The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Linux Fest in Texas! (Friends)

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Carl George joins the show to talk about Texas Linux Fest, Omarchy, Linux desktop environments, configuring Linux, and more. Use the code `CHL15` for 15% off your ticket to Texas Linux Fest.

Welcome to ChangeLog and Friends, the weekly talk show about all things Linux Fest. By the way, use CHG15 for 15% off a Texas Linux Fest ticket. Big thank you to our friends over at fly.io for sponsoring and supporting and partnering with us all these years. Learn more at fly.io. Okay, list Linux Fest. Well, friends, the news is out. Our friends, over at CodeRabbit, codeRabbit.AI, they've raised a massive series B, and they've launched their CLI reviews tool.

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and their announcement of their CLI review tool. Again, codrabbit.ai. Well, friends, we're here with our good friend, Carl George, steeped in Linux, works for Red Hat, steeped. Just kidding, I love her. I love Red Hat. What was that? The Fangs are out.

principal software engineer at red hat the last thing around the show you schooled us about I think just the this dichot or this um this separation that was kind of happening and that was about a year ago not really happening but just this war in in link between sentos red hat rel rocky I don't want to talk about any of that today none of it zero of it go back and listen to a year ago who cares what's going on now well I think the biggest about the biggest news I've seen come out, but we have Texas Linux Fest. So we're going to talk about that too. Okay.

But the biggest news I've seen come out of Linux recently has been around Arch Linux, Umarchy. Oh, yeah. And this resurgence of the desktop Linux. Are we there? Is it this close? Is that the thing? I know Ubuntu desktop's been out there, but is Omarchi, what do you think about

Amarchi? Is it the right way to say it, OMarchie? I have no idea what the right pronunciation. Yes, pronunciation is. I'm happy to see it. I haven't tried it myself. Not really interested, but I'm glad that people are taking an interest in trying new things. And, you know, so much stuff in open source in general is just, I'm going to try this and see if it sticks.

See if it gets traction. See if it gets contributors. You know, some people try stuff. It never catches on and it just kind of fades or it stays as a single person project for like 30 years. But, yeah, I definitely like seeing experimentation like that and, you know, what people can come up with. So Omar Archie, I think, is effectively a configuration script that configures Arch in an opinionated way, out of the box, to have an awesome Arch set up. And I don't think that's, okay, so DHS started it, and he has a loud microphone. He also has taste that a lot of people appreciate, and so he's gotten traction behind it.

And, of course, lots of people like Arch Linux. There's other Linux as well as Carl's well aware. Are there other O'Marchie-like setup scripts that exist for other distros that, like, is there a red hat thing? Is there a CENTOS thing? I don't know. Carl, first of all, what distro you rock in, you know, in your personal life? I use Fedora pretty much everywhere. Okay.

That just fits in naturally with my work that I do naturally for working on CentoS and Rel and in Fedora itself. So is there a fedora, like, out-the-box setup script where it's like, boom, Fedor-I. Dozens of them. Lots of people have made things like that. Yeah, I assume it would be, right? Probably the one that's got the most traction interest. The hot topic right now is a project called Universal Blue, an ex-canonical guy, George Castro. He decided that he wanted to create like a preconfigured like Fedora setup

using the, pick the term of the term of the week, a mutable image mode, atomic, whatever. I think Fedora's branding is centering itself around atomic workstations. Some people still like the term immutable, even though not everything's immutable. So it's kind of a weird thing, a little identity crisis on the naming, but, you know, engineers love naming things and arguing about names. But yeah, they're a way to take Bootsie images where you can boot up an image and you don't apply updates to packages individually.

You just boot into a new image and you carry forward like your home directory and any configurations you've set up. They've got a good structure now where they've got like an image template and you build put everything in GitHub with GitHub actions to build the images, stores it in GitHub Container Registry, and they're doing all kinds of different preconfigured desktops, the way they see it, you know, opinionated desktops. Kind of a similar thing as the OMA Archie stuff.

