LINUX Unplugged - 672: The Kernel Is Not a Museum

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

Your favorite open source projects have been busy. We round up the new releases worth knowing about, plus the big kernel changes headed your way soon.Sponsored By:Webroot: Webroot is cloud-based antivirus, engineered to stay out of your way. For a limited time, you can save sixty percent.Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:AppleTalk 1985-2026 Memorial StickerSorry, I only open regular files StickerWebroot — Save sixty percent when you go to webroot.com/unplugged.💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMWeb Boost — Send us a boost via sats or USDKDE Plasma 6.7 Released With Per-Screen Virtual Desktops, Wayland Improvements - PhoronixPlasma 6.7 - KDE CommunitySee what's next for Firefox — Firefox.comsystemd 261 Released With New systemd-sysinstall OS InstallerIntroducing Myna: Speech to Text for Ubuntu Desktopmyna: Myna is a lightweight speech-to-text application for Ubuntu Desktop.Linux 7.1 Annouced by Linus on Sunday June 14th — Anyway, possible slight hiccups in the merge window aside, the newstoday is 7.1.Linux Kernel 7.1 Officially Released, Here's What’s New - 9to5LinuxLinux 7.1 Features: New NTFS Driver, New Intel + AMD Hardware, Performance Optimizations & Modernization - PhoronixLinux Kernel 7.1 Officially Released with New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED, and Major Code Cleanup | Linux JournalThe first half of the 7.2 merge window - LWN.netLinux 7.2 Adds Ability To Limit Programs To Only Open Regular Files, Avoid Being Tricked Or Doing Silly Things - PhoronixBtrfs Now Enables Large Folios By Default, Lands Huge Folios With Linux 7.2 - PhoronixXFS Zone Allocator No Longer Experimental With Linux 7.2 - PhoronixEXT4 Reworks Fast Commit Handling & Faster Directory Hash Computation - PhoronixLinux 7.2 Improves Anonymous/Unnamed Pipe Performance For Shell Pipelines & More - PhoronixAF_ALG Deprecation Approved For Linux 7.2, Useless & Insecure Crypto Driver Code Removed - PhoronixLinux Finally Ends AppleTalk Protocol Support - Phoronixsoltros/Cabinet — Cabinet is a lean, high-performance "File Locker" designed for self-hosting. It prioritizes a fast web experience, mobile-first design, and simple file management without the bloat of complex syncing engines.Distro Stu's Nix Router ConfigPick: Fluxcast — Stream your Linux desktop to a Smart TV via Miracast/WFD, DLNA, or Chromecast.Pick: audible-cli — A command line interface for audible package. With the cli you can download your Audible books, cover, chapter files.Pick: Import-To-AudioBookShelf — A utility to take books which you legally purchased from Audible and move them into Audio BookShelf

Oh, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen, coming up on the show today, your favorite free software projects, they're not taking the summer off. We're going to round up the releases that you need to know about, including some big changes coming to a kernel near you very soon. And we'll round out the show with some great booze, some picks, and a lot more. So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual lug of ours.

Hello, a mumble room. Hello, hello. Thank you, save us and hello, guys. Hi, guys. Hello. Hello, everybody up there in the quiet listening to. Nice to have you out there.

Also, happy Father's Day to all the dads out there listening. You know, happy Father's Day. Happy Father's Day to the Daddogs out there, too. And the Squirrel Dads. Oh, thank you as well. Happy Father's Day to you as well. And the Cat Dads. Cat Dads, I think, count, right?

Of course. Dads will come in all shapes and sizes. Also, good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking. Go to Defined. net slash unplug. Your network is the most important part of your stack. Let's be real about that. It's your core infrastructure. Performance and control really, really matter here. That's why we love Nebula. So you can get started with Managed Nebula from Define networking. You go to Define.net slash unplug. You get set up 100 hosts for free. No credit card required. It's built on the open source

Nebula platform, which was originally created to connect Snacks, Glope Snacks, Slack's global infrastructure of snacks. You mean, you can imagine how complex that was from the go. That was day one, and they've just built on that since. And unlike traditional VPNs, Nebula is totally decentralized. Your hosts connect directly to each other, and then you can set up your own lighthouses,

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Try it 100 host for free. No credit card required. Go to define.net slash unplugged. Redefine your VPN experience. That is define.net slash unplugged. Let's do the news, boys, and let's start with one of the stories I am really genuinely excited about because a feature I have been waiting for for a very long time has landed in plasma. Plasma 6.7 was released this last week, and they finally baked in per screen virtual desktop.

I think they did it just for you. as well. No, that's not true at all, but I am very grateful. I think that took 21 years is what I saw. There was a bug opened from 2005. And I think I've been complaining about that on there for about 21 years. So have you tried it? Have you tried it? No, because the only machine I have right here in the studio on the screen. Oh, no. That's true. That's horrible. I will, though, because Aurora just updated so fast, so I got it right away. But immediately can notice, I hate to use this phrase, but it is snappier. It is. I'm running it as well. Oh, you are?

Yeah. And you agree. Shout out to the next packages in K-900 for the great work packaging stuff there. Oh, I noticed it immediately. Yeah, me too. I didn't expect that. I didn't either. I mean, because it's not like plasma sluggish.

No, I would not have categorized it as sluggish either. But so this release is the all-whalen, you know, release when, and Nate Graham confirmed that 79% of plasma 6 users were already on whalen. Wow. That's a lot. Wow. A lot of whalen improvements in here. A lot of whalen improvements in here.

Yeah, right. So, X-11. is gone for good in 6-8. Yeah, that's what it is. Something like early 20-27. Yeah, it's gone for good in 6-8. But this, look at this. Whalen only remains planned, yeah,

almost 80% now are on Wayland. Look at that. That's pretty wild. I mean, it is really a smooth experience now. I mean, I think it is generally pretty good. They fixed a bug, too, that was impacting Aurora and Discover, which is nice to see.

Just one of those, like, little small things that they worked in here. The polish overall is something that people often talk about, but it does seem like every single release, we just keep seeing an iteration on Breeze. It's getting better and better. So what I did is once I had the default, or once I had the install,

I switched everything back to all the default, so I could see the new styles and everything like that, and I love it. I love it. Very happy with this release. Just only been using it for like two days so far, but those two days have been really good. There's some interesting things in place

for like what they're calling the union engine they're working on underneath. Basically, they're going to use CSS and then a Rust parser from Servo to like parse that and handle it. And then it's going to be basically one style to rule them all eventually. It's disabled by default for now.

It's a work in progress. But you can see they're doing a lot of work under the hood. A feature they've added that I think we'll find useful is you can now test your microphone volume right there in the little volume hopper. Nice.

Widget. Now that is slick. It's really nice. There's also a nice little touch here. It looks like The Oxygen theme is returning for KD's 30th anniversary. Can you believe that? 30.

Yeah. And apparently it was, quote, really, really in bad shape before the restoration, which was led by Philip Phila. So if you, I don't know, or nostalgic for the oxygen theme, well, there's a modern version now. Yep. Improvements to the clipboard manager, color, lots of performance improvements. GPU rendering optimizations, too, so you don't have to have a big old GPU to do all of this stuff. Here's a couple of other

just quick hits. You can now sync your mouse and stylus pointers, an option to set and change prefer to the calendar app an option to assign keyboard shortcuts to toggling the global push-to-talk microphone mute throughout the plasma applications. There's now an easy way of selecting mixed skin tones and emojis, so you can just have, oh, there's the new emoji thing, the system monitor app that respects

your preferences regarding storage units for gigabytes versus other gigabyte display. It's like a long list of things to go through here. And like a lot of times we joke that Nothing really comes out in the summer, but man, this is one of the major, major releases for plasma in general. And here we are in the summer. It's really great. And it's impressive how fast we're getting it. You've gotten already. I mean, thanks to the maintainers, but I'm running it already.

I just seem to recall it used to be months before I get my hands. Absolutely. We live in a different world now. At least it depends on your distro. But you have the options now if you want something that lets you get it real fast. And, I mean, I think it's just also, you know, the project ship's quite regular releases now. It seems like that cadence is very well polished. So it works well. Yeah, shout out to them, too, for that microphone volume test. I think it's going to be really useful for our guests. Brentley, you tagged a story that Firefox shared with us. I guess they're kind of putting out there essentially what is a roadmap for the future features that they plan to add to Firefox in the near term.

