LINUX Unplugged - 689: First Kontact

Episode Date: October 18, 2026

A new documentary reveals KDE's 30-year underdog story. Plasma pioneer Aaron Seigo joins us to look back, and explore what's next with Plasma 6.8.Sponsored By: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:Web Boost — Send us a boost via sats or USDJupiter Uplink💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMConnecTen Internet: promo Jupiter35MP3: Clanker Therapy 3: What Have You Been Building?YouTube: Clanker Therapy 3: What Have You Been Building?Bootleg: Clanker Therapy 3: What Have You Been Building? | Members StreamKDE at 30 - KDE CommunityPlasma 6.8 30th Anniversary Edition - Release Notes — Plasma 6.8 is released on a very special day: KDE’s 30th birthday. Today we celebrate three decades of the KDE community providing the world’s greatest free and open-source software.KDE: The Documentary — The Story of Free Software UnderdogsKDE: The Documentary TRAILER — The Story of Free Software Underdogs │ Full Film Coming October 14thKDE 4.0 Release Event Keynote - Jan 18, 2008Aaron Seigo - GitHubArcGIS for Elixir — Convenient access to Esri ArcGIS APIs for applications written in the Elixir programming language.Sparking a Fire | Linux Action Show s20e06 - YouTube — Aaron Siego joins us to talk about the new open source KDE powered tablet that he and his team are working on! Find out how hard you want one, after this week's episode!Culture of Shiny | LINUX Unplugged 25 — Aaron Seigo joins us to call out the new and shiny culture that’s pervasive in the free software community. And even your own humble hosts have been afflicted with from time to time.KDE Connect — Enabling all your devices to communicate with each other.Local-First Software — Experience apps that work offline, keep your data private, and sync seamlessly across your devices. Your data stays with you, not locked in the cloud.jellyProxyKiosk — LCARS Jellyfin info front-endPick: RememberWindowPositions — Remember window positions for apps in KDE Plasma 6+. Especially useful for multi-window applications such as browsers.Pick: Konveyor — Konveyor turns Plasma into an endless, scrollable row of windows. Nothing overlaps, nothing gets buried, and the rest of your desktop stays exactly the way you like it.

This episode of Linux Unplugged is brought to you by Incogni. You know, we spend a lot of time talking about taking control of our digital lives. We self-host. We use open-source software, and we lock down our networks. But what about all that personal information that's already out there? There are entire companies, you and I know it, called Data Brokers, whose business is collecting and selling information about you, your address, your phone number, even information about your family.

That information can be used by scammers to target you. It's happened to my family. That's why I like what Incogni is doing. incogni automates the process of removing your personal information from over 420 data broker sites. They handle the removal requests, and they keep coming back every 30 to 60 days because these companies don't let up, and they'll list your information again. And Incogni's removal service has been independently verified by Deloitte. They've also got a great iOS and Android app where you can track your progress and keep an eye on your monthly risk assessment reports. And with Incogni Unlimited, there's exposure scanning that helps you find your information beyond the usual data brokers.

Find your details on a blog, a public forum, some obscure website. You can submit the link, and their privacy experts can handle custom removal requests because protection your privacy shouldn't require a second full-time job. Take back control of your personal information. Go to incogny.com slash unplugged and use the promo code unplugged for a 60% off an annual plan. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash unplugged and code unplugged. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee, and there's a link in the show notes. Go to incogny.com slash unplugged.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Today, we are celebrating 30 years of KDE. There's a new documentary out that tells their remarkable story. We'll dig into that.

And we're going to take a look at the new Plasmus 6.8. Plus, our old friend Aaron Seigo joins us for an insider's look at KD's history and where it's going into the future. And then you know what we're going to do. We're going to round it out with some great. Great picks, boost, maybe some feedback and maybe some voicemails. I mean, there's a lot there. I'll let you figure it out. But before we get to all of that, let's say time, appropriate greetings to our virtual lug.

Hello, Mumble Room. Hey, how are you? And hello, Brent. Hello. Hello, everybody there. And hello up there in the quiet listening. Hello on the live stream. Thank you for joining us, making it a Tuesday on a Sunday.

Also, good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking. Go check out Managed Nebula, defined.net slash unplugged, a decentralized VPN built around the open source nebula platform that we love. It's optimized for speed, control, industry-leading security. It's amazing. I really, really, truly believe that your network and your mesh VPN is too important to not completely control yourself. Manage Nebula from Defined Networking is fast. It gives you a resilient mesh VPN to help you out with a lighthouse, and you can also maintain and control your own lighthouses. No big tech control pain login. Nothing like that. And you can get started with 100 hosts for free.

No credit card required. A tiny network or a ginormous, slack-sized global empire. It all is impressively fast, amazingly secure, and easy to get started. At defined. Dot net slash unplugged. Redefined your VPN experience, manage nebulous, speed, self-control, right where they matter the most. Defined.net slash unplugged. And thank you for Defined.

Defined.comnet slash unplugged. Just a quick housekeeping here. Clanker Therapy 3 is out. The MP3 is available on our extras feed. And the YouTube version is also out. We'll have that linked in the show notes. And then there's an extended cut for our members, a bootleg version as well.

And those will all be in the show notes this week at Linux unplug.com slash 689. Thank you both. You both were great. And we finally got to dig into Brent's workflow, which was fascinating. I built a thing. Yeah, you did.

More than one. More than one thing. Accidentally or naturally? I don't know. But audience members built things too, and that was cool to dig into. It was. It was. We had some great interaction there, too.

So, all right, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. You can go check it out. We'd love it. I think you might like it too. And it lets us get some of that out of our system without having to put it here, you know, in the gosh darn show. 30 years of KDE. It's incredible. And KDE at 30, they are also doing a funding initiative around this that I just wanted to mention.

just to kind of put that out there. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. And boys, I'm old enough to remember some of the very first versions. You've seen a lot of these areas, haven't you? Trying to get the wife to run KDE2 and the KD3. And then things really went off the rails with KDE4, Plasma at that point. So it's really, really something to now see Plasma 6.8, released on October 14th, 2026, sort of their 30th anniversary release. This is the one that drops X11 altogether.

All Wayland now. No going back. It's funny how that was like, I mean, you know, I knew it was happening, but it's the thing I'll notice probably the least when as I've been trying it. Just because it's been on Wayland for so long and it's been so good. And there is X Wayland, so you can do still X11S. Yeah. It's interesting to see both Gnome and Plasma pushing on this, but 6-8 also land some major remote desktop upgrades.

Yes. Oh, man. Some fascinating stuff. Like, there's now three explicit operating modes. So you've got shared access, which is like the help desk, screen shared. host stays live. Then you've got remote access, which is the sort of exclusive mode. The host screens get removed,

not just dimmed, and then they get shifted to the remote session, right? So it's like your session. It's not the computers or the host session. Oh, that's great. Or you can do it as an additional display as a virtual monitor. That is...

Yeah. See, like that's not just additional... Like, that sounds like a deep reworking of how you're thinking about doing this tool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big one.

Mm-hmm. Clusive mode can lock the host screen, so that makes sense. But the other mode that is really unique is you could be using it and still have something else using it in its own virtual screen. Yeah. Yeah, the virtual screen stuff that Kewa is doing these days is very cool. There must have been plumbing because along with this spectacle, their screen cap tool got some reworking.

There's some new plumbing there too. Finally, yeah. Yeah, you've been messing around with it. Uh-huh. Yeah. Because before you couldn't easily, like, if I wanted to record, say, me talking while demoing something, spectacle was not the tool for that. now.