It's just they're delivering it as ready to go images. Bazite's in that same family, if you've heard of that. It's pre-configured, ready to go for gaming in general. A lot of blue fins, the other real popular one they have, that is a gnome workstation, pre-configured the way, basically the way that George likes it, and a few other people that have gotten involved with it, but things that they think definitely need to be installed on a workstation to make it a day-to-day driver. So that's cool. What do you do? What do you use? How do you configure your stuff? I'm sure you have years and years of doing it.

I am an old school sysadmin, so I use Ancable for my workstation. Oh, man. Hardcore. What's that? That's hardcore, man. You're just writing your own Ansciple stuff. I thought you said, what for? I was like, because it's just what I know. No, hardcore. Now what's it. I'll give you what for. No. It works for me. It fits in my brain. I use the Gnome desktop and they have actually an interesting, the backends for all the settings is a thing called deconf. I've heard it kind of compared to like the Windows registry. It's not like a configuration file like most people like on Linux. But it's got an Ansible module that's really well integrated. So I can just in my Ansible playbook just set up and say like, you know, set the clock from, you know, instead of doing 24 hour time, use A&PM. And that's just a single key. in a little chunk of yamble that I put in a playbook, and then I run that along with all the other little things that I have set up to go.

And so that's how I'll configure my systems. I'll be getting ready to do that here in the next month or so. I've got a hardware refresh coming for my work laptop, and I'll just run that playbook, copy over, I think I run the playbook, sign into my Firefox profile, and just double check that there's any files loose like stuff and Git repos I haven't committed yet, things like that. Then I'll be good to go.

Have you played with Ancibel in a while, Jared? I don't have a ton of experience with it personally. I want to, but I haven't done it yet. But do you have any? I have some experience, but just back when, so we used to use Ancible with deploying change log probably six, seven years ago. And so I learned it then. I did a little bit of Ancible when I was doing network administration, like decades ago.

And it always made sense to me. It seemed like for my uses back then, it was like slightly too much for what I needed. which was really just a couple of scripts. But once you get over the learning curve, as Carl, I'm sure can confess, that's all very simple and straightforward. And that makes it worth the lift. It requires like a client server, right?

You still have to have like a main Ansible hub where you run your playbooks, right? Isn't that how it works? It can work that way, but there's a lot of flexibility. The way that I'll usually do it is I just have the, I have the playbooks in a Git repo. I'll clone the Git repo and then I'll apply it to local host. You can also do it where, like, if you're configuring servers, your local machine is kind of the hub, the control.

I think the official terminology is the control node. But you can have it where your local laptop is the control node setting up a server. You can have the control node set up itself. You can do any number of things. There's a lot of flexibility. That's probably the hardest part of it is that there's enough flexibility that, you know, there could be multiple ways to do a thing. And that can get you confused, especially if you hear about what. one way to do it and you try and do it. Then you find another way. And then you're like,

okay, well, what is, what's the most correct way I want to do this? Or at least that's where I'll get hung up on it. Other people who just go with the first thing they find that works and they say, okay, good enough. I don't really care. Yeah, I think correctness is like subjective in things like that. It's like, this works for me. So cool. Can you give us a deep look? Well, not like deep, deep, but a deep enough look where it's not too shallow of how you go from fresh fedori. install, clone a GitHub repo down, boom, Ancible. Like, how does that, is that roughly how it works? Is that, did I paraphrase a good version of it?

That's pretty much what I'll do. Okay. The things that I haven't got set up figured out right with Anciple quite right is sync thing set up. I use that kind of like a Dropbox, open source Dropbox thing. And the way that is configured is you open up a browser and go to a portal and local host to do the setup in a web browser. I'm not really sure of a way yet to put that into Ancibel.

