenary, which is basically an LLM in your terminal 2e, written in Rust, of course. And this is pretty cool. You can, by default, it's connected to your chat GPT API. Turns out I don't have one of those. So that instantly put me in hard mode. But it also supports Lama CPP as a backend or OLama as well. So I connected it to my OLama instance

and used that for a bit and actually kind of love it. Has a bunch of history and it uses vimkey bindings. Hey, go figure. So it's modal and all that good, great stuff that I'm learning to love. So Tenary, I think awesome tool. I would totally recommend. We'll have a link to that in the show notes.

And password manager? This is another one that I wanted to get working, so I use keypass XC generally. That's a good way, of course. So I was looking for keypass tuis. There's of course a terminal, like just a console program you can use, which was real painful. So I quickly exited that. I didn't want it. But I did find a tui for keypass called KPXHS. It's basically interactive key pass, and it's just a front end for the key pass CLI. But this is where I fell down again.

If something wasn't packaged in NixOS, I tried and tried to kind of make a flake to just pull something down from GitHub. But why's you got to teach me this? Because I'm doing something wrong, it's not working, and I really want to be able to do this little thing. You've identified an area to learn more about. Yeah.

With the homework after the show. Mm-hmm. I feel a little proud of myself for trying because it's a skill I've wanted to acquire, but I did not quite acquire it, but I got into it a little bit. So never got to the point of doing passwords in the terminal, but I tried.

So keep track of your score. We're going to total up all our scores at the end, okay? We'll do. So don't reveal it now. Wes, how did your week in the terminal go? Anything stand out for you in the categories when we get to like text editing or email management? Anything there that surprised you? I imagine you probably used Vim.

I did, yeah, Neo Vim to be precise. And you went with Arc for email. I didn't get super creative on that front. That is true. Well, I like that we all tried Arc, so that's new for all of us. You got it working first, I have to say, because you figured out the app password route,

and I, so dumb. I've done that before. Well, I also asked an LLM, so I just got better LLM advice, I guess. Oh, okay. Well, and then I realized, like, I tried using the JB email, which didn't seem to work, at least with my level of permissions or whatever,

so then I pivoted to mine, and then I was able to, it was kind of hard, because I ended up getting like a link to the right place instead of finding it in the UI, and then I was able to sort of initiate what I needed. That was the thing for me, is I actually had to search for it and then click to it. You could not find it in the Google settings.

So once that hurdle was done, that worked pretty well. What did you do for music playback? Yeah, so I did do CMOS a little bit. I also did actually manage to try out cast arrow for podcasts Oh, yeah, yeah, that one hadn't been updated in a little bit But it does you know, I was able to listen to our stuff. I listened to some other ones I mean you basically just have to add feeds yourself, but that's fine So, you know paste in the feed URL then... I know that's not quite considered streaming because our bonus points said extra bonus points for streaming, but I feel like if you get podcasts going in

the terminal, it could be worth extra bonus points. I think so. Yeah. Can we give it to them? Yeah. All right. Five points for you, Wes. I did try, what was it called? YTUE-music? YTUE-music. Yeah, how did that work? I wanted to try it, but I did not get it. I could not get it running. Oh, okay, okay. I didn't try a ton, but in what time I did experiment with sadly that, but.

Did you opt to use a TUI file manager at all? Not, I mean, I didn't use it all of the time, but yes, I did try out Yazzie, which I actually have running here. Yeah, yeah. Because I wanted to try the fancy image support in Kitty, so check this out. Okay. Whoa, it's perfect. Yeah, isn, because I wanted to try the fancy image support right in kitty. So check this out. Okay? Whoa, it's perfect. Yeah, isn't that nice?

So what I'm seeing is a three column file manager and in the third column is a perfect rendering of a PDF It looks you so it's a manual for a microphone. Oh It's great and that's a 1080p display, right? And it renders, it all fits on there really nice. That's nice. Okay, so I kind of have to admit, I stuck with Midnight Commander here because, again, I was going for easy points. I use this all the time.

I love Midnight Commander. It reminds me of Norton Commander from when I was a young lad and my dad's computer ran Norton Commander before Windows. And I still have a soft spot for it. And so I just know how to whip through that thing. That makes sense. And it's got multi-pane support.

So I used Midnight Commander, but Yazzie's looking real good. I did also use Dua, because I like it for specifically deleting files. And because you can go in and mark a bunch of stuff to delete and then have it delete all of it. Did you do anything for task management? Yeah, again, I didn't do a ton.

I kind of pivoted to this part of it a little late. But I was trying out, let's see here, I tried to open all these up, a Vault Tasks. It's a two-way markdown task manager. All right, ooh, I like this markdown. Yeah, so you kind of have a vault. You put a bunch of markdown files in there, and then it's got like a,

it's own little bespoke, two-y interface. Front end to that? Yeah, so it has its own thing where it's kind of parsing it. It's all very new. Sounds like maybe refactor is pending, but it is written in Rust, and it is in Nix packages,

so that's actually how I found it. Hmm, that's cool. Nice little find there. I think I have a couple of finds maybe you guys haven't seen. I'm not sure. We'll see. Yeah, it does have some basic filtering support. You can browse through your files in it. And then it does have some support for parsing out stuff for like calendar and time management, too, which I didn't try the time management stuff,

but you can have it figure out calendar stuff. So it's neat. It sounds like you got all the base points, I'm guessing. Yeah, I did also cheat a bit on the browser part. So you should only get the 10 there for sure. Yeah, I think we're all just getting 10 for that one. There were moments boys. There were moments.

I mean, you got to get you got to do the job and multitasking. Yeah, I was also just sticking with Zellage. Yes, I've been using it a lot lately anyway. It's kind of taken over. It's totally solid. So I don't really, you know, mine were not that surprising. I've sort of covered them as you boys have gone along, but I did a couple of different, so I'll swap mine out for task management. Todoist CLI. I've recently gone back to using Todoist about three months ago. It's just because it, for this reason, everything talks to months ago. It's just because, for this reason,

everything talks to Todoist. It's true, yeah. It's really great. I'm missing Logsic, because I've been spinning out of Todoist into Logsic. Yeah, yeah. If I hadn't done that, this would have been easier. GoMux totally worked out great for me.

A 2eMatrix client written in Go. Oh yeah, I was using Iamb. Oh yeah? Uh-huh, matrix client for Vim Addix written in Rust. Yeah, there it is. This one is written in Go, and I think this is the one that's sticking. I've had trouble getting it verified though. I think I'll figure that out.

But I actually think this one might stick because I love just having the Matrix chat in a terminal. The resource usage is fantastically different. Oh, yours looks a lot like IRC. Oh, mine looks like Element, but in the terminal. Yours looks like an IRC client. I kind of like yours too. Have you been enjoying it? Yeah, it's pretty minimal.

And it is like, right, so like if I want to go explore rooms, I have to type colon and then rooms. Yeah, yeah, sure. But like you can use slash and then just type for search. You can do a lot of the Vim keybindings are all there. Of course. So it's pretty easy, you know, you can use gg and shift g to navigate up and down the page.

So it's all very natural if you know Vim movements. As a Starlink user, ping times are pretty important to me. We've mentioned this app before, but there was a couple of these, I was like, oh yeah, I know this app. I'm gonna use this while I'm doing the TUI challenge. And one of those was G-Ping, which gives you an N-curses graph of your ping latency up and down,

which has been really nice to see. And then I started the TUI challenge at the studio, and I realized I need to go home. Got to switch Wi-Fi. There's several ways to do that. But Impala is a TUI for managing Wi-Fi on Linux. Smart. I was just supplicating like an animal. several ways to do that, but Impala is a TUI for managing Wi-Fi on Linux. Oh, smart. I was just supplicating like an animal.

And then like you, Wes, I use CMOS. Small, fast, very light. And I just added a podcast. And it's really easy just to add also a directory or an individual file, and there's a kind of like a Vim command, and you get into the command mode, and then you tell it you wanna add, and it'll start auto completing the path for you, and then it just figures it out for you. It's very efficient. If you just wanna listen, yeah, exactly,

like you have a folder of music, boom, no problem. Yeah, so that was, those all worked. I don't know, I got every category. I didn't get very many bonus points though, Brent. Well, that's not quite true. Oh yeah? Yeah, because you get a bonus point

for syncing your tasks with TodoList. Oh, okay. That's nice, I suppose. Well, if you don't want it, we don't have to get it. No, I'll take it. I'll take it. I think I was really struggling to get the apps running, and so then by the time I got them running,

I was like, I'm just gonna get to work here. You know, I'm just gonna try to get the basics done. I take it none of you boys did any batch operations in your TUI file manager? Not unless do we count moving a directory of files as a batch operation? Not at all. No!