Yeah, I thought this was interesting because it's been a while. since I've dove into what they're trying to do over there. And there's been a little bit of controversy recently with some of their AI features, you know, and they added it on the off button because of all of the pushback. So I was just curious about like, well, what are they thinking the future of Firefox will be? And it's kind of interesting. Like there's a lot that they're working on PDFs. So right in the browser, you will be able to split, merge, and reorder PDFs.

which is an interesting, it makes me believe more that the browser is actually an OS on top of our OS. But for most regular users, I imagine that's really interesting. Also, this feature has been asked for for basically ever,

customizable built-in hotkeys. Yeah. I will note, too, what they've done is this website that you shared with us, which will have a link in the show notes, for the features that you can try now, they just have a button here. So they have like this roadmap of features. And if that feature is available for testing, they have a try now button. That's a neat, neat approach. And they have them

by category as well, like productivity, there's privacy controls that they're working on, AI done differently, they call it. That's the category name. Speed and performance, of course, built in protection, better web stuff, which is an interesting category. So if you're interested in where the browser's going, it's worth looking at. And I just felt good about this. I think having a map like this feels productive. I had totally lost sight of what Firefox is even trying to do, and some of this makes me feel a little better about the future of Firefox. I guess it answers that question. What is Mozilla even doing for Firefox?

Well, here you go. This is what they're doing. They made a what's next page. The thing that grabbed my attention was new web APIs. Wazim JS Promise integration, deferred module evaluation, web transport, and more. Also some like CSS. improvements to support more stuff there. So all stuff making Firefox better at handling whatever random web page you get. HDR video on Linux.

Yeah. Was listed there. This one stood out to me as well. Paskey support for Firefox sync. I don't think you avoid sync users, but that's interesting. Yeah. If you are, you probably won't passkey support at this point.

I'm not using Firefox to manage my passwords, but I do use it to sync everything else. Huh. Huh. Okay. Yeah, good fine, Brent. There's some stuff in there. There's something, you know, It's still doing stuff, which makes me feel a little better.

Wes, you were excited about the System D-261 release, and I was looking through it. There are a couple of interesting goodies in here. Yes, indeed. One you'll notice is the new instance metadata service, or IMDS. Of course, you get SystemD-imDSD as part of that. Got to have that. It's a unified way to access virtual machine metadata. In particular, you're going to see this a lot because it interworks with major cloud platform,

and their metadata services, right? So, like, if you boot up a AWS EC2 instance, then there's, like, an IP you can query and get info about, like, all the stuff, plus all the stuff that's exposed by, like, you know, the virtual bios and whatever is programmed in at the virtual machine layer. And so now all of that kind of stuff sort of classifying, what are you about, like, where you are, the VM environment, what it knows about the VM is exposed in this metadata service.

And you have one spot to look if you hook it up with the system D. way. I suppose, you know, in my current mindset, where that seems useful would be being able to query it at like a scale and then build an inventory and things like that, right? It sort of almost becomes like an API of information about your system. And you maybe don't have to do the like handling of what's the difference between how Amazon does it or Azure does it or Oracle Cloud does it or Hetzner's in here too or even Volter. Okay. That's not what I thought you were going to start with. Oh, you, okay. Okay. Well, it's finally happening. Yeah, here we go. Finally happening.

Ladies and gentlemen. Yes. Okay. Another notable update here is live update orchestrator and Colonel Handover Support in System B. I thought that's what you'd start with. And this has been building. There's been like other parts of this. This in particular includes support for user units and stuff.

But the idea is, so there's K-Exaq, right? Who wants to reboot? It's so slow. Let's just jump immediately to a new kernel without rebooting the system. I'm sorry. K-Exec is too slow? No, no. K-exexex-great's great.

Okay. I'm just trying to say, like, if you haven't heard about Kegzek for a while, that's what it does. Okay, yeah. Right. Instead of doing a whole reboot. You do a live swap. Yeah, you just load, you like load the new kernel into memory and you jump into it. So you're really avoiding the whole post process and, you know, the bootloader.

Mm-hmm. But what's getting really tricky here is the idea because you're not blanking RAM, right? You're not cycling through things. You can hold stuff in memory and theory. Okay. Like, we don't now. When you reboot the kernel, it's as if you reboot it. You get a whole fresh thing.

Right. We'd played with like persistent RAM disk. We tried to kind of solve this with a hackyway. Yes, right. You can, like, tell the colonel, tell Mark memory is sort of like, don't touch this. It's supposed to be a fake sort of,

as if you had a persistent RAM. But at a more fine-grained level, what we now have with the live update orchestration and the Colonel handover stuff is the idea of you can basically declare memFDs, which are like memory file descriptors, which is basically just claiming a chunk of memory, right? But it's interfaced as a file descriptor.

Okay. And so if an application gets one of those and then serializes whatever state it wants, right? So whatever stuff is happening for the application, it's running all of its runtime state. If it dumps that in this MFD or a few or whatever, it can pass that off to SystemD, and SystemD will use the kernel's new orchestration

and update features to save that across a KX. Like a handoff thing. It's like a state handoff. So it stores it in memory, and then it tells the kernel, hey, when we reboot, you need to keep these bits of memory untouched and then reclaim them and restore them.

And then SystemD picks. up after that, and then as systemity goes, it does the same, and then it's able to hand the MFDs back to the service when it boots, and then the service is able to, if it has support for this, load that back in, and then just restore itself, and it would be like you didn't

reboot it all. That is so sexy. That is neat. Now, it doesn't support everything, like you can't preserve, like a network socket or stuff like that, but there's a bunch of other caveats. So network traffic would get dropped. Yeah. For a bit, but... But the primitives that this is enable is pretty exciting. Yeah, everything from like emergency infrastructure scaling.

Oh, man, there's so many things you could do with that. Live swapping to a new system and continuing your work. Oh, ho. Okay, do we want to talk at all about storage CTL, a tool that sounds really cool, provides a command line interface for I would imagine storage resources? And this is sort of the system D mantra, right, of unifying a bunch of things under a common control. Yeah, there's more and more capability built into System D to talk about what storage is on the machine, expose it to you, have APIs around it, and I think, like, format and work with the

disk, because it kind of comes also with SystemD SIS install, which is a simple, modern, text-based operating system installer. Oh, my God. Are you serious? Yep. It builds on System D's existing partitioning, credential management, and system management features. It can copy an OS from temporary boot media, like a USB drive.

So now System D is able to sort of go from, you know, nothing is on your system to it's formatted and partition things and also installed. Again, clearly useful in cloud deployments. Clearly useful in cloud deployments. I have to wonder, though, if you wanted to roll your own distro, say like a hyper vibe kind of thing, could you use something like this? Yeah, I mean, more and more,

there's just system D primitives you can build on instead of having to roll it yourself. Wow. So System D, Sys Install, a modern text-based operating system install. I kind of want to play with that. Yeah, me too. I think we should. So you have to have SystemD 261.

I mean, this is a big release. There's a lot in here. There's also some hardening stuff. Something called restrict file system access. It uses a BPF program to restrict execution to binaries stored on signed and verified DM Verity protected file systems. So if you really want to be super strict that like only the binaries I've explicitly signed and told can run on this system, another way to make that happen in a secure way with System D. So maybe a way for a really lean system or a container.

that doesn't need the overhead of SC Linux or App Armour, but to still have, like, just only essentially an allow list. Mm-hmm. And you've seen this, right, like a lot of the, we've seen things like the Bootsie systems,

more and more are you trying to use systems that do have signed file systems, do use DMVarity under the hood. So you could combine that with some of those technologies and it have a very secure sort of setup that has fast delivery, but can play nicely in a modern enterprise. Very impressive.

And I suppose also noteworthy boys, right? Because we now know that Leonard Pottering, you know, original creator system D, he was working at Microsoft for a bit. He left in January of this year. And he co-founded a Linux security startup. And this is the first major system D release since he's made that transition. Do you think you see a reflection in some of these releases? I think there might be a bit of a theme.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a pretty solid release for cloud deployments that are just trying to spin up Linux systems as secure and fast as possible. But I still think there's a lot of primitives that people that are building distributions out there can use as well. It's always interesting, too, how they have thought of a new thing to take over that I have never even considered. I didn't think about building a Linux installer into System D. It's inspired. I wonder if they, I wonder if did Chad Chipit come up with that idea?

Like, hey, Chad Choebt, I want some new features. And that's like, Chad Choeb is like, this is a great idea. We should build a Samba server in, too. You let me know if they ever build a Samba server in, okay? I will keep an eye out. That gets me thinking about some of the criticisms people have with System D's. Like, it just does too much and it's too complex, et cetera. Do you think this is just heading more and more down that path?

Because it seems soon we're almost going to have just System D be the OS. What do you think, what do you think there, Wes? Well, it kind of depends on how well you think it... does these things and how much it's open protocol, something you could have other things implement and play with. There's a lot of VARLink push in this release, for instance. So whatever you think of VARLink might play into that? You know, like, is it a kernel feature that system D is just using

that other systems could take advantage of or plug into? Those would be the questions I'd ask. Yeah, I think the other question is, if you were to build an operating system today, would it have this feature? Hmm. That's a good way to look at it. And if you were, I think honestly, a lot of these features come because these are getting deployed in all these massive cloud infrastructures and the cloud providers at talks and through emails and through private connections, they just complain about the things that take a long time to do and spin up. Like, my mind was blown when we went to Anisha's talk from Anthropic about spending up 40,000 containers at once and how, you know, something that takes 35 milliseconds ends up adding up big time. Like, just these crazy optimizations that they have to do.

