Tech Over Tea - Linux Won't Save You From Bad Choices | Bigpod

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

Today we have the one and only Bigpod on the show, I've known about him since the days he ran the Distrotube discord but he's got himself involved in plenty of ventures some which involve some bad choices. ==========Guest Links========== YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpod Mastodon: https://mastodon.bigpod.si/@bigpod Website: https://bigpod.si/ ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome to episode 178 of Tech of a T. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson, and today we have a guest. This is BigPod. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Hello. Doing great, actually. I've actually known about you for, like a while i know like you know you do a couple of things new youtube channel that's not how i knew who you were i didn't even know you had a youtube channel until like you contact me again to like i start and do i start to do this i knew you from when you were a mod on distro tubes discord

yeah yeah that that was a while ago now wasn't it like when did he shut that down yeah a couple Discord. Yeah. Yeah. That was a while ago now, wasn't it? When did he shut that down? Yeah, a couple of years. Probably a year or two ago. In quite a while. Why were you doing that in the first place? How did that even happen?

Me and DT go back a couple of years. He had this thing called open free Sunday chat where I used to join and was a bit of a driver of conversation a lot of the time. And basically I used to be a filler and then after a while he made me a moderator there and after a while I became moderator basically anywhere he had these things so I I help him out in even now on his channel when he does live streams I moderate and I'm a bit of a filler on that on his uh his uh end of the month patreon chats he does i know you've done some like collaboration videos with him as well there was one where was it making like arch packages or

something like that i did two videos with him one arch packages and one step packages uh oh yeah okay awesome well why you just randomly hit me up like as i was on like mastodon you're like hey do you want to i know this guy who would be great for the podcast like his name's big pod why why in the world did you want to come on here like what what were you going to get out of it well i'm trying to broaden myself a bit uh my brand uh because i'm currently out of a job and i'm trying to broaden myself as a youtuber as a future blogger trying to get myself out there if i cannot find a job so i can have at least something to fall back on and maybe in future even be something a little bit bigger. I've luckily not had to be in that position where I didn't have any job whatsoever,

but I have had some positions where they were not giving me the hours I needed and I was like, well, I could stick here but I'm just gonna be burning through any savings I have within like a couple of months I'm gonna have nothing left like I've gotta find someplace soon but what like what sort of experience do you have out there like like I did see on your LinkedIn you've done like some cloud stuff and servery stuff. What is your background in the tech space? My official job employment record is working in container space. But my schooling is more primarily in server stuff.

That's what my school had for the level education i did but i'm doing uh i the company was working also did a lot of programming so uh programming in the container space mostly okay well how obviously like the container space is very, like, Linux-y focused. There is some, you know, there is some stuff you can do on Windows. It's gotten better than it was, but, like, Linux is still that core focus of containers. So, how did you end up, like, ever getting interested in Linux in the first place? How long have you been using Linux? What was your first distro? Third distro was Ubuntu 17.10 okay first officially distro what I count officially um it's a bit of a story

that's why we're here I was back in the day I was actually interested in Linux before going with Ubuntu 17.10 but I was I was always thinking it was just a server distro so every so often I checked it out in a VM did some stuff learned a bit and then deleted it but with I didn't do a lot of server stuff like for others or for myself for public so I didn't have much use of server stuff for others or for myself, for public. So I didn't have much use for server at the time. So, I believe it was right before the release of Ubuntu 17.10, one of my professors came with his personal laptop and he put into something that wasn't Windows.

And he asked, what is this? And nobody knew, except me. I knew just enough and I said, that's Ubuntu. But I didn't know which version of Ubuntu because something was different. Ubuntu 7.10, because it had a

pre-release version installed. Ubuntu 7.10 is the version that switched from Unity to GNOME. And that threw me off. Right, that makes sense. And afterwards, I talked with him about desktop Linux and then I found on my desk an old laptop. It was laying on my desk for a couple of years because I was supposed to fix it, but I didn't. It was working just very slowly and I was supposed to fix it for myself

and I didn't because I never had a need for it. So it was sitting right here where it's supposed to, It was sitting right here where I was supposed to sit and look at it. So that was fun. And I pulled it out and I just for fun installed Ubuntu 17.10 on it. And from then on, I made myself use it. Because at the end of that school year, I was supposed to write a paper like 10 page paper on some something to do with computers because I was supposed to it was at the at the end of the that segment of schooling and so I decided I'm gonna do Linux stuff comparing to Windows because I had a Windows desktop and a Linux laptop. So I did server stuff because that's more applicable.

And so that made me carry that laptop to school, which was really funny because I always had to have a power cord with me because battery didn't work. Oh, it didn't work. Who cares about battery drain if there's no battery? Technically, there battery battery to drain and it technically did drain right it just drained in five minutes okay yeah at the time that was like a 10 year laptop okay at the time and that was like seven years or something like that ago. And I then got my professors to allow me to use laptop in class, which made me the only one.

Okay. And especially in the computer classes, I could use my own laptop and all that. And they saw it as a bit of a challenge to see if I can do the same thing they do on Windows. And of course I did everything because by the time i already made myself kind of kind of knowledgeable and yeah then that laptop broke right before i was supposed to end the writing of that that paper so i still wrote still managed to write the whole of it on linux i did it in a vm because that was part of the challenge i set for myself and then i put it on a usb i brought it to school

printer office and got back a bit of gibberish like 10 pages of gibberish because libra office and windows and office don't go well together. What was that? That was what? So you were doing that six years ago? Yeah. Yeah, especially back then. It was a lot worse back then. And then I made it to work in Office at home, got it back to that printer shop, got back nice papers, gave it to professor and got, I believe it was a four, we have a scale from one to five with four being second best grade. I did have a bit of problems, like there were no pictures there,

because I forgot them, I was supposed to add them but I forgot. So a professor asked me why are there no pictures? And before I could think of an answer he gave an answer for me and he asked, do you think it will look more professional that way, like white

papers you see on internet? And I was like yes, that's it. And then then I was a couple of months without a laptop I had a desktop desktop but then I was supposed to go to a next level of education so I got a more powerful laptop so I could carry it with me all the time because school computers suck. We all know that. And I got myself a powerful gaming laptop and from day one it was always meant to be a dual boot machine but from day one I booted into the original version of Windows to check it out it was Windows 10 at the time I made a USB with Rufus

of Ubuntu at the time it was already actually 1810 because next school year and loaded it up and that was me using Linux in the meantime I also learned Arch Linux in VMs and all that so loaded it up and that was me using Linux.

In the meantime, I also learned Arch Linux in VMs and all that. So soon after there was a third partition with Arch Linux there and that's me. Then it was Linux all the time. And there are periods when I used only Linux, there are periods I used dual boot nowadays dual boot is because call of duty doesn't work on linux yep yep yep okay so i probably now that i think about it i i thought six years ago was a long time ago and then i

thought about when i started using linux and then i realized wait six years ago is not that long ago is it um yeah so I get I would have been using I would have been daily driving Arch around the same time as well then let me actually just check I probably have a video of it Brody Robertson when when did that video come out no No, not the recent videos. Where's the old one? I've got too many videos on this channel. It's got to be close. Maybe like, I'm going to say at least four years ago.

Someone's going to know exactly how long it was. But when I started using Linux, I didn't even have like a Windows VM at the time, I initially started, the start of a school term, like, maybe two weeks in, I just nuked my Windows system and installed Arch, I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't know, like, I'd watched a bunch of Luke Smith videos, I kinda knew what I was getting into, but not really. I ended up writing some of my papers at the time. I think I wrote some of my papers in Groff, actually.

And then exported them out to a PDF. I wrote some others in LaTeX as well. It was a mess of a year. But I think I didn't end up installing a windows vm until i ran across one random bit of database software that like the interface that we're using that was like part

of the assignment had to be used on windows and there was no way to get it running through wine it just it just had to be used on windows i think it was like a database designer tool or something like that that sucks yeah it does yeah because everything else like i i got around the library office rendering issue by just exporting everything except my one professor who was refusing to accept pdfs because he thought it was harder to mark them i don't know he was a weird guy but for you you, yeah, I don't know. Everyone else, like, so everyone else, they accepted literally every file format, even formats that didn't make sense. Like, half the assignments I could submit as a TXT document, and they would not care.

They might care because the formatting's off, but, like, they accepted it as a submission. But when you were swapping,apping like what was your experience like doing that because you were intentionally trying to compare the two experiences like what what did you feel were your limitations with linux would you feel with the limitations with windows did you feel like one at the time was better than the other like where do you stand with that windows was definitely better for me because I knew it better. Sure. But that aside and hardware issues aside, drivers were a problem.

Okay. Because, well, Ubuntu was great. I did try to use some other things on that old laptop. Like Fedora, in the middle of sitting on the floor waiting for class. Yeah, if you don't have a cable right beside you, ain't gonna work on ancient-ass laptop with wireless. They definitely don't have drivers in their kernel. Yeah, that was a suck experience.