So I'm still doing that by hand. Then I already mentioned signing into my Firefox profile and syncing all of that stuff down for all my bookmarks and history. Are you happy to sync thing? I like it a lot. Because we are not happy to Dropbox at the moment. Most of the time I completely forget sync thing. I'm even using it.

I just have a directory called sync that is just the same on all my systems, even my server, so I can just shuffle files back and forth really quick or just always have like, you know, my directory of notes or those memes that I wanted to share. Most of the time I forget that I'm even using it because there's not like a, well, there's a tray icon that you can get. I don't use that. I just periodically go pull it up in the web browser and make sure everything's happy and working. So I'll forget that I'm even using it. Do you use that for collab at all or is it all just your own stuff?

It's just for my own stuff, personal. Because if we were to replace Dropbox, which I would love to at this point, it's been so flaky, just even the desktop app. and just stop syncing. I, like, force, quit a bunch of processes, and then it starts again, just, like, nonstop trouble. We would need that collaboration features, because that's how I use it, is to share. And how does it work with large files?

Good stuff. Are you mostly sharing memes? How big are you think? I have not had any, I don't share very large files. Certainly not, like, podcast size, you know, video recordings. Yeah. But videos that I have put in there in larger files have all worked just fine. I haven't had any issues with it.

but there may be a certain file size where it starts getting problematic. Yeah. But like with the experimentation thing early on with the OMarchie, like the only way to find out is to try it. It's to try it. Yeah, totally. I also don't know what the collaboration features look like. I'm sure that if they are lacking,

there's probably lots of requests to improve those and ideas about how to improve those. It's open source. There's a lot more opinions than people willing to do the work usually. That's a fact. That's not just the open source world, though. in a proprietary world they hire employees to work on stuff than nobody else wants to

but in open source you have to either convince somebody that it's worth their time or you have to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself I wonder if Sinkthing has a token like tailskill does

I was trying to think about one other tool I use that requires well sometimes requires browser intervention and tailskills one of them where it makes you click a link but if you know

or you have an off key or a token kind of key then you can sort of just use that when you instantiate it. It's like, okay, this is really me. I don't have to ever go to the browser and prove who I am. Like an activation key type thing? Yeah, it's kind of like that.

I wonder if Sync thing has that kind of thing because so many things are things, you know? That's it. That's it. You know, like I had said the thing like 17 times just now. I was like, I'm just going to stop saying thing, okay? No more things for me. And here you are saying a few more times just in case.

Just in case. So I think the reason why Omarchi is, catching on is because I think a lot of people want to experiment with Linux but they're so intimidated you know and just like oh my ZSH I assume O Marche is like O

maybe the O is like from O my ZSH I don't know where the O's coming from but we try to infer what these names are about that sounds like a reasonable guess I never thought about that but yeah because it's kind of the same thing right like oh my ZSH I think you're probably I would bet you know five bucks you're right that sounds correct thank you

let's not go out the truth. Let's just assume I'm correct. It's always more fun. The thing about all my ZSH, what it does is just like gives you an awesome setup and then you can just use it. And then once you're using it, you start to formulate opinions and I want to tweak. I want to go from there. But you do not have to start from. It gives you a starting point. Canvas, exactly. And I think that's what these setup scripts are so awesome for is it lets you use it out of the box in a way that's not just stock. In like an opinionated, these are good settings. Not like these are our default settings, which aren't always good, especially for development.

And then you can start to tweak and configure and go from there. And it sounds like Fedora has ample, you know, a number of projects like that. I'm sure every major distro has people that have wanted to provide that for others. And maybe they're just lacking the signal to the ratio that DHH has in, which is why he's gotten so much because there's a lot of steam around that at the moment. But that's cool because it brings people in. and then they can get their feet under them and they can try it out

and then they can go off and do their own thing or they can switch from Arch to they can go distro hopping as so many of us do in the early days of Linux and then they can settle in and really sit with the same

distro for years as it sounds like you've done. Oh yeah. I think another aspect of the O'MArchey stuff is that I don't think there's a ton of stuff out there yet for Hyperland which is the desktop environment or shell thing that it's using.