Oh. It is. So, like, you know, you'd have to, like, get your own sync or use a tool that can do both. Like, maybe I'm recording Reaper and then I'm recording in Spectacle. Yeah. You know, Brent had a good pick for recording on the desktop ages ago that I've used. But you had to run them both and start them around the same time. Yeah.

Now it's all integrated. It's just one tool. And I've been trying it. I mean, 6-8 in general, it's just really fast. It feels noticeably faster. And Spectacle also just, you know, sometimes it'd be a little slow or, you know, not at all. Especially not the video part. That's awesome.

Also kind of interesting, I think, We're just, you know, early days here, but the union theming is reaching beta. The new theming system now supports both QT Quick and QT widgets. So that's things like Dolph and Kate and Console. It's taking a long time to get here. Yeah. The goal is one styling system across KD applications. We've talked a little bit about this.

It's not like we're going to see an immediate visual refresh. Right. The goal is that you don't really see anything. But they get a single source of truth for declarative styling that they can use on all the different things and not have to have, you know, basically theme components re-implemented in different frameworks, which just sounds miserable. And then the other thing that I think, and I might have mentioned this earlier on there, too, but I thought this might be Brent's favorite feature is Cup. K-U-P is now a installed default backup tool that ships as part of plasma. Oh, yeah.

A couple episodes ago, I got some homework to try to give that a proper test. You got to give that a go soon. I'm sure it's pretty simple, but I'd like to know if it's effective, you know what I mean? That's pretty fun. And you seem like a good candidate, because if anyone's going to break it, it's you. And if anybody has a lot of hard drives to back stuff up, this guy. Lots of random hard drives all over the place.

Well, he's got that cool, he's got this cool crazy wiki brain he was telling us about on the stream. Probably got to be backing that up. You should. You should back that up. Oh, yeah. Good point. Back it up with cup, as they say. It's a nice, solid release like Wes is saying, like it's one of those.

You can feel the performance. It's not going to rock your workflow. It feels like 6-8's going to be sort of a long-term rock star. And it means we're getting really close to 7, which is just bonkers. And it really makes me reflect on the entire history now that we're here at 30 years. And just perfect with the 30-year timing, there's been a new documentary released. And it really tells the story of KDE over the last 30 years. We watched it.

It's great. And I'll play a little bit of the trailer for you. And then we're going to talk to one of the folks behind the early days of KD in Plasma and one of the stars of the documentary. I always describe myself as a relative newcomer to KDE. I've only been here 10 years. Using Linux on the desktop was tedious. Microsoft Software at that time was really, really bad. I mean, it was normal that a computer would regularly crash.

I saw a post on Usenet. There was this guy who had posted a call to arms to create a desktop environment. The initial vision of KDE was very much driven by how can we make Linux successful and more appealing to this. general public. And the cool story is that it's been a bunch of self-organizing people who saw that vision and for one reason or another that spoke to them and they got involved and they made it happen. KDE started with this lofty goal of replacing windows and of course it was crazy. The goal of world domination is always there of course. The Q'd library was very convincing from the

very beginning. There was a drawback to it because QT was not really open source at that time. We got a lot of of criticism, not to flag from the free software community over the licensing. If you disagree, go do your own thing. And in fact, some people did. Can you explain to me what is Godot? It's a KDI ripoff, started by Miguel de Icaza. People were talking past each other and it got heated. A lot of it boiled down to cute is evil, KD is evil, Gnome is good, without people really knowing the details.

We wanted something that had lots of features, allow people to do things in new ways. We got a lot of backlash with a release of 4.0 and people were saying, okay, KD sucks. People were disappointed, people were angry about their favorite features gone. This was the end and I was going to die and it was all my fault. I was the person to push the button and I did so consciously. And I stand by it.

Yeah, I mean, we have doing this thing for a long time. And it's one of those things that maybe shouldn't have work. The thing that I'm most proud of having done in my life, done in my life and continue to be doing SKDE. We'll link to the full documentary in the show notes on the cult repo YouTube channel. And Aaron Seigo was one of the stars of that documentary. He led the design and development of plasma. He served on the board of KDEV as the president, roughly from 2007 to 2009.

And Aaron continued leading plasma through KDE4, which was a very rocky era with vision and leadership and really move them through that to Plasma 5. And Aaron joins us now. Ladies and gentlemen, join us right now, the man himself, Aaron Seigo, on the podcast. Aaron, welcome to the unplugged program. It's really good to chat with you. It's great to be here. Looking forward to it.

Aaron, you and I actually have spent a lot of time chatting way back in the previous lives on Linux Action Show because we were doing that show right around the time Plasma 4 was landing. And I thought, you know, I don't really think I appreciated it then. but looking back at it now, you were really kind of early communicating with the Linux quote unquote media and podcast on what the vision was and why Plasma 4 is where it's at,

why we're trying to do what we're trying to do. Like you were early to that in a way that most open source projects have only figured out probably in the last few years, I think. Yeah, well, it was, I think, really important to not just myself, but everyone in that community that we really,

out to kind of the masses, if you will. I mean, slightly smaller community then, I think, than it is now. But it was really important because that's, you know, A, that's who we were writing software for. They were, you folks were our greatest supporters. And it's also where contributors came from, right? So if you really want to build something that's going to last year after year, decade after decade, you need to have a relationship with the people that, you know,

make the bacon come home, as they say. So, yeah, it was, it was. was really important. And I think it was a magic time where there was a lot of really interesting podcasts. And when I saw your name come up in the invites and the email, I was like, no way. He's still doing that? That was really cool to talk to you. Yeah. You know, Eric, I think it's really great that you took the time. And the documentary is fantastic. I had a chance to watch it and we watched it. And one of the things that it does really well is it does give plasma for its flowers, if you will. And

I think you're cutting yourself a little short because I went back and I did a little rewatching of that era. And you were fantastic at communicating the vision even back then. I think you were at a Google event and you were introducing Plasma 4. I'll just play a moment. 11 years ago. Oh, I remember this video. An international team of technologists, artists, translators, documenters, and communicators started to assemble. Today we form the heart of a global community that is thousands strong.

We've worked together across all divides, human and technical, to create software for all matters of people, devices, and systems. And in that time, we've accomplished what few thought was possible. We've created a coherent and innovative user experience erected entirely in the open using a process based on participation. Some of us that participate are entrepreneurs, others are researchers or professionals in our respective fields. We are all technology enthusiasts, and together we make KDE. And to celebrate the launch of 4-0, I'd like to share with you what it means to be KDE. Man, that's just a great... You were really...

I don't know, you were zeroed in on the mission there. Makes me want to use it, and I'm using it right now. There we are. But it was... Life is good. You know, if we could just talk about it for a second, Plasma 4, it was a huge role of the dice. And here we are, Plasma 6.8's coming out. We're at 30 years of KDE in community.

And Plasma 4, now looking back at it, was seemingly an essential, transition, but a very, very rocky transition. Could you give us just a little bit of that history from your perspective? Yeah. So during the KD3.X releases, I was maintaining more and more and more of the desktop shell myself. So I'd inherited a desktop shell, a run dialogue, the panels, which were called kicker at the time, you know, they're functional. They worked. They were reliable. They had little quirks here and there, but generally they were, they worked. The problem was, is that there was like no real future for them. If you thought forward like five years or so in development, they weren't going to be able to keep up with where things are

obviously going, which was a combination of things. The one, everyone's moving more and more and more to online services. Everyone's going to be carrying a phone in their pocket and they're going to expect to be able to use that phone with their laptop, with their desktop. It's going to be a mobile multi-device world. At the same time, I was one of the few people still contributing patches to, say, the panels, because the code base is kind of crunchy.