But otherwise, there weren't many limitations for me at the time outside of gaming but that was also hard of a limitation so even think about it do you play counter-strike otherwise source yeah uh we did play counter-strike 1.6 in the classroom. Yep, yep. Yeah, and we didn't even have internet in that classroom. So, because professor, you can use computers without internet.

So we played Counter-Strike 1.6. But yeah, not much for me at the time. But things I discovered over time where there were certain limitations of either either side yeah i i think early on i didn't realize the limitations you know when you first start your system you don't know what you don't know about it so as you start learning more you start realizing what you can't actually do because i obviously i had that that um uh database software but at the time uh there also wasn't some like i think some other things i want to use like zoom i think at the time with the web client you couldn't start

a call and i didn't want to install the desktop client and like some random other i think some some browser plugins might have behaved a little bit weirdly as well i was using i was using vivoldi as my browser on windows and on Linux. And Vivaldi is fine on Windows. At the time, the Linux version, for some reason, just took forever to load. It wasn't a snap. It wasn't a flat pack. Nothing like that.

It just took forever to load. I don't know why. I think, for me, the biggest hurdle is the fact that I threw myself directly into a tiling window manager. My first experience on Linux was using i3, which also is not a great tiling window manager experience. It's great because it's easy to configure. The default config is, you know, really well set up. But it's a manual tiler and manual tilers are rough because, you know, you end up forgetting.

Like if you're just getting started, you don't realize that you can like rearrange things in all this nice way. And you just have this line of pillars across your screen and every application is just horrible to use. So I actually got into the habit of basically not even using the tiler. I would have one window on each virtual desktop. And I still do that today. I just feel like it's more convenient. Like with the exception of maybe I'll do a two split. But I'm usually not going to go above that except in really weird edge cases.

But what are you using? Oh, okay. Once you started using Ubuntu, where did you go from there? You started using Arch at some point. Did you stick on Arch going forward? Or were there other things you played around with? I was hopping around quite a bit. Trying to learn things.

I always had Ubuntu to fall upon. Sure. But Arch and Ubuntu were my main mainstays but i was always keeping with something floating and i didn't really venture into tiling window managers so the most extreme thing that i was using was openbox but otherwise mostly using no matter which which can be seen from my history even today so what may so i have you you've tried out tyler's along the way though haven't you or i have tried up and didn't didn't care a lot for them okay not my thing what what don't you like about Tyler's like is it just the familiarity you have with the floating experience because

of windows or is there something about the workflow that doesn't really suit what you're trying to do honestly I would sooner or later use floating mode and put windows in such an order that I had tiny parts of this window and on top of it another window, maybe even half of that window because other half is on the non-existent monitor and stuff like that. So that's how I got used to in windows and that's my workflow to basically accomplish same thing but waste less less space that's fair the like my my only problem with the float is i use floating windows i will put windows in floating mode on my tyler but i use it as like a fairly sparing thing like my i've got a web browser in my OBS layout right now and the browser itself is like sitting on my window like sitting on my main window

above my face on like the discord layout because I don't just I want to see my face as I'm talking but most windows I will tile like I As I said because I I do everything where it's, like, usually one window per desktop. Do you actually make use of virtual desktops a lot, or do you like to just cram everything on one place? I don't tend to use virtual desktop.

I have... Okay. I have two monitors. One monitor is my working monitor, where I have mostly one window open, whether it be an IDE, game, browser, whatever it is I'm working on. Then I have a secondary monitor that's over there that I have basically Windows laid out willy-nilly and some of them are minimized. I don't need virtual desktop because of that because i'm used to that and i did use virtual desktops on windows for some time

but the main reason i used them was because i literally wanted to hide something right it wasn't even showing up when i was alt tabbing that was my use case for virtual desktops yeah I didn't use them when I was on windows like really either because I there is a hotkey for I don't know what the hotkey was so from my experience like because I never I look I probably could have just googled it and found it but whenever I i i did virtual desktop stuff it was sort of accidentally like i'd hit the key to like do the virtual desktop switcher and then move a window over and like wait why did i do that i don't know that's stupid like if if i was gonna have it you know super one super two super three like you'd normally have on a tyler like

then i probably would get used to it more. And someone's probably going to tell me the hotkeys for it. And it's going to be something really obvious. And I'm sure if I go back to it, I'd probably want to work out how to do it. But... I think it's super left and super right. Oh, so there's no way to jump directly to it?

It's just left and right? I'm not sure. I think it's super left, super right. But I'm... I never used hotkeys for World of. There is another use space I used virtual desktop for in Windows. At the time when I was still in school, when I was using school computers, when I wanted to hide something from professors. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah that was a useful thing we were supposed to be uh doing something so we were we were playing games in and i was the one that never got caught mainly because of that i guess because they didn't really care because i always had everything done

before i started playing games. Now that I think about it, I guess back in high school when we were using Macs, I would have been using virtual desktops back then as well. Yeah, because I was using like Mountain Lion or something. My condolences. Sorry? My condolences. I've not used a Mac in such a long time

I don't know if anybody remembers this but I actually started my YouTube channel on a Mac yeah it was not not a good idea don't don't don't do that because back when I started the channel it wasn't a Linux channel

it was just I don't know what it was I actually I can't explain what it was because it wasn't a Linux channel it was just I don't know what it was I actually I can't explain what it was there wasn't a tech channel either some of my early videos I've just talked about things that don't matter like I made a video about when I hit like a curb and then shattered the hubcap on my car I was like hey look I broke that and that was just the entire video it was a bad video no one should watch it I think it's still uploaded you want to go watch it but you shouldn't watch it but yeah eventually i did swap i did start using arch i got i got a laptop that i could install arch on it wasn't a perfect experience like surprisingly like surprisingly i didn't have any wi-fi issues at the time which i

was really expecting to have but then eventually the touchpad broke and now i don't have a touchpad on it and i didn't ever want to get fixed plus i don't really use the laptop like anymore anyway so it's not really a big deal for me in the first place. Um, but I always worked with, as I said, I always worked with having one thing installed on hardware, but you were saying that you were, you had different petitions for your different distros. Yeah.

Yeah. Have you run into a situation where maybe you selected the wrong petition? Maybe you wipe the entire drive. Like, have you ever accidentally instilled over something you shouldn't have had? I shouldn't have done so. I made my data in such a way that even if I did, I didn't care. So you weren't going to lose your home. Thankfully, I did.

Yeah, I did lose my home many times. Catch was I didn't have any data in my home. Right. I had one partition. I had, I don't know how big, SSD and bigger hard drive. And that hard drive was a shared partition or shared drive between Windows and Linux, always.

It was NTFS formatted, and I had all the data on it. Wait, I'm sorry. Hold up a second. Wait, wait. So I had access to all data, whether it was on Windows or Linux or any Linux. That was my horrible system of doing things. Your main data drive was an NTFS drive on Linux? Yes.

Yes, you can do that. How was the NTFS driver back then? Because I know it's not perfect nowadays. Working. That's simply that. It was working. Never broke for me. It was...

I have to say, it was great. It worked. I don't believe that it was great. I believe that it was working. It was working. It had all normal speeds you would expect for a SATA 3 2.5-inch drive, and that was all I was expecting.

Jesus. It worked. So stupid. Let's just say my goal was having all data accessible on any OS I put it into. I guess you technically achieved that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's just say after I switched off that laptop, I never did that architecture again. Yeah, I hope not. That seems like a recipe for disaster i'm surprised that did anything ever like bad ever happen to that drive or did it survive the entire time no it's just fine it's still in that it's it's the main drive in that laptop currently wow that's actually kind of impressive. Or no. No, actually it isn't. I removed it. It's actually now my main backup drive in my desktop. Please tell me it's not still NTFS. Yes it is. But it isn't actually loaded into Linux unless I manually

do it because the point of that thing right now is that if I whether it be Windows or Linux I need to make a backup I just zip tar whatever everything mount the drive of course

I first have to plug it in because it's always unplugged because it's me I like to make things harder for myself I go I plug it in, mount it put the zip or tar file on it

unmount shut down the computer, unplug it and that's it's 15 minute operation per every few months unless i have to clean it up because i waste i filled the two terabyte space so then i first clean it up so it's a half an hour operation is that a ssd or mechanical drive it's a hard drive. Okay, okay, okay. One and a half inch. When you said it's not mounted... When you said it's not mounted,

I thought you were going to say it's not mounted on Windows. And then I was... It's not mounted anywhere. Unless I'm copying into it, I unmount it. Okay, okay. And then unplug it. Because it's backup drive now. Sure, sure.

Is that your only backup drive? Because that seems like a bit of an old drive. It's a six-year-old drive, yeah. I have one that is actually older. It is... Wait, how old is that drive? 11 years at least it's not part of your backup solution as well it is

but that drive is for backups of things that have somewhere else as well right secondary backup. Okay, okay.