It's relatively new and a lot of people are, it's very, very configurable, a lot more than like Nome. I don't know if it'd be more or less than KDE. That's another one that's very configurable. Right. But KDE's been out there a long time, so there's a lot of opinionated KDE setups out there. Hyperlans a lot on the newer side. So I think, you know, there's an appetite.

One of the reasons it's getting so much traction is that there's an appetite for, people have heard of Hyperland, they want to try it. And they go and they say, okay, well, I don't want to start from scratch because when you You saw Hyperland from scratch, it is pretty bare bones. It's just right there. And it's like, okay, write your config to put stuff where you want it. So people are looking for an out-of-the-box ready to go set up to start from and change, not necessarily start from scratch.

Yeah, who's on the work kind of thing? Omarchi actually extends from Omikub. This is the... No, let's not look it up. Sorry, I already knew this, that's why I had to look it up. Yeah, no, go ahead. I just like being, you know, I like Carl Betting on me. Yeah, my bad.

And so OMACube. OMACube, this is the thing that the DHH made as well. It's like a Kubernetes. I wouldn't say that. It's more like a deployment thing. I haven't played with enough to know exactly what it is, but it says turning fresh Ubuntu installation into a fully configured, beautiful, and modern web development system.

So he kind of took the same thing, I guess he had done with Ubuntu and turned it into. And that one didn't connect, but maybe Carl's right then on the Hyperland. Now I'm knowing where it comes from. originally the etymology is now complete omacase that's his thing right that's right the omicase spirit the idea that the entire set up experience can benefit from being tailored up front by someone with strong opinions that's basically dhh in a nutshell right right configuration uh well convention over configuration but that convention is kind of pre-configure uh pre-configuration that is very strong opinion all right so now we have that that figured out sorry omisaisa

I gave you credit where it was not due. And I lost five bucks. And yeah, you can, I guess, who does he give it to, Adam maybe? Or just, just, just, just, just, just, just, hold on to that. You get to all the money, right? I was off for in the bet. Nobody took me up on it, so I'm good. That's a good point.

That's a good point. So Hyperland, I'm not super familiar with that, Carl. Is it a windowing manager? What is it? Is it a? Yes, I think that sounds about like the right term. Like Linux desktop stuff, you know, you've got the whole, the idea of like, a desktop environment that's kind of, you know, this should be, maybe it's not as

opinionated as something like Om Archie, but it is a design where you install it and it has all the components, there's nothing missing out of the box, you know, you've got your file manager, you've got your sound settings, you know, a basic desktop may be kind of minimal, but, you know, a more or less complete setup. KDE out of the box, I think, is the same way, KD Plasma, XFCE, there's other desktop environments like that that advertise themselves as desktop environments. And then you've got the things like Hyperland, I3, Sway is another one.

There's a whole bunch of these other things that they don't really describe themselves as whole desktop environments. They're more like, like you said, I think Window Manager was the term you used. And so those, they're definitely expecting you to come in and make a lot of your own choices. Like, I want to use this window manager and I want to use the file manager from gnome and I want to use the image viewer from XFCE and piece together things by hand.

Long, long ago, I used to do that tinkered a lot more and I was like, yeah, I like this app and this app and I'm going to piece together my own little stone soup of a desktop. And then after a certain point, I was just like, no, no one's good enough. I'll just use this. This is what most people are using. You run into enough random weird issues with things not working together that you want to go down a path that is more common, where if you have a problem, you know that other people have run into the same problem. So I think that's where desktop environments fit in versus people that

do want to tinker and come up with something that is extremely custom and exactly the pieces they want and nothing else. They'll go down the route of the window managers, which is where Hyperlane fits in, I think. Gotcha. On their website, HyperLand, hyper.com. It says they provide the latest Wayland features. Now, I don't even know what Wayland is. Do you know what Wayland is? well that is a whole thing it's way deep under the covers a little bit of a deep dive right this is why I would say hyperland is probably not