There's also just, you could phrase it, like, how much. Oh, there was one thing I should mention, too, let's say. To speak to that, there's something called condition fraction. Oh. Which lets you do canary deployments at the service manager level. you can roll out to a percentage of machines by hashing machine ID. This is great for your, remember forever ago

you're asking how to do staged rollouts, Brent, at your brother's store? There you go. Wow. And aren't solved it for you. But the other thing, do you remember the whole XZ vulnerability? Nope, forgotten all, yeah, I remember. Never heard of it.

Right? Yeah. So that involved, instead of having something like plugged into the elf metadata saying like, oh, system D needs XZ, it was done as a DL Open, which is like a dynamic way to open a shared library, right? Right, right, right.

And as a somewhat indirect result of that, System D wanted to have a system to be able to expose that as metadata. So, like, as part of the build process, it would tell you in the metadata and a way you could read, like, what do I do dynamically? What shared libraries do I depend on

with DL Open that you can't see from the regular elf metadata? And that is now shipping as well. Wow. So it's a nice little bow on sort of responding to that terrible little supply chain scare. Well, we have been waiting to see what the first, quote-unquote, AI features are that come to the Ubuntu desktop.

And we recently got word that it's not going to be quite what you expect. It's going to be more of an accessibility thing, and it's going to be text-to-speech. And this week, we have a much clearer picture of that. They've launched a new project. They say the project will be desktop-focused, local speech-to-text dictation, with the first target release being Ubuntu 2610. The initial interface is intentionally simple. You press a keyboard shortcut, you speak,

and then the text gets inserted into the currently focused application with visual feedback while dictation is active. The first implementation targets the Ubuntu desktop on Wayland, with Ghanome is the primary validated environment. Voice assistance, voice commands, desktop control, translation, and automatic language detection are outside the initial scope. So they, I think, are intentionally couching this is limited in scope.

They have provided diagrams that show the architecture overview about how it works locally. How are we feeling about this first go at it? Well, my initial response is this is the way you ship an AI feature. You'd be totally open about what is doing, what's under the hood. You know, Firefox kind of botched that a little while ago with their first features. But they do describe, you know, under the hood, it uses speech recognition models running locally on your machine. So I think that will make people happy or at least less hesitant maybe of these features. So communicating lots, I think, is great.

That's what we're seeing here. And also starting slow with some features that are pretty obvious if they work or not and are pretty simple. That's a good way to gain some trust. So I'm liking this measure approach. Right, Wes, this has to be probably the least controversial implementation of the technology possible, right? Indeed. And I would say so far it seems like the reaction from what a little I've seen anyway, but it seems overall positive, I think. I'm taking a look here.

They have a sort of a test branch where you can see a little of the development. Yeah. And just, to be clear, it is named after the minor bird because it's renowned for its ability to listen to mimic and reproduce human speech with astonishing clarity. Just like it's avian counterpart, this application is designed to master voice audio listening intently to your spoken words, instantly translating them to accurate clean text. It's a Python app. It uses UV. They use hypothesis for generative testing, which is great. Love to see that.

It looks very nice. Right now they have a whisper with faster whisper as one option, and then also Nemetron, which can do Kuda. So it sounds like they kind of got stuff for CPU and GPU going on here. Not a ton of stuff yet, but you've got like a desktop interface it looks like. There's obviously SNAP support. They're pulling in Whisper and Nemetron from SNAPs. There's also a back-end server, standalone Ubu STT server. That's the main thing to snap.

This standalone snap's going to ship, I guess. So this will be interesting from a couple of different vectors, I think. Number one, from like a user experience, what kind of load does this put on your desktop? What kind of memory your usage are we looking at? And what does it set sort of the minimum requirements to have a number of? a decent experience here. So that's, I think, one vector to consider this under.

The other is just, I think, what a hole there is in the accessibility space for the Linux desktop right now. And how this is table stakes on Android, iOS, I assume Windows, I don't actually know, and macOS,

table stakes. And it's like minimum bar accessibility. And we had this email from listener Matthew, and he said, Hey, Linux on Plughosts. I'm a blind Arch Linux user, and I really enjoy your content. I really feel like Linux accessibility is understated.

Many desktop environments have little to no support for usable screen or usable screen reader experience, especially Whalen-based sessions. I'm comfortable with Monta, though I believe more people need to know about this. It's true that blind people themselves have made their own projects, thanks to open source, specifically for these individuals, but it shouldn't be like that. Thanks for reading my post. And we're thinking about, you followed up with Matthew. you a bit. But I'm thinking like

this is probably the best implementation that canonical could do that actually adds value to people in this space that could really use accessibility tools like this on Linux. And to Matthew's point, we don't really have much in Gennonome and Wayland right now. And this is the exact area that

canonical is going to go after. Now it's not a screen reader but it's getting us to part of the way there. Yeah, it's great to see. I'm excited to see what happens. It seems, you know, if they're making some good progress us. And it seems like, especially as John mentioned, we've been on the show, that, you know, they're given pretty regular updates with the work that they're doing. So, well, there'll probably be more to come. I do also see it's GPL3. So that's pretty cool. I have a little bit of a, hmm, pondering here. And I think, Chris, this is in your expertise. Why, like they built their own thing here. And it sounds like Wes, you know, gives it the little approval. But why not use something like what Home Assistant has been working on with their voice?

stuff and voice input. Do you think that that's a missed opportunity? Whisper is being used by both projects. Some of the primitives are the same. So that's good. I think, you know, I could see using the bits that do make sense and then building a custom layer for the other parts that interface with the desktop.

I think there is like a lot of people that don't know that you have Whisper and Piper happening over there at the Home Assistant community that is really powerful for text to speak. and speech to text and all of that. But basing on Whisper is going to be, I think they're going to have decent results. Fast Whisper usually does decent results

if you have clean audio, but if people are in a noisy work environment, it's going to be pretty hit and miss. So it's going to really depend on that. And I think that open, I haven't dug through the code base, but I imagine there's a interface that they have so that they're intending,

like they already support too. So I imagine, like, as other options are available or whatever, like you'll be able to extend with different ASRs. Well, or, I mean, is this some sort of, thing that app developers could build on top of and maybe create a screen reader using the back end that canonical is providing here. That's a good question.

Well, I think we'll have to just find out if people experiment and build something with it, right? That's the open source way. I guess we'll check it out, right? Because we're supposed to get it in the next release, you know? Isn't that what they're targeting? Yep. I know I wrote it down, but I'm an old man.

I can't remember. But yeah, the next release. Yeah, 2610. We don't have to wait that long to try it out. webroot.com slash unplugged. WebRute is a cloud-based antivirus engineered to stay out of your way. It takes up to 33 times less space than the bulky competitors, and it scans six times faster.

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As happens to us last week as we are wrapping up the show. So, Linus announced a new kernel. Linux 7.1. Hazzah. Yeah. It's pretty exciting. Linus Rhodes. Normally, I try to front load the merge window

and do as much possible the first few days, which we're going to come back to that with 72. Oh, my goodness. Oh, this is so funny, too, because, spoiler alert, it didn't go this way. He says, this time I'm not sure it's going to work out with my laptop. He didn't think, wow, a couple of long flights without internet,

but I've made sure that I have fetched the early pull request. Thank you. You know who you are. So I'll be able to do some of it offline. Well, I guess you worked the entire flight. Oh my goodness. Anyway, possible slight hiccups in the merge window aside. The news today is 7.1. Below is the short log for the last week. Nothing particularly interesting or scary stands out, which is as it should be. It's mostly various smaller driver updates, GPU networking, sound, miscellaneous with some networking and trace tooling fixes and random minor changes elsewhere. Well, one of those random,

minor changes is this major rework to the NTFS driver implementation, which now has full right support. That is correct. And Linus merged it with the commit message, NTFS resurrection. Yeah. And that's because it's, so, okay, let's put the... This is a long saga. It is.

We should try to maybe do a short version. Yeah, okay. So there's a lot of different ways to talk NTFS, right, which is the sort of Windows file system. we've had NTFS 3G, which is like a fuse option, which works well but slow. And is in user space.

Yeah, there has been the traditional NTFS driver in the kernel, which has been there a long time, but it's been read only. Then in 2021, we got NTFS3, which was from Paragon,

which was previously out of tree, but then they got it merged. But then... It kind of has just been rotting in the tree, unfortunately. Yeah, they kind of left. And so now, this is like a four years, rewrite from the

XFAT maintainer NamJ John and he took the bones of the original read only NTFS driver added full right support using modern kernel APIs like IOMAP delayed allocation folios and now we're getting it yeah a real true modern NTFS implementation on Linux

after this multi-year saga there was a little hiccup there was a kind of got pulled and then unpolled because there were some get structure issues with the commits but that all got cleared up and obviously it's here now. I'm going to bet that next week Windows comes out with a new file system. I don't think so. I don't think so.