It had definitely matured over time, but it had grown a lot of rough spots. And there were some things that were just absolutely unfixable. One of them was the system tray, right? So the way the system tray was being done then was very much how motif apps in the early 90s were being written, or the mid-90s were being written. which is that every little thing,

every icon you saw was a different X window. This meant it was inaccessible, like for people who needed accessibility technologies. That wasn't a thing. We couldn't reshape them. We couldn't change the size of them. We couldn't theme them. And if you think of something like a tablet or a phone,

that's just a non-starter. If you think about convertible devices, it's a non-starter. And so we designed a protocol over a debus to publish the data as a service. And then other things could consume that service, which also meant you could have a system tray on both your screens, right? So the original design of like Gidees 1, 2, and 3

really designed for the era of one desktop, one screen, one person, more or less, you know, and an internet connection. And the really funky stuff that was happening was thin clients, which are still one screen, one computer, with one person in front of it. And so with that as kind of the backdrop, I looked at what we had, and I saw Q24, which was a massive change from Q23, which KD3 was based on, really disruptive change in itself.

Right. So there was a toolkit change happening as well. So the assumptions change, the landscape changed. I can see how you're kind of forced into sort of a rewrite. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so it was, it was a huge risk and a huge gamble. So on the library level, beneath everything, we were updating for modern,

media, modern, the hot plug era, et cetera. And so there's a lot of stuff happening under the covers in the KD core libraries. And on top of that, we're now redoing the desktop, hopefully, and the goal was that we could build something that would last the next 20 years that would survive the multi-device world, that would be amenable to an always online, always connected experience with people having hundreds of thousands to millions of files at their disposal, et cetera, et cetera. And I think, you know, the success of that was up and down, and not just in the first release, but just like, have we achieved all those things.

But I will point to the fact that Plasma Mobile is still a thing. It's the default desktop environment on Steam on their handheld device. We're seeing it shipped on, I mean, my laptop is a tuxedo laptop, the one I'm using now. It came with it pre-installed. It's with Wayland and it's beautiful. And so, you know, in some sense, we did achieve kind of that goal. And people have continued it on. I think one of the things I feel is kind of the biggest success of it all is that it's been able to transition between multiple generations of developers.

And they've maintained that structure, that vision and the, you know, the coherency is still there. And no one's felt the need to, well, we've got to rewrite this now. Right, right. So eventually they will, right? And that'll be a great day too. And perhaps difficult, maybe, I don't know. But so far, this basic design is held up, and it's allowed people to iteratively move it forward, which is also one of the goals. It was a few years of pain for years and years of a platform that's paid dividends is what it was.

Yeah. And people are, users are, especially in the free software world, we have very passionate people, which is very cool. But passion comes with a price as well if you're on the receiving end of that passion. and people were very focused on the here and now, and that's completely understandable. No real complaints about that. But it does have the negative, the possible negative, that if we're only focused on the here and now, we miss the opportunities to set foundations when necessary.

And if we are too focused on the here and now, we'll also get caught up in short-term hype. And that was, you know, so you've got these two kind of things, right? hype that'll never deliver and foundational work that needs to happen, that's going to have a short-term pain cost. And around the 4.0, the early, like 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 era, we were dealing with both those things. There was a lot of hype about certain technologies in the free software environment that aren't with us today for all intents and purposes. And then we had to pay that pain to get, you know, the next revision of the KD desktop environment out the door. Yeah.

Yeah. That is, and yet it's, and it feels like we have echoes of that today, perhaps, with like AI workflows. And one of the things that strikes me about your era, where you were really, again, pretty effective at communicating is plasma was also trying to figure out what do we do in the era of not just the web, but mobile devices, which you just touched on. And I have one last clip. I'll only subject you to one last clip. This is you on the Linux action show, episode 196. And you were talking about a project that I think, Aaron, maybe on the other side of the clip, you can correct me. I think this led to Plasma Active. So I want to play a little bit of this for you. The Plasma Active user interface, user experience. You can actually see it if you go to plasma dashactive.org. There's a website dedicated to it. And while you can launch apps and get apps on it, it's actually centered around the concept of activities, which we started on Plasma desktop.

but I think is really started to shine on the tab. And on these activities, I mean, essentially we're talking about like plasma widgets here, like living kind of in predefined workspaces is kind of a thing? No. So the idea is that... I like being wrong, by the way. Good job, right? You nailed it.

Yeah. Good thing you're on another continent right now, Saigo. No, just kidding. All right. So what are activities? Okay. So the easiest way to explain is kind of through the use case, right? we have a laptop or a tablet and we tend to take it with us wherever we go.

At least I do mine, well, not everywhere, but of course not. And when I'm doing work things, I have a few projects at work, but when I'm outside of work, I'm with friends, I'm doing other things. So, Aaron, I went and I looked to see kind of where this ended up, and it seems like plasma active transitioned to essentially what the plasma mobile effort is today. Yes. Is that accurate? That is.

So, and there's been a lot of things that have happened in between then and now. So the whole, we gathered, I think it was in Berlin to discuss what would become plasma active. Eva Bukhchefe's company was involved in this as well. And we were really excited about, you know, bringing free software to the device world. Since then, QML happened. Yeah. It really took off. Marco Martin did a really good job with the Kirogami components that are still in use.

but yeah, this morphs into Plasma Mobile, which is still there. And the concepts, so what was really neat about that, and it still is, I think, is a lot of the components, like the battery and the clock and other components, especially on that one, like the desktop widgets and notes, those are the same components that are used on desktop. Right. Exactly the same components. But they restile and reconfigure themselves based upon the form factor they find themselves in, and not just screen size, but also input. So you have touch, which is a very different thing than a mouse and a keyboard. And these components are able to jump between these different interaction modes. And this was long before the web actually got there to similar concepts.

And certainly before rich client application started doing the same thing. Sounds like a payoff from exactly what you mentioned, the previous generation missing, right? That was kind of what the whole point was, the paying off. Exactly. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, for developers today who are still, you know, pushing all this forward, I think it's really important to take that as a lesson, you know, a historical lesson of looking at it and going, okay, you can innovate and you can successfully produce things that, yeah, there might be some pain or whatever, but you can actually innovate in the open and in the free software environment, even on the desktop. And you mentioned a couple times about having, like, goals for the project back then. And I'm curious if you feel like the plasma desktop, but also the project as a whole, has achieved the goals that you set out.

What do you say? 20 years ago, something like that? Yes, like 18 years ago, which is crazy to think about. Someone actually responded. So someone watched the documentary. Sorry to go on a bit of a tangent. Sure. And apparently it jogged their memory.

And they responded to an email that I had sent them. They wrote me and I replied to them 18 years ago. Wow. And they replied to that email and say, I'm so sorry I didn't follow up on. this, but I just real. Yeah. That sounds like something I might do. I'm bad with email. It's, yes, it's, it was great. But so have we, have they, have we achieved the goals? And there are the people doing right now to do this. I think that's a, a question that is best

left for the people working on it to, to really answer because the goals will change, right? Have my hopes and dreams and goals for it, uh, been realized? Parts of it. Yeah. One, it has, ensure that the project continued to live. That was obviously goal number one, longevity. Two, it has remained at the forefront and been able to remain in the forefront of adapting to things like Wayland, which was just coming in at the tail end of when I was still involved in a daily basis. So that's kind of goal number two. Can we continue to evolve it as the technology evolves? Yes. Are we seeing it on devices? Yes. Right. So again, the Steam deck is an example. Yeah. So those things, yes. On the other hand, because I'm a horrible pessimist and a

critic of myself, there are also things that we didn't really ever achieve to what I hoped. So one of the vision parts of it was the idea of a non-local service-oriented experience so that you could be running an experience, forget about applications. You're editing something or you're watching a movie and you can seamlessly bind and use devices together. So KD Connect kind of goes in that direction. I use KD. Connect all the time for presentations. Love it. The design and the architecture of that app as cool as it is. And it kind of gets that idea, right? It's really limited and it's not generic. And I wish it was architected a little bit differently. No shade to it. I use all the time. But that's one thing that I don't think we ever really got to was can I be working on something

on my desktop and then just slide it over onto my tablet and walk away with it. Can I hand my tablet or my laptop to a friend while I'm working on a piece of code or something on my desktop and just have them start to interact with the same session? We are seeing bits and pieces of this appear on the web. We're definitely seeing a huge push for this in the local first movement of apps, which I love, by the way. And we started to make progress on this with Plasma, but then like so many other priorities took over. And I still think that to this day, the idea of viewing computer interaction session

and experience as being not tied to the device you're on and not necessarily local. It's like one of the big dreams we had, right, was you walk into like a train station and instead of installing the train, you know, the app for whatever place you're in that shows their timetables lets you buy tickets, when you walk into the station, that becomes available to you and you can just tap it onto your device. And when you leave the station, it goes away because you no longer need it. We had those things actually working, right? But they never really took off. And so if I was to say one thing we never got to and really seeking to fruition, it'd be that. And I think actually now is more important than ever for this because as Linux becomes popular and more used, we're seeing

more third-party apps. We're seeing more people trying to deliver software onto it. And that kind of frightens me because, as a user, because I don't trust most of those people the way I trust, you know, the fine folks who are making free software. And I look at it, I think of things like the clipboard and most of everything that runs on debus, like the system tray, it's an unsecured mess. It's getting better with Wayland. We no longer have a window manager that's also a key logger. That's great, which is X-11. So we made progress there. But there's still, I think, huge huge opportunities for reimagining these basic things as secured services that are not necessarily local, right, and just making it seamless for the user. So that's still something I dream about.

That's another thing that changed, right? Like, that's a big thing that fell out from under us and how you had to design software. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there's still fruit to be plucked from the tree there. But otherwise, I think that, you know, where the plasma desktop environment is now where KDE in general is, I'm really proud of what's been achieved there. And I say that points at the people who continue to work on it all these years. I think they've done a great job. Amazing. You mentioned the Steam Deck quickly there. I mean, for those who don't know, KD is the kind of, let's call it, the second interface on the Steam Deck. When you first saw it land there, how did that feel for you? Like, were you surprised?

Yes. I mean, the news was unexpected. It wasn't on my bingo card. Like, oh, yeah, it seems to people pick up. But if you think about it, if you're like, okay, we want to have a Linux-based experience and we want a second, like a desktop style interaction. And if you're really looking at it just passionately, right, you just throw away all your allegiances and, you know, friends away. And just think about it from a purely technical point of view. I really do think that what Q's and KDE libraries and then plasma on top of that gives you just it's not beatable. It is the pinnacle of what in that space. So it didn't surprise me that they picked it. One thing that it did when I heard about that though, I was like, oh my God, this is going to be so huge because if the Steam Deck is running Linux and they're expecting people to run games on it, that means that games have to run on Linux. And if games are running on Linux, they're going to run on desktop Linux. And if they're running on desktop Linux, that's going to unleash an entire, like, tidal wave of highly technical, geeky computer-loven people, which is part of that, you know,

that crossing the chasm where you get to that next group of people that are past early adopters, but they're not really the mainstream yet, but that's a really important group to get on board. And it is. I mean, I still am blown away by the fact that I have Steam as a package, like a system package, and I fire it up. And I just like, I want to play this game. I want to play that game. And I don't even, I barely think about, oh, is this going to work on Linux?

And so I think it's a beautiful example of like the virtuous cycles that can happen, where they get something that is great for their company. And necessarily by participating with that, they make everyone else's lives a bit better too. They may not have set out to make it that way. Maybe they did. I don't know. But that's the result, right? And that's, I think, an absolutely beautiful thing.

Yeah, it is amazing. I'm curious about that, actually, because you kind of, you've done a lot of open source and you've worked for companies making proprietary software, how do you think about the relationship between those two things? Yeah, so proprietary software is troubling. There are still certain segments that it is almost impossible to have a right now, go forward 30 or 40 years, I think it'll be a different picture again. But there are certain silos of software that are really hard to make open.

Games is kind of one of them. The amount of just sheer art and effort that requires to put out a, not even a AAA game, I have a friend who's been working on a game for three years now, him and a couple other guys. And they're just about to release it. Certainth Godot. Yay. It does run on Linux natively. So it's all good.

But there's a huge amount of effort there, right? And it's like, is that infrastructurally important to freedom? It'd be nice if they were open, but it's not necessary. So I think there's gradients, right? And there are some segments of technology that were just not there yet. And so there are still spaces for proprietary software to deliver features that free software is not quite there yet. I think one day if we continue pushing forward and we don't give up the mission, which I do think is a realistic possibility, seeing everything that's happening these days, as long as we stay the course and keep the mission in focus and focus on expanding the boundaries and innovating where necessary, we will eventually get there. I prefer doing open source and free software.

So at my current place of work, I do contribute to some proprietary software, and I also work on and release free software there. I've just released a big new library last month. That's 100% free software. Oh, we should add that to the show notes. Yeah, so that's a library to access ArcGIS from the Elixir program, programming language. Excellent.

We do more and more of that kind of stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a mix, right? I think it's always important in wonder where you are to advocate for what is better and what is good. And part of it is that even at these companies that are proprietary are putting up proprietary software, they today build so much on open technology and really helping them understand that relationship as well. Yeah. To open technology that they rely on is huge.

It's partly what got us into the trouble with Google and Amazon, right? That message never got through to the upper. people in those companies. And, well, in Google, they lost those people. And it didn't hand off. I think at Amazon, it's never was there. And we see a weird mix of contribution and abandonment and betrayal at both those companies when it comes to free software.

So it's another important thing. We need advocates that do interact with these companies. The example that I would give as the lighthouse for this is Microsoft. I remember ESR, if anybody remembers that fellow, claiming that Microsoft. going to die any day now, right? And he was completely wrong as he was with many things. But with Microsoft, I thought it was quite obvious that they were pragmatic and capitalist, you know, oriented. When things got bad for them, they would shift. And they have. When the incentives lined up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have to understand that most of these people

are not dogmatic, which is not great. Because it means they will just go wherever the wind blows, morals be damned. But if you can be there and help that wind blow in the right direction, you can move them. And I still think to this, here's my, my bold prediction from Microsoft, they are slowly moving towards a day when the Windows kernel will no longer exist, it'll be a Linux kernel, and they'll have a shiny UI on top of it. My guy. And WSL will just become the kernel, and WSL will go away completely. Have you been listening to the show? That's my prediction. Yeah, that's our prediction here for for sure. I seriously, yeah. I seriously could see it because it's just incentives will align

that way eventually. And year by year, they're marching towards it, right? They've realized that their developers prefer that environment and that that's why they're pouring so much into it. They just released native Linux containers for Windows without having to have a virtualization layer. Like, they're on their way, baby. They use it so much internally, right, for their services and hosting and whatnot. So yeah, this is possible. And it's not about destroying, you know, the competition or having to pull, you know, the walls of Jericho down. It can really be about how do we move the world so that everyone just does the right thing. Yeah, now I'm sounding all utopian again. No, I'm like it. I apologize. This reminds me of a quote that I read of yours. I wonder if you

can dig into it a little bit. Sure. You said open source is an immune response to the denial of access to society through technology. Can you explain that a little? Sure. So, So doing something like open source where you're contributing effort to something that you may not maximally see a return investment on, right, in terms of like I'm not going to get paid as much as I could. I'm going to spend some of my evenings, my weekends, a bit of my spare energy that I could just be relaxing, kicking back with a beer on the boat or whatever, right? There's a cost there. Some people love it and just do it. They do it no matter what. But a lot of people, they do it for other reasons.

mix for a lot of people, I think. And for me, it definitely was, and still is an ethical imperative as well as everything. I mean, enjoy it too. And so you have to ask, you know, oneself, well, what justifies that cost? And if you look at Richard Stallman, right, like the most rabid person in the world when it came to it at the end of the day, he didn't wake up that day. He wasn't born that way. He got pissed off at a printer, right? Someone stopped him from doing something, and he responded to it. And he was like, oh, yeah? Well, he was. watch this. Hold my beer. I'm going to go, I'm going to go change the world so that this proprietary rubbish doesn't continue. He saw the dangers because the dangers were present.

So when I see a world where there's an ebb and flow, like right now, there's a lot of critique about contribution to open source projects. I think it's completely valid. I think there is a vast under investment in general. There are bright spots in the world, but in general, there's the vast under investments into open source software from people who use it and build huge companies on it. Oftentimes they work against the best interests of, right? I mean, the things that, for instance, Google has pulled on mobile over the years with Android is just sickening, in my opinion.

Yep. Right. So, and we also talk about, you know, the famous XKCD comic of, you know, the world's infrastructure on the internet and then one little guy in Kansas that's, you know, working in an open SSL or whatever. Maybe we are in a point where there's an overabundance of use and not enough giving back. And that concerns a lot of people. And the question that sometimes gets floated and people ask, is it sustainable? Right.

Can it continue on? If you do achieve 100 million desktop users on plasma, that's a huge, that's a different ballgame. Will you be able to find the people to actually keep up with that or we just implode under the pressure? Or will you be taken over by larger forces that will just like steamroll everything? Excuse the pun, I guess. So people often ask questions about sustainability. And one thing I point out is that, or like to point out, is that when people are faced with immediate direct oppression, when they face the pain of not being able to use the hardware that they own, when they cannot fix the tractor they bought, when they cannot change the batteries and their devices, when they cannot look behind the software and see it spying on them, when there is a camera in their neighborhood that is sending data to who knows where, while we know where, not where you want it to be. When people face those levels of oppression, people have a response.

And I view it as an immune response of society. And you get the white blood cells of society, and they tend to be persnickety and a little bit aggressive at times. But they're the forefront of people who respond to such things. And so for me, the idea of open and free technology as a necessary bridge to equitable participation in society becomes a response to oppression as a person. becomes a response to oppression as oppression grows. And so there becomes a balancing, right? Where as hardware and software oppression ramps up, people fight harder back against it. And that's, to me, the immune response, right?

If everything was really easy and simple, and we were in this minority position, I think it would be difficult. That was kind of the important part, I think, of the Free Software Foundation back in the 90s, whipping everybody up and getting them all freaked out about proprietary software because it was kind of soft, right? Not a lot of people were really feeling it because they didn't know what the alternatives really were. But they were spot on about the dangers of it and they were able to get enough of us concerned about it and convinces about the ethical side of it that we did something. So it kind of primed that response. But it was a response to, for me, it was a response to the fact that I could increasingly only find work on really crappy proprietary systems to write software.

And I didn't want that to be the future. So I grew up in a very poor set of communities. And I knew that as technology was more expensive but more important, these people were going to be left behind. And these people were not someone on the other side of the world. They're my friends and my family. So it was a very personal thing to me as well. And I think that as people feel that, they respond. And so I don't think there's any real, I mean, I don't want people just to kick back and go, okay, it's all fine. We don't have to do anything. But if we look at it in the larger level of 50,000-foot view, I don't think there's ever a danger. Now that the genie's out of the bottle, that free software will go away. If it becomes suppressed, someone tries to put it back in the bottle, that will cause a commensurate response. And so I think it's a too late for proprietary technologists and people who wish to, You know, the tech bros that we're dealing with right now in the world that are trying to use technology to turn our world into a dystopian horror show, they can do it, they can try it, but it's not going to work, and it's too late. If they had done this 30, 40 years ago before openness was an assumed de facto stance, maybe, right? I mean, I think that's why these kinds of things did work better in the past.

But now we know what the response can be, and I think the harder you push on people, the greater that response will be towards openness. What I love about the documentary is that it captures, I think, a sense of what role plasma plays in that. And also helping me really appreciate just how much time and energy individuals and communities put into enabling it. That's what I really took away from that. I'm really glad you had an opportunity to participate in it, Aaron. Yeah, me too. I mean, I met so many amazing people and had so many amazing experiences that continue to live on to this day. And what I think is amazing about the whole experience of all these people that did put in so much effort is you'd be very hard pressed to find many people that regret it.

Wow. Wow. And I think that if you have something that takes a bit of risk and a bit of effort and a bit of whatever else and everyone comes out of going, that was 100% worth it. And I would do it again. I kind of miss it. You know, I can't do it now because of this reason or that reason. You know, that's a real thing. Yeah.

You know, and it's still there. If you want to experience it, you know, you're just one Git clone away. Yeah, it's much easier these days in a lot of ways, actually, than when Aaron got started. Dude, we were using CBS. Yeah. We were doing patches by email. It was email list that I spent, I don't know, six, seven hours a week, summarizing and putting into

newsletter so everyone else can keep up. I used a lot of Perl scripts to do that. It was part of the Linux Linux kernel cousin. Yeah, I use their stuff and kind of improved it a bit. But yeah, so we were one of the first projects to try and standardize a non-automake

build system, which becomes CMake. We adopted their great work, and we didn't do it. We just adopted it, took advantage of it. We are one of the first major projects to strongly move towards web-based reviews of patches. No way. Yeah, so I started using that in Plasma.

It was a standalone web app, wasn't integrate with anything because we didn't have the whole Git workflow. Sure. But you could point at your patch or your CVS branch or whatever. Subversion at the time, I think it was, actually. You could then, yeah, go and just do all the normal things

that we take for granted now. Like, they'd comments in line and stuff and post an update and all the rest of it. Everything but merge, right? Because it didn't have that's that integration. But this was like so much. better than email. We did it just for plasma and then other people in the community are like, oh, that's really cool. Could we use that? I'm like, oh, yeah, you can totally have it. It's right

there, you know, if you want to. And it was a very subtle way of getting people to move to a lower friction system without actually to convince them. Just it was, I thought it was so much better. People would just come to that conclusion on their own. And they did. And now in this day and age, it's like everybody takes PRs for granted and, you know, the ability to work offline with Git. And it is so much easier. And that's a beautiful thing. I'm the, I'm the, I, I'm not one of those people that goes, oh, back of the day, we did it for real. No, it was horrible. It sucked. It's way better now. It is. It is way better now. Language servers. Dude, language servers. So I can like get, you know, real-time feedback on my

code base and jump around quickly and I don't have to grab for things across 100,000 files. Oh, my God, that was such a game changer as well. So, yeah, the people of today have it far easier, which is awesome. But yeah, it's their chance now, right, to build a lot. on this and do new great things. And I recommend everybody go watch the documentary. We will have it linked in the show notes. I'm going to play a clip from Aaron from it to wrap us up because he really nails why KDE is so important. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us.

It's been great chatting with you. Hey, thanks for having me. It was great to steal you again. It's somebody for the first time. Really? Thank you for everything that you've done. We're still writing that today and we really do appreciate it. All right.

Now I'm going to leave you as wise as I think maybe you've ever sounded. The world needs an open option for the desktop. It needs open options for everything, but it needs one for this as well, what KDE does. User interfaces are definitely going to evolve and they're going to be something very different in 30 years, and they are now, probably anyways, but someone's got to be there providing that as a free and open option. This is so important in a world where everything we do is based on software. If we don't have those options, whole classes of people become disenfranchised. This was burned into to my head when I was at a conference and a group came up and told me about these farmers in

southern Africa that had translated KDE into their own languages. So they had software that the farmers could use because they could read and write in their own language most comfortably so they could enter the digital age of farming and not get left behind and not get out competed. They did not ask for permission to do this. And they certainly were not a big enough market for Microsoft to pay attention to, for instance. They were never going to get a Windows in their language. They didn't have to ask us permission. They could make the small changes they need to make to have everything they needed. And that's how we avoid the world drifting apart into those who only participate on permission and those who grant

permission. That's by having free software. If we chose at some point in the future not to base our society as quite so heavily on software, that might change. But that's our reality. I don't see it changing. And so Katie has a really important flame to keep lit. Somebody has to be there for the betterment of the world, providing that free and open alternative, which means that as people develop and push forward, it's the world's backstop to making sure that we don't leave whole groups of people behind. At the start of the show, Chris mentioned that we did Clanker Therapy 3 last week, and we featured a whole bunch of listener uplinks in that stream, but we have a few that we want to get to now.

Hey, guys, my name's Matt Mangano. I'm an aerospace engineer by trade, and I work with AI workflows and helping the company I work with work through that process. And I also am a big open-cloth fan, try to contribute a little bit here and there. But I have just built a small little project where I just embedded an agent into a live ISO. So, you know, your girlfriend, your mom, and your dad. A lot of people can't install Linux easily, especially Nix.

So when you boot up the live ISO, you can sign in with your chat GPT subscription or use an API. And basically just tell the agent what you want, and the agent will install it. There's also some markdown files that, you know, kind of guide the agent to make it a little bit easier for the user. So it's called Agent Hifen installer on my GitHub repo So I'll try to send it to you guys

I don't know if I can paste it into this or not Anyway, it's a great listen to you guys Have a good one Thanks man, that's a cool idea Yeah So I think what we'll try to do Is play one or two an episode

You know So there'll be a little, you know There'll be a bar a little bit Because we'll try to get the best voicemail on there And we're going to play another two in the bootleg later on in the episode too. I don't think they're called voicemails. I think they're called uplinks.

We got one from Soltros and L. Ray coming up. You did build the thing. But the show has gone long because of that great chat with Aaron, which was a lot of fun. So we should do... Boosty Graham. Some support.

And we have an unbelievable baller booster. Brentley, get yourself ready. Are you sitting down? Get everything out of your mouth. Okay, I'm strapped in. Ready. Clear yourself because our baller booster, he's black, he's back and he's black.

It's black host with $1,200 34, 567, Satoshi. Hey, rich lobster! What hell was that? Spaceball 1? They've gone to Plaid. Smoke if you got them. Blackhost writes, boosting the Texas meetup fund. Yes.

Oh, yeah. Nice. I think Blackhost, you get to pick if we should do it on a Friday or Saturday. Have we decided which one would work better, really? We're going to lock that in. We're going to lock that in by next episode, all right? So get your feedback in quick. Thank you, Black host.

I am committing to that. I appreciate that. very much. That is one heck of a spaceball's boosts. Incredible. Producer Jeff is coming in with our next baller booth, 666,000 666 Situci. I hoard that with your kind

covet. PJ writes, I'm making up for being a lazy booster. Cheers. It doesn't add up to me. He's never met a lazy bone in his body. Yeah, lazy and PJ are not. His definition is very different than mine. Well, a dude

trying stuff boosts in with 30,000 cents. All right. This is coming in early this morning. Indeed. Signal. Between this one and the pool party episode, I am getting my janky self-hosting fix and loving it.

As for your Fedora Ubuntu episodes, I see those as my news for what they're doing and it serves as a gauge for what technologies they're embracing. Keep it up, Jens. Yeah, we're having a pre-show conversation. Is the distro review getting old? Are people still interested in distro reviews like the new Ubuntu and Fedora releases?

Also something we're taking input on and signal received. Thanks a dude. Appreciate that. Bearded Tech is here with a one, two, three, four, five, Satoshi's boost. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. A live boost. This is the start of the Alaska trip fund. Hey, let's go.

Okay, here's an idea. What if we took a cruise from Seattle to Alaska and did Alaska meet up? I think that seems like a great idea. And if anybody wanted to join us on the cruise, Making a J.B. Cruise. You could join us. And we could all be on the same boat. That's a fantastic idea.

So what's the budget that we need for? I don't know. But if, I mean, that's not, I mean, that's not crazy, right? It's probably, I don't know, I'm guessing going to be $12, $1,300 a person for a cruise, which is a little bit more than a flight, but not always more than we pay for breath flights. Not terrible, actually. So, yeah. Okay, that's a crazy idea.

Maybe we get some sponsors on board. We get a little budget set up. You know, we celebrate. The show survived. And we go on a cruise. cruise to Alaska. Thank you, period of tech. Jody comes in with 5,678s of two years.

The traders love the ball. Listeners since I first heard last mentioned on the Linux Outlaws podcast. I'm spending some sats to empty the old fountain wallet, have fun in Texas. Thank you, Jody. Appreciate you. Hope to hear from you on boost.jubterbroadcasting.com

in the future. Well, Gene Bean comes in with some double ducks. Hey. I am programmed in multiple techniques. Y'all are talking about clone proprietary apps, and I'm wondering if you know of one that reproduces the current version of Microsoft OneNote. That is the one app my spouse absolutely loves

that isn't available to her right now due to a job change. I bet you give it 15 minutes. I'd love to be able to hand her an open source alternative that is feature for feature compatible. Well, that's sweet. I'll keep an eye out. I haven't seen that, but it seems like that's probably...

Seems possible, though. What a cool era where we get to have this? This? Like, this has been just things of dreams previously. These are ones I'm a little more apprehensive about, but I also like it. Are you a one-note hater? What's the deal? No, no.

It's just, it's a thing. It's a title wave. It's a thing. There's just second-order effects. Yeah, there's just second-order effects. Gene continues. I have to imagine your transcripts. Help with this, but it's a major...

Major accurate for my clinkers, I think it was just... Yeah, my clinkers are at... Oh, it's impressive how accurate my clankers are at pulling details from love. I recently asked about building a static site and mentioned some options had recently been talked about here and moments later it came back with not just Zola and the episode number, but exactly what Brent had to say about it. Pretty cool times.

That's what we're saying. When we say at the end of the show, there's some metadata that's useful for you. That's awesome, Gene. I'm glad to hear that. Nice. You could see how we could maybe turn that into like a site search feature in the future one day. Absolutely.

One day, boys, one day. User Al KF is here with a spaceballs boost. We're going to have to go right to Ludacris speed Longtime listener Oldest son saved bought and build his own gaming rig He's been on CasciOS

A while but went back to Windows Because of Bannoli Hope this Colonel Level anti-cheat thing Soon gets sorted out Anyhow, best wishes on that Texas trip Thank you very much Appreciate you

You know we are keeping an eye On some of the new anti-cheat developments It seemed to be very promising It's limited in scope at the moment but that's awesome. You know, my son just this weekend had to solve this whole upgrade, downgrade, modding problem

that was, you know, five rabbit holes deep. And I came back a couple hours later and told me about it. I'm like, oh, I'm surprised you didn't ask me. He was like, yeah, I didn't know you were home. Yeah, I was here the whole time. You just never said anything. Deep in the problem. He just deep in the problem.

Awesome. He figured it out. All right. Yeah, we are looking forward to our trip to Texas. Thank you for the support. Mm-hmm. M-Rams here with a row of satchels. one, one, one, one. Is that right? Did I get that right? I don't know. Everything's under control. I'm sure it's fine. It's 11,111.11 sets. Hi, I was listening to an old

episode when you were switching to graphene. MRAM says, what do you use now? How do you handle Google lockdown of Android? I'm using EOS with NextCloud together with NetBird and I'm enjoying it. I have left Google. My graphing OS usage remains, but it's now, unfortunately, kind of become my home phone. I don't even really even use. I don't even use it. use the cell service at all. Actually, they realize she just turn that off. Just cancel that.

It's like a small tablet. Yeah, it's basically a little tiny tablet for YouTube and Slack and, you know, social media and buzz and whatnot. So I'm not using it much these days. I feel like the Graphene OS proposition

isn't quite what it was. I am hopeful that their partnership with Motorola produces fruit. The problem I'm having is more and more things are requiring the Play Integrity API. That's a real bummer. But I know you boys have been happily sticking with it, not seemingly having the same strugs that I'm having.

Yeah, so far, I mean, there are the occasional apps that don't work, but it has not been a huge. For me, the absolute killer is the cash app. Yeah. My whole family's on the cash app. Yeah, I'm still using it full time since, I don't know, it's been many years now. It's three, four, something like that.

And I was pretty app minimalistic before that transition, so it made it easy. And so I don't run into apps that give me issue very often. So you guys don't use PayPal or cash app or banking apps? Not as an app. No, I use banking apps. It works perfectly fine.

I haven't used PayPal recently. I have used that one. What about our credit card app? You have another problem with our credit card app? No. Huh. Okay. See, that's been my...

This has been my issue. So far, all the banking apps I've used, it worked fine. I can see how that would be a major problem for sure. It doesn't sound like the project's very interested in supporting the latest pixel hardware. Mm-hmm. So we're really kind of in this in-between period. It's where I'm at right now, I'm Ram.

We're graphing hopeful for sure. Yeah, well, you guys are. I am graphing hopeful. I'm just a little bearish at the moment. Emram, I would like to know, you said you were running EOS and Netbird and NextCloud. Which device you're using that on? Yeah, good question. Mm-hmm.

I agree. Magnolia Mayhem comes in with 3,000 cents. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, you're a great guy. How's this, Fray? What are you working on? response.

All right. The speedometer went out of the mail truck I'm driving, and I don't have a phone stand. What I do have is a laptop with a USB dongle. I like where this is going already. So instead of driving around holding a phone in front of my face, I pulled over and vibed out a CLI spedometer. Oh my gosh. It just pulls the speed value from the CGPS JSON dump, jacked up the zoom, and sat it on

the mail table next to me. Full time from concept to prod 4.5 minutes. No, this is not a current speed boost. That's so good. That's solving problems. Getting it done. Solving problems. In production.

I can totally relate to the speedometer not working. Yeah, you can. Good on you. That is a good implementation. I might have to steal that. Thank you very much, Maham. Good to hear from you. Mark, A.U.

You comes in with our first Fiat boost for $25. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. More clinkered therapy. Using my wallet to vote. Vote received. Appreciate it. Yeah. Hope you enjoyed Clinker Therapa 3.

It'll probably be a bit before the next clinker therapy, because we're going to be traveling to Texas, and I'm traveling for family stuff before Texas and all that. So it'll probably be a minute. But we got more cooking. We got more cooking. Thank you. U.S. Brit comes in with $10.

I like you. You're a hot ticket. Time Traveler Boost, episode 358, post-market OS just renamed Nura. Like Chris, I run a home assistant in a motorhome and wanted an integrated server display to mount on the wall. I found in One Plus 6T in the archive drawer and clanked a solution. Oh, details in an email.

Okay, I'll have to check that out. You know, first of all, I'm enjoying that clanked is becoming, because I've used that jokingly. U.S. Brits, good. So I turned on the wireless ADB on my Amazon Fire tablet and had the clanker go to town on just sort of cleaning things up because the things only got eight, only, it got eight gigs of RAM. And I guess my home assistant dashboards are using two or three gigs.

That does remain one of the nice advantages of Android. Yeah, so wireless ADB, you know, turn on developer, mode wireless ADB debugging, pointed at the IP, give it the pin, and then told it to just start clean in house. And it can read the logs really well. I had to update all the software. It's really great.

Better at Android than I've ever been. Oh, well, and it's got more patience for it than I do, too. I'll tell you that much. My leaky canoe sent in a five Fiat boost. Linux or something. Here's some V for V for the dispatcher recommendation a while ago. Oh, good. I just hooked it up and an HD home run to my Hermes

agent and it is chef's kiss. Perfect. That's for all the inspiration. I'm constantly clanking out my playlist on dispatcher. Like if a feed goes bad, they're perfectly good at like

spinning it up, testing the feed, seeing if they get any frames and then finding an alternative. So, yeah. And then, it's like you're having your bot watch TV for you.

What a great use of tokens. That's great. Thank you very much. Appreciate that canoe. Atypical comes in with a free member boost. Why are you guys using meetup.com when there's a hosted Gavio by J.B? Also, can I get an old school last bumper sound? It's been

a while since the Matt Hartley days. All right, so what was the reason we stopped using Gath I.O? Because we were using it for a minute, and then we stopped. Do you remember why? I don't think there was any particular decision. No, there was. We hit a problem, and it came up at a meetup, so we stopped using it. I just, I'm totally gone of... Very vaguely remember this, but I think we'll need to be reminded somehow. There's also the perennial network effect.

And this time it felt low stakes, I think, just because you don't actually, there's no real meetup and you don't have to sign up. It was just a place people might see that it was happening. The other core issue that we've had, I mean, just as well, function standpoint with meetup.com, is it puts everything in our Pacific time zone. So we're doing an event in Texas,

and it's putting it in the Pacific time zone. But for the live streams, we are doing them in the Pacific time zones. All right, here you go, sir. Thank you, typical. appreciate you. The Atomic Ars comes in with a free member booth. I don't yet have a working front end for Jellyfin. That's a

to do, but I have a working info front end in Hellcars. Well isn't this for two it is? And he sends us, he sends us dot files. Dot nix to take a look at it. Our audience is so awesome. Did this just come in? Did he know we've been talking about Elkhars all morning? Did that just

come in? Or is this just a wild coincidence that we've been talking about? No, this was six days ago. If we'd see it earlier, we'd We would be ahead. As usual. That's crazy. We literally Atomic have been discussing building Elkhars dashboards and Elkhars reports this morning before the show. That's funny.

Thank you so much for sending that our way. We'll definitely take a look. Thank you, everybody who boosts the show below the 2000 set cutoff or that stream sats, 13 of your stream sats. And you all collectively stacked 29,356 Satoshis. This is a tasty burger. Now, of course, you got black host, you got PJ. We got some great. boost this week. We had some great member boosts, some great Fiat boost. So we're really getting

it ready for Texas. When you bring it all together, boys, get ready. Here comes 1,459,832 Satoches for episode 689. Thank you everyone who supports the show either as a member or as a booster directly. We really do appreciate it. This year has been a tough one. And when we have episodes like this, it really validates the hard work. Value for value has been received. Thank you for being part of it. Boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com, jupiter. Signal for the network or Linuxunplug.com

slash membership for just this show. You get access to the special features. Keep us going. And boost.jubterbroadcasting.com to get that message on the air. Thank you, everybody. A couple of on-theme picks for you this week. This one, actually both these are so up my alley. It's ridiculous.

The first one, simply named, Remember Windows. Window positions. Remember Windows positions. Although I do remember Windows. Remember Windows positions for apps in KDE and plasma 6, useful for multi-window applications as well. Automatic restoration of Save Windows positions.

Now, Wes, I think you might have found this. And I'm wondering, do you actually employ tools like this? I'm not really currently, but I'm not really currently. but I have in other situations. So this is essentially a fancy K-WIN script for remembering where your application windows lay out, especially useful on multi-window and multi-screen setups. It seemed like maybe the kind of thing we could use at the studio, perhaps,

if, you know, one particular implementation. It's something that Plasma used to kind of do. Really nice, and that's actually very customized, while all applications, you can do only a certain list of applications, you can make sure some applications never get managed like this. It has some really nice. nice customization options as well. So it's a good solid project.

It's packaged up for several distributions out of the box. It's been tested on Fedora, FreeBSD, and CashEOS. And it is GPL3 licensed. Let us know if you try it. This next one is really a bit of a workflow changer. So get ready to do something different. Get ready to do something new. This pick is going to change the way you use your computer.

ready boys are you ready i'm not conveyor conveyor turns plasma into an endless scrollable row of windows nothing overlaps nothing gets buried and the rest of your desktop stays exactly the way you like it every window gets his own column right next to the one you're already using when a row runs past the edge of your screen it simply scrolls so a laptop shows two windows on an ultra wide can show five from the same row tap a key to cycle columns through a third half or two thirds depending how you like to split it up. Built for multiple screens, conveyor supports multi-monitor setups natively. Each display keeps its own scrolling row and workspace stack, and windows can move freely

between the screens and per monitor profiles. Let a laptop or an ultra-wide or a portrait display get used in the layout that fits it best. Why weren't we using it already? This sounds very well thought out. You really get it when you go look at the link in the show notes and you see their visualization of it. And I think it starts to click. This is a different way of using. This is like tiling combined with workspace management combined with endless side scrolling.

Finally, the scrolling you love from your phone for your desktop. You know, my friend is better. This is better. This is side to side. The visualization has to be seen. It's beautiful. I would like to suggest that maybe, you know, dear listener, if you subscribe, to the school of Brent having too many tabs open.

This may not work perfectly. I love the idea. You're just trapped in an infinite scroll. Well, you don't do a, you don't, it's one firefight. You don't do, oh my gosh, you don't do one for everyone. One? One firefire. Oh, I don't think you understand.

It's a bit of a person problem. I'm realizing now, it's much worse. You can stack them, you can tab them. You guys, this is, it's a different paradigm for using the plasma desktop. I actually think there's a real winner. idea here. This is a different way of doing it. It's new. It's fresh. It kind of leans on everything you already know and love. And it works great on touch as well. So if you have a touchscreen, it has gestures or a tablet. Oh, man, this would be amazing for a plasma tablet. I guess it's a

C++ K-Win effect plus QMEL widgets. I really like it. Yeah, I'm going to have to be trying this. GPL3. It is GPL3. It's called conveyor spelled with a K. And I I really do, even if you're a Ganyome user and you're not interested in plasma or, you know, a hyperland user, whatever. I don't know what you're using. I'm not your dad. Go to the show notes and look at this, look at conveyor because it's a great idea and you're going to want to do this. I just, oh, such a good find. Plasma is so good and so flexible.

I'm really surprised it's not used even more places by default, just people doing these kinds of things and creating their own environments. You know, I was reminded at watching that great documentary that, like, when I first got the, this think pad, I had you configure plasma on here, the way you like it. Because at the time, like, you kind of needed to configure it. Like, the defaults weren't amazing. Especially because I, I mean, I'd used it before, but I was coming more from the Ghanome universe recently.

It's like, I don't want to have to spend two days getting this just right. These days, you don't need to do that at all. No, it's gorgeous. Except maybe to add conveyor. Didn't you do a whole stream with how you customize your plasma desktop? Yeah, it was a whole process. It was, you know, a 45

minute setup. But you really had a dialed in at that point, but I think Wes has really nailed it. And then you add some of the distribution improvements on top of that. It's just, it's really at a good spot. And 6.8 is such a solid release. That documentary is linked in the show notes. It's definitely worth a watch. And honestly,

the one thing, I wish I would have watched it with my wife or one of the kids. You could show it to a lot of people, I think. I think it'd give them a better appreciation of something I'm into in a way that is very digestible by everyday folks. And human. It's human stories. The people involved with the documentary really got to understand the source material, and they're just, it's well shot.

The audio's good. It's framed well. You know, it's good camera work. So it's a well-produced documentary, and they clearly researched and understood the source material. And so I think it's going to, it could reach beyond just Linux nerds. I think it really could just, you know, people that are interested in computer history a little bit, or people that want to know more about a hobby that you're interested in. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes.

That'll be over at Linux Unplug. dot com slash 689. And then in that RSS feed, you might have heard Gene being talking about it, but we do have some extra bony metadata in there. Ah, yeah, how about diarized VTT files for you? That way, you know, whatever you're having to adjust the data, be that yourself or something else, it knows who said what.

We also put a live item before the stream about 24 hours or so, and if your clanker's watching our RSS feed or you have a podcasting 2.0 app, you'll know when the stream goes live because we flip it live and we send out a little pod ping. So you could have your clanker or your podcast. podcasting app, let you know when we're doing one of these here live shows. See you next week. Same bad time.

Same bad station. And of course, all the details and the back catalog links to the Mumble Room, the Matrix, the membership program that keeps us going. We have all of that on a website. It uses HTML. You can use the hypertext transport protocol to go there. Go to HTTP-slash-slash-Linix unplugged.com. That's dot com.

And you'll get all the show notes and the bat catalog. And of course, there's a bunch of other great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Shout out to the members and everybody that joined us live on this Tuesday, making it a Sunday, on a Tuesday, which is actually so. Trust me, it does make sense. Thanks so much for joining us, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. As a Sunday.