great for beginners because like right off the bat you're asking like what even is this whalen thing right it's like there's more questions and I'm like I don't know what that is yeah for people that have been you know using the Linux desktop for a while a lot of times you'll have see strong opinions about it at least on Fedora I forget what version

it was but Fedora switched over to Wayland by default some things didn't work it was fairly early on whenever to switch up, but let me back up a little more. Sure. You got to have something that draws, draws all the windows on your screen, handles all of that stuff.

For a long time, that was Xorg server or X-11, is what a lot of people call it. I think technically the term, X-11 is the protocol, and like the project is X.org, and then the thing people are calling X-11 is X-org server, I think, is the actual correct term. These are often used interchangeably, though.

People will just throw those around and say, I have to use X-11. And well, the XORG developers, the people that worked in that project, they realized that they're 20, 30 years of technical debt around that server, you know, that thing to draw everything on the screen was piling up and it wasn't really working great for them. So they decided one of the developers started a new set, okay, well, if we started this over from scratch, how would we change it and did a lot of different things, a lot of it around security. XORG has a long history of security vulnerabilities and things because of the design and lots of technical debt security problems arising.

And then the developers decided, okay, well, if we started over, how can we design this where we wouldn't run into this category of issues? And what they came up with was Wayland. That is, this new way to do it. The differences where in the old XORG server days, all these desktops would use the same XORG server. and then they would talk to that through those APIs. Wayland is just the protocol, kind of like X-11 is for X-Org server. And so with Wayland, the idea is that all of these clients

are going to talk to the Wayland Protocol and be their own, the equivalent of the X-Org server. So in the Nome setup, they have a thing called Mutters, one of the components of Nome, and that serves as the Wayland Compositor, I think, is the term. Okay. Hyperland is also a Wayland Compositor. Sway is another one.

KDE has one. I forget what it's actually called, but it's similar in Nome where it's part of, it's one of the components as part of the whole plasma desktop experience they have. And so that has been a big shift. It is for many, many years, people have said, you know, XORG is eventually going, XORG is eventually going away.

Wayland is the future. It fixes all of these security problems. It's more maintainable. It doesn't have, you know, 30-year-old code in it for things that don't even matter anymore. and but then you know like with anything else you tell people this is going to be an eventual change you have to accept you have people that try to come up with reasons why they have to stay on the all one well i've got this one particular bug on whalen that doesn't happen on exorc server

but that's not really a fair comparison because there's many bugs that are only on xorg server and don't even exist on wheyland so it's really just you know if you want to look at only the negatives you're swapping one set of problems for the other the theory is that the the wayland problems are easier to fix and more maintainable long term. Yeah. So where was the pressure to migrate placed? Well, it's because of the XORG server team, they came up with Wayland, but Wayland's a protocol.

So they write a protocol and they just brush their shoulder off now, or do they give a reference implementation? Is it on the Gnome team and the KDE team or I guess the Hyperland folks? Like, who actually has to implement these Wayland compositors? It's definitely anyone that wants to consume it. And a lot of those Wayland developers, they are, they're working in some of these other projects as well. Like some of them work in both Normand Wayland, some of them work in Wayland and KDE. And they're working together implementing this.