Redundancy is fine. Okay, that's fair. So is that your own... I have it mainly. So is... What is your backup system right now? Like how... If you want to backup your system,

you want to backup something, what is the process that you end up taking? Everything that isn't absolutely cannot hit internet or in any way i don't want it to hit internet goes on i goes on both drives or at least the one that is in my computer. Everything that can hit the internet is zipped up or tarred up and put into a private cloud storage. Okay. Is that Nextcloud or is that something else?

Blob storage, no application specifically. It's cloud cloud. Okay, okay. AWS S3 or whatever, GCP. I'm not telling which one it is.Cloud. Okay, okay. I think AWS S3 or whatever, GCP. I'm not telling which one it is. Sure, sure, sure. No fair enough. But it is one of the big three.

Sure. You just dump it on there and then it just exists. Yeah. Okay. Exists on there. It's private. Encrypted. I don't care.

And that's... And then if you need to, like, just grab something from that, you just pull it down and then... Hopefully, you don't care and that's and then if you need to like just grab something about you just pull it down and then hope hopefully you don't need to use it but you know it's just going to be there yeah yeah it's mostly mostly things i already have somewhere else because everything that is able to hit internet is probably my source code and that is probably on my personal gitlab right so yeah do you host your gitlab there's some other stuff yeah okay because i know you i noticed you hosted your mastodon as well are those the i host that as well yeah are those the only things that you host or the other things out there that are on your there are other things as well i also host my own uh oci registry so for

docker images or what is now podman images that's what i what i have and that's quite a necessary thing for me to have so i have that currently, those three. So is that something you're hosting on your own hardware or are you hosting on some... No, okay. It's publicly accessible. It doesn't touch my network at all. It's such a way that I would host it.

That's a big no-no in my opinion. Why do you feel that? Why do you not think it should be on your network because that that means i would have to open ports to my network and that's not gonna happen i know some people like the idea of i of like physically hosting your own oh it's one thing to host your own local stuff like you want to host your own local backup. I host that. Yeah.

I have that. I have a server for that. But whatever is publicly accessible, that should be somewhere separate. If I had a separate connection for that, yes, I have a single connection. No chance. You don't trust that? If I was alone, living alone, sure. I don't live alone.

So you don't want to put other people's data at risk by doing that? Okay, that's fair. That's totally fair. Other people's data, experience, all that. Then I would have to fix it. So with the stuff that you do host remotely, what made you want to go and host your own GitLab

rather than use the main instance or your own Mastodon instead of using any of the instances out there? Like, why do that yourself? Why go through the hassle? For GitLab, it is that I do a bunch of weird stuff. Right. A bunch of weird, crazy stuff with my code,

with all the stuff, and I don't want to bog them down or anything i know i know what i'm doing is insane so i i need an example here of what what you're doing let's let's just say uh i used to i used to make uh uh anything that was art that wasn't in main repos, I used to build myself with automation. So AOR, if it was AOR, it was in a GitLab repo on my server and every day it was

building. Right. So stuff like that. That's compute and storage. I shouldn't waste on them. Simple as that. You should do what Yublu does and put waste on them. Simple as that. You should do what Ublu does and put it on GitHub. I know we do that, but we do it for a reason.

We share it with public. I didn't share it with public. I was the only user of it. And I didn't want anyone else using it, to be honest. So that's the reality. That's the reason why. And that's the same reason I don't have configs on my GitHub, GitLab, because I think it's just a waste of their space.

Because at the end of the day, only I will use it. Right, okay. I get that, that makes sense. So what about the Mastodon then, is that you don't trust that some instance that you're on is going to go down or I don't trust for it to go down

yeah, that would be more of a mainstream explanation, the realistic explanation is that I switched too many servers I was on one server. I don't even remember which one it was. I switched from that one.

I believe I was deleted from it, or I deleted it myself. I don't know. Maybe I forgot to even log in for a long time, so I deleted it that way. Then I was on another server. This was oops. And that one shut down. Then I was on another server, this one, oops, and that one shut down. And I was on another server and again forgot to use Mastodon so I got deleted from there,

or it closed down, I don't know. And then the latest craze about Mastodon came I decided I'm not gonna I'm not gonna be looking into a new server when I forgot to log in for a year because I will forget to log in I'm gonna create my own server let's see what happens and yeah

it's working well if it's a single user instance it shouldn't be that bad. Architecture is in such a way that I'm sure multiple single users could work on it. I did an overkill solution. Okay. I don't even know the process of hosting Mastodon.

So I don't even know what an OVQL solution would be in this case. I use three servers for what could be one. Let's just say, no, I have a database server. I have a main program server, so where Methodon runs, and I have a server for what I call front-end, aka, all it does is a proxy.

Proxy layer. What? But it does allow me to do some stuff with other stuff, so on the same server, I have GitLab, I have my registry, all that. Okay. Those three servers now contain all my public

infrastructure. Of course, I also did something special, and about a month ago, I went and for about a couple of hours, turned off my proxy layer, so nothing was accessible.

And when it came back, it was working just fine as before. You know what was the difference? I switched to the server. At least the proxy layer came back. That's good. Yeah, it came back. It should have. It's Nginx, after all. Only difference was

it was compiled for a different architecture. Because I went and I bought a new virtual machine this time with ARM so I have a, my proxy layer is ARM I can say I use ARM now

why why did you change the ARM why did you do that I need to know why you sold the arm. Say I use arm. Right. That's the reason I tell people. Reality is I save a dollar or euro.

I save a euro a month. Okay. That's pretty good. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. save a euro a month okay that's pretty good yeah okay yeah this is so stupid this model is so overkill for what you're doing it's my like i play with that stuff that's the point of it. If it goes down, it goes down.

I don't care. I use it unless I said something to public so someone else can pull it from my thing. That's it. I use it. Outside of Mastodon, I'm the only person who accesses it normally. So if it goes down, it's my fault.

That was kind of the point of it all right so outside of doing this weird architecture how difficult would you say for someone who's never like hosted mastodon to go and do it themselves because i know a lot of people will set up a mastodon instance with one of the mastodon providers, like the ones who just do all of that stuff automatically for you. But if someone just wanted to go and do it, how difficult would that be? It's somewhat simple. Of course, because of my experience, I use the Docker container or Docker compose compose file which had multiple of same container and that is pretty simple all i had to do was fill out uh uh their configuration file properly and set up a podcast server and already server that's but it's all uh that file was all

all set up for me already so all i had to do was enter the right links into it. The only problem comes when you want to do it publicly, SSL. That is, let's encrypt, let's be honest, free, why not? And Nginx, if you're not versed in Nginx, you have a bit of trouble. You might have a bit of trouble configuring. But then again, their configurations even for that are available publicly on GitHub. And even on their website. So you can use that as a basis.

So it's pretty streamlined. So I guess with containers nowadays like that makes things a lot easier than it would have been at one point you like i know that you have clearly you have some sort of interest in the cloud space in the server space and all that did you like were you like how big were containers back when you first started doing stuff? Non-existent, at least to me. Containers came, were a thing, but they were clearly, especially in my bubble, were basically non-existent. I came across them a couple of years years ago two, three years ago

no, it actually had to be more time flies nowadays you didn't notice three, four years ago if I think back on my experience I think maybe it's just yeah, maybe it is just your bubble then

because I do remember a class I had where we covered Docker containers but then I had where we covered Docker containers, but then I had other classes. We didn't have that at school. I'm sorry? I was the one who introduced Docker containers to my professors. Okay.

But I also had another class where we did Angular. Not AngularJS, but the original Angular. Very deprecated at that point. So, you know, there is this mix of things that make sense and then ancient tech. But so you clearly have an interest in the server side side why is it the server side that seems like grabbed your attention so much um maybe part of it is because i think it's the future okay i think uh client side is gonna change in the next few years of Of course, I've been thinking that for the last seven, eight years,

but yeah, I think sooner or later client-side will change. It will go smaller, thin machines. It will still be powerful enough to run on its own, but for the most part, we will use Cloud. Whether it's through browsers, through virtual network infrastructure, something, something infrastructure. You know what I mean.

Yeah. Something like that. It will go through that, and I think knowing server-side is very important. And also, I've been writing most of the stuff for myself in web app form. I haven't written a desktop app, even for things that I give interface for in a long time. Longer than I've been using Linux, actually.

Okay. So did you have, it sounds like you have experience with that before, like back on Windows then. So when did you start getting involved in this space like full stop then? That goes probably to most of the time I wrote software. First software I wrote when I was like 14. That was when I learned C++, I think.

In school. In what would be considered high school level education. That is a rough class. C++ in a high school. Yes. Let's just say we have a vocational

high school education. Oh, was it a teacher that understood C++? Or were they learning along the way? No, that was what it was picked for our year. And the person just happened to know it and teach it. Okay, okay. I just say I learned everything myself. So, and i was still

in front of the class even though i learned everything myself i was three three classes in front of course i started a class early because by the time we started it was half a year in because we were first learning uh theoretics of programming or not really theoretically it was it was practical using scratch scratch uh that mit program scratch that yeah that little cat i believe it is the icon yeah that's never a thing that's actually like a a really interesting way to run a programming class teach the concepts and then move you into like an actual language like huh okay no no let's just say i just say without saying anything about my classmates um i i was the only one who happened to have next couple hours free after we had a test.

So first time professor sent me out, second time he said wait here, sit in that back computer, turn on some text, some ID for C++ and then he just dropped a c++ book and i think it was a slovenian translation of the of the actual c++ from from the original authors or something like that he just dropped it and uh start on page one that was my introduction to C++. Wait, so he just didn't even want to teach you? I was too ahead of the curve on that. I think I had a classmate who managed to pass the gauntlet after me, so he joined me then.

God. Yeah. So then there was a couple of classes in front uh so by the time we came to the third year out of five i i learned i taught myself java and c sharp okay i didn't want to touch c++ ever again and by that point i didn't want to touch C++ ever again. And by that point, I didn't want to touch Java ever again. Yep, yep, I have a feeling. So C Sharp for me. Yeah, C Sharp is just Microsoft skin Java. I actually like it. I know some people are like, you know, C Sharp bad.

It takes Java and then just makes it less Java, which is great. It makes it a million times better, great. It makes it million times better. Let's be honest. Yeah. Yeah. So from that point, I first learned how to do a desktop applications. So I need, of course, console applications, of course, desktop applications. And then I started looking into ASP.net.

Ah, after that I threw away all the knowledge I had about desktop applications because that's it. APIs, frontends. And then two years happened. Then came the fateful 1710 release and me installing Ubuntu. What do you think happened? First thing I installed was I installed.NET Core and that's what I've been using ever since. Wait, so everything you do now is.NET Core?

No, it's not. Everything now is.NET because they changed the name. Oh, right. Now it's.NET. That is.NET. Not anymore.NET because they changed the name. Oh, right. Now it's.NET. That is.NET. Not anymore.NET Core. I forgot about that. When I write code for myself, I write C Sharp. Hmm, okay.

Huh. Fun fact for people who watch. .NET works faster on Linux than on Windows. And Microsoft knows that and hasn't yet done anything about it. They also implemented a couple of features specifically for Linux that were not available on Windows or Mac until the next version. So, they don't care. So what you're saying is that Linux is the definitive.NET platform.

Nowadays, yes. Especially for ASP.NET. ASP.NET Core. What are you going to use? You should use Docker containers anyway. That's why it works that great, because Docker containers. That's a good point.

Yeah, no, I didn't think of that. I guess, like, I know it's really easy to hate Microsoft for everything they do, and for many things, they absolutely deserve it. But Microsoft today is not the Microsoft of the early 2000s they don't want they're not going to

be like we are proudly a linux company because that goes against their like their core we're trying to sell windows trying to sell windows server all that but they are fully aware when they say microsoft loves linux they are not lying but there's also a little asterisk there and then under it in very small text we love money and linux is money basically basically it's money for them it's it's what what drives uh most of their cloud, or not, let me correct myself, it doesn't drive their cloud. It is the thing in the car. And the car is made out of Windows.

Still. I thought that was a really bad metaphor. Their servers are still Windows. Right, right. Most of the things that are running on those servers inside VMs are Linux. Right, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, if you're doing everything in Docker containers, you're doing everything in virtual machines, you're doing everything... If you're doing Kubernetes, you're doing Docker, if you're doing anything like that, you're gonna

be running Linux because nothing else really works with that. Oh, you can't use Docker on Linux! Technically you have Windows Notes for Kubernetes, but who uses that? Come on. I'm sure there's going to be at least one person out there that's like, I do. Let's just say, I think I know someone who does, but they use both.

Well, where are we going to go from we go from this where so talk about service stuff i guess the best place to go from here is talk about your so you've got this interest in like servers and containers and that sort of leads naturally into these image-based systems that I see that you've got yourself into nowadays. When did you start getting interested in containers on the desktop side? As with everything with me, that even predates

my interest in containers on desktop for the image-based devices. For the first time I heard of Silverblue. I thought it was a great idea. But it was the future. It works right alongside, great alongside

with the whole idea of client becomes less important, all that. But what was, in my opinion, it was a horrible user experience. Because making your own extension of it so you could deploy it was a horrible experience. So I didn't use it.

And then George Castro kindly showed me through... I was following his project before it was even a project actually but it was just a bunch of shell scripts and at one point I checked it out and it was archived and then I found out it was moved to a project because now it has gotten better, OCI Images. And I installed it on my, at the time, work laptop.

And soon after... Is your main OS? I hope not. Yes. Yes. It was... I was running Ubuntu before that. That's not as bad then.

We were using either Ubuntu or whatever Linux we wanted. There was no... There were a couple of Windowses and Macs, but mostly it was Linux. Okay, okay. So I had Fedora Silverblue on it. Everything ran perfectly.

And at first I didn't really engage, but right before, like a couple of months before I actually lost my job, like a month or two, I started engaging with them, and the rest is history. So how long ago was that, do you reckon? Because if Yubilu already existed, then it can't have been that long ago.

I guess February? February, March? What, this year? This year. Ah, okay. I thought it was maybe a bit longer than that. So, things like DistroBox already definitely existed. DistroBox...

Did that exist yet, or was that a couple months later? Distrobox exists for a while now. Yeah, it certainly didn't get the attention until a lot more recently. But Toolbox definitely existed. Toolbox existed for a couple

years, ever since Silver Room. Distrobox has been around at least since last year Yeah Huh So from there you just sort of Is that what you're using now?

You're using UBlue? Yeah I use my own build Built on top of George's build Built on top of UBlue Built on top of Silverblue So what was it about ublue that grabbed your attention was it the was it george's explanation on how to build your own custom image

or was it something else that ublue actually offered so uh some of it was george how he was handling things and some of it was that things were already done. NVIDIA was already working. That was a big driver for me. NVIDIA was already working, other stuff already working. So why not? And then I started doing things like talking with them and then I started filling in pull requests or accepting pull requests and checking them out. in pull requests or accepting pull requests and checking

them out then I did a couple of pull requests more together with them like we did a couple of actions that's another one of my things I like to do is CICD stuff and that

that then came to me being where I am now with them. So it's just, how would you wait? I don't know where I was going with that. Now think about it. This happens sometimes.

So what are you, what are you running on you blue? Like what is your desktop right now? No, no. Okay. Oh yeah. So what are you running on Ublee? Like, what is your desktop right now? GNOME. GNOME? Okay. GNOME, yeah. Have you, like, I know you said you messed around with Mate. Have you experimented with things like KDE, XSE,

or anything like that else, like, in your past? I probably ran most of the major desktop environments one time or another. And you just tend to gravitate back towards Dome then? Yeah. There was a period of time of probably a year when I ran Mate. Okay.

So it wasn't that long. But, well, it could have been a bit more. I ran it on Ubuntu. It was Ubuntu Mate. And I was a member of that team as well. So, yeah. So, what is it about Gnome that... Or Gnome, or however you want to say it.

I don't really care how... People get really weird about the name. I don't know why they pronounce it. It's just like people getting weird about Linus and Linus. Like, he says it's fine either way. It doesn't matter. I know one is technically correct. I'm more about that because it's his name.

Sure. If he said it's Linus and that's the only one that's correct, like, that would be fine. But when he says Americans are stupid, basically, just say Linus and that's the only one that's correct. Like that would be fine. But when he says Americans are stupid, basically just say Linus. Like if you're going to say both is fine. I don't correct people. I don't correct people.

But if people ask me or like if, if somebody was like, is that correct? I would say, I would tell them how, how to correct Linus. As far as I know, that's the Finnish.

Yeah. Finnish specific, but I don't say Linus as far as I know that that's the Finnish yeah yeah specific Finnish specific but I don't say Linus and then is his surname is pronounced slightly differently in Finnish and Swedish as well I don't know the difference yeah yeah anyway that's not where I was getting to with this what is it about what is it about gnome that grabs your attention like why is that the distro you gravitate towards? I know a lot of people There's a lot of people in the Linux space Who are like GNOME bad, GNOME this, GNOME that

But what is it about that? Because it's not It's floating, yes But it's not a Windows-like experience It is a very different kind of desktop It's a very simplistic desktop. Okay. People don't understand that it's really simplistic.

You have the top bar, you have talk in whatever format you want, because extensions, and you have that grid where you select your application. That's it. That's the simplistic part of it. And I like, first of all, I like that big screen instead of a menu that to me never made sense.

During Windows 8 times, I hated on it in a big way. As soon as Windows 10 came out, I realized how wrong I was. Let's be honest. And as soon as I could, since there was an option later in Windows 10 came out, I realized how wrong I was. Let's be honest. And as soon as I could, since there was an option later in Windows 10, you could set it. So it was always a screen instead of a small menu. And that's one of the driving factors for me for GNOME because that is big.

Icons are big. for GNOME because that is big. Icons are big. You can see things and search works for applications. And that's it. Like

my operating system, I wanted to get out of my way. And nothing does that better than GNOME, in my opinion. I think the issue with the Windows 8 grid is... So, Gnome is fine because it's all consistent. Like, every icon's the same size. There's the same spacing.

It's very clear where things are going to be. Windows 8, you had these different sized boxes. They had different colors it just it was just a mishmash of everything i get what they were trying to do but i don't think it worked i think like it's obviously like they're trying to adapt a tablet system into a desktop system but they didn't go far enough into it being a desktop system so it seemed really jarring for those people who wanted nothing to do with tablets and like mobile devices for their computer but gnome is that it's it's more of that middle ground where it's a very friendly tablet system very friendly mobile system but it's still like, you know, clear grids, clear spacing, and it feels a lot more

coherent to me. Well, at the end of the day, for me, it's all about search. Right. And, and screen makes search much cleaner. Whether it was on Windows or it is unknown. ScreenRake is much cleaner. It can show more stuff on it and so on. Whereas with Menu, on Windows

10 and 11, first of all it changes size, then on Windows especially it sometimes does this, sometimes that. And with Menu that's generally a thing because it will have to change because it is actually

doing stuff. Screen doesn't need to. That's been my main driver for it. All of this. Yeah, Gnome is clean. Gnome gets out of the way. It uses more resources, but I don't care

about that. Honestly, I don't care about the so-called bloat. The whole resource usage thing, it's a really weird one to me. I guess it's because there's a lot of people in the Linux world who like to run, or who maybe only have some

really old system. It's got one gigabyte of RAM, it's running a 10 year old cpu and for those people yeah i i get it you're trying to yeah for those people i understand problem is that a lot of people who who call this stuff out don't run that yeah no they've got like 16 gigs of ram 32 gigs of ram 64 try 64're going to be probably more correct for those nerds. Yeah, some of them for sure. And when I say those nerds, I also mean myself, because I also run 64 gigs for some reason.

Yeah, I've got 32 in this system. That's enough for me. I can't even manage to use up that. I guess if you're using a lot of virtual machines and things like that... That was my plan, yeah. But... I use 20 gigs right now. Ah, that's fine.

Let's see how I'm using it. Also, that is probably a virtual machine. I'm using 3.7 gigs of 32. I'm using 3.7 gigs of 32. And probably the max I go to is maybe about 8 or 9. My system is very overkill. Yeah. My system is as well.

But hey, you know, overkill's fun. Overkill is underrated.'s my that's my uh thing i say when someone says i have an overkill system but the thing with with the thing with bloat is i don't get why people like i i get if you have a reason for the performance like you're trying to get every last bit out of a game for example like that makes sense get rid of everything else running make a very Clean and lightweight gaming system, but for your if for the people who just you know they live in a web browser They live in their email client. They live in they live in their IRC chat like But you know it's using too much of my 64 gigs of RAM. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're running DWM as their window manager, and the extra megabyte here and there, that's the problem. Now, there are some applications that are really bad. There are some web browsers that, actually most web browsers, that just devour RAM like that's probably the thing that i have that uses the most rim like when i when i have brave open and i'm running like 10 20 tabs it's just like hey how much ram can i have can i just have all of it sure go ahead. Why not? Yeah, that's a big issue for its browsers. But browsers use it for a reason.

I'm sure there is a reason. JavaScript sandboxing, that uses a lot of RAM. Yeah. But I've seen people who, for no other reason than to just go load-free, they go with Gentoo. Not for any good reason like joshua does joshua has a great reason for it they go because they want the reason to have to use as little ram as possible even though they have 64 gigs of ram or or even more my favorite meme with gentleoo is, if I compile the code of my own system, it's

gonna make it drastically faster. Like, you're maybe gonna get a little bit of, a little bit of extra optimization out there, and if you mess with some build flags, for sure you'll definitely get some faster applications. But when people are just downloading the package and then compiling it as is, you're not, you're not saving any real time. I think I talked to someone who does like high performance computing or something like that. So things that actually compiling yourself would matter. Sure, sure.

Uh, uh, I believe they said that beyond compiling the actual runtime library, they they use, nothing else makes sense because only that does actually lower their time in a significant way for them. Anything else makes no sense because when you're doing things on

so many computers and so many so long yeah, you want to eek out each second performance but then you realize that everything that you want to have it available all the time as well not have it compile every every few days for i don't know how long just so that just so that it's 20 minutes earlier down 20 have to sort of think about the benefit versus the weight of doing it. If you're going to save one second per run, but the update is going to be 20 minutes, you've got to save 20 minutes worth of seconds for it to even be worth it.

Yeah. You won't do that. But then again, we're all we're engineers sure we we automate for two weeks for what what is a one second job if you're doing it for the sake of it being fun like that's that's fine but now in the engineer case that's because you're trying to justify having a job that's a little bit different uh that's because you're trying that's because you're trying to justify having a job that's a little bit different uh that's because you're trying no that's because you're trying to all the future times you're going to be doing it you're going to let something else do it you're going to do something else

because you probably have such a stack of things to do and you're not paid by the hour yeah that's fair let's be honest yeah no that's fair you know spend the time now and not deal with it later spend more time now so you don't have to think about it again or when you do have to think about it it's oh I have to press that button one thing you mentioned earlier one thing I want to go back to from earlier is

the whole thin client thing you mentioned where you say like this seems to be the direction we're going in the future but i think we're sort of most of the way there now like people people like us we still have you know high performance systems because you know we're interested in gaming things like that but for a lot of regular people they don't have a computer like they will have a phone they'll have a tablet. They will have a tablet. And a lot of schools, especially in my area,

they are giving their students Chromebooks. Like, these are very, very low-power systems. Like, obviously, some of the higher-end Chromebooks can get fairly powerful, but, like, these are, like, $300, $400 Chromebooks where they barely have any storage, and you actually have to do everything through Google Docs, through

some other cloud services. Like you are not doing anything local in these systems. So I think we are already most of the way there. And I actually don't think it's a bad thing per se, because I don't think it's either. Sorry? I don't think it's either sorry i don't think it is either i think a lot of the applications that we otherwise wouldn't ever see on linux over the next couple of years we are likely going to see i will be very surprised if like adobe doesn't go full-on cloud like they don't have a

what like adobe, whatever you want to call it, where it's, like, you can just run it on any system you want and just run it in a browser. I'm surprised they don't already have that. I'm surprised as well, actually. It seems like the most logical direction. I know why. I know why

they don't have it. Because that would get expensive real fast for them sure because they are popular and they have a lot of stuff to render that would get expensive actually that's a good point yeah

that's the only reason reality if you ask me and getting it done that's it but render costs would get high fast. And that's it. But render costs will get high fast for them. That's it. I guess if you want us to do it, probably the lightest place to start of their stack would be Photoshop

because whilst it's still going to be expensive to render, it's not Premiere expensive to render. Yeah. But then Premiere could get expensive real fast. That's what I mean. Like, if they're gonna do it, Photoshop seems like the best place to start and then just scale out from there.

Yeah. But I know on that note, like, that takes us sort of back into the other thing with the bloat topic where there's a lot of applications now we see using Electron, which is just a glorified chromium browser but that's given us the ability to have you know we wouldn't have discord on linux without electron with this there's a lot of programs we just wouldn't have if electron didn didn't exist, and I get it, I get people

wanting to have a lighter application, especially in those cases where it's a poorly programmed Electron application, and it's one that is quite laggy, but in a care. Like, I really don't. And if it uses a bit of extra RAM, like, fine. Go ahead, use the extra RAM. It's not like I was really using it anyway. I'm going to say it this way. People who know me, either from this sort of chat, or know me from my stuff, or who will know me now will know that know and will know that I hate

JavaScript I'm its biggest opponent my favorite my favorite IDE is fully implemented in JavaScript. Probably TypeScript. Because it's Visual Studio Code. Electron app. There you go. I don't care. If it's a good app, if it works, great.

If it doesn't, oh well, I won't care for it. But that. And whether it's proprietary or open source, whether it's Electron, whether it's GTK, whether it's Qt, all of that, I care about it working for me. I think with the, like, especially with the growth of things like the Steam Deck, we're seeing a lot more people like that coming over to Linux space, and it's this, it is leading to a bit of this,

I don't know, over the past, maybe, I guess since I started using Linux, I've noticed this weird, this weird culture shift happening in Linux, because back when I first started, maybe this is just the people that I was surrounding myself with, when I first started, the whole everything must be free software always free software nothing but free software that was the the message i was getting back when i first started but i i've seen people now who don't care if it's proprietary don't like they don't make a distinction between free software and open source they've accepted that mit is like the the license of the free software world now because that's what it is like people don't For the most part make new GPL projects. There are some exceptions, but most of the projects we're seeing are MIT projects BSD projects. We're not seeing as many

GPL style projects anymore and this is leading to like this weird clash between the people who are classically using linux and this newer crowd that is i guess less interested in that and more interested in the the technical aspect like what they can get out of the system rather than the ethical concerns attached to the kind of software you use. Yeah. I was on the same, like, I was bombarded with the same free software messaging you were. I have the same opinion I had before.

Ethics have nothing to do here. Simple as that. It's all about what works for you and what you want to use. Simple as that. And if they don't want to use proprietary software, they have all right to not use it. That's the freedom of software. So you're very much on the pragmatic aspect of it, then.

Yeah. The software that does the job is the software that is the good software. Yeah. I also am the person who will use MIT, but that's because I think it's uh actually much freer license than gpl in my opinion freedom of the developers is just as important as freedom of users yeah this is something that's sorry gpl doesn't freedom of developers is something gpl doesn't take into account yeah this is this is i, where the big culture clash exists, because when people say free software, like, that has a very particular meaning. It means the FSF definition of freedom. like that doesn't really align with this thing that intentionally restricts the freedom of

certain people involved in a system. I don't know like what is like ultimately correct but I can definitely see the direction that things are going. We are shifting away very very quickly from the copy left from all of this stuff that has classically been here. It's always going to have a place. The Linux kernel is always going to be GPLv2. Torvald has said he has no interest in GPLv3. He doesn't

care about TVization, and relicensing it to MIT at this point, that would be an absolute nightmare to do. It's not going to happen. Yeah. And you're always going to have the i don't see any reason why the gnu core tooling would go away like i know busy box has gotten a lot better than it used to be and we're probably going to get to a point eventually where compiling the kernel with rewrite everything without rewrite everything in Rust. Yes. I know there was the Amazon project where they were rewriting the core tools in Rust,

which I love. Who hasn't tried that? Right, but if Amazon's backing it, they have money and they have developers, so that's feasible in their case. But where was I going with that? Free software. Clang and Linux.

Oh, yes. Clang, thank you. We're going to get to a point where compiling Linux with Clang is going to be as good as GCC. And maybe we see a shift over to BusyBox as the main tooling. Maybe we see a shift over to busy box as the main tooling. But that's not something I really see being a future that people are pushing for. So there's still going to be those core systems. But all of the software you run on top of that, it's getting more and more MIT every single day. It is getting more open source, less free software.

Yes, yes. Honestly, basically that's what it means. Which, depending on who you are, you would argue is more freedom than the free software side. Yeah. Yeah. I've always said that I respect what the free software movement has done, but for my personal system, I am a more pragmatic user.

As I said, my first browser on Linux was Vivaldi, which if you ask DT, is proprietary garbage. Yeah, I'm going to say this. Free Software Foundation and all people surrounding surrounding it they did a lot of good good in the years that passed simple as that their time has passed there there is a change of generation happening new new people are coming and that comes new ideas new new new values even and that that is a big problem for for that crowd and there is certain certain percent it will stay that will bring the message forward and you have all all space to do it i i'm not stopping you, and nobody should stop you.

What was that? Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that the funnier thing with the new generation coming up is we've already seen some of these new young leaders, like Asahi Leader, the developer of Asahi Linux.

You've got Leo Rowe like leo ro over on libreboot you've got a bunch of other people out there who are doing great things but my favorite part is the people who are like i think leo is one of them who in some cases are more extreme about free software than the FSF, because I don't know if you saw it, but LibreBoot had this blog post where basically they argued that the Free Software Foundation actually

doesn't care about free software, because they don't care about the software that is embedded into the hardware that the user cannot change. They don't consider that as part of the software in the system. So that's not something that you need to be concerned with. But in this, like, in, like, LibreBoot's case, they're like,

no, if that's not going to be open, then the whole free software thing doesn't matter. Like, it doesn't, like, the idea they had was if your firmware embedded into the hardware, the FSF doesn't really care about that because it's not something the user is intended to change. But if that same firmware is something loaded as you boot the system, in that case, it's criteria and you shouldn't be running it. But it's still the exact same software in the end

so yeah wouldn't the loading the firmware as you boot be the better option because then the user can like reverse engineer it they can analyze it they can change it as opposed to having embedded in the hardware where it's always going to be proprietary and nobody can touch it. I would agree with them. Because, yeah, that's the logically better option. But, again, FSF is older. It has mindsets that are a lot harder to change than the technology is changing. So that might have

something to do with it as well because maybe maybe but maybe when that maybe when those opinions were forming when that was that was setting in stone really uh microcodes and stuff like that wasn't even an option the kind kind of firmware loaded on, or weren't a norm like it is nowadays. I think they existed, but they were not the norm. I'm pretty sure when the FSF was forming, Intel was rolling out their microcode. I'm pretty sure. But it's like a couple of years it really had existed by that point

it was not you know the standard that it is today where if you're getting an x86 CPU it is going to have microcode updates you are going to want to install them because otherwise you basically have a broken CPU and yeah

that's pretty much it. Um, right. Not, you mentioned, um, old microcode and all that. I remember the story from back in the day about Intel.

Okay. Um, when the, the first, the first processor that had, uh, for blue Pentium or something that had, uh, uh, a floating point unit into the, processor that had Pentium or something like that that had

a floating point unit in the CPU. They messed it up. And first of all, they were selling two CPUs. One with floating point unit, one without.

And the one that had floating point unit did floating point unit, one without. And the one that had floating point unit did floating point calculations slightly off. And there were specific numbers that were way off. At the end of the day, they actually... First of all, you have to show that you need that number. This actually has a problem for you. At the end, they decided to send everybody a new cpu

it was one of the first into maybe pentium 2 or pentium 3 something like that yeah and that that that's something uh something microcode wouldn't be able to fix for anyone curious why uh if you look at any number library like you look at a money library for example uh it's not doing the money in floating points everything is an integer there is a good reason for that floating points are floating points are the devil like this is a chris titus thumbnail floating point units are the devil nobody should use floating points they are bad like if you if you need precision floating points should not like they're fine for like you know doing things where it doesn't really matter if you're off by a couple of points but if you if

you need it to be exactly what it needs to be on the money right on the money like you you need like a coordinate system where it's down to like the meter you are not using floating points they're bad they just don't know stop it you wrap integers you you're much better off multiplying by 100 than then at the end of the operation doing exact opposite. You're much better off. Yeah, exactly. Because integer operations are

basically all the things computer can do. And it is for so long in those CPUs. And some CPUs even optimize for that. The big ARM CPUs from Ampere, or it's called the Ampere Ultra CPUs. Those are specifically made for integer operations.

Well, if you want to know how like... The reason for that is because web servers are basically integer operations. Yeah, yeah. If you want to know how... Nginx was great. If you want to know how great you want to know how unnecessary

floating point units are in the early days computing, if you needed floating point, it would be a separate chip on the board. Like you didn't have floating point support

in the CPU. Yeah. I believe that that CPU that I mentioned is one of the first that actually had a floating point unit in the CPU itself.

Yeah, I feel like one of my professors might have told me that story at some point. There are devices that are really good at floating point calculations. They're normally called graphics cards. Yeah.

Because that's what they do all the time yeah graphics are look there's a reason why there's a reason why they went up in price when everyone was mining crypto they're good at that they're good at crunching numbers that's literally the purpose yeah they're good at floating point calculations and crypto mining is essentially floating point calculations as well it's also a good space heater but you know that's a whole separate thing yeah

so going back to sorry the whole computer is a good space heater at the end of the day because it's mostly wasting electricity have nothing but exhaust fans, no cooling fans. No intakes, only outtake.

So, going back to you hosting your own Mastodon instance, have you been paying attention to what's been happening with Instagram and threads? Because I know people are very worried about threads joining the 30-verse, and they're worried about what's going to happen

and whether it should just be blocked and all this stuff. I know of threads. I don't have an opinion about them joining. I can't use threads. Welcome to European Union. Right. They block threads because... I have no idea.

Something, something, something. Privacy. GDPR stuff probably then. Let's have a look. Yes, yes. Yay. I actually didn't know that. Threads, European Union. Let's see. Yay. A lot of regulators said nope not gonna happen uh i think it has to do with something with with just uh registering from instagram or something like that meta's uh twitter competitor is not yet available in the EU due to regulatory

concerns. Huh. Wow. The EU actually is sensible. Wow. In theory, EU is sensible. I won't say my opinion why, but... In this one case, they are sensible.

I'll give you that. Yeah, they did good. I'd say they did good. Yeah, like, it would be nice if maybe they caught up to, you know, the rest of the social media, but hey, you know. Well, they're already there. They find them, all the time. It just doesn't matter, because they have too much money. Yeah, that's the problem. But yeah, like, look, if you find someone a billion dollars and they make $10 billion...

Yeah, that's what it is. Basically, that's what it is. It's just an inconvenience cost. They like to find them. That's the reason they're sensible, after all. Because, well, if they don't want be good for our our people well we're gonna find them money free money for us yeah that's true that's basically the idea behind european union nowadays and tech companies fines well i guess um since you don't really have much

to say about that then have you been paying attention to the... Not the Red Hat situation, because there's something there, but the Fedora situation now, the telemetry situation? Because I... It's a mess. I'm going to say it this way. No, yes, it is a mess, because open source and free software people are behind the time.

In my opinion, telemetry should be in every semi-major open source project for years now. Mm-hmm. Because... reality is, it gives you good data.

Mm-hmm. Much better data than issues and forums. That's what it is. If you want to have good user experience, you're gonna have to collect telemetry. The question is how you will collect the telemetry and how nice you're going to be to your users. That's where proprietary companies fail. That's it. So, okay. Well, one of the concerns that we have,

that is definitely, like, probably going to end up being the blocker, is whether it's opt-in or opt-out. Now, the guy that proposed the telemetry for Fedora basically said, if we cannot do opt-out. Now, the guy that proposed the telemetry for Fedora basically said if we cannot do opt-out, then there's no point even doing it. Because opt-in telemetry

is basically garbage data and you don't get a representative sample, so you think that it should be opt-out. Opt-in telemetry brings in the same amount of useful data as forums and issues. Basically none.

There is no point to opt-in telemetry or such opt-in data acquisition. Just people who don't care, and those aren't a good sample. People who don't care will, and those aren't a good sample. Especially in the Linux world where, like, you know, it's very, like, the whole idea of telemetry is very, very touchy. Like, maybe you can get away with it more in, the mac os world and the windows world where people are sort of more conditioned to that being a normal thing but in the linux world if you even say like we are going to collect hardware information like people freak out about hardware information like you know the size of your drive the cpu you're using. Even that is enough for some people to just say, no, that's not going to happen. Yeah.

There needs to be a change of mindset, in my opinion. If we want to have good applications, we need to either go and report everything we do with their applications or we need to allow them to collect data. I'm an engineer. i'm all for automation so collect data it is i'm not gonna go and and enter everything i do i i don't have time for that one thing that i do think is like a concern that makes sense is whether Fedora should be the project collecting this. Like, one argument I did see that kind of does make sense is why is Fedora collecting the data and not the GNOME project? Because the GNOME project is obviously where that data is going to be used to improve the project.

It's not Fedora directly. They're going to be sharing the data with the projects as opposed to using it themselves. And obviously their contributors are going to be working on things in GNOME as well. But it's GNOME itself that's going to benefit. Yeah, that is actually a bit of a thinker, but there is much more than just GNOME

what is GNOME. Simple, just one of the things, what applications people use, how many times they are used, how long they are turned on. All this stuff can help at least to decide whether

that application is even needed. Let's say, for example, I never open, I don't know, something that was previously, I never open GNOME software. What's the point? If there is enough of people who never open

GNOME software, what's the point of it then? Right, right. That kind of stuff. And then data sharing. Why not collect everything at once when you already have a chance, and implementing that same thing ten times, and that means ten times the compute intensity work at once i think the other argument cross reference data and all that i think the other argument for fedora collecting the data is fedora has the architecture to like support that system whereas gnome's obviously a big project but they're not as big as fedora is like fedora has that those resources to make that actually function yeah they infrastructure yeah yeah yeah fedora also said they are committed to

make like this is going to be a big one that i think if they if they didn't do this it would just be a no-go full stop they They have said they're committed to making the data collection model as transparent as possible. So they want to make the like they basically want to make the database schema public effectively. Not in like the actual database schema form, but saying exactly the fields they're collecting, why they're collecting the fields. They want to make sure the entire data collection model is like the the software itself is open source They want to have it so if you want to build it yourself They can provide build instructions and you can point it to your own server to collect the data. I

Think these are things they had to do Like force if they didn't do this it would be a no-go if they were not making it very clear the data they're collecting I think then you could absolutely argue this is a stupid idea and it should not be done. Yeah. And it is a question about privacy. That's one of my stops. If you have, Anthony, there is no PII problem,

I see no reason why not. I stand on this I sort of I I do see the value in the anonymized data and all this but I put something I don't know if you saw it I posted something on Mastodon and like I think ultimately this is a it's i don't have an issue with the data collection myself and i can see why it is beneficial but what i posted was i implore any of the fedora contributors out there that might see this please do not back the new telemetry proposal i know telemetry can be incredibly valuable for improving the product offered by fedora and i'm sure some great improvements can be made with it. But I see this as your Amazon Lens moment. If Fedora Linux goes ahead with this, it doesn't matter that the user can opt out,

it doesn't matter the data is generic, it doesn't matter the data is anonymized, for now until the end of time, Fedora will be called a spyware distro. You will hurt community trust in the project far more than anything you'll gain from improving the software, and I really don't want to see that happen. The Linux world is very, very touchy about telemetry in any form whatsoever. And I don't

see Fedora coming through this unscathed. I think if they go through this, they are going to hurt the project far more than anything they can possibly gain from it. Possibly. Possibly. But I'm not sure that it will end that way. I think, yeah, it will not go unscathed. I think the gain can be quite big if right people have access to it.

Have capability to affect change. I get that as well. I totally get that as well. It's a very difficult situation to deal with. Because...

People need to... It's... Yeah. People need to... It's open source. People were very opinionated people. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. It's hard to change opinions. Yeah. I think that part's absolutely true.

I don't know. Yeah. It's... I think... know. I think, look, I think if they weren't just coming off of the Red Hat situation, it wouldn't be like as big of a deal. But I saw someone post something on one of the breakout forums for this that I love so much. There must be an eternal contest at Red Hat to see which group can generate the most negative press and or piss

off the most people. The fact there appears to be a strong desire within Red Hat to collect user data from users' private machines using opt-out mechanism is troubling to put it diplomatically. Obviously this person didn't like the change but I think that first part, like, seeing who at Red Hat can generate the most negative press,

I think is a good way to put it, because Red Hat does not get a break right now. Like, every other day, there is some new thing happening. Where did you stand on the Red Hat thing, by the way? I stand on... I don't care. Fair enough. Yeah.

Either way. Yeah, that's fair. There is no clear legality issues. That's where it ends for me. They have all right to do that. Apparently, they have all right to do it. Oh, well. they have all right to do that apparently they have all right to do it so oh well and I always thought that the model of Rebuilders

was problematic to say to say to say just a little bit about it problematic I didn't think it would last actually on the note of rebuilders I don't know if you saw this where is it do it should be I'm gonna send you something

because if you have not seen this yet you're gonna you're gonna laugh because now people are backing a certain company that I never expected people to back. Oh, wow. I'm just waiting for 180. For anyone listening, this is a blog post from Oracle. Oracle. That Oracle.

Keep Linux open and free. We can't afford not to. Oracle is posting this i don't believe them behind java mysql and all that for the record i do not believe oracle i oracle is doing this purely out of self-interest to get an own on red hat but I love it so much. Why not? Free positive press. Yes, no, that's the thing. All they have to do is say we are not, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Microsoft could come out and say we want to keep Linux open and free right now, and it's just free positive press. Yeah. It's so good like oh the funniest part about it is i've seen people who are now like we love oracle like what do you mean like what do you what do you mean this is oracle Oracle! Oracle! This is a company that is theorized and has, like, lots of lawyers.

This is the same company that does 180 really quick. We're going to see where this road leads us. You know, honestly, you know you've made a mistake i i look i don't know who who do you trust less oracle or ibm because i don't know because they're both horrible yeah i don't know that's a hard one. It is. Yeah. People just forget so quickly. Like the internet has a five minute attention span. I'm going to say it this way. About certain things, Linux community has a memory of we will never forget.

And about certain other stuff, they have a memory of it's been two seconds. What happened? Oh, yeah, yeah. People will never forget, like, some random comment Lennart Pottering made 15 years ago. That will never, ever leave the zeitgeist. Oracle? Who's Oracle? I love the small indie company

that we all love now Yeah I honestly I wanted to equate currently Red Hat and IBM to Blizzard or to Activision in general

Okay look there's no breast milk being stolen from fridges so there's at least in general. Okay, look. There's no breast milk being stolen from fridges, so there's at least that. But that does not mean that they're still not a good company. Oh... I... I think

I play Blizzard games all the time I kinda can't wait for it to become Xbox Blizzard maybe some structure will be there surely it can't go worse

than what it has already been yeah I guess I guess you're right it can't it can't get any worse. If there is one company that can't go worse, it's Activision Blizzard. Activision Blizzard King. You forgot about the King part. The King part's very important. Of course, yes. ABK.

Actually, it is very important because Microsoft wants for the king part more than anything else sure they do the mobile space is very very profitable they want that mobile space because they want to be the big player there Simplius

they know they want in PC they know they're lost in console the last battlefield is mobile games they want in pc they know they're lost in console the last battlefield is mobile games they want to be they want to be the big the big player there and that's the space that's still growing like you know you are still there is still growth in the pc space and there's still growth in the console space like you know populations go up all all that stuff. But if you look at any graphs of game growth, especially because as countries like... India was a big recent one.

As India came online, mobile games have absolutely exploded there. China was first. They came online. China became a massive market. And now India is going down that same route. And know people don't have a lot of disposable income, a lot of people are just gonna have them phone and that's gonna be their gaming device as well. So you're seeing a lot like I think and Brazil as well, Brazil is another great example like as as they rise up

they are seeing more people get online when having phones and you're seeing mass like there are games in these in these regions that i've never heard of but are some of the biggest games in the world yeah and reality is mobile market has different, mobile game market has a different way of thinking. That's the main catch. You mean a lot of money. Selling everything possible. To be fair, that's...

Microtransactions. We all love microtransactions. That's the genesis of microtransactions. Depending on how you... Okay, wholesale is technically the genesis the mod modern microtransactions let's say this way the idea of the infinite scale where you can spend as much money as you want yeah there was that horse armor and all that but the serious microtransactions came because of mobile space. And they creeped into our desktop games as well. Yeah, yeah, they do.

And nobody likes it. There was that brief period where a lot of companies were trying to bring NFTs into games as well. Some are still trying to do that. It's not stopped yet. Yeah. But at least it slowed down a little bit at least with nft market like completely imploding it didn't happen as quickly i don't believe it's

not gonna happen i if there is a profit margin to be had there these companies are gonna find it but it might take a bit longer now, which is good. Well, when it comes to microtransactions, I am happy that Diablo 4 doesn't have them. And they kept that in Immortal for now. For now. I am not holding my breath. Wait until season two.

If Microsoft doesn't buy it, I am not holding my breath. If Microsoft doesn't buy it, I am not holding my breath. I know people are looking for more stash tabs. That's a good microtransactions spot. Yes, those stash tabs. And one thing I had to do was explain to people why stash taps can't be implemented immediately. Which, I don't know, people think that all you have to do is

enter another icon and you have a stash tap. It doesn't work that way. It's not magic. You have to have a database. And you won't go migrate database every five seconds. That's kind of the point. Why no more stash taps? That's why they're point. Why no more stash tabs? That's why

they're waiting for season 2 with gem tab and all that because database migrations are hard and error prone. And you do not want to corrupt the database

for Diablo 4. That would be a fun one. The important part, though, is why were they not there from the start? That's a whole different question. Because they thought it would be enough for the first couple of seasons. And gem tab, I don't really see a problem.

I don't see a problem with gems. I have 50 of each of them. I have enough. Some of them collect way too many. They actually had to increase the number of ores and herbs you can have. Because some people hit 9999. So they add another 9 to the code. So they add another 9 to the code. So now we have

99,999. And by this speed, by Season 3, some people will have that fall. Oh, without a doubt. For sure. Oh, God. Man, like, we all love modern gaming it's great

yeah just play indie games indie games uh indie games where it's chill you won't you're not gonna you're gonna have as much of this mess sorry i don't play much of that i don't play much indie games you just play call of duty i most i must play Call of Duty. Currently, I'm Call of Diablo. And I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft. And maybe some...

The only game that you could classify as indie for me is Kerbal Space Program. Okay, okay, okay. I actually never played that. I don't know why. It's just never grabbed my interest.

I don't... It seems cool. I get it. It makes sense why it's cool. But it's not my thing. Lock it, go bird. Lock it, go boom. That's just a game loop Of Kerbal Space Program And then by the time

You launch it 50 times You're happy It didn't go boom right away That's the fun game loop Of Kerbal Space Program It's actually fun It's actually fun it's it's actually fun that's that's the best selling best uh advertisement for a game it's actually fun which is not true for a lot of games

out there and since there there is no humans in the game you don't worry about it going boom. You have this little green, green, possibly plants. Nobody knows exactly. They do have arms and legs and walk, but they're possibly plants. Possibly plants. Nobody knows. Nobody knows the lore behind them. The lore doesn't matter. The theory behind it, they're possibly plant based

not animal based and when they go boom you're sad especially you're sad when you leave them on the moon that's when the whole rescue operation begins

the second part of the game loop rescue operation let's just say I once walked for four hours just so I could get my kerbal to the rocket because I landed a bit too far away

and I walked in real time so that was 4 hours real time walk thanks god I automated it I grabbed a cube some small cube and I grabbed my mouse and placed it on the cube

and the cube was placed on the W key and off it went. That reminds me of how I automated my block training in Skyrim. I grabbed a rubber band, put it around the block button and around the analog stick so you would just keep walking into the enemy and they'll just keep trying to smash your shield yeah then i went off to watch a movie on the second monitor while making sure my kerbal didn't fall that would be embarrassing It's just like I don't understand why you did that

I didn't want to leave him on the moon I didn't want to leave him on the moon That's literally it And I didn't want to go and send another rocket up Because I was really bad at landing things at the time Which is why I landed it so far away because I was trying to keep it safe.

And then you spent four hours trying to rescue him. Was the four hours worth it? Did you rescue him? Yes. Wow, okay. I rescued him. Of course I had to send another rocket because I ran out of fuel when I came back to Kerbal. So I had to send another rocket because I ran out of fuel when I came back to Kerbal

so I had to send another one just to get right nearby so I could do a spacewalk to the other one and turn it around and then land or more like just re-enter because then parachutes took over everything else

yeah that was an adventure it sounds like it parachutes to cover everything else. Yeah, that was an adventure. It sounds like it. Turbo Space Program. Yeah. Some call it Explosion Simulator. That's it. Yeah, Rocket Go Boom.

Yeah. Well, I think that's pretty much everything to talk about um what's there anything else you specifically want to mention like we're going to do sign offs but anything anything else you want to talk about nothing else like i'm looking for a job yeah if anyone if anyone has like a remote position that you've got open for, like, what is it, cloud, cloud server programmer stuff? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

Cloud DevOps. Yeah, nice to let me know. Is Mastodon anything else? That'll be in the description anything else you want to mention uh i can't hear you uh can you hear me yeah i can hear you can you yay okay okay so i said check out my youtube channel and if you find it it's bad i give you permission to cry because i do many times yes it's bad and at that point i I probably should say that I'll be doing streaming again until I can give up. I'm going to try and do it for at least a month. How often do you stream?

Normally, when I do stream, I stream twice a week. I do stream, I stream twice a week. I do programming. I have a couple of ideas again, so I'm going to try and actually finish them this time. Yeah. Is that everything you want to mention? You got anything else that Yeah, I guess. That's it.

Okay. Yeah, that's it. I'll put all your links in the description down below. So if anyone wants to go find them, then that should be easy enough to do. As for me, if you want to go see my Linux videos, I upload there six-ish times a week.

I'm not sure what's going to be out by then, because this is coming out in like two weeks. Hopefully not more Red Hat stuff. I really hope, because I'm getting sick of talking about Red Hat. They need to stop. And then Oracle needs to stop writing ridiculous blog posts

like they respect open source, because you don't. I already planned out all my videos for this week. I can't not do a video on Oracle saying they're going to respect open source. So yeah.

That'll be out by the time you see this. Maybe, look, maybe Red Hat's going to do something else dumb. They probably will. Anyway, the gaming channel is Brody on Games, actually, wait, did I say the Linux channel name, that's Brody Robinson, go there, check it out, uh, Brody on Games is my gaming channel, I probably have finished Black Mesa by the time you guys are seeing this, so if I have, I'll be playing, I think I'll be doing Portal Co-op with Ren.

But if I've not finished it, I'll be playing Black Mosa. Also, Final Fantasy XVI, which is very fun. I highly recommend it. If you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version over on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you're watching the video, you can find the audio version on any podcast platform. There is an RSS feed right in Tech of a T. I like sticking my RSS feed

in AntennaPod. It's a great app, but it's also on iTunes, Google Podcasts, all that stuff. You better find it. Yeah. I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say? Thank you for listening to me ramble. You know, I enjoyed the rambling.

As it got earlier in the morning for you, the rambling got worse and worse. Because what is it, 2am for you now? Yeah. Yeah, well... At least it's silent. That's true, yeah. It's going on 9.40am here. And it is... Very sunny outside.

Bright. Very bright. It's been cloudy the past couple of days. Anyway, with that, I guess it's going to be the end of the show. So... I'm out.