LINUX Unplugged - 623: 50 Days of Blue

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Chris fled a declarative-first world for the promised land of Bluefin's atomic simplicity. Fifty days in, did he find desktop bliss or just fresh compromises?Sponsored By: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.FMNix Vegas - Extended CFP, and a sneak previewNix Vegas CFPBluefin | The Next Generation Linux WorkstationFour Years of Universal Bluechad-russell/nix-blue: uBlue derivative with nix compatibilitykarypid/bluenix: Bluefin with /nixthrix/nix-toolbox: Fedora toolbox with nix.add nix using either the determine systems nix installer or the vanilla installer · Issue #2371 · ublue-os/bluefinInclude smallest pieces necessary to make installing Nix easier · Issue #765 · ublue-os/mainRecommend homebrew as the default · Issue #576 · ublue-os/bluefinfeat: homebrew on image by m2Giles · Pull Request #1293 · ublue-os/bluefinAdd support for ostree-based Linux distributions by Hofer-Julian · Pull Request #586 · DeterminateSystems/nix-installerOstree installation breaks with composefs changes in Fedora 42 · Issue #1445 · DeterminateSystems/nix-installerArbitrary top level mount points and composefs (#26) · Issue · fedora/bootc/trackercomposefs: The reliability of disk images, the flexibility of filesublue-os/bluefin: The next generation Linux workstation, designed for reliability, performance, and sustainability.ublue-os/image-template: Build your own custom Universal Blue Image!amyosveneos: Bootc images based on Fedora Atomic & Fedora CoreOSm2osbos: Customized OS images based on Universal BlueBuilding Locally | Bluefinublue-os/cayo: A bootc server image for your self-hosting needsZach: Easy Omarchy update and install.CommonArchJaKooLit's Hyprland setupsPick: bitchat — A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks. No internet required, no servers, no phone numbers. It's the side-groupchat.Bitchat: bluetooth mesh chat, IRC vibesbitchat-android: bluetooth mesh chat, IRC vibesbitchat privacyJack Dorsey says his 'secure' new Bitchat app has not been tested for security | TechCrunchLINUX Unplugged 459: Better than ButterBriar — Censorship-resistant peer-to-peer messaging that bypasses centralized servers. Connect via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or Tor, with privacy built-in.Obtainium: Get Android app updates straight from the source.

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 today I'll be doing my 50 day bluefin check in but first we're going to have ourselves a little Linux user existential crisis. I'll be doing my 50-day bluefin check-in, but first we're gonna have ourselves a little Linux user existential crisis I'll tell you about that then we're gonna round out the show with some great boosts and a Blowout worth the price of admission alone pick that you're definitely not gonna want to miss and a heck of a lot more So before we dig into all of that, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.

Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. And shout out to all of you up there in quiet listening and, of course, the live chat room. As well, stay tuned because we have a heck of a show coming up. But before we get there, I want to mention that the Nix Vegas Con has extended their call for papers, which I believe you can still jump in on, and our own Wes Payne has. Yeah, that's right.

So hey, come to Nix Vegas, co-located, I guess, at DEFCON 33. Yeah, that's right. More Nix at DEFCON. That seems like a very good idea. And yeah, you have till the, I think, the end of this month to get your paper submission in July 31st They have a session eyes link that we have linked to in the show notes that you can click on It's an easy process So if you're just thinking about it, why not throw your hat in the ring and then Defcon 33 August 7th through the 10th

I mean people might be just coming to Defcon They may want to come say hi to West Payne should think about a meetupup or something Oh, that's a good idea. No, I'm a little jelly Sounds fun also a scheme how to get you to come with me. Maybe I don't know how we pull that out I can pick you up along the way Too bad. It doesn't run out there. We also will be at Texas Linux Fest in October So check them out. Maybe get a taco in there and get your plans to come see us in Austin. Yeah, that's right. You still got time for their call for papers as well. Yeah. So there is a bit still of time and two different events,

one in the near future and one off in the distant future where we'd be happy to see you. So this week, we want to talk about a really big macro trend that's happening in the desktop Linux space. And then eventually we'll get into my experience with Blufin. But I want to take a moment and make sure that we all kind of appreciate a shift that is happening in the Linux desktop landscape. Like, just put it all out there. Having now used Blufin for 50 days, watching projects like Universal Blue, which is like the source images behind Bazite and Blufin and Aurora, what we are seeing demonstrate out over there is containerized workflows to build a Linux desktop experience

that doesn't require forking the project. You're building on top of images, you're building on top of layers. Instead of say, in the past where maybe Ubuntu would be based on Debian but it would be a fork of Debian with its own repositories and all of that. We're seeing a shift in the way that the desktop is being built and it doesn't require forking. And maybe there's a bit of a pulling apart or you know different organizations and people filling different roles. What we think of as a distribution, yes, there was the stuff where you curated a desktop

environment and you picked the apps that went together and you put it all into a nice experience, but you were also doing a bunch of actual packaging and building the package that runs systemd and make sure that bash exists so that you have a shell to run and all those things. I think it's interesting too to see not everyone necessarily reinventing that. It's not a new packaging format all the time, but you do end up with a different curated experience

often. So to get, say, Blufen, they don't necessarily need to have their own set of package maintainers. At least not to the same degree as trying to bootstrap an arch when you started with Fedora. I mean, the maintenance overhead just right there is exponentially different. That's huge, right? Just, you know, you don't need maintainers

that are necessarily packaging everything. Maybe you just have to take care of a few of the edge cases. And I mean, it's not like we haven't seen that. I think it's a matter of degree and tooling especially, right? Like you've seen a bunch of us rely a lot on Demian to have a lot of packages, but then they rebuild a lot of their own stuff, and then there's some downstream distributions

that pull directly from their parent distribution with their own additional archive and some that do a bunch of rebuilds. But now you've got very explicit technologies, like with containers, that you can really just say, from whatever version I like that is almost good enough for me and then add on whatever you want.

Yeah before the show started I ran a command I bet it's still in my command history right? It should be. I ran a really simple command that was just sudo bootc switch and then I gave it the URL to Aurora and I said use colon the latest image and hit enter and I went from having a gnome based bluefin system to now a plasma Aurora system. And of course this is something we've talked about being able to do in the NixOS ecosystem and regardless of that comparison it's just one of those things like when you think about doing it on a traditional distro you just think I'd

rather not. I'll install a new you know a new partition a new system I don't know if I want to co-locate both of these in anything, but like a demo Yeah, I mean the whole entire process we did live in the bootleg. I mean was what five minutes? Yeah, and that included downloading, you know, four gigs of files. Yeah, so it's it's interesting You know the bluefin folks, uh, they like to use dinosaurs to remind us of the older model. Like, you know, sometimes you got to bury your dinosaurs. I know it's, there's imagery there. There's a message there. Because I think they view this as like a post-Distro model. They don't like to call any of the UBlue based stuff, Universal Blue stuff, a Distro.

Yeah, they build images. And is Bootsy like the meteor or what's the part of the image here? Yeah, it's like a rise of a new evolution of distributions. Fedora Silver Blue, Endless OS, Bluefin, Bazite, Ubuntu Core, Nix OS, Steam OS based on Arch, Manjaro's working on Manjaro Immutable, Arcane Linux is Arch based, Blend OS, Vanilla OS, SUSE has a Plasma based and based and a genome based immutable. We're seeing this rise across all of the distro makers of these immutable or atomic distributions.

It does seem to be like it's not a trend, it's something everybody's getting involved in now. And I think when we first started talking about it, it's like, hey, check out this new cool trend. With this immutable base, there are also a lot of these distros are going for this experience where the user doesn't even really notice it you're not even really aware of of this you know the fact that slash users read-only or something right I mean it's a part of it right as it's

changing the customization layer so maybe instead of adding a PPA and then installing zoom or downloading the dab right you're you're you're pushed to use stuff like flat pack or Homebrew or other third party options that don't mess with that part of the file system. And as a result, if you do that, then they can say you don't need to locally compose that part of the OS anymore, right?