I also heard of another project recently that is, I think it's called Wayback. And the idea is that they are going to write a Wayland Compositor that, that can basically act as a translation layer and servers that were designed to work with XORG server like XFCE or I3 can just talk to Wayback and Wayback will basically lie to it and say that it's XORG server but then also be a Wayland Compositor

and just kind of be like a translation layer in between so there won't be as much porting work. That's a really new project though so I don't know how well it works yet or if it works at all or maybe working perfectly already. But yeah, it's definitely on each individual project to just adapt to the new project. protocols. And that's some of the pushback, I think, is that people see like, oh, well,

there's work involved in this. This is going to change. But I like this desktop that works on X-Ork server. Why do I have to do anything? And yeah, that's just open source in a nutshell. Because the times are changing, yeah. Underline stuff changes. So interesting. Nothing stays the same forever. So do I, am I tracking this right? And maybe Adam, let me know if you're tracking this, too because it's complicated right so omarchie is a configuration script that installs hyperland into arch linux and hyperland is a compositor that implements the wayland in protocol which means it's also a window server like it's a windowing server then because xorg isn't there xR server is not there so hyperland is then its own

windowing server in that way because it implements whalen composites way Okay. That sounds accurate. And so that, okay, so that's all right. It matches with how I understand it. Then bring it over to,

I'm not a developer on these things, so I don't fully understand them, but that all sounds correct. But you're like three classes ahead of us in school, you know? So like, yeah, so we're just checking our work against yours.

We still might all be wrong, but probably Carl is more right than I am. And so bring that over to Nome. Where does Wayland Compositor, Wayland Protocol, and a windowing server fit into Nome. Is it like built in the Nome now? Essentially, yeah.

The, I know the component in Nome is called Mutter. That is the whalen compositor. It runs as a separate process, but it's all, it's integrated. It's part of the Nome project. And that's where all the wheyland things happen for Nome. And then all of the other Nome components just integrate into Mutter to work together as one desktop environment. Okay. The good thing is because with Nome, you're not, it's not really designed for that piecemeal.

Like, I'm going to take this piece and that piece. They're really designed to be like one cohesive unit. work together. So really, you use a distribution that has Nome either pre-installed or you can, even in Arch, you can install, you know, the Nome, I think they call them groups in Nome or in Arch also, you install the Nome group and you get all of the, like, design components of Nome that work together. And you don't really have to even understand that, okay, well, Mutter's handling this

part and Nome Shell is handling this part. It's all just, you install Nome and this collection of pieces work together versus something like Hyperland or any of the other various like window windowing environments or window managers, you do have to kind of understand, okay, well, I got all this working. Oh, but I don't have a file manager. How do I read my files? And now I got to install that or this part's working or that part's not working. Noam's definitely designed to be a lot closer to the it's ready to go, works out of the box

for the most part. But at a cost of you don't have as much choice with it in configuration. So, yeah, it's kind of like buying an entire set of Lego where it's like this is what you get. It's all packaged. it has all the things for you to build this particular thing. I'm talking about Gnome now. So as a Fedora maintainer, I'm not saying you are one, but are you one?

Are you a Fedora maintainer? Okay, so as a Fedora maintainer, and does Fordora ship Nome by default? Is that the default environment in Fedora? So the yes for what we call Fedora Workstation, there are certain deliverables that are called additions, I think is the right term. and kind of the flagship edition for a long time was Fedor Workstation, which defaults to Gnome. More recently, I think about a year, year and a half ago, we have, let me back up a little.

Besides the main Fedora Workstation Edition, there's also Fador Server Edition, which obviously for servers, not meant to have like a graphical environment on it. But there's also Fador spins that would have things like KD Plasma, XFCE, and other desktop environments. A lot of people would use those.

Farther back, it was decided that KDE plasma was popular enough and important enough to be what we call a release blocking deliverable, meaning that if something's broken in the KDE plasma spin, Fodor could delay the release to get that working before pushing out a new version. A release blocking spin wasn't really that different than an addition. So basically they said, we need to promote this from a spin to an addition and give KDE a little bit more love and feature better on the front page. So now for desktops, Fedora has two additions. There's the workstation, which is Nome, and then Plasma Desktop, I think, is the name they went with. A lot of people, you know, engineers in naming things,

you know, there's lots of talk of like, well, we should have, you know, Plasma Workstation and Nome Workstation and have it more, you know, right in the name. And then other people said, no, workstation is Nome. And then lots of different opinions and fighting about that. But eventually what they landed on was, you know, we still have Fedora workstation that is Nome. And if you want to call it a default.

sure, but also the plasma desktop is also featured as a leading variant on the front page, one of the choices you can download, and that has KD Plasma in it. Gotcha. All right. So my last question, then I'm going to make sure Adam's with us and has further thoughts. Because I'm still getting clarifying questions. So as a gnome or as a Fedora maintainer then, with regards to gnome, do you have to care at all about Wayland, X11, those kind of things?