I did in DoA. Oh yeah. Okay. I did a batch delete. OK. I think we have to give it to them. Also, I have a bunch more picks if we want to. Yeah, rattle off a couple while Brent totals it up, and then we'll get our total going.

OK, so for more system management, I tried out systemctltui. Oh, cool. Yeah. Just kind of a nice little way to check out what's running in systemd, which is nice. on the file management front. It's not only management, but I found TDF which is a tui based PDF viewer That's surprisingly decent actually cool. Let's see I on the dev side. I checked out a

Jqp which is a tui playground to experiment with jq if you ever use jq you kind of write JQP, which is a TUI playground to experiment with JQ. If you ever use JQ, you kind of write semi-cryptic little strings to parse through JSON files. So it's nice to have an environment that can refresh it for you and reevaluate your rule and play around. And then also RainFrog, which is a database management TUI. Because sometimes you, there's already a P-SQL, but I wanted to see what else was out there.

If it's on the TUI, it means you can SSH in and use it. You know what I mean? Yep. That's pretty good, all right. Let's see, for the LLM, I did Paralama. Okay. Which you can, it's kind of got a nice graphical TUI for choosing models and then, you know,

kind of standard thing for chatting with them. And then, to try to make my life a little bit easier for some of the stuff that I could answer this way I Started using wiki to eat which is a Wikipedia Specific to eat, you know, which has pretty nice support Wow. It has it uses the text interface, right? So it's like You didn't have to backwards try to support the web. You could just get right access to the information It's so nice. All right So we will have links to all those plus all of ours that we used in the show notes

at linux-unplugged.com slash 619. But you know what that means? It is now time for us to add up our scores and see how we all did. Brent, do you have the math over there? I have some math, but I think I'm going to advocate for extra points for you guys if you want me to.

OK. So one thing we didn't answer, did you use your terminal multitasking app to have more than one session open? Yes. Yes, OK. Let me add extra points here for you. Would have gone insane if I couldn't do that.

Yeah, mandatory. He's math-ing. Yeah, math hard. Actually, our rules don't actually say how many points you get for that. So how many points would you like for that? Five? Yeah. That seems fair.

Five. It was a sprinkle of points. Yeah. All right. I'll give you extra points for that. That's exciting. You're using some sort of 2E-based calculator, right? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yes, indeed. Okay. And I also feel like you could get some extra extra points here. So Chris, you used go mux to Browse matrix. I think that's pretty fancy. So I'm open to giving extra points. Is it is that I didn't do it Is it fancy? Well, how about five for each of us? Okay five for your wet for Weston. Yeah Hey, now you got to give us the math before the music runs out. Oh, how much time do I have? But West you also did LLMs. You want some extra five points for that? Yeah, but you should get music runs out. Oh, how much time do I have? But Wes, you also did LLMs.

You want some extra five points for that? Yeah, but you should get it then too. Yeah, exactly, that's where I'm headed with this. Wait, I used an LLM, I just did it in the browser, does that count? Not at all. Okay. Okay.

Center judge comes out. Do you wanna guess who you think is at the top based on our explorations here? I think you. Wes, any guesses? I'm gonna go with you as well. Oh my god, you guys. Okay, here are the scores.

So I have nine zero points, 90 points. I got a big minus 20 for the task management, but I also didn't get 20 points. So that's actually like 40 missed points. And Wes, you got 145. Nice job, Wes. Nice job, nice job. And Chris, you got 75 points.

So Wes, you are the winner. Congratulations, Wes. I did not expect that. Congratulations, Wes. I have to share my prize with Knicks Packages because I gotta say, compared to your experience, it felt like cheating because not only could I browse for ideas to try, but for most of them,

I mean, not all of them worked, but most of them, they just pretty much ran. Hey, I mean, I picked the hill to climb and at the end, I think it was helpful, but it took me the entire week practically to get there. So a couple of these, I think the Matrix client and the email client are sticking because I have them set up already so I'm just gonna keep using them. So in the end, walking away with a couple applications I'm

still using. I'm curious in this challenge you have any lessons learned you want to share? Anything that really was like an aha moment in trying all of this? If you haven't used Midnight Commander yet give it a try. Unraid.net it a try. Unraid.net slash unplugged. Head on over there to check them out and support the show and unleash your hardware. Unraid.net slash unplugged. I'd like to introduce you to Unraid. You might not be familiar with them. They're a powerful, easy to use NAS operating system built on top of modern Linux for those who want control, flexibility, and efficiency in managing your own data, your privacy, and your own applications. And Unraid allows you to mix and match the drive

of any size. So if you've got multiple different size disks, you can put them in the machine and it'll work with you. It also supports all the modern ZFS and other file systems, XFS and others are in there as well. And they've integrated tail scales. So you can bring remote access to your applications with a checkbox. No port boarding, no static IPs, no complex firewall rules. None of that stuff you got to worry about. It'll just integrate right into your tail net. And there are, I mean, thousands,

thousands of different applications that are just one click away to install. A lot of the stuff we talk about all the time and more is in there, including special versions if you have AMD hardware or Intel hardware or Nvidia hardware so you can get things that are GPU accelerated They also make it really straightforward to get Linux VMs going with virtual GPU support So you could have multiple GPUs in there. You could have one GPU in there You can work with their VM system to pass that through to your Linux machine.

Oh, something else that I think is really nice because this recently shipped in Unraid 7.1. If you've got like an Ubuntu system now or a FreeNAS or maybe a Proxmox system using ZFS, and it was good, but you wanna move to something a little more robust, a little bit more feature rich, that'd be like Unraid. Well, Unraid 7.1 now lets you import those EFS pools.

Yeah, you can just bring them right in. So that's slick. If you got data on there, you got virtual machines already. Just bring them right in to unraid seven dot one. They also have a 30 day free trial that lets you test out unraid. No credit card required. This is nice, too, because it means they have a sustainable development model over there and they keep building and they have been iterating

for so many years on making this thing just a champ. So go check it out and support the show. It's unraid.net slash unplugged. Go see what you can build, play with the stuff we talk about and build something reliable and useful for yourself, for your friends or for your family. Get started at unraid.net slash unplugged. Well, we got a bunch of feedback from the Terminal 2e Challenge.

Thank you everyone. We got one here that we're pulling out from Don Harper who sent in an email, hashtag 2e Challenge. Hey guys, thought you might want to follow my attempt on the TUI challenge. They wrote a series of blog posts over at Duckland.org. And he says, great to see you folks in Boston. So I've pulled a couple little excerpts from those blog posts. You want to hear?

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Don. All right, day one here, text editing. Since I normally read my email and RSS feeds in a TUI app, and I use Vim as my editor and IDE, I figured it would be fairly easy for me to take part in this one. That's what I was thinking coming into it.

I thought, hey, I've used some of these apps for years. This is going to be no problem. Yeah, turns out not so much. So Don says, there are bonus points for using a script to help things out. And I guess the script I use to start editing a file should work. And he included that script, which is kind of nice. Day two here email since I already

live in NeoMut I should probably describe my setup. So they use Gmail and for filtering use a tool called Gmail CTL. Don says which allows me to control Gmail's filters from my computer. Works by connecting to Gmail and pulling down the filter definition file and then firing up my default editor. Once I'm happy with the changes, it'll upload it back to Gmail. That is a real Linux nerd solution. It also uses system D timer to schedule the sync runs for the email and runs not much to index the mail so you can search through it all. And day seven, TMUX with the first pane split into four to show the tools off. But I also have panes for my email, RSS, Mastodon client, and SSH shells on a couple other machines,

which brings my grand total to 200 points. Not bad. Not bad at all. There's a bunch more details in there. There's basically a blog post for every day's challenge, which is a fun read. So duckland.org for that. Amazing.

Yeah. Thank you for sharing. I love that we heard from some folks now that have been like, mostly living in the TUI already, using their TUI apps. It's hilarious. Speaking of mostly living in the TUI, Darnier sent in really fascinating details about how they use the TUI and some tools that they were involved in way, way early.

So Neomut being one of them actually. So I think we'll read that in the Booster show. Boostergram. Well, that means it is time to read some Boosters. We got some TUI challenge followups in the boosts too. And we're going to start with someone else who is our baller booster this week with a generous 100,000 sets. Thank you very much someone else. Our longtime listener, Sporadic Booster. That's how well we appreciate it very much. Checking in with a nice valuable boost.

Making up for lost time. It's good to hear from you. Adversaries 17 comes in with 42,000 sets. Hey, it's Adversaries! There he is! That's not possible. Nothing can do that. So, does Emacs count as a 2-E? Technically doesn't it have a daemon and then a GUI client app? If it does, then I don't know what problem there is,

because Emacs is the whole darn operating system. A long time ago, he goes on, in a Pacific Northwest far away from me, three hosts, well really only three years ago, had a mission to get a ham radio license. I waited and waited and waited and waited saying when they do I will. It could be a whole JB community thing. Well no. Well, I got tired of waiting, so I went and took the test. Get your ham radio license, guys. It's not that hard. You make me wanna be a better man. KE9DMQ out.

Thank you adversaries. Very nice. Now, adversaries, maybe we should do that for another challenge one day. We gotta recover from these challenges. This one. A ham chow. This one, a little.

Yeah, make a whole ham sandwich theme out of it too. Thank you for the boost. Well ShyFox boosted in 30,999 sets. Oh my god, this drawer is filled with fruit loaves! I love this challenge. I learned a lot and will keep using some of those TUI tools. They also link to basically their TUI challenge results here. Let's see if we can figure this out. The total didn't do so good on email management, it looks like, but the total, 100 points.

100 points, not bad at all. Excellent. Beat me. I think that beat me. That's so bad. They also included a bunch of backgrounds and some screenshots. We'll be sure to link to that. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I think Shy Fox, I also, you know, parts of it were torturous for me, but it was sort of a nice reminder of how good we have it now, and to get out of the comfort zone, and then to walk away with a couple of apps, and kind of like a new understanding of how to use Bluefin. Not bad.

It doesn't seem like maybe the email worked great for them, but they did find Himalaya. Himalaya. Oh yeah, okay. A CLI to manage emails written in Rust. Got a nice little minimal UI to it. So there's a lot of good options. Thank you for the boost, Jeff Fox.

Oh, they also use Jellyfin Tooie. Oh, I wanted to try that. How did we miss this? I was on, that was on my list of things to try. It just, really we just didn't watch much TV this week We were busy to each challenge week two is coming up. Oh my gosh Turd Ferguson comes in with 22,000 sets This old duck still got it loved the last episode it had me laughing some of us still use mutt And let me tell you this that old dog still hunts

You know what we're finding out a lot of our audience is still using these surprising. Yeah, it's crazy. Chris, you said you were gonna use Mutt when this all started. I thought I was. And I did not remember how to use it. It's true. It's true, that was it.

I just, I don't know what happened. Biggles boosts in with 21,000 cents. I don't understand what the heck is going on here. I love the TUI challenge idea. I use systemctltui, nmon, and alacrity with zeledge and I'm looking forward to trying many more of the TUI applications mentioned in the show. Ah, very good.

See, another TUI natural. Yeah. Well, Gene Bean sends in 4 in 4444 that's two What if we go with them? You mean Rosa ducks or like a rose? It's a treasure could also be an a flack duck Says I'd love some open shift coverage. Okay, you were asking for some feedback. Yeah, I was thank you I'd also welcome coverage of its upstream. Okd. Oh yeah, that was something that crossed my mind too, was chasing down the Upstream projects

and taking a look at those. He also sent me a DM, and I'm gonna share it with you guys after the show. I don't wanna share too much, because it was a private DM, but shout out to Gene Sun, who also listens to the podcast. That's cool.

That's cool. That's cool. That's cool. Outdoor Geek is here with 5000 Sats. Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. A tip for the privacy tech person. The 2024 Subaru Cross-Tech base model doesn't have a cell modem. It has two smaller touch screens instead of one giant one, which means they're including

more buttons and knobs. The base model still includes adaptive cruise, lane keeping, emergency braking, Android Auto, etc. I wonder if the low end of other model brands are preferable to some? That is to me. Chris, you don't love Subaru's. I mean, I just don't love what they've become. And what have they become? They're like minivans now on car platforms.

That's their huge vehicles. Complicated often too. But I do like this. I like that direction. They start going more in that direction. I'm all about that. They're finally listening. Walk it back, manufacturers. Just walk it back a little bit. My other suggestion would be, I don't know, a van of the 1990s era.

Early or late? Early. Go early. Antoine 1109, Boo-S in with 4,444 cents. Seems that looking up put all my duck. Definite yes. On the Red Hat OpenShift Deep Dive, we use VMware currently and have looked at Proxmox and Hyper-V and would really love to get your take on OpenShift from a Linux admin perspective.

I think it's time to get on that. I think it is. Thank you, Antoine. Appreciate that feedback, and I've heard that from a lot of people at the Red Hat Summit. They are not happy with the direction things are going with VMware, and they are shopping, and I think it's a good time for us to take a look in,

because they've been modifying, upgrading, improving the product to try to address that customer base. Let's see if they've done it. Well, systemdbsdd sent in 3,433 sets. Danger zone. What do you all think of Apple's new containerization framework? Answer to WSL maybe, threat to Linux?

We did some coverage of this in the members bootleg version earlier today in the show, and it's interesting. Just a quick overview, in Mac OS 26, a new container command is going to be available, and when you execute it, it will pull down Linux images, and then it will run them in what they're calling a lightweight VM. So it's like a tiny little VM that runs a tiny version of Linux kernel with a custom init system. Just enough to boot up and then start the container.

Each container does run its own kernel. I think the thing for me is like, there's a lot of developers with Mac laptops and there are a lot of options, Podman desktop, Docker desktop, KoLima and Lima I think have been pretty great tools. But all of these, there's kind of like more setup and for some maybe you want to customize,

you want to have ability to like run more stuff inside this VM where all your containers are running or take advantage of other workflows. But having something that's just simple and well supported, kind of more stock out of the box, I think is probably gonna be a usability win, both just that and then whatever other tools can sort of be used as orchestration on top of this.

Oh, that could be interesting. You could totally see some more open source stuff making this easier. Yeah, I bet you will. GUI apps and whatnot. I'll just add this system DBSD. I think it's a capitulation from Apple. And when the WWDC video that explains this feature starts,

they introduce it by saying containers are the standard way to ship software on servers, not on Linux, but on servers. Now that's a pretty big statement when you consider that it wasn't that long ago that Mac OS server was a product and Apple even sold server hardware. Now we live in a time when Apple talks about shipping software on servers, they're talking about Linux containers. And so it's an acknowledgement that their user base needs to have a good production system or at least semi-quasi production that they can build on and then ship. So it's an interesting capitulation from Apple in that regard. And it also now means, as a result, both Microsoft and Apple are shipping commercial operating

systems that take advantage of the Linux kernel and either distribute it after the fact in some form or another. And that's a remarkable moment to be in as well. Thank you for the boost. Brett came in with 2222 Sats. That is a row of ducks. Stay out of my van. All right, thanks, Brett.

I know what the user agent here is for Brent instead of something like fountain. Hmm. Interesting. Very sus. Brett's hacking the system. Brett Johnson, that is. Kalec Bucin with another row of ducks.

Greetings from Poland. Hello. I started my journey with Self-Hosted a year ago and have been hooked on the network ever since. Welcome aboard. Thanks for listening. I just want to say thank you for the great content. I discovered a ton of Self-Hosted apps from your podcast

and now use them almost every day. All running in Docker on a VM on an i3-8100T Fujitsu mini PC running Proxmox at home with USB 2TB hard drive for the Jellyfin library. Ooh, a mini PC. I love the mini PC for the HomeLab system. And I bet the i3 doesn't use too much power either. Yeah.

Nice, okay. I will second the recommendation I heard here for Obsidian syncing. The Obsidian Live Sync plugin with a quick couch DB container Running over tailscale works really well across iOS and Linux Okay, as for Nix because of you. I'm tempted to try it One day hey could always installed on your existing Linux a choice and play around with Nix Yeah, a little Proxmox VM why not so it's interesting the timing of this boost because just this last weekend I was thinking, do I really

want to pay another year of Obsidian sync because it's not cheap and so the Live Sync plugin and a CouchDB container on my tail net does seem like a pretty good solution. Thank you for that idea, I appreciate it, Kelk. Well, hybrid sarcasm boosted in 10,000 sats. I spent some time with GoMox this week. I think I'll keep it around. Otherwise, you're all better men than I. I need my Go-E. Oh, I don't know, Red. We were suffering, too. We were suffering.

There were moments of bliss and retro, beautiful nostalgia. That nostalgia kit did come, and that is almost worth it on its own. But I agree, the Matrix client wasn't too bad. Thanks for the boost, hybrid. Kongaroo Paradox is here with 8,400 sets. I don't understand what the heck is going on here. This is why I have bedtime wine.

Hey, I'm boosting with my progress for the Tooie Challenge. No time for more. So he's trying to do a little bit at the last minute. And he has, see, does he have a total here, Brent? You're, oh, total of 95 with two penalties applied. That's pretty good. That is pretty good. I'm insane, it's pretty good,

because that's about what Chris and I got. He got a negative 20 on the email, but he got some bony points on the text, on web, on file. He's like in Yahtzee too. Very well done. To Do Man was his task manager of choice. I had a great time with the To Do Challenge. It was easy for me on the Neo Vim and TMUK side,

because, well, a daily drive it. But for the rest, it was great discovering all these new apps. The big surprise for me was how manageable it was to live without a full-fledged browser. Being used to VimMotions, W3M was great, was a great experience to reduce the learning curve for text content.

Browse, a little rough around the edges, but it got me the rest of the way. I was able to log into GitHub, and most of my tests were okay. I ran out of time to get email and music going, but I look forward to getting it done soon. You guys got me excited about going full TUI. Full TUI. Can't wait to hear how you guys did.

Full TUI is great. It's on title material. Thanks, Kangaroo. Thank you for that, Boost. It's good to hear from you. And if you're listening after the fact, we still want to hear your reports. This is a topic we'd be happy to revisit for many episodes to come.

So feel free to hashtag TUI Challenge email, or if you'd be happy to revisit for many episodes to come. So feel free to a hashtag TUI challenge email or if you'd like to support the show with the boost, it's a great topic to boost in. Thank you everybody who boosted. We did a 1000 sat cutoff for this week's episode and we appreciate it. So normally what we do is we read all the boost, but the ones that make it on the air are 2000 sats and above. And if you'd like to boost in fountain.fm makes it really easy because all of it's hosted for you. But there's also totally self-hosted routes and all of that available.

Lots of apps too where you get all the podcasting, two-dot features. Podcasting two-dot is not just about boosting. You get chapters. You get also in there, um, live stream support, which I think is, I just don't think people wrapped their head around how cool this is. You subscribe to the podcast and you get our podcast like regular, but if you're on a 2.0 app, you also see when we're live and there's a lot of content

on the live stream. So there's a bunch of other great features, but that's some of it. But thank you everybody who participated in this week's episode. We had 22 of you stream sats as you listened. I always appreciate that. And you all collectively stacked 50,299 sats as you listened I always appreciate that and you all collectively stacked 50 50,000 299 sats for the show which is not bad at all

thank you sad streamers when you combine that with our boosters we had a really good showing we had 306,863 sats total for this week Thank you, everybody who supported this episode, episode 619 with a boost. And of course, a shout out to our members who make it possible for us to keep on going with a nice known amount and really are the foundation for the show. And then you can support each individual production with a boost. You found this one, this pic this week, right? Yeah. Enter SOMO. Oh, OK.

A human friendly alternative to Netstat for socket and port monitoring on Linux. Please into the eye, thanks to a nice table view, filterable interactive killing of processes. Also, instead of having to do net stat dash t-u-l-p-n, you can just do somo dash l. I have to say you got me with this one because it's always really handy to be like, what app is listening on what port? What ports do I even have open? Who's using it? Is anything listening? Is there a connection established? This gives it all to you in a TUI table. There you go.

Fits in with the show, and you didn't say it, but you probably guessed it. It is written in Rust, and it is MIT licensed, so you can do with it as you go. Let us know how your TUI challenge went. Of course, if you have any future challenge suggestions as well, we'd love to hear that, or any other feedback, you can boost it in or go to

Linux unplugged dot com slash contact. We also want to remind you that we have chapters and transcripts for every episode. Those are available. Not some of it's available only in the podcasting to auto app some of it, but some of it's also available in the regular one auto apps as well. So just make sure you're checking your app for that. Then you can skip around or re-listen or look something up in the transcript. It's actually pretty handy too for trying to get like the name of something.

So just wanted to remind you that we have that. Did Chris really say that? You can check. Uh oh, yeah, I suppose that's the downside right there. And of course, we'd love it if you join us live. It gives it a special vibe, as the kids say. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station. Yeah, that's right.

We do the show at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern over at JBlive.tv or JBlive.fm in whatever ice cast stream client you want. Or pop in that mumble room and listen to a low latency opus stream. Details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. Don't forget all the great apps we talked about linked at linuxonplug.com slash 619. And then there's a bunch of great shows over at JupiterBroadcasting.com. Go check out the launch. Brent's been joining us recently. We've been telling some fun stories. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday! So you