You don't have to worry about stitching it together into a working base sort of Linux system. We'll do that ahead of time as a single atomic unit will ship that to you and then you just switch between those and you can keep your layers on top. So, this is where I think we have a divergence is I never really had this I had a different experience when I went from NixOS to Blufin with NixOS I'm composing the entire system. I'm doing these atomic updates where I switch into a different build.

It felt like its own unique beast. And so the immutability and the atomic updates were just part of this unique beast. And it's hard not to notice you're using NixOS, right? It's very different. You did it very intentionally. And the way you interface with it is not really like anything else. So when I went to Bluefin, where it felt like traditional Linux

in that it has the standard file architecture that you expect, the file system architecture you expect. The old FHS. Yep. It was more of a, it felt more of a experience shift. It was more realized that this was a system that was designed to be immutable, that I wasn't really supposed to be modifying this directly.

And it sometimes was a problem. But it made me realize that it is a bit of a post-tinkerers distribution, these types of systems, in the sense that this you know, this thing, Blufin, for example, it ships with tail scale integrated. But what if I wanted to swap tail scale out for Nebula? That's actually a surprisingly large amount of work with a big amount of learning to figure out how to customize that image.

You very quickly end up in, I need to customize an image territory if you just want to, say, swap out a component like tail scale. Right, yeah, and that is where if it's baked in, there's not necessarily as easy of an option to un-bake it. And so if you're doing it at the layer where you wanna switch out a flat pack you installed, no problem, easy peasy, yeah, exactly. But to make your own customizations,

that's where you start having to engage in the build pipeline. So either this is for people that really like to tinker, or it's for people that don't wanna tinker. And it's not for people that like to mess with computers. It's for people who like to mess with computers. I think it's for people that want their computer just to work.

And there is a lot of people that started with Linux to play around, their computer was a toy, they got to a lot of people that started with Linux to play around. Their computer was a toy. They got to learn. They experimented with different desktops. They distro-hopped quite a bit. As time went on, they got busy with jobs, perhaps family or other responsibilities.

And that toy turns into a tool. And then you extend that far enough out, and it gets to the point of you don't want your computer to have problems at all. Anything that stops you from just getting work done is very unwelcome. And for that category of user, which I suspect is actually the vast majority of real world users. Immutable distros, especially ones like Blufin. They're totally built for these people.

They're totally built for these people. Like the developer that just wants a really solid workstation that is container first, like man, is this perfect for them. See, that's where I have a bit of a question. I think for developers specifically, I'm less sure. There's a lot, because that's where I feel like they're trying to market at two different groups, right? And that's why maybe Bazite has a lot more users than any of the rest of these, right? Because people running Bazite, that's what they want, right? I mean, you want a thing that just runs games and doesn't break.

Absolutely. And I think there's a class of developers, and Blufin especially seems pretty targeted that way. And if you can fit into their model where you don't need to rebase, then that works well. But it seems like if you are a developer and you do need to make any changes, you are going to have to engage. So I guess it just feels like,

on one hand they're saying, we wanna build this in a way where people who have modern cloud container DevOps skills can change it, but that's a different class than people who just want their computer to work. I agree. Like I think the people who want their computer to work don't really wanna also then build

a whole bunch of container pipelines for their computer but there's not a lot left in the middle between run exactly the image you get or Fully engage and that's where I wonder about the developers specifically it is actually you you're making it with the point You're making really is that? It's a very targeted type of developer where it just works out of the box Yes, and there might be the majority of them it might be yeah It might be but you. It might be. But you're right. You want to swap out a few core components,

maybe for whatever reason, you've got to go with the Docker instead of the Podman. That's a lot of work. That's no joke. So you're right. If you fall into this world where you get most of your stuff either through brew or flat packs, and you're good with the stuff they include.

I think these immutable distros have this very attractive set it and forget it actually semi bulletproof quality to them that I suspect makes them a stronger competitor to commercial desktops. If you can fit, and that's why it's nice we have a lot of options here, but if you can fit within their defined parameters, I think these immutable distros are a stronger contender. Well, I mean, I think they're spot on.

The most people, devs included, unless you are someone who does want to dev on the desktop, like you don't care about doing the composing, right? Like I might care that I need to add a package that I can run, but you don't care about doing the composing, right? Like I might care that I need to add a package that I can run, but I don't care at all about how the package manager works or the nuances of how the init ramifest gets regenerated. Like that's exactly the stuff that you just should run in the background. And I think we have seen the first signs of this.

What do you think, Brent? I have always been unsure about these immutable systems because everyone I know who's been running them have been Super technical and want to tinker with stuff But then I hear yeah this is going to be perfect for the user who doesn't want things to break and just wants to get things done and I wonder if like last episode where we explored Ohm Archie and the whole point was Like last episode where we explored Omarchi and the whole point was to use Linux for its strengths. Is this a version of using Linux for its strengths that might get, like Bazite, a big input of

users that are looking for a specific thing that traditional distros didn't offer? I think so. And I think, you know think Bazite is a great example of where we're seeing this. That's Bazite out of all of the Universal Blue projects has the most traction. And it seems to have appealed not because it's technically interesting and not because it includes this or that,

but simply it just makes gaming on a device like the Steam Deck really approachable. And it solves a lot of challenges just out of the box, and it's created this bit of a perception shift around Linux, and I think you particularly see it with YouTubers. It's the gaming that has sort of opened the door for these popular YouTubers to talk about Linux and open it up to a new demographic. And I think it's winning because it's working, right? That it just works. And kind of, especially with like, they were pretty early, right? With like, getting all the graphics stuff shipped, which is exactly the layer of, you know, desktop dev that you can be an expert at like using Linux as a dev workstation and understand nothing about Mesa and OpenG.

Yeah, there's all these layers of how graphics and gaming should work on the desktop and now you don't have to care. Here's another thing that's been a weird shift for me is now after a while of using NixOS and now 50 days of using Bluefin. When I do jump on an arch box, I don't remember, we were just on arch recently for something. Oh, Merchie. Oh, yeah, right. When I jump on an Arch box, I feel like I'm flying without a parachute. Like I got no safety net, even though I'm not afraid of breaking the system necessarily. But it feels like you're using the computer in root mode almost constantly. Wait, I can just install packages right into my root file system? Yeah, it's weird.

Like an animal? And this is where I think, if this idea that these immutable distributions or desktop experiences, whatever you want to call them, become more and more popular, which it does seem like that is happening. And myself, I don't really see myself using non-immutable distros and ones that are atomically updated going forward.

I just don't know why I would go back interesting I do think you'll March you and the Omicube stuff makes for an interesting thought experiment just in terms of how we classify things right like What is and isn't a distribution because like in some ways a March? He feels like a lot of what bluefin especially DX is doing in terms of making yep a well put together development ready to go Workstation they just didn't they left all the regular stuff of you install arch or Ubuntu DX is doing in terms of making a well put together development ready to go workstation they just didn't they left all the regular stuff of you install arch or Ubuntu and then run our stuff on top and then the bluefin and you blue folks are taking going one step further back to then

Not be the full distribution as we were talking about but to step into more of bottling that and shipping it as atomic units That you can deploy and then you have all the way up to like, your fedoras building the whole thing. But the universal blue stuff is a more modern way to do it than the way the Oma Archie, OmaCube stuff is, right? That's bash scripts and installing packages from the package manager. It's like a layer, right? It's almost the exact analogy with containers, right?

They took a lot of... Because if you look at the structure, there's a build.sh that sources a bunch of other build modules. In that respect, it's it's they took a lot of because the stripe you look at the structure There's a build on SH that sources a bunch of other build module. It's in that respect. It's very similar Once you're in the containerized build environment, what's actually happening between it and Omar? You're very similar. I think right, but then you just stuff all of that in the OCI Bootsy layer But the different yes, but the difference is right. It's happening on each end user system. There's a lot of variability there There's a lot of things that can go sideways after time. A big part of this is shift left.