Or you just make sure Nome is packaged and installed and configured. by default and they they're black box to you it's mostly a black box to me but that's also because i'm not a maintainer of the known packages or any of the way you i mean the royal you sure the group of maintainers that maintain that part yeah and that's part of the difference right is that we have the collection of fedora maintainers but then you're you know you work on the specific things that are interesting to you the packages you care about i mentioned my sysadmin background so i have a lot of like server oriented and like python library stuff that i i'll interact with uh a few desktop apps, but I don't maintain any desktop environments.

For the Royal Way, though, you're correct that generally the, you know, Fodora makes sure that Nome is packaged and working. That's a lot of the, a lot of the known developers from Upstream also work in Fodora and package it there, make sure it's all working correctly. And then everyone else can just kind of maintain applications and libraries and whatever else that, or even Nome extensions that integrate with that base desktop. And they'll just adjust to, you know, whatever changes, that is one thing that people can criticize, fairly criticize Nome for is that

the extensions API isn't, there's not really an API for it. There's a lot of Nome extensions, and they're well known for basically breaking with every Nome version or every other known version, which can be pretty painful. And then you have some Nome developers that will just go out of their way and say that extensions are a niche thing, which is weird because every distribution that ships Nome has at least like one or two extensions pre-installed. They're not niche at all. Maybe some of these smaller ones are, but that is one of the things in Nome that nobody's really figured out how to do yet is to have like a stable

extensions API where you can have an extension that works well for an extended period of time because Nome releases a new major version every six months, which does line up pretty well with Fedora's release schedule, which is the same, a new major every six months. So every new major version of Fedora has the next major version of Nome. but it can be painful for those extension developers whenever the things changing out from under them. For sure.

All right, Adam, are you with us? Are you tracking? I'm tracking. I'm just overwhelmed, I would say. Like, it's not that hard to follow necessarily. I think for me in particular, I would love to use, like I love Linux server, Linux servers of all types.

And I would love to try. use Linux as a desktop, but because I'm a creative and we do video and audio, there's always something that stops me. I can build machines. I love that stuff. But man, all these distros, all these configs, all this, it's just so hard to map your mind around. It's no wonder why we haven't experienced the year of the Linux desktop. Because it's all, the sand is always shifting underneath you, I feel as someone who knows the lay the land well, or at least to some degree, you're a couple classes ahead, as Jared said. That's probably underselling Carl. I don't want to undersell you, Carl. Sure, sure. I'm just reusing your words. We're in elementary school. He's in

college. Okay. That's a lot of classes. Okay. That's not a few. You're being generous there. Where if I, for creatives who want to build their own PC and they don't want to use windows. OMG, please stop. Don't make me use windows. I've tried it. It wasn't the worst ever. It wasn't that bad. Is this your first time publicly saying this? I know you told it to me last week privately, but you know. Do you want to make a stance here?

Because you were pretty, you know, I got a lot of loose here. You know this, right? I'll love it this week and I'll hate it next, you know. But I'm an experimenter. I love to tinker. I love to try. And I think that if you want to go the easiest road possible ever and have your GPU drivers and your IPGP drivers

and all the drivers ever right there at your fingertips, use Windows. because that's what it does well. It is not extremely configurable to my knowledge. There's the installs a ton of stuff on top of it is getting littered with copilot-esque things. I don't even know what they're doing with it. There's a lot of ways you can remove that stuff,

but I think Windows is a super easy user experience unless you're a developer. If you want to SSH into or you want to do things you could do on a Unix Linux system, it's just not as easy and smooth. not like installing another flavor of an OS that's very popular out there and being able to treat it like a thing like that. I had a lot of opposition.