It's been a while, too. Also good to see the Apple Silicon Macbooks getting SMC power driver support for some of the systems, giving better battery and power metrics. Of course, some of that's changing with macOS 27 Golden Gate, but it's there. Also, did you see this? In 7.1, 7.1, a mainline support for 12 new SOCs and hardware pletrics, and hardware platforms across Arm and Risk 5 and added real-time kernel build support

for 32-bit arm systems out there in the field. Fascinating. We not only have real-time kernel support these days, but we haven't on 32-bed arm. Not 32X-86, though. No, well, who wants that? There's this small little lining here about Intel Fred being enabled by default

for supported systems on Panther Lake, Diamond Rapids, and AMD. It's interesting. So this is like a 30-year upgrade in a way. I mean, this is already, this is text not new, but just sort of making it the default here is. So basically any time, since basically the 8386, anytime a user space program needs to talk to the kernel

with like a system call or an interrupt or an exception or something like that, it goes through what's called the interrupt descriptor table. The CPU save state, switches to ring zero, jumps to the handler. When done, it returns back to user space. This process involves multiple microcode steps, memory reads and serialization operations.

It's been the same since like 1985. Wow. But with Fred, we're replacing that IDT delivery mechanism with new instructions that do the same sort of ring transitions, but they do them atomically. They do them with fewer steps. The CPU handles the context switch more directly, so you get fewer memory accesses,

fewer serialization operations, and lower latency. So it's a kind of cool new thing that X-86, like it's doing it both on Intel, It's called Intel Fred, but AMD's doing it as well. And we're finally starting to get access to it. I like the name. Larrable on Fronix notes, quote, great news for Panther Lake on Linux and pairs nicely with Panther Lake Intel idle driver,

C-State editions for Linux 7-1, as well as ongoing Z-Kernel Linux driver development improvements. I feel like the Panther Lake generation of Intel chips might pull me back to the Intel side. If I were in the market to get a laptop. We should at least get to play with one. The good news for Panther Lake on Linux just keeps stacking up. It's really impressive. Fred's also expected to be used by the upcoming AMD Zen 6 processors. And Intel Zeon Diamond Rapid Server processors.

Oh, boy. I like those names. I want one of those. Nice to see the Steam Deck OLED audio fixes getting now upstream, reducing the need for downstream patches in Steam OS, which is good to see. Oh, no. Oh, no. You should have warned me about this.

PCM-I-CA support has been removed as well as Morph 486 era X-86 support paths. Yeah, well, I still have PCM-A-CA cards, PCM-I-CA cards. They were the best. Wi-Fi? Look, look, when 80211B came out,

no laptop had that built in. But a guy could get himself a PCM-C-I-A card and he could get himself Wi-Fi. And then if he needed to switch over, you could get double-wide ones with an Ethernet adapter, you could get ones with storage. I feel like it didn't get a chance to live up to its potential,

and we shouldn't remove it yet. Okay, but the upside is, as part of that, we're dumping 140,000 lines of legacy code in the kernel. Okay. That sounds like a good thing. You can have this, but you can't take anything else for the rest of the episode from the kernel. All right.

Well, we do have some good news from 7-1. It included nearly 13,000 non-merged change sets, contributions for more than 2,000 developers with hundreds of first-time contributions. That's cool. That's really cool. I think it was like 300 and some. Okay, so we opened up with teasing Linus

about low-keying what the next merge window is going to look like for Linux 7-2, right? Because now 7-1's out the door, so work never stops for the kernel team. They immediately open up the merge window for the next kernel. And Linus is like, I'm going to be on a flight, going to be working on my battery. Maybe he has a Panther, like, I don't know,

because he sure did get the work done. So we have now seen the first merge window. the first half of it for Linux 72, and more than 7,000 non-merged change sets have already been pulled into mainline. We are seeing some code removal around I-486 again, but let's talk about some of the stuff that's landing that looks really interesting,

including a new feature in Linux7.2 that adds the ability to limit programs to only open, quote, regular files and avoid being tricked or doing, quote, silly things. So this is a brilliant feature that it basically limits the type of file. Okay, all right. So this landing to Linux 7-2 is this Open Nat2 underscore regular flag.

Yeah, so there's already been the existing open, which is a system call for opening files. Open Nat2 is this new version of it. That doesn't allow silly files. I hate those silly files. That's right. It's a sort of anti-silly system call, if you will. Good, good, good.

Well, okay, so Openette 2 is the modern version. Sorry, now we're getting Openat 2 underscore regular. Regular, right, regular. But it's part of OpenEd2. It's basically because OpenI2 supports passing a struct of various things that it's this open how parameter. And so now we have more ways to tell it, you know, be regular. Yeah, the flag indicates the path should be open if it's a regular file. It's useful to write secure programs that want to avoid being tricked in opening device nodes with special semantics while thinking they operate on regular files.

Exactly. So, like, there might be times, right, that you need to open a device node or a special file or something. under Proc or something like that, right? Or a pipe. But that's usually a specific point in your program and it's not from like generic user input for uploading a file into the browser or something like that.

And so this enables you to opt into that behavior of saying, hey, I really want a regular file. Which sounds funny, but it filters things like, yeah, like a device node, so dev zero or dev random or a FIFO or a pipe or Simlig substitution attacks here can kind of, be detected as well.

And this will play into container sandbox hardening. This is kind of a way to, you know, you could add this in as part of that. So it's a nice new, yeah, it's a nice new feature to... I think it's mostly important as a flex. Like you can walk up to a Mac user and be like, my kernel only opens regular files. Does your kernel open up strange, silly files?

Your kernel might open silly files. You should be concerned about that. You know, like that kind of thing. It's a flex now. I like that. I also like seeing the BTRFS. our buddy ButterfS is now enabling large folios because I think like Brent has a ton of those. Oh yeah.

By default, huge folios are coming with Linux 7-2. Huge folios. A folio is a kernel data structure that represents one or more physically contiguous pages. And a huge one is two megabytes apparently. Yeah, because like the small ones were four kilobytes. Yeah. It's kind of huge. Apparently.

It's relative. Mm-hmm. Okay. Butterfess also gains a new IOCTL for return. turning raw checksums to user space, a stable UUID for overlay OS-style use cases, and a lot of performance work, including reported sequential write and direct IO throughput improvements. Nice to see. And our classic buddy XFS has also seen some work.

Yeah, it doesn't just stop a butterless. Heck no. No, no. New zone allocator is now out of experimental status in Linux 7-2. Reminder, you're not going to be getting the 7-2 for a little bit, but that's good to see. Yeah, it's used for zoned storage devices, including those SMR hard drives and ZNS. S-FSDs. Okay.

Most of the rest is kind of just fixes and minor changes, but EXT-4 got some cool stuff too. Yeah. It reworked fast commit handling to reduce locking contention, which is always good, and avoid deadlock scenarios, which is even better. Yeah, it's nice to see that. Because you really don't want your file system driver to deadlock. I mean, you can't claim that extended four is abandoned. It's nice to see that. No, there's like hybrid journaling path that's being used now for recording metadata deltas instead of always having to write full metadata.

It should make things a little bit faster there when updating metadata. Data updates. Just doing a little boom. Yeah, and directory hash computation is optimized by processing input in four-byte chunks and removing function pointers, which is like a 2X improvement for at least longer inputs. That'll finally get Brent to stop complaining. Big EXT for a guy. Yeah, he's been bitching about that for years.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay, well, how about this? We were talking about you don't want to open pipes when you don't think you need to be. But I do not. I think many of us run a lot of shell pipelines or use pipes as part of. operating on a Unix-like operating system. Big pipe guy.

Yeah, right? So Linux 7.2 is improving a non-pipe right, the kernel path used for anonymous pipes, such as shell pipelines and standard streams. So this change avoids allocating pages, reducing contention between concurrent readers and writers. So if you're passing a whole bunch of data over that pipeline, this could get somewhere between 6 to 28% better throughput.

Oh, all right. Somewhere between 5 and 22% lower average right. latency. That is significant. And it gets better when you're under memory pressure. That's the thing right there. That's really cool. Because that's always when I'm piping.

I'm always piping under memory pressure because that's the secret boys. I'm always under memory pressure. We also have some changes in the crypto driver code. I just want to mention that they have been deprecating for a period of time bits of this interface that allowed user space applications to call into the crypto API directly in the kernel. And not crypto in the currency, but crypto in the sense that it used to mean as in cryptography. Yeah, that's right.

Remember the good old days? But I guess they've been deprecating this. It must be because it's insecure, I would assume. Yeah, so you remember copy fail? No. No, I've completely forgotten that. Yeah, well, that recent, somewhat recent. So this is some follow-up from that, huh?

Vulnerability. Yeah, this was used in part of that attack because it has optimizations that kind of let you overwrite memory in a way that one area was treating it as read only, but now suddenly it's getting used later it's right, and you've been able to change it. And essentially, no one is maintaining it,

and these optimizations just, like, aren't really worth it anymore. And especially now that we're in the era of a whole bunch of sustained LLM attacks. Yep, exactly. Okay. All right, that makes sense. And really, there's kind of a lot of that.

Like, if you look under the hood, a lot of the things being pulled or kind of reconsidered what the value is, has stemmed from that. Yeah, it's interesting. the fallout just kind of continue i said you could not take anything else away from the kernel in this episode but i'm that one i'm okay with that one i feel like makes sense we need to be safe all right though let's just see what we have next here on the list here uh the next feature in linux seven two is they are

sorry let me finish that they are i didn't really didn't want it reads here removing apple talk protocol support from the mainline colonel sorry chris why why do we have to remove Why? Why? It doesn't hurt anybody. It's a great little protocol for those of us who are enthusiasts that like to have classic machines. Why? What is this hurting? It's 4,000 lines of code. It's nothing. It's nothing in the Linux kernel. I just can't stand for this. Do you, are you going to put some effort into building yourself a fork that maintains this? No, but what I have thought about doing is, you know, creating a consistent complaining campaign about it, you know, just consistently getting on a soapbox. You think that's a... brand new segment on the show, huh? Yeah, yeah. Do you think that might help if I just complain a lot?

I get it, but it is... It is sad to see. The removal was triggered, they say, partially by a burst of AI generated fixes that was rarely used code that lacked active reviewers. So you're telling me it's a victim of slop trimming?

Yeah. So this is the problem. People had forgotten about it and the slop brought it up. The AI can't consider the art and history the full context around Apple Talk, right? This isn't IPX. Okay?

But this isn't like some rando Bluetooth 2.0 protocol we don't use anymore for like low bit rate headpieces. But Chris, the kernel is not a museum. Like we don't need these things in there if nobody's using it. First of all, shut your mouth. Second of all. Listen, man, I got old

Macs somewhere around here. I'd love to fire up one day. I don't know. Like if I can't use Linux and I can't use mapples, what am I going to do? It does look like they will be maintaining it still in this Linux net dev mod orphan module.

Really? Yeah, that's what I see here in the patch for removal. There's also some AX-25 and ham radio that are over there. Oh, the ham guys are getting it too? Well, this might have, they might have already been there. I don't know much about the ham radio driver.

It does also say that Apple Talk was removed in OSX in 106 Snow Leopard in 2009. Yeah, I know. And it sucked then doesn't... And just because they do something wrong... You've only gotten over that one. Two wrongs don't make it right, Wes.

And you know that. You know that. So we can collectively cope before the show I created Apple Talk rest in peace sticker. The Memorial sticker where we as a community for those of us that remember

can put it on our machines 1985 to 2026. It just talked different. Stickers available right now on jupitergharge.com. And while you're at it, why not pick up? Sorry, I only open regular files so you can flex and celebrate

Linux 7-2 the can't-do attitude of saying no to special files. Sorry, I only open real stickers available now, jupiter garage.com, go check them out. Sorry, I only open regular files and the Apple Talk Memorial sticker. I am putting them on my rigs.

I'll tell you what. It's too soon. It's too soon for both of those things. Too soon. I'll tell you what. If I could have my way, we would have a little network of Apple Talk going, and you would just use it for, like, device discovery and file transfer. You don't need TCPIP for that. Like, everybody's doing all these mesh networks and overlay networks.

Well, if you're just on a land, why not use TCPIP for everything you use TCP for, but then use something like Apple Talk for your local file sharing? Guys, your laugh, there's a real use case here. You want to set this up? First of all, I know obscurity isn't a thing, but it is a thing with this. Okay, this would be a thing. Second of all, it's so easy.

Third of all, it does name resolution, so you don't have to set up home DNS. Yeah? And then if you really want to get classic, you get classic macOS, then you go into the Apple menu, you go into Choozer. Did you ever have to use Chusor? Yeah. That's a lot of fun. I'm just thinking. I mean, what else are you going to use IPX, NetBooey?

Why not use Apple Talk? And then you have a, you want a private file sharing network? that nobody's ever going to discover and nobody's going to come looking for, it'd be your local little Apple Talk network. You want to try it out here at the studio? I mean, I kind of do before they take it away from us. I think it makes sense.

We got one kernel release left. I feel like this deserves a moment of silence. Do you think it does? I mean, I'm feeling sad, boys. We've got a cone for this and you can just, you know, grieve in the cone if you'd like. The cone of silence. Okay, we should totally do this.

In the studio, in the studio. In the studio, we should totally. Come on. Have the whole studio. just be Apple Talk. Wouldn't that work? All right. You get over here.

Oh, yeah. I'm for it. I'm officially approving it. Do you think if we had like a layer to VPN, we could sort of extend it across the network? That's what I was wondering is how you would route it, because obviously you'd want to, you'd want to do that. Could you somehow run it over TCP IP?

Like an Apple Talk mesh? Yeah. Encapsulated, exactly. Could you encapsulate it? And then you just, and then you would run it over your mesh network on top of IP. I don't see why that? All right, moving on. Well, we may have something for you.

In the future, we'll have links to all the new... There's a lot more stuff. We just wanted to kind of cover the highlights. And we'll put a link to the new stickers over in Jupiter Garage, too, if you want to commiserate with me. Or flex, that your colonel doesn't mess around with silly files. I want to take a moment and thank our members for making this episode possible. Members, you now get a free web boost to get your message in.

You can send one free boost per episode. Also, you get access to the boost. bootleg, a lot more content, or the lean and mean, ad-free version that Editor Drew puts together also available to our members. The core contributor applies to this show, and the Jupyterdot party is all the shows and all

the special features. And you members, you make it possible. Thank you very very much. We appreciate you. We've got a special baller boost here this week from hybrid sarcasm. The amount is 61,923 Satoshi's. All right.

Hybrid says, I boosted this amount to Coder Radio when my daughter was born three years ago. Since it's Father's Day today, I figured I would do that again. So happy Father's Day. Ah, that's great. Oh, that brings back to the memories. Thank you, hybrid. Thank you, indeed. There's a bit of metadata here, too.

It says Zaprite. You guys know anything about that? Oh, but Zaprite is Web Boost. Yeah. So that's our first baller web boost, I would say. Oh, it might be. It might be. It might be.

It might be. It might be not, though, either. Sultrose comes in with 24,000 sats. Hey, guys, no time, long time, no boost. Siltros, we appreciate you. Sultrose here. I retired Sultrose OS, but I learned a lot. Right now, I'm working on Cabinet.

A file locker, because I really don't like using Nux Cloud. Anyways, I'm very grateful for all you do. You do incredible work with the podcast. Thanks for being you. File Locker is a solid. lid, or cabinet, is a file locker. He writes, it's a lean, high performance file locker designed for self-hosting.

It prioritizes a fast web experience, a mobile first design, and a simple file management without the bloat or complex sinking. That does sound maybe like a very useful thing. Yeah, that does. Have I have something that run somewhere? You're sitting on top of like a file share

or something like that? Uh-huh. Optimized for mobile screens, he says. It can be added to your home screen as a progressive web app. That's a nice touch. Well done, Soltros. Well done.

Dajah boost in with 9,494 cents. Coming in hot with the boost. All right, question for you guys. And anyone in the community wants to boost in, do you have any preferred methods of dealing with burnout? I used to get rejuvenated by doing something weird with my home lab or joining in on a J.B. challenge, going for a hike, or letting my ADHD pick a random new hobby for me.

But nowadays, everything seems to just make it worse. I love to hear strategies you guys use. Hmm. Such a good question. It feels like you're always having to evolve the strategy. It does feel like it doesn't. Yeah, I had some answers to this one, but then he mentioned them all as not working anymore. So I don't know.

I'd say get a squirrel. That helps. Are you sure about the homelab thing? I mean, sometimes stacking a dub in the home lab can help. But I think, you know, what I've been trying to do is get outside and do a couple of small things outside. Like, I'm currently fighting the biggest fight of my life with poison hemlock. So every day I try to get out there, do a little. trimming and spraying, you know, just stack a little dubs.

It isn't related to work. I still think there's something to that. Yeah, I do agree with that. I would wonder, though, if there isn't probably some bigger pressures that are just making all this other stuff not as enjoyable. And a lot of times for me, when that happens, it's like bad sleep, maybe, you know, not eating. So, like, a couple of issues are compounding, usually like three or more. And that's usually when I start to just grind down.

And you've got to have to kind of address those. Yeah, it can be difficult, too, if it's, you know, there's pressures and maybe standards or, you know. it can be useful maybe to try and unpack why the things you that don't no longer give you that what about them has changed yeah or if it's not them has changed

you may also consider getting a van it's a really busy hobby that gives you all sorts of adventures so that would be my top advice and it won't financially destroy you quite as much as a boat no no no no not as much as a boat okay we got a second Dajaboose here I'm going to, some feedback on local models versus cloud models and that kind of thing.

I'm in a similar boat to PJ. As a general rule, I don't fully integrate anything into my core day-to-day production until I can own it and run it on my own hardware or a VPS I control. Probably I've been listening to Chris's defined networking ad reads for too long. But that being said, one thing that is handy is that the Open AI API spec is quickly turning it into S3 of the AI world. So in the interim, even with the cloud models, I can run them through a proxy. Yeah. Which is, I think, a good tip.

I think, too, that we're probably not injecting into the conversation very much is the potential impossibility of people running their own injector that sits in front of these cloud models, which could be your way to make sure certain secrets or certain things you don't want shared, a way to route between the free available models. There's a lot. I mean, we really could almost do a whole stream just on the, we should do a stream on the injector stuff. That's a good idea. Yeah, because there's a lot there that I think would address some of the concerns of our audience.

Thank you, Daja. Great boost. Good to hear from you. There's a boost here from Not Sure. It's a row of ducks. Web boost changes everything. Great work. Great.

Glad you like it, not sure. Good to hear from you. Gene Beans here with 7,77 sets. Oh my God, this drawer is filled with fruit lobes. I am super excited about the U clock, Chris. I wanted a nice looking home assistant controllable alarm clock for my son. I already have them waking up with lighting in Home Assistant. Until then, alarms have been an echo dot thing.

I just ordered the clock, and I can't wait to play with it. That is great. You know what, Gene? That's such a great. It's so much more useful than the echo dot. It's so much more useful. Again, saved my bacon this time on the, I think it was the fridge. Last time, it was the freezer this time, or vice versa.

I saved our bacon. And the other thing I added was now a three-minute warning when the freezer door has been open for more than... That's nice. Yeah. Just a little warning there on the thing. I kind of want that. It's, the you clock is great. If you don't know what we're talking about, I think I buried the lead a lot by putting what is probably one of my favorite gadgets of the year so far casually as a pick last week.

But sometimes the picks hit. Sometimes those picks hit. Yeah, Nathan Boussin with 2,223 sets. Just pump the brakes right there. Love it. Looking forward to trying Windows, MCB, anything to spend less time remoting in fixing. It's S. You get it, Nathan.

You get it. That's it. Oh, God. It was in the clip. The moment I realized, oh, I'm not going to have to use Windows hardly at all, ever anymore. It's already rare. Now it's even more rare.

And also, like, if a family member really needs help, I got an option. That's really good one. That's the one that gets me. It's huge. Well, A.A. Ron boosted in with one, two, three, four, five sets. A.A. Ron. Yes.

That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. I know it's only ever played in the book. bootleg of the show, but my favorite AI song you have made is the time-killing song. You play sometimes during the pre-show break. Can you share that with the audience somehow? I think it would be fun to use the college Acapella group profile on Ceno. We like this. We do have, we have yet to do this. Here we are. The guys need a break. It's time to feed Brent. Take a moment yourself. Get something to drink. if you got them

Oh, this is just a little break Yeah, it's a fun song I've never heard this one before It's because you're always out having a break We play it when you're away from the I don't know

The song may be all about you For all you know, I don't know One day we'll figure out a way to post those A-A-ROM. We do need to figure that out It's just a lot to do Where is A-A-Ron right now? All right, Boudai comes in with A-Ro-Duck-Ducks

Oh, with a flex. Okay, what do we got here? We have LS piped into a word count, eight, which I treat my download. Oh, talking about, he's got eight files in his download folder. Wow. Finally, I wanted more people to give us this. I want to know. I'm not going to reveal mine until we get a few of these.

I treat my downloads folder like slash temp. It even gets cleared on reboot. Oh, that's wild. I like that. So eight actually feels pretty high in this case. I'm going to definitely admit that I do not clear. out on reboot boys. Let's see if I could let's see if I can just tell you the oldest

file in my downloads folder. Baddei goes on to say, if there was something on there that I needed and got deleted, then I didn't need it that much. Good point. Okay. All right. That's not as bad as certain Zen to it. Oh, I cleaned up. It's not as bad

as I expected. It's going into last year. I'll just leave it at that. We get more I might reveal. I wonder what the mechanism is here. I'd be curious about that. Is it a temp a temp a Something else. A little boot script. Yeah, we'd love to know.

How are you actually cleaning that? Just a little RM, RF as a boot script. That's not dangerous at all. Tomato comes in with 5,000 sats. Missa Bustin with happiness seeing you again. Missa Boost! The one reason I'm sometimes I have to use Windows is when the latest DDRM tools, ah, for the Kindle stop working with Linux.

Oh. This Windows MCP thing sounds like it might just save my Unix bacon here. Nice. I don't even thought of that. You should let us know how that's goes. I'd be very curious. That is a great use case, Tomato. Please keep us boosted on that one.

DistroS2 boost an end with 12,345 sets. Okay. I came to test out the web boost. Okay. Nice. I don't know why you boosted with Windows XP, though. That's weird. And, and here's my Nix router config.

First web boost with a link. First web boost with a link, boys. That's cool. We got a flake here. Router. Dot Nix. One of what's in here. Check out that router.

Not nix. Oh, he's using ZFS. Oh. On his router? I love it. That's great. Couple interfaces here. We got DNS mask.

Yeah. Kia for DHCP. Nice. I could look at these configs all day. I really could. I also, like, I'd like to start at the flake. And you've got to go to the main config and then get to the... You're jumping ahead.

You're going to the end of the book, I got to say. Well, I wanted to get to the good stuff. We only have so much time. Whomever Whiz comes in with 9,000. and nine sets. It's over 9,000! I really wanted to clip some audio for you from Star Trek the next generation, but I didn't even know what episode it was in.

I realized, however, the subtitles exist. So instead of just clipping the audio, I made a tool to easily clip dialogue from any video in your library. Check it out. Wecker, W-E-C-E-C-E-R. Also, you could have just told us the line, and we would have told you the episode it's from. But I love the idea of this tool.

I don't think the repository is public yet, but it's a great idea. Check out. Oh, Quip. Clipper. We need this in our life so bad. We're constantly trying to figure out how we could take little sound bits. So we'd love to keep this thing fresh all the time. And just as an aside, if anybody ever wanted to help us,

if you have, like, say, a backup MKV file of an episode or a movie that's in 5-1 stereo, if you were to open that MKV file in an application like Reaper or anything that supports multi-track editing, you might be surprised to learn that often the dialogue is isolated on its own track, and you can extract it from all the other background noises to a certain degree. Just if you didn't know that. Whomever whiz, thank you very much for the boost. We really do appreciate you on that. Well, I'm going to sneakie pull one up here.

Todd from Northern VA with 1,200 sets. This is a long time, no boost, but this is a test boost after resurrecting my node after one plus year of downtime. Nicely done. Test boost received. Todd, we know exactly how that feels. we have that problem too. That's great.

Greg, the lawyer, sent in 50 Fiat dollars. Hey, rich lobster. Using the web boost to say, keep up the great work. Thank you, Greg. Nice to hear you. What kind of lawyer into you do, Greg? Always love to know that kind of stuff. That's awesome.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Carl N comes in with $25 via Zapprod Fiat. Easy in my guild for riding on the self-hosted membership deal for so long. Thanks for clients. Planker Therapy really enjoyed it. I'm glad you liked it. Thank you very much.

Appreciate it. Well, Brad sent in 20 Fiat dollars. I enjoyed the Clanker Therapy recording and all that Hermes info. More links and examples would be appreciated. Love the easier to contribute Web Boost option with this Fiat. Awesome. Thank you. Sire came in with $5.

Finally, a great way to spend my hard-earned fiat currency. I like you. You're a hot ticket. Yeah, get rid of that dirty Fiat, throw it at us. That's fine. We had a couple of member boosts come in to... Oh, more than a couple. Yeah, it's new.

It's new. It's new. It's new. So we should expect that. Uh-huh. It's exciting. Now, some of you decide to go anonymous. You can't put your name in there in the field. It is all right.

We would still like it. Anonymous boosts in with two boosts here. IDK about folder numbers, but I do know my Bitcoin numbers. And with Bitcoin under 100K,000 U.S.D member boosts are a steel. But will you increase membership prices when the price goes above a hundred. hundred thousand. We haven't really ever adjusted. I mean, if you think about it, I think at one point it was around 16 or so

when we started. Yeah, true. And we've always just kind of kept it what it is because we don't really denominate in dollars, we denominate in sats. So just a sats a sat, really is kind of how we think about it. But I suppose anything's always up for revaluation if you have a better idea. Somebody sends us a really great idea. You know, why not?

A time killer T. T.K. comes in with a member boost. Ooh. I like that name. Longtime listener. Since the days of TechSnap with Alan. Right on. Love clanker therapy. Please do more.

Zip code boost. Oh, great. All right. So we got a zip code boost and a plus one for clanker therapy. Yeah. Okay. So here's the numbers, Wes.

3.3.3. 3. 3. Oh. Yeah. Zip code is a better deal. Oh, did I? Yeah.

How many three? I need to know the right number of threes here. Oh, the blurry vision. It looks like three threes to me. Brent, how many of threes? There are four threes. There are four threes. One, two.

Yeah, it says 3, 3, 3.3. There are four lights. There are four lights. It is true. Okay. Well, my map. I don't quite. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't hear it way. Oh, there it is. For a minute there, I thought he had a silent minute. Yeah, well, he did for a while. Okay. What did you got there, Wes? If I, if I've picked the right continent, you never know, it is in the town of Zwingdrich, in South Holland. in otherlands.

Sounds probably just like you. Nice. I'd probably butcher that, so tell us boost back in. Thank you, Time Killer.

Thank you, Time Killer. Appreciate you. That's great. All right, Bradley. Gong Fuja boosted in a members boost. Hmm. Bring up the holy hand grenade.

Loving the content and extras for members. Actually agree with producer Jeff here on the idea of using AI. I agree it is helpful and open source will catch up in the end.

But I don't like short-cutting knowledge and not really learning it as a result, especially when things go wrong. I think we had an interesting follow-up chat today on that. PJ has really been diving in deep on the local model stuff. I've got a good local model combo in the bootleg today. So I'd like to know what you think on.

And I think part of playing with the tools is learning how to set them up so that does work for you, right? So you do find the way, like where do you offload and where do you inspect or follow-up or gatekeep? Or, you know, like where you set the gates in your workflow and which pieces do you focus on? And that'll probably be different for a lot of different people. What are you really trying to get done?

That really is the defining thing which you'd expect from a local model right now. Well, and like you can have different, you know, some folks might vibe stuff up and throw it up and test it. It's kind of smoke test it live. But you could, you know, have a proposed architecture and then you walk through every piece with it and then it sets it up. You know, you could take totally different approaches

in terms of like how involved you were at each step. Censor Smile comes in with a member boost. Put some macaroni and cheese on there too. Long time listeners since 2013. First time booster. Call me a curmudgeon, but I'm not going to try crypto in this life. After hearing all these boosts all these years, I can finally send in a message as a member. I'll be sure to send some U.S.D when I can in the future.

Thanks and keep him coming. Glad to make it happen for you. Censor Smile. Welcome to the Boost Club. B-O-O-S-T. Whomever Wizz boosts in here. Maybe it's a follow-up boost from before because one cool thing I did with Quip Clipper was batch export all the lines from TNG. Resistance is Fute. No way. You could batch line all the Resistance's futile lines.

It works perfectly with only a few clicks. And I also made it so you can export just the center chint. That is legit. What? I was just saying that. You sure were. That is so good. Yeah, look at this. He sent us some copies of it, too. That is good work. Well done. So he's got all the resistance is futile now? I'm jelly. Resistance is futile. Aw, Hugh.

Oh, that's nice. That one's a good one. Yeah, you got to send us an updated link because we got, I think maybe just your GitHub profile, but not. I want to try this. Yeah, that is wicked, dude. That's great. Who's next? Marcel.

All right. Marcel comes in with a free member boost. You can read higher voltages with it. Oh, good. Yes, with using an. ESP resistor divider. It basically maps 0 to 12 volts to 0.3 volts. Yes, I do know about this.

It's not my preferred way to measure this voltage. Brent, we've talked about this before. It's not quite ideal. Yeah, we did play with this when we were doing that diesel heater reverse engineering because we had several strange issues. And voltage was one thing that helped with diagnosing a bunch of stuff. So we did use a resistor to do exactly this. but you kind of end up

I think in the car with diagnostics and stuff you end up with like remember Chris I had like wires everywhere and like little tiny components and resistors and like transistors and stuff so yeah a dedicated device would be really nice something also that you know if you drop it

it doesn't fall into a million pieces so mostly a packaging issue I also wonder could there be a slight resolution loss yeah that's a good point Because we're looking at really micro measurements here. So that's something to consider. Depends what you're doing. But Marcel, I think it's in the category of worth me playing around with

because I think I have most of the components I need to actually try it. I like that Marcel's clearly paying attention because there's this line. There's lots of online calculators or I'm sure data could help you with it. He was paying attention. But I like this last line. Just be careful because you could easily fry the ESP with that 12. of the oldsy got over there. Yeah, that is true.

Have done. Which is another thing to consider perhaps in that you have to just navigate that with part of the setup. I think, you know, my route's probably going to be a meter that has a USB port on it that can talk to a Linux box. It's just there's the perfect devices available if you're in Europe that are just exactly what I'm looking for. But with taxes and shipping, to get two of them is almost $300. And they're like $40 to $60 devices. if you do the conversion. You just toss a link in here.

I'm be curious. Yeah, I need to find them. They're just, oh, you know, like when you have, like, a dream device? It's funny that it's like a $50 device or something like that. I would love to have two of those. It's just the way the world works right now. Tomato's here with a member boost. I'm trying out the free web boost, but I have to say,

boo for the cloud flare nonsense, boosting two shows in a row, and I had to prove I'm not some bad actor. Heck, no. This was, we were experimenting with serverless to assess. eventually avoid spending up even more VPS servers with EngineX and stuff that we're running hundreds of. So we'll see. You know, I'm always a little skeptical on the Cloudflare side myself. Greg the lawyer member boosts in, boosting in to say keep up the good work.

Thank you, Greg. Hello, and again, thank you. We also have a leaky canoe member with a member's boost. Plus one for topical live streams off the main feed. I followed Chris's lead after the Clanker Therapy stream and set up a multi-agent setup and deployed wrappers for the critical functions I want my agents to accomplish. However, I'd like to ask,

how do you handle when your agents are, quote, moving too fast? It's usually a gap in the skill, and so they're just kind of going off on their own. and trying to figure it out, just using tool calls and whatnot. So you might see if maybe there's a little more implicit instructions you can give in the skill. Any thoughts on that, Wes?

Yeah, maybe more some sort of gate or interaction point or... Yeah, approval gates are good too. If they're having a problem, you could always say, okay, stop here and, you know, put approval gate in. That does work pretty well, and that's sometimes the way you can work through the problem. I also like if you, you know,

if you make them work in super small increments and maybe you could have checkpoints or have them at regular intervals use various other agents or sub-agents for a review as a way to sort of, quote-unquote, slow things down. Yeah, yeah. Let us know how it goes, Leaky.

Stewart comes in with a member boost, saying, excited to see a web boost option. Getting Albi Hub set up has always been on my backlog. I'm sure I'm going to get to it eventually, but this is nice in the meantime. I found self-host about six months before it ended, and I decided to come over and give Lop a chance. Been a fan since.

Well, I'm glad you did, Stuart. Nice to hear from you. Well, this one's from Pavel, who's a friend from Berlin that I met. Testing this good old member boost functionality. It worked. Good to see you. Bobby, member boost in. Woohoo, less friction.

More inclination to boost thoughts. To that end, I'm beginning to get it. AI, I mean, been playing with some of the stuff you talk about. Burning question, though. Are you running L.L.M's life. locally. Isn't that always the burning question? And if so, what is that magic hardware? Want to self-host where possible? Mm-hmm. Don't we all? That's been one of our kind of two-week theme conversations in the bootleg is like,

what can you actually do locally? And the answer is not a lot right now, getting to be better. But we have a producer actively researching. Yeah, PJ's on the case, and he's reporting back. Good question. Also shout out to Zippy Frog, did a test boost, and Space Warlock came in with a member boost. His first boost! Thank you for helping. us help you help us all. This is great. I haven't found an iOS matrix client I like, and I'm not usually at my desk during the live streams.

I've been hoping for this ever since you did Texas Linux Fest last year. Thanks for getting this figured out. Thank you, Warlock. Thank you. Nice to hear from you. We're doing very well. Props to Chris, who got the whole front end on. Oh, please.

It wouldn't be anything without the fancy back in and reporting Westpane. A scuffed member boost in. Free member boosting check-in. Yeah. Nice. And then we got Jimmy member boosting in. Okay, this is what I've been looking forward to. Okay.

It's dressed to me, this is appropriate, at West. Do you remember how Chris fell in love with another man's van? Are we really sure it is another man's van? I'm a bit fussy on details, you see, but I'm pretty sure it's not actually another man's fan. How did it cross the border? Who's it registered to? I suspect it's actually Chris's spank bus. Well, I mean, it depends on the technicalities.

You know, Jimmy, just get its technicalities there. Technicalities. It's right now, it's the Internet's bang bus. Let's be honest. It's the Internet. Now, if it ever makes it back, I have no idea. Well, you got to make that tempting, you know? Put on the sugar. Well, that's air good, buddy.

Uh-huh. Well, Jupacabra came in with a free member's boost. Hey! They are doing a lot with Mayo these days. Clanker therapy was fire. Thank you. While the stream was loaded with information, I'm experiencing the blank canvas syndrome. What would be a good next step on a fresh Nix OS system?

I was thinking of unleashing Claude Code over SSH and let it loose with I want to deploy Hermes agent. Let's cook. That's, I mean, why not? You know, I've said this before, but what has been supremely useful, whenever people say, I don't know what to do with the agent, I think, you don't have anything you self-host? You don't have anything annoying that you have to, like, move information from one spot to another? It's super handy to put it in front of your self-hosted services. And I think you might find the family approval factor of using whatever their favorite chat app that they've already been using for years to interact with whatever you set up as a smart

home thing increases the approval factor by a substantial amount that makes it worth it. So I would say if you have anything you're already self-hosting, you know, get a Hermes thing going, get it cooking, and then stand it up and have it start interfacing with the API that that self-hosted service almost no doubt has. Such a good way to go. Like you got jellyfin or Plex or you got things that are managing, you know, media for those instances. Like, why are you going to a web UI and searching for a file when you can just tell the bot,

you know, go get me this? Make it easy for that too. I also have a lot of fun playing with having it use like a text to speech thing. So like something like Pocket TTSA, there's a bunch of office. say there's a bunch of options. So that could be another thing, fun thing to play. Those briefs and stuff like that can be a lot of fun. I would also argue that if you have a project that you've been meaning to do for like a year, maybe two, maybe five, have at her, right?

Let her means just kind of suggest what to do with it or tackle it completely for you and get that thing done. Start you. Start it. Start it. Let us know how it goes. You know what I'm saying? Let's do it. Let's hear it, buddy.

All right. Anton comes in with a member boost. This is a tasty burger. Long time listener members since around 2012-13. Hey-oh. First-time booster, hi-oh, not a fan of cryptocurrency. So the Web Boost is awesome. Thanks for all the years of great shows.

Hope there are many more to come. Any chance the message limit could be longer than 300 characters. I don't know about that, man. This makes these segments pretty, pretty long. It is a balance. It is a fine. Like occasional member extra long. Oh, yeah.

Thank you. Appreciate it. to hear from you. Thank you for the long time support. Live long and prosper. And our final member boost today, which is our last boost, from five-five, high-five connoisseur. Hey, hi-five. Oh, I'm in. So excited about the web boost and the member boosts.

I fell off of AlbiHub due to the cost of opening the channel, and, well, my addiction to pocketcast. Great work, as always. You know, I used to be a big pocketcast user. I can't go back. I thought about it recently. I'm like, no, I'm very happy at Facebook. Yeah, same here, actually. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. Thank you, everybody, members, boosters, and streamers. We had 20 of you stream sats. Collectively, you sat streamers stacked 25, 922 Satoshes. Thank you very much. Now, since this is all new, what we think we're going to do just to make it one final line number is we're just going to convert the Fiat boost to sats for the total at the current price values. We don't really know the best way to since it's two different. But this is what we're experimenting with right now. We always appreciate your feedback because the goal is transparency.

The total boosted for this episode is 332,982 Satoshi's. That includes the member boosts and the Fiat booths. Thank you, everybody. And, of course, the Satoshi Boots. That's all in one final line item right there. Yeah, that combined to make a total of 39 boosts. Woo! And some streams, of course.

That's awesome. Of course. Yeah, 20 of you. Thank you everybody who supported the show with a boost or a membership. It's kind of neat to bring it all together in this segment. Finally, it's feeling like it's really happening. Thank you for trying it out. Yeah, I mean, this year of shows, since the beginning of the year, would not be possible.

Without your support, we continue. And even if at this point the show were sold out going forward, the deficit that we have dug ourselves into, we would still absolutely need your support to survive. It is, and it only compounds as the year goes on. So thank you so much. It really does make a difference. And we enjoy hearing from you. It's our favorite segment of the show. A couple of picks.

A couple of picks. I think maybe, Wes, you found Fluxcast this week, which lets you stream your Linux desktop to a smart TV that supports Miracast, DLNA, WFD, or Chromecast. Yeah, that's right. You know, Miracast especially has been one of those things that just has floated around forever, but I've never actually been able to take advantage of or try. Obviously, I Chromecast all kinds of stuff.

I have used DLNA on and off over the years. And of course, there's very small. ways to do that. But I thought, like, a nice little focused app that could just let you stream your desktop would be pretty handy. It does look really nice. Pretty straightforward. Supports KDE organome

and Waylon and Waylon. So, if you're on the Waylon desktop. You can also get it. You can just since it's a Python app, so you can set it up that way. Or there's an app image. And it's GPL3.0 as well. Fluxcast streams your Linux desktop to a TV. They have a great

video demo of it. And it's almost anticlimactic. It's so straightforward and simple, right? Because especially if you're using the Chromecast combo, it just works. The TV detects it if you're on the same land and you're just streaming your desktop to the TV, like, no big deal. And they have a video

embed up on it. There are some issues like some Samsung TV cast stuff has issues. So it may not be perfect for your exact devices. You have to give it a go, but hopefully it's easy to try. Something tells me the Chromecast is probably going to work best, followed by DLNA, then Miracast. And then it's going to drop off from there pretty quick.

But that's pretty neat to see. And it's nice that it works great with modern desktops. So I doubled down again this week. I kind of gotten out of the habit of backing up my legal Audible purchases. I've had an auto membership since Audible was a company. And just kind of always every month buy a couple of books. I'm a pretty big audiobook listener, especially on long drives or in the evening when I'm trying to go to bed, things like that.

And it's pretty easy to just fall into the habit of browsing for audiobooks with the app. being like, yeah, I'll get that, I'll get that, because you want to use up those credits, and then just kind of forgetting about them and letting them just sit on the service. And I've talked about various ways to extract them off of Audible before, but this time around, when I was revisiting the solution, I decided to implement Audible CLI, which is a command line interface to manage multiple audible accounts, which is nice because we have multiple in my family, browse and export your library and your wish list.

It'll download the audiobooks in the AAXC or AAX formats and then help convert them to non-DRM formats. It supports a faster method of browsing and retrieving the inventory than some of the other picks that we've talked about in the past. It's available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

And it is GPL3 as well. Audible CLI, boys. Yeah, this looks nice. I like it a lot. It's clean. It's easy to use. And if you're so inclined, it's very straightforward to have an agent sit in front of.

Yeah, seems like a well-maintained, uh, up-to-date Python app. And using UV again. And it's already a Nix. Yes, it is. Yes, it is, which made it very easy for me to get up and going with it. And then you could combine it with something like import to audiobook shelf. Our buddy Steve Ovens from the Ask Noah podcast has utility that takes books which you legally purchase from Audible and then moves them over to your audiobook shelf instance.

We've talked about audiobook shelf in the past, fantastic app. And Steve's made a tool to manage that. There's a couple other things out there. It, for me now, what I have is essentially a system detail. timer that once a week sweeps audible looks for books that I've picked up and if they're missing from my

audiobook shelf library it automatically downloads and imports them for me to my library. Yep and I can have it to a sweep for my wife as well. Well I've got a sort of just sneaky final pick here. Ooh, I love it sneaking in with. Yeah, because whoever whiz popped into the

matrix chat to give us the correct link to quid clipper. Oh, good. So I can actually now see, Quid Clipper is MIT licensed, find and cut lossless clips from movies and TV by searching the subtitle dialogue. There's a command line tool, but then also

like it looks like there's a whole web interface here or an app interface. What? Wow. Somebody's been busy. Boy, talk about the pivot. This looks awesome. I'm looking at the interface pictures right now. Library browser,

dialog search, folder dialog search, scrolling, script view, stream, select. Lossless clipping, bookmarks, clips is first class items, batch export. There's a NixOS support down here. Oh, this is looking for good. As well as Docker. Yeah, it really is.

And the CLI part as well, I think we'll be given this a try. Chris, you've been asking for this once a week for about a year now. I think he was reading our gosh darn minds. All right, we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well, and you'll find that over at Linux. unplug.com slash 672. What else should we tell people before we go? Maybe some extra details around the show,

metadata types, structured information about the episode. Oh, yeah. Well, like maybe if you want to try to use this tool on something like a podcast, like our podcast, don't know if it would work, but we do provide SRT and VTT files

right there in our XML RSS feed, as well as our cloud chapters JSON, of course. That's true. Another pro tip. Oh, and there's an MB4 file out there, lurking hidden in the feed. We should probably tell people that at the beginning of the episode. Yeah, we should. Yes, but there is indeed an MP4 file out there.

And another pro tip shows live. See you next week. Same bad time. Same bad station. That's also in the feed. Can you believe it? It is. That's right. We do it Sunday's 10 a.m. Pacific 1 p.m. Eastern. You get converted to your local time zone over at jubiter broadcasting.com slash calendar. We also have the lug going. It's our mumble room. Low latency, opus audio goes all week long, but poppin during the show for sure. And then our matrix chats, all of that and more. Linuxunplug.com. It's our website with our information on it. And then there's a bunch of great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.

Okay, that's it from us. We'd love to know what you'd think and any feedback. Please do boost it in. Don't forget, boost.totubterbroadcasting.com. Thanks so much for join us on this week's episode of Your Unplug Program. And we'll see you all right back here. Next week.