We do the builds, and then we know the build worked, and then we ship you that. Exactly, so there is that difference. But otherwise, how they actually get composed is at the end of the day relatively similar. That's where I think it's so fascinating, because it exposes this, probably a spectrum is not enough dimensions for this whole chart

of different options of where you can be on quote unquote distribution space. But here's where I'm going with this, probably a spectrum is not enough dimensions for the, you know, this whole chart of like different options of where you can be on quote unquote distribution space. But here's, here's where I'm going with this is I think NixOS is, if you will, a divergent path in this immutable future where these other systems try to hide some of this from the user and they try to, you know, maybe they offer Brew and the Flat Hub and they try to like, you know, give some options there. Where NixOS is like you go all in and you're managing that you're the one that's constructing that environment. It feels like NixOS and will be the escape hatch

where you have this future, but you're in total control. And you're composing it yourself on the fly with the configuration versus these image based ones, where you're composing it yourself on the fly with the configuration versus these image-based ones where you're basically taking their experience and then you're building on top of that if you know how to do that. It's gonna be two very different paths in the immutability world and the best way

to really appreciate and understand what I'm saying is to try them both. For sure, yeah. Because I think that's where there really is an individual layer of like, what works for you? What escape patches do you actually need? Which things do you want to tweak?

And do they fall into the class of how easy is it to do? How often do you need to do it? And how annoying do you find the process? And if you haven't tried one yet, it might be worth doing that just because this is such a trend that seems like it's not going away. Like I said, we have just about every distribution under the sun that's taking a stab at this. There's a lot of options out there. So there's some shopping you can do, there's some playing around you can do, there's some experimenting you can do to really get a sense of this and at

least have some experience even if you, you know, don't make it your daily driver. They're really nice too. Blufin is a sort of secondary OS on your machine to boot into if you have other problems or you just, you know, whatever. True. It's really nice. You know it'll be rock solid,

a little update in the background. And right now, I mean, they're nice and fresh. They got recent Fedora, great desktops. It's a good time. And Blufin's got that fresh installer, which is also pretty nice. OnePassword. comm slash unplugged that is the number one password comm slash unplugged all lowercase Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application even unmanaged shadow it

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I don't know, since they first came out. But I want to know, are you going to try this? Have you been using it for a while? How has that journey gone? If you wanna boost in, let us know, that would be amazing. But mostly today, Chris, I'm curious, how has your 50 days of Bluefin gone? Can you believe we're here at this part already?

No. Like 50 days. Oh, I guess that means it's been 50 days since Red Hat Summit. That's right, it was Boston. I was inspired by all the Bootsy and cloud native buzz. So I had a next book that Olympiad Mike had just recently gave us. And I thought, all right, this is the most sacrilegious thing I can do. But here we go.

So I deployed Bluefin on that laptop and while we were at our Airbnb and then when we got back, we deployed it on what had been a neon workstation which is now well currently an Aurora workstation so I of course I played around with it here and there live but I mostly just put it on the two systems I use the most which is my laptop in the studio workstation and it's also not only my 50-day mark of using bluefin but it's also the four year anniversary of Universal Blue, the project. Which congrats to them.

Yeah. And they started with Blufin, so that technically makes it four years of Blufin. So I'm using a distribution that just turned four years old. There's about 25,000 weekly check-ins of Universal Blue systems. Bazzite being the most popular, Blufin and Aurora are up there. Of course, that includes Silver Blue and KenoKnight as well. You know, regardless of if it's your community or your distro or image or not,

it's just, it's great to watch folks building and finding software and Linux stuff that works for them. And there's like a lot of organic excitement around UBlue and the team behind it, and I think that's great. And the thing that's neat too is a lot of the original team still involved. So that gives it a unique vibe.

In fact, you could argue they're still very much the center of their community, and their community really takes place, I think, on their discourse. They don't have like a Reddit presence or a big social media presence outside of that. But it gives it kind of a unique vibe where these people are still very much involved,

they're approachable, and they're making news and they're still, it's fascinating. It definitely has its own dynamic, unlike other distros. And I think it's good. So let's start with the good and I'll get to the bad of using Blufin now for 50 days. I think my favorite feature has been the auto update and forget it feature, which you can turn on. It's not on by default, but it's nice.

And after about a month of not rebooting my system, because it was just rock solid, I did get a notification that said, you should probably think about rebooting. Nice. That's a good touch. Yeah, yeah, it was. The UJUST command, which comes with all of these Universal Blue based images is really nice. It makes it easy to update everything.

It lets you do lots of system tweaks and additions like setting up Distro Box or virtualization, gaming, turning on the command line bling and a lot of things like that. It also has like a TUI mode where you can see all the options and get a brief description and see what they do. So that's pretty nice. And of course, it is immutable, so it has a read-only root file system. So only VAR and Etsy are writable by the user.

And that really hasn't been an issue once. It's really been nothing but positive. And I don't know, Brent, if I told you, you know, you couldn't write to anything but VAR and Etsy, you'd think, well, that's not gonna work for me. But it's been totally fine. I actually can't remember the last time I wrote anything but VAR and Etsets, to be honest.

So as soon as you say, oh, no, those two folders are writable, it's like, well, am I losing anything? It doesn't sound like I'm losing anything. And I think they make a lot of good out-of-the-box app choices. They just recently decided to change from GNOME software to, I think, Bazzer, which I've been trying, and I liked a lot. You do end up needing to, I think,

add a lot of additional software and set up a lot more stuff but the base stuff they include has been really good. See, this is one of my big hesitations actually. You mentioned in our, you know, the previous segment how difficult it is, let's say if you want to switch to Docker from Podman, which is built in by default. And I'm just curious, well, why not have a version of Bluefin that's so vanilla, but they have flat packs that are pre-installed? Because that would be a lot easier to modify, for instance.

I'm assuming it's because some of these choices need deeper system, I don't know, integration? Is that the case? Well, some things are like Firefox and whatnot. Those are a flat pack. In fact, in the build, you can actually see at some point it uninstalls the Firefox RPM and then it installs the flat pack of Firefox. Like when you go through and watch a custom build of it, right? So that's been interesting. But I think some things like brew have to be installed

in the way they are so that way you can put packages on the system. So some things do require that level of integration. Right. like if they want to deliver the appliance part Then they need some stuff to build with so I think that's to some extent right like if you want to install a bunch of The bling well some of the fancy, you know shell helpers come from brew or if you're gonna You know ship images and you need a bunch of escape hatches Then you probably need a container run time So then you're gonna have one and it's pretty tightly integrated and hooked into the terminal. And then so if you want to option options, then do you have to how much work is that to swap out or parallel maintain?

So they've tried to make you just handle a lot of that stuff, but you can definitely, you know build from copy their build and from the upstream fedora stuff and tweak stuff out that way if you'd like to. If you really want to learn how to we can talk more about that Yeah, we'll talk more about that. But what I will say It really has been very Minimal maintenance. I mean I had the least fussing the least maintenance I have ever had with any desktop system Period Chris can't break it approved. You heard it here. Right? It is solid. So here's the bad. That's the good Here's the bad what has worked amazingly well on my studio workstation

Has made me feel a bit boxed in on the laptop. This was most felt when setting up the system Some changes require pulling down very large images for what seems like a simple change And I mean I'm talking gigs and gigs of images which not a problem on the studio workstation on Ethernet. Bit of a problem when you're on the go with a laptop on LTE but after the system is mainly set up you will run into this from time to time but it's pretty livable so it's not that I don't want to overstate it but it's definitely worth having a solid internet connection when you first set up your box. You will feel that. But I will admit, some of my bias here is I'm not a big brew fan.

I never really have been. In my opinion, it's slow. It uses a lot of computer resources when it is running. And the package availability, while decent, nowhere near AUR or Nix. What, you didn't want a package system written in Ruby? I don't get that, Chris. And so I found myself really suffering

during the TUI challenge. I mean, if it was something that I couldn't run via Podman or Flatpak, I had to play this game of Distro Box Roulette. Which package manager out of the available Distro Box images can I actually get this installed in? And man was that tedious and a real pain in my butt. And you know, they have this thing called developer mode where you kind of like kick it up into a more

advanced user mode. And it made me think, well they're not opposed to having more advanced users and modifications. So it'd be really nice if there was like a UjustNix command that set up the nix package manager or the determinate systems nix installer in like a bluefin blessed way where you had a slash nix. I mean the software availability would be incredible. It would open up, you'd have brew, you'd have nix. It would be amazing.

You could get just about anything in the free software world installed. But I did a little digging around, and it seems like the project not really a big fan of this. I kind of find this fascinating. I was looking too, because I don't know if you remember, they used to ship it. Yeah. Well, if you go look it up on Google, Google AI answers still claims they do. And they also ship DevBox, which might have been why they were shipping it originally.

Yeah, so there's kind of some interesting history there. You can see some users sort of like, oh, why did this disappear? And it's another case where people are kind of confused because kind of just low key change log notes. And then I guess most of it happened on Discord conversation around it. And so there's multiple people sort of asking and digging up how it happened and where. And there's definitely been lots of asks over the years. So I'm kind of getting a little bit of spicy pushback.

Yeah, I mean, it usually starts with, sorry, this is out of scope for us, but then if the person pushes back at all, it kind of gets a little contentious. Like, I think it's totally fair to have, you know, they get to say no, they get to make this project, they're totally right to point out that you can, you know, they publish a whole bunch of docs on how to go make your own images on top of this and have a whole

workflow designed to let you do so. So that's all totally valid. And I do wonder about that, like, A, just that a lot of people keep asking, that's a signal. And then B, like, if you have to add brew, is it really out of scope? Like, I know they've had issues with SC Linux, none of them use it. So they're not really like they don't want to deal with the maintenance burden or any maintain any of it. It's just sort of something feels a little inconsistent that it used to did it

used to be in scope, what part of the scope change where it's no longer in scope. And as a user, it would be such an unlock. It would be such an unlock. And my kind of next best is an ArchDistro box with the AUR. But I'll tell you, the AUR hit rate ain't what it used to be, kids. I have a lot of stuff failed to build with AUR that I have no problem installing from Nix packages. Brew also seems right out of the box, like a strange choice for a Linux distribution to rely on as its primary place to get, you know, packages for user land.

I think they specifically like that it is distribution agnostic. That's because they don't really consider themselves a distribution, right? They're they're built on top of these core images and then they can layer in Brew, which works in user space and is distro agnostic itself. I know part of the issue with Nix was SE Linux compatibility and homebrew plays nicer with that out of the box, I believe. I just feel like when's the last time you had brew on a Linux distribution period, like I don't think I've ever run into it.

So it seemed like an odd choice. I'm glad you got to at least give it a taste, Chris, and tell us that one. It is funny. I installed something recently, and the error output was about being unable to do something on macOS. Like, it had some sort of post install script for Macs, and it tried to execute it and it failed.

So OK. So say a guy wanted to add Nix, just the package manager. So you know you still had bluefin or aurora you had the file system Standards you you know you really are in a kind of a red hat for door experience But you just wanted the NICs package availability It's a great place to run it really in that sense because you don't have to care about the OS you can just use it for Isolated dev environments or for running whatever package This is an example of where you need to start making your own custom images. And so we thought, well, this would be a neat opportunity to try to build BlueNixFin, which

Wes Payne, you gave a go. I did give a go. We'll also have some links. There's a few different folks out there who've taken stabs at this as well. Yeah, it's kind of fun to go learn more about how you go build your own images. I tried both from cloning the whole repo for Blufin and building that just to see what a base from Silverblue, from Fedora,

building the whole thing looks like. But if you don't wanna make crazy changes or not add, if you don't wanna remove stuff that's deeply tied in, they've got an image template repo that you can just fork on GitHub or clone locally. It's all powered by Just with a Just file, so that's your entry point just like with UJust on on Blufin. And what this does is it it's got a container file set up that runs a build.sh script that's ready for you to add your own scripts or whatever you want into. So is this where you would say like create a slash nix directory at the root?

Exactly. You can install extra software, you can add extra directories or manipulate stuff. Because like one of the core complications here is you need a slash nix, which you don't get unless you modify the image. That's also been made more difficult recently. I believe as of 42, they're now moving to use compose FS as the thing that like composes and puts together this read only root file system, which has better integration.

I guess it also allows like hashing and check something for security around like what the final file system looks like and stuff. But it means it's even harder to do hacks at like runtime without modifying the image to make it have a, and especially for Nix, which is like really all the stuff that's built is assuming a slash Nix at the root.

So you really need it. So you get in this build.sh, you make your modifications. Yeah, and so that's run as part from the just file as building, it starts from, like it's just a container file that the start that says from, and then bluefin, bluefin dx, bluefin, GTS, Aurora, you know, whatever the base image you want. And then it handles running your build.sh for you

in the right environment that's set up so that like RPM OS tree can run and commit your changes at the very end automatically. So you don't have to think about that. So base one of just getting Nix going is yeah, you just need to add a makekdir slash nix so that that's there to work with. And then shout out to the determinant Nix folks because they've done a lot of work and

continue to do so to not only get Nix to play better. I mean, you don't get a whole bunch of extra verification, but just to play better out of the box with SC Linux enabled systems, which is great. And then also specifically to make their installer work on OS tree systems. Oh. Now this gets tricky if you're trying to do it. I was building my own version of their installer,

which obviously has a flake, so it's easy to do, which is great. Because they know to figure out, basically you use slash var. So you make slash var slash nix or something like that. And then you bind mount that over the empty slash nix that you make in the image. And so if you leave them var slash nix or something like that. And then you bind mount that over the empty slash nix that you make in the image. And so if you leave them a slash nix and you run it at runtime, that'll all just work.

Now it gets trickier if what you do, what I was trying to do, which was build one where you could like fully bake nix in. I got that working in single user nix mode where you'd have to use pseudo or like grant yourself permissions. With the multi version one it's tricky because when you're in that build environment,

systemd isn't running, but you want systemd to work. And I think right now some of the setup process sort of assumes that they can like write stuff and then reload the daemon and then check that that worked and like other stuff that you do at runtime. But so you're telling me to really just make it work with the Terminant Systems Nix installer, you just needed to create create slash nix and it could either be var nix that's bind mounted or whatever But well you'll do that happen that can happen at runtime because slash var is writable. You need the right name

Existing in the image at runtime So it seems like the bluefin image just needs slash var slash nix to exist and then a you just Not even that just slash nicks at the bait at the base Okay, well, I was just thinking then a you just image that bind mounted or something But yeah, just like a you just option that just has an image that has slash nicks or um And I think this is what they would push for right is Some community folks who want to copy all you know they they have it's all integrated on github actions You can set it up to build automatically and build a downstream version that adds it on.

I just feel like, yeah, yeah. If you look at some of the issues, their perspective is that even adding that sort of implies support. Right. And I think it's folks that recognize, let's say, that Nix is complicated and that they don't, you know,

it's not a tool that they're engaging with. So I think maybe they've had some bad experiences perhaps. I don't know. See, this is where I feel like though I am going to struggle to keep using Bluefin on my main laptop because like I would like to be able to swap out some of the components, but I don't want to go through the process that you just went through where with NixOS, I would just add it to my configuration. I need to know the syntax, but I can find that pretty quickly,

and then I rebuild, and now that exists. Yeah, there is. That's what I'm struggling with, whereas on my workstation there in the studio, I don't make those kind of changes. That is where I think there's kind of an interesting, maybe gap isn't the right word, but yeah, right? It's optimized for different parts. It's optimized for the appliance user,

and then it's optimized for the distro builder. It would be a great, it would make total sense if you were gonna deploy a fleet of machines and you wanted to make Nixon and engage with this process. If I was DHH and I lived in the container world, this is how I would be building, I'm Archie. I mean, how cool would it be to have this but Arch? That'd be really something.

Then you'd have the AUR. But I agree that it is kind of, unless you're already doing a bunch of container stuff all the time, it is a figure of bit to, I mean, I will say, I think you could definitely do it, because for their image template, it is, you could fork it on GitHub and then just add one line into the stuff

and then have GitHub run it probably even, and then have an ISO file you could use, or a Docker thing. It's definitely doable. Yeah, yeah, maybe. You know, because there are things that I do like about it. And it is a cost where like, once you figured it out,

and you can even use GitHub, it's all set up to like push to GitHub repo and stuff, so you could have it run, bake it in, and then you could just rebase locally. And then once you set it up, you can even set your system to just follow that for updates. So then you can just rebase locally. And then once you set it up, you can even set your system to just follow that for updates. So then you can go into GitHub, trigger the action or whatever to build a fresh one.

Right, that's how you'd wanna do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it could be worth looking at because like I've mentioned it a couple of times in this episode so far, but having the file system hierarchy standard actually on your system turns out is handy. Because what you get is every application that you run, it just sort of seems to understand

it's on a Linux box that knows where stuff is, where this can sometimes be an issue with Nix. True. NixOS, you know, not an insurmountable issue and there's tools to help mitigate it, but it is something you just have to think about and it's something you don't have to worry about with Bluefin. Right. It might be somewhat more incomp it's something you don't have to worry about with bluefin, right? It might be somewhat more incompatible because things can't write to all the places They might want to but yeah for the most part you probably don't want them writing there without very explicit permission

Anyway, and I don't have to decide which version of VS code. I want to install. Yeah There is also something nice about the fact that they support writing to Etsy you dev rules dot D Now this is this is intended to be writable so like when you install a package if it's adding hardware support for a device it can write it to rules.d. The way this works in NixOS is you declaratively define a UdevRule in the configuration and then it generates that rule for you. Now that's probably a better long-term way to manage a system. But an example is like, you want to connect a quick hardware device to flash it, or a steering controller to play a Steam game really quick.

And you forget, yeah, I gotta actually go define a UDEV rule for this. Where with this type of system where it has a actual rules.d that you can just write UDEV rules to those devices tend to just work because a package adds that rule and that experience is a little smoother perhaps not the best long-term way to do it but is a smoother end-user experience. Yeah there's some more escape patches in that way which I think is kind of interesting because there's you know it is more of a component composed system in that you have this core bit and then you do have, you still have a mutable writable Etsy

that's gonna be per device on there in a way that's a little different than like how NixOS does it. Then you've got the Flatpak layer that you might install and then the Homebrew layer as well that all act together to get you your final system. The experience I've had though with the studio workstation, I mean this is such a no-brainer for a headless server

if you just took out the desktop graphical environment and just ran this, this thing, this low maintenance, if you're running everything as an image anyways, man, it's just such a great way to run a server. I know they have a, they're working on something. Yeah, they're working on a new one. So they had one based on CoreOS that I had not tried, but we'd been poking at.

So they have a new one called KO. Yeah, there we go. A boot-see server image for your self-hosting needs. And yeah, you could totally see how this would make a ton of sense, especially when on a server, you might not need to do nearly as much of that kind of, you know, base level changes or customization, especially if you're mostly just running a bunch

of containerized workloads already. It'd be killer. I feel like I'm sticking with it I mean, I think they also they do note they like includes EFS out of the box, too So yeah, not only do I just sort of have everything set up But I just rebased the studio workstation to Aurora and I haven't really played around with the plasma version yet So it seems like an opportunity to keep doing that for a bit. Yeah, what'd you think in the process? So super smooth. I Really really liked the boot C command line stuff is really simple to understand. One liner did the whole thing. Literally a

one liner did the whole thing. And kind of just like what you're used to from NixOS, right? Like if you reboot, you could go choose the other one. I can roll back. I can roll back. That's a big deal. I mean, it really has been super bulletproof to the point where it had to remind me to reboot, you know, and that I think is a pretty good stamp of confidence right there too. It's a really solid system and I feel like it's being built on top of Fedora 42, you know, the latest Fedora stuff which is really good but always just needs a little bit extra and they're adding that. Yeah, it definitely, you know, definitely a lot closer to like a shiny workstation than you get with base Fedora as

lovely as it is. And I'm a lot closer to more like a rolling fedora I mean they have they have to do the updates and they have to rebase when fedora 43 comes out But they're gonna deliver those updates to me and I'm just gonna continue to can yes I have more stuff in flat pack and brew which you can update more on your own timeline Yeah, and then you know there if you use the you just auto update not only will it do all of the Yeah, and then if you use the Ujust auto-update, not only will it do all of the image updates for your system, but it also will do all the brew and flat pack updates in the background for you too.

And the idea is embrace the reboot from time to time, which I need to get better about, and then you just come into a fresh system that's with everything up to date. Well, you'll just have to start telling us your system uptime, and we can shame you until you reboot more often. Unraid.net slash unplugged. system uptime and we can shame you until you reboot more often.

Unraid.net slash unplugged. Go unleash your hardware with Unraid. It's a powerful, easy-to-use NAS operating system for those that want control, flexibility, and efficiency in managing your data. Unraid is built on top of modern Linux and it allows you to mix and match drives of any size. That's a big one right there. That means what you have in your closet right now, you could throw into production and start utilizing. It also includes built-in support for tail scale, so just like check a box and the applications on your tail net.

Static IPs of course are supported, but even better for those of us that can't run it, it now also supports Wi-Fi out of the box. But the thing that really sings are the thousands of applications and the super active community. Not only are they great with support, but they're always coming up with stuff. I just noticed community member John M. recently submitted a script that can automatically monitor the CPU usage of your Unraid box and then shift power profiles so that the unraid box is using the most efficient power profile per CPU demand and it can do it dynamically too. It's just that kind of stuff. There's just a brilliant, brilliant, passionate community around unraid which means that

when you do run into some sort of challenge or you have a question or something you want to try, you're generally gonna find somebody else that's done it or can help you figure it out. The other thing that's really nice and just saves you a ton of time, the VM stuff for like passing through a GPU or sharing a GPU or getting templates so that way you can just design something and then always build from that. All really, really straightforward with Unraid. Probably the most efficient way to do it.

And then in 7.1, they took the ZFS support that's been in Unraid for a little bit and they really brought to the next level by making it possible for you to migrate from an existing Ubuntu system or a Proxmox box or a free NAS. You know when you're ready to go something a little more powerful that has a bigger community and more applications, a little more flexible, well that's Unraid. And so it's it's really something that lets you get started with a lot of the stuff we talk about on this show in just minutes.

So go learn more and support the show. You go to unraid.net slash unplugged. Go check it out. You've probably heard about Unraid, but if you actually tried it, they do a lot of neat stuff and they have a great model over there to make sure they can continue building that thing and following the latest developments in Linux. check it out and support the show go unleash your hardware

Without having to lock into some sort of rigid setup unraid net slash unplugged Well from last episode we received a little feedback from Zack writing Hey, I haven't had a chance to try it yet but when you guys were talking about Oh Marchie and Having a better update mechanism to remove things that you didn't want in there First thing that came to mind was the common arch project Seems to be very similar to the boot C and bootable container projects But based on creating arch and other distrobased containers instead of being tied directly to OS Tree like Bootsy is.

In theory, you could basically run the Omarchi install script at container build time and then have a bootable image that could just be installed directly and updated atomically. I haven't played with it yet, but I'll be sure to report back if I do and see if you guys give it a try. Oh, thank you, Zach. Yeah, this looks very interesting. I don't think I've heard of common arch before, but having a similar idea, right? Like I think one of the strengths of these kinds of approaches is just like containers

worked to wrap whatever language and runtime that you needed, right? They can work to wrap whatever Linux you've needed as long as you've got the right sort of hooks to make it deployable and runnable. So if CommonArch does that part of it, that sounds great. We've got a link here from Zach to their GitHub org. I don't know if they have any more docs.

I see ISO Builder, System Base, Core, which is a Docker file. So I don't know the best way to find out more But if anyone else does I think it would be definitely something we take a look at Might be pretty new, you know on a quick. I'm Archie update. I saw DHH post that they're working on Getting it down to a five-minute install from a fresh system. So essentially like an ISO It has like a five minute setup. He's also been joking about creating Omicon, a Linux conference with vibes.

And he just did a- Did you promise we'd go? No, not yet. He did a six hour Lex Friedman interview and I skimmed it. I don't think Omarchy itself came up, but his thoughts on open source and WordPress and removing his systems from the cloud did come up. So it sounds like there's a lot more still coming to Omar Archie and we'll keep an eye on it.

I think it's a fascinating project. I suspect you do too. I don't know, what do you boys think? You think it's fascinating, right? Like not something we're necessarily using, but definitely noteworthy. Yeah, absolutely. It's great to see people

Messing with building on tweaking configuring and sharing cross collaborating on Linux I think the thing we're most excited about is the demographic He's going after the way he's talking about it and advocating it. I'm definitely gonna check back in soon I think that's something we should do a Couple of shoutouts. I want to try to do this more often So I want to just give shout outs to people that are contributing value back in time and effort to the show and two solid folks that do this on a near daily basis are CGBasePlayer and ChanceM in the web chat. They're always working on the website just making sure things go but recently they had to help with a migration. We moved this week in Bitcoin

to be fully hosted on the Jupiter broadcasting website. There's a lot of little bits there they had to pick up for us. So I wanted to give them a shout out and then I wanted to solicit you listening. If you notice somebody in our community who's extra helpful or helping with the show in some way and sending value back, call them out either with a boost or a message in Matrix. We want to try to give those people more attention because it's the community members that are doing those things that really make a big difference. We really appreciate it. So shout out to all of you out there who contribute some value

back in time and talent. Four score and seven boosts to go. And of course we have those of you who contribute your time, talent, and treasure. And the treasure in the form of a membership or a boost. And we have a couple of great boosts here. In fact, I'm going to say it's KS Koba, who is our baller booster this week with 50,000 sats. Hey Rich Lobster!

They write, hey guys, I'm a new listener to Unplugged coming over from the self-hosted podcast. I tried to get into Linux a few times over the last year to have a more work focused computer I'm an academic in an emergency room doc, which means writing lots of research manuscripts or journal articles This means collaborating with others on word doc files That has the track changes the comments all stuff, and needs a reference manager software. This has been, as he puts it, my friction point, bouncing me off of Hyperland and Ubuntu for the last two times, ultimately giving up and going back to Windows where I can't

find a comparable program. Any recommendations for others doing this kind of work are ways to interact with Windows colleagues. I dream of whizzing around my desktop using hotkeys, tuis, and workspaces." Aw. This is such a good question. It's interesting for that kind of environment too, where I would assume if you can optimize your keystrokes to save you time in any way, it is welcomed.

And if you get used to something like a tiling window manager, that can certainly do that for repeated actions. So I could see why there's this desire. Yeah. But interacting with other colleagues with Word documents. This is tricky because if you still live in a world where everybody's using the desktop application workflow and they're using this reference manager

software that's Windows specific, that's where you get jammed up right what's what's liberated Linux users over the last decade has been the migration to web apps where yeah web work doesn't matter what platform you're on yeah back in the day when I had to use some Windows apps like that I ended up just running it all under VM so I just have like a Windows VM and I would do it in there. At that time I was using VirtualBox which had the functionality to pop out Windows from inside your Windows VM. So I can't say I would recommend that setup to anyone saying

but you know there are things you could do like that but it would depend on how much of, you know, if it just means a single giant VM window and you don't get any of the benefits, this is probably not worth it. If it's like you can run a couple of apps in a way where you can still take advantage of your window manager and Linux shortcuts,

maybe there's something there. Yeah, I was hesitant to recommend the VM route just because that can be painful. You also need hardware that's gonna do it in a way that isn't awful to work with. But you could just have a dedicated Windows virtual desktop and you just run Windows full screen on that virtual desktop

and when you switch over to it, you're in Windows and and you switch back and you're doing all your other work. I mean it's doable. Let us know if you find anything KS and if anybody has any recommendations please send them and we will pass them along because I have been in that spot. Been there and I really feel feel for you. Also thanks for boosting and listening to the show. Nice to have you on board. feel for you. Also, thanks for boosting and listening to the show. Nice to have you on board. No stromboosting with 25,000 cents. Good news, everyone. I we got some weird looking in stuff and maybe improperly or incomplete base 64. You have to fix his improperly encoded message.

Well, it looked like base 64. So. It wasn't totally happy, but it did spit out, hi, with a smiley face. So we'll take it. Hello there. I like that you had to razz him on his improperly word. I mean, it could have been my software processing it, too. Who knows?

I mean, you could have just not called him out. I mean, I'm just saying. It could be my Base64. Oh, yeah, no. You're walking it back. He's back there. Yeah, now you're back. I wasn walking it back. He's backpacking. Yeah, now you're back.

I wasn't trying to blame you, Stromo. Thank you, Stromo. Appreciate the boost. Well, there's a mega row of ducks here from Derivation Dingus. Hey, Chris, I think you nailed it with the point about how early we are on everything here at Lennox Unplugged. We aren't wrong. The rest of the world is just slow.

At least that's what I'm going to tell myself. You know what they say, stay humble and stack sats, you lovely bunch of trendsetters. Oh, thank you, Derivation. I've been reflecting on that. I still feel that way. You know, we're out there a little. We're too ahead of things sometimes. And it means that we don't necessarily address the mass market we could potentially be addressing. But hopefully you're all still listening in 2050, the year of the Linux desktop. One day, we'll be right. One day.

MikZip, that's how I say it, comes in with 20,000 sets. There's coffee in that nebula. Please, more unhinged AI audio as you come across it. Oh boy. You have no idea what Wes creates on a weekly basis Daily basis, let's be honest. Oh, man. Do you have any recent favorites with? There's been some good ones there have been yeah. Yeah, I love it when you get the voices That's always my favorite. Well that British van lifer was pretty decent. I was

But I'll keep that in the try to pick a very good one sometime. Yeah, they're mixed up. There you go. Show worthy doornail 7887 comes in with a row of ducks First boost. Hello. Thank you. Yeah coming in from pond verse. Nice. Wow So not only is it their first boost, but then they also set up Albie Hub, I'm imagining. Probably, yeah. Well done. Episode 620 hit home for me. Brent loves building things. I have 11 ESPs spread across a larger property

with a barn, greenhouse, and a garage, all separated from the house. My guy. Zigbee and Z-Wave never really worked, but Wi-Fi solved my problem. One ESP8266 is a custom thermostat for our greenhouse furnace. All powered by Home Assistant.

Saves a ton in propane costs. Now I can't seem to get Fountain working at all. Email codes just say, that didn't work. Any ideas? No, that's a very odd, it's a very odd error message. But they do have a Telegram group. If you're on Telegram, you might pop in and see if somebody can help you there.

Way to persevere too, you know, bouncing off fountain. Yeah. You still have to boost, so props. No kidding, no kidding, absolutely. Gosh, dang it. Coming in hot with the boost. I like you, you're a hot ticket. I like you, you're a hot ticket.

Thanks, Dornell. I have fantasized about using Home Assistant to automate a greenhouse, because it just seems perfect, both from the heating and the cooling and the humidity monitoring. You could also do soil. Sweet plant dashboard, yeah. Yes, dude. You've also fantasized about using ESPs

to get a custom thermostat in Lady Joops. Oh, for sure, like to run the furnace, yes, absolutely. One day, one day. Well, BHH boosts in... 2000 Sats. You make me want to be a better man. Aye, guys, I just looked into SniffNet, which was the pic from last episode. That GUI toolkit is iced. Just figured I'd let you know. Oh, thanks BHH.

Yeah, nice to hear from you. Thank you for the boost. Well, PJ's here with 12,140 Sats. This is why I have bedtime wine. Ahead of the Curve with Linux stuff, this boost amount is how long ago the last Arch Challenge was prior to the release of this episode. Can you figure it out? It's 12,140. I remember thinking, it's about dang time. Yeah, fair, fair. Yeah, we're done. That's the crazy thing about our audiences

They're ahead of us on a lot of this stuff, too So Wes, did you did you do the math there? Well, what let's see we got some hints, huh? Yeah, the first two digits is years ignore the zero So said 2013 if we subtract 12. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, and then that sounds right ignore the zero Oh, how long ago? Oh, yeah, that's a tricky one I was gonna say 12 might be 2012. It's close to 2012 to be 2012 2012 2013 seems like the right range What are we doing with the 14 though? It's not for the yearly. Yeah, 14 14 2012

Alright nailed it. Let us know how we did, PJ. Let us know. Rotted mood boost in with $10,000. Oh, I'm in. Ah, this is a check-in boost from episode 618, the Tooie Challenge kickoff. Ah. We got some Live Long and Prosper's,

and mood says getting caught up on old episodes. A time traveler check-in. Thank you, sir. Live long and prosper. Appreciate that. That's nice. See, we're getting some data. That's great.

Yeah. Pingu98 boosted in another row of ducks. Keep up the awesomeness. I'm a recovering Linux on Chromebook addict. Finally got working audio on my 2019 Pixel Go running Ubuntu 2504. It's like having a new machine. Finally got working audio on my 2019 Pixel Go running Ubuntu 25.04. It's like having a new machine. I could probably have done that ages ago with Arch, but I'm not quite there yet.

Nice. You know, we all got into some kind of weird thing. I, instead of doing Chromebooks, got into netbooks for a while. Oh yeah, I had a netbook. Thought that was going to be a big thing. That was a great size. We did get Unity out of that. Thank you, Pingu. Appreciate that. Marcel's back with 5,000 Sats. Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. Brent, I didn't tell you about these projects last time I saw you, simply because they

didn't exist yet. I'd be happy to talk about them next time you're in Germany, though. Wink, wink. I can even bring the ePpaper screen. I know you love Berlin, but Bavaria is worth a visit too. I'm noting how a lot of these European cities start with bees. So all the bee cities must be the good ones, right? Makes me hungry. Makes me think of breakfast. Yeah, I did call on Marcel last episode because he mentioned all sorts of really great projects that the last time we were together we didn't get a chance to chat about. So glad to hear you're learning new things

and always pushing the envelope. Sounds like we're on the same path. I like that. And it is nice to hear from you, Marcel. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy. Comfy boosts in with 2,500 sets.

Just pump the brakes right there. No message, all sets. Thank you, sir. Appreciate the value. But Gene Bean comes in with double ducks. Ooh, that's 4, all sats. Thank you sir, appreciate the value. But Gene Bean comes in with double ducks. Oh that's 4,444 sats. Oh my god this drawer is filled with fruit loops. Ah fuck! Oh and this one's directed right at me. Wes, how do you deal with the fact that ESPHome in Nix is always way behind? Ah fair. I've tried going that route for building updates but it lags behind HAOS and the associated add-in too much. So far for me, I've res going that route for building updates, but it lags behind a HAOS and the

associated add-in too much. So far for me, I've resorted to just using a virtual environment on macOS to do builds so that the versions match and builds are fast. So I'd be curious to know, actually in practice, why you need the latest versions of ESPHome. That's what I was curious about because generally unless you're doing something pretty new, I don't really know if you need it. Like in practice, I don't know how much it matters and I'm curious if Gene Bean has a reason why. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, right. How often do you need to update if you're not making a change or whatever?

I don't think it's going to impact you. I did a little bit of looking and my first honest answer, Gene, is I just really haven't used it really in anger yet. So it may be that I run into exactly this problem. I do suspect I may, I'll probably start pretty small and may not need to update them a ton once they are working. So we'll see how much that matters. So I mean, you're talking about setting up pretty basic like IR blaster, temperature sensor type stuff.

Yeah, that's where I'm starting anyway. And I've been surprised how well it has worked. I did look and right now, or at least as of whenever this boost came in the other day, it was up to date in terms of the ESPHome package in Nix. And it looks like the last few updates are pretty much just the real good kind of Nix packages updates,

where it's basically just changing a version, the URLs all stay the same, the dependencies stay the same, and you just need a new hash and a new version string. And those are really pretty easy if I did need to hack that in to myself to get a new version. I'd be willing to do that,

or even just clone the package or whatever. So, may do that with an escape hatch, but I think right now this is homework for me to do some more ESP work this summer so I can report back on if this is actually a problem in practice. Yeah, and if Gene has any examples, I'd love to know. Totally, yeah, I'm curious,

more about your setup there, Gene. He also had something we should check out, which looks like it's some hyperland setups that are kind of like ready to go For like different it's like jaculet. I think is how you say. Okay. Yeah, put a link to that in the show I've already played with the fedora one and plan to try the Ubuntu one today. I mean, that's neat I'm cool a passionate Linux enthusiast. Okay and tech hobbyist Need but sharing cool setups. Yeah fedora hyper Hyperland, Hyperland, Debian Hyperland, MixOS Hyperland's in here.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Thank you, Gene. Well, Magnolia Mayhem sent us not quite a row of docs, it's 3,333 sets. Well, that's very good, buddy. All caps, it says, go podcasting. Yeah, go podcasting Thank you. Go podcast nice to hear from you mayhem appreciate that that came in this morning as the live stream was getting set up

So thank you. That's a fresh boost Fabian came in with 2,500 sets Also a fresh boost came in on our live stream. I disagree that Google isn't crawling more. Every website I manage is getting hit by bots, including Google bots, way more than I've seen in the last 15 years, especially in a faceted search page, a lot harder. I have also been seeing a lot of noise about the bots' intensity increasing. We were talking about in the pre-show, there's this number they have now of something like,

would they say 1,500 bot scrapes to every one user visit? Yeah, and I think maybe, because I think they were trying to say more that the visits were going down, not necessarily anything about the scraping traffic. But the scraping traffic is also going up. That one makes it totally different. So it's a two, what they're getting at is, the problem is is that the a lot of times information is either provided

directly by Google or an AI assistant now So you don't need to go to the website and they're scraping more often and of course people want to have more current information So that's probably another reason why the scrapers are turned up It is a problem. I don't know like It's like could be maybe we level off like it's really hard to say where this goes if people have other insights on this Or if you've noticed traffic your project. I really wonderful see more right like cloud flares trying to do more like a hey If you paid a scrape, we've seen like the Anubis project You all talked about on self hosted right coming in and right so well

Thank you everybody who supported the show with a boost you helped make episode 623 directly possible with your support shout out to all 24 of you who just stream those sats as you listen You just sat back and sent some value collectively you stacked sixty three thousand two hundred and twenty seven sats just by Streaming them when you combine that with our boosters. We stacked a total of two hundred,810 sats this week. Not too bad, not too bad. Would love to see that number creep up a little bit, but we still appreciate all the support. It really is one of our favorite segments. We get the interaction with you, new ideas come into the show, and the messages are extremely motivating for us. And on top of that, the

entire thing is built on open source and open standards. There's no middleman, there's no stripe, there's no PayPal taking a cut. It just goes from your podcaster wallet to our nodes. And each of us are set up in a split directly, including the podcast app and the podcast index. Thank you everybody who supports with a boost. You can do it with Fountain FM. That's the easiest way to get started. But there are other paths like Podverse and AlbiHub if you like to do the self-hosted thing and of course you can use the podcast index if you have AlbiHub

too so there's some other options there. Thank you everyone and thank you to our members. Now the show actually begins because this week our pick is a doozy. It's a brand new project that's only about a week old. It was started on kind of a lark, I believe by Jack Dorsey, and now has been picked up by a rather large community. The project is called BitChat and it is Bluetooth mesh chat with IRC vibes. It is decentralized peer to peer messaging that works over a Bluetooth mesh.

No Internet required, no servers, no phone numbers. You can do private chats. You can do public group chats. It is very early days, so we're not necessarily counting on the security, but it has a lot of great security ideas implemented. We'll want to see how it goes. It is an open source project. But what's really insanely neat is that it is decentralized mesh networking, not like Meshtastic, which is using low-powered radio. This is just using the Bluetooth

in your phone. So it's a much shorter range thing, but you could think of, you know, at an office, at a group event, during a protest, you could actually really see different scenarios where being able to stand up, mesh group chat very quickly could be really valuable. I'm blanking. In a past episode, I tried one I used on the plane. I might've used the WiFi, maybe use Bluetooth,

but it was not nearly as slick or easy. Like this was, besides the permissions step, which is standard these days, it really just worked pretty quick. I mean, you and I- Popped right on. Yeah, you updated yours and then we were able to immediately chat.

And it has such, such awesome IRC vibes. And I've really been missing IRC recently. Like you do a slash and you get this beautiful menu of all your different commands. You know, you can set up a new channel, you can hug someone, you can slap someone with a trout. You know, a lot of the classic IRC stuff. It has emergency wipe too. You can triple tap and clear all the data. iOS and Android versions exist. They use LZ4 for message compression. It has really good adaptive battery

modes and they've really worked on optimizing the networking. It's really fun and early, but each device acts as both a client and a peripheral that does the transmission. It does automatic peer discovery. It has stored and forward offline message delivery. So Wes was able to DM me a message, even when I had the client closed.

I mean, it's pretty neat. That's so great. Right, and again, needs to be tested early days. Don't go using it to exchange a whole bunch of your most precious secrets. But they are trying to use really good encryption technology here too. Okay, and yeah, it does look like what?

There's Android and iOS. It was iOS first and then they ported it to Android, I think, so there's like a Swift and then Kotlin version. Yeah, it's basically two different projects, right? At least the Android one is MIT licensed. I have not checked on the iOS one. I saw TechCrunch did a really lazy takedown. The headline is, quote, Jack Dorsey says his, quote,

secure new BitChat app has not been tested for security. I mean, like, the dude wrote this on a Saturday and a Sunday, and then like on a Tuesday, they're giving him a hard time for not having it audited. Right, and Dorsey's created a white paper, which is what people are following to do the different implementations. So it's really lazy and cheap

to take a shot at something that's like seven days old. But that's the entire pitch of the TechCrunch article. So, you know, this is of course gonna get parroted by anybody that. Hey, you clicked. Well, it got me, yeah. it's just it's it's very It's very clicky iOS version is under the unlicense. Okay Yeah, which is basically straight to the public domain as far as I can see, which is it really interesting

Yeah, I think it's a little harder to get the iOS version because you have to go through test flight at the moment And there's a 10,000 max Right, but you know with Android and especially if you use obtainium you just because you have to go through test flight at the moment and there's a 10,000 max. Right. But, you know, with Android, and especially if you use Obtanium, you just point at the GitHub repo and it just installs the APK. It's really nice. It's so fast and the battery life seems to be very minimal

because I've had it installed for days and I haven't noticed any major impact. I could also see this being just a great chat with the wife and kids around the house. Like, why do we need to be doing anything over the internet? And one of the things that I've always been looking for is some sort of offline We could be camping without internet chat and I was thinking next cloud chat, but that's a lot of it's a lot of overhead I have to run where these are just really simple apps that we could just use for just quick messaging back and forth when like One of us is inside like one of us is inside

and one of us is outside or we just wanna send each other notes. Yeah, and it's just so easy to get going. And the idea of a little Bluetooth app, Bluetooth mesh is so cool. I did look, Briar was the other app that I tried previously. It does Wi-Fi and Bluetooth,

but it's a little more involved. This would be really fun for us to use at conferences whenever we meet up with the JB community just so we can all have a shared experience. I know we did that with Meshtastic. It was at... At scale. Well, we did that at scale. Yeah, we did it a couple of times.

It was fun, but not everybody has a Meshtastic device, etc., but everybody has a Bluetooth on their phone. That's the thing. Where in the giant expo hall are you guys? Well, and you can have channels, so you can see how that could be really useful. And the thing that's nice is A, no account or phone numbers required,

so people don't have to go through a signup process that's always finicky when you're trying to do anything like that at scale, and there's no server. So you don't have to worry about setting up a server that people can get to from the event Wi-Fi, and it's none of that, it's just a Bluetooth mesh. But the other thing that I think is fun and awesome to see is that this was essentially a vibe-coded idea

with a white paper, and it's gone from that to a community building out both iOS and Android versions and creating something real here in like seven days. So it's a perfect example of how sometimes open source software can just catch fire and really take off. And maybe it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it ends up having security flaws. But in the meantime, it's a lot of fun to check it out.

And like Wes says, it's not the distribution. It's the fun you have composing the distribution along the way. And troubleshooting strange esoteric. Anyways, link to BitChat both for iOS and Android and some of the details about how it works in their encryption, which looks like they're really taking a good shot at making this a private communications tool as well. But you just kind of want to wait and see that,

how that works out in actuality. All right, that's it for us. Don't forget, we'd love to hear your experiences with immutable distributions. If you've tried it, if you're willing to try it, if you bounced off of it, any of that, boost in and let us know. It's one way you can support episode 624 and get your message read on the show. Anything above 2000 sats does get read. Now, if you want more shows we're wrapping up and you're wishing we weren't done yet,

you're probably a great candidate for the bootleg. That's at linuxonplug.com slash membership. Right now the bootleg's clocking in at like two hours and 35 minutes with lots of extra content in there. And then last but not least, we should mention Wes, we should try to mention every episode that we have both transcripts and chapters. That's right. So you can find what we've talked about

I just I got an email from individuals says gosh I wish you'd put the names of everything you talk about in the show notes Well one one next best thing to that could be you check the transcript We try to link everything we can at Linux unplugged comm slash six to three or whatever the episode number is But the next best bet would be the transcript. Yep. And those chapters mean you can go right to the segment. So if you want to replay the Bit Chat segment, you sure can. But then the real power move is to join us live. Make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday.

Come on over to JBLive.tv. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station. That's right. JBLive.tv at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. That's where our virtual lug gets together at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern. That's where our virtual Lug gets together in our Mumble Room, our Matrix Chat chats along with us and helps us title the show. It just gives it that live vibe, you know?

Just that live vibe that we like so much. Yeah, if you come, you can hang in a certain Chris Last does a little DJing sometimes. You had some great pics this morning, let me say. Oh, thank you! Thank you. Yeah, you gotta get a little early for that. All right. Well, that's everything we talked about. Links at LinuxUnplugged.com. So that's everything right there. That's it.

Also, you can check out notes.jupiterbroadcasting.com if you want to do some backlog searching. notes.jupiterbroadcasting.com Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode. We'll see you next Tuesday, as in Sunday! So you