And I'm also not steeped in it. So it could have been, you know, user error, but it was challenging. But the real question is, is if I'm using Linux or I want to use Linux and I want to be a creative who does video or audio or podcasts and things like this, I don't even know, I guess, Figma is a web app. so you can probably figma on Linux, no problem. But where, what distro do I choose? What windowing server?

It seems like maybe Wayland is probably the route because XORC's got issues. Let's just say, where do you go to be a creative and use Linux? Well, obviously I'm biased and we'll say you can do all right on Fedora. Okay. But the real, real answer is that's just the wrong question to ask. Okay. The real question is use what works for you. if you try something and it doesn't work.

The thing that people love about Linux is that you can just change it out because most distributions are free of cost. You can just go and install a new one. You know, well, the famous, you know, not really mean, but like people call it like distro hopping. Like you can just swap out and change one. People overdo that a bit where they, you know, run into any problem and instead of trying to solve it,

they'll switch to another distribution and then have the same problem after, you know, hours of reinstalling and whatever. You know, not everyone has that quick, you know, quick setup script with Om Archie or Anstable Playbooks or whatever. And so they'll spend, you know, a weekend getting a new distribution set up and then run into the exact same problem and realize this isn't anything to do with any particular distribution. This is, say, a bug in Gnome or a bug in KDE or whatever, or a bug in Wayland or a bug in XORC server from the old stuff. The main thing is, I would say, get out to get out to the events, a little future segue to what we should talk about. But get out to events, talk to other Linux people.

There's a ton of people doing podcasts on Linux, doing creative work, videos, and streaming, and all kinds of that stuff. Talk to them, see which ones they like. I know that I have some friends that I won't shout out all the other podcasts out there, but I know that there's some podcasting fans I have. They use NixOS. Yeah, shut them out. My buddy's over at Jupiter Broadcasting. They do a lot of stuff.

They are big fans of NixOS, which. is a, if you think that, you know, Omar Archie is like really, you know, or Hyperlane is really configurable. NixOS is that kind of for your whole list. Just like everything is extremely configurable. I don't know a whole lot about it. I haven't tried it myself, but they are big fans of NixOS. My friend Michael over with Destination Linux, he uses Fedora for all his podcast production stuff. But then there's other people on his show that use other stuff. So I would say get out and talk to these people. I'm sure you've probably met. some of these folks before.

If you haven't, if you see them at a show together, I'll be happy to introduce you. Just talk to other people, see what tools they're using. Besides distributions, you might find out about other applications. You may think,

oh, well, here's this Mac app that's really good that I would have a hard time doing without and they could tell you about, oh, yeah, I used to use that and try this app on Linux works better for that or is good enough for that,

but then there's this other app that helps fill in the gap and just talk to people, network, At the end of the day, I don't really benefit or care about switching people to Linux anymore. There was a time in my life where I was like, oh, yeah, everyone should use Linux and I need to convert people. And that's just, I know, use whatever works for you. If you're happy on Mac and don't really have interest or curiosity in changing, don't.

Like, if you're happy and satisfied on Windows, then keep using it. It's not, you know, my problem. But for me personally, I know that I want to use an operating system that I can contribute to and change in effect. I can't do that with Windows. I can't do that with Mac. I can do that with Fedora, which is why I use it. That's true. That's good points there.

Well, I would say, hey, if you're listening to this on YouTube, wherever you're listening at, drop a comment if you're on YouTube. If you're out there not on YouTube and listen on the audio podcast, we're on X. You can email us, editors at changelot.com. I would love to hear from creators, creatives, whatever you want to call yourself. Anyone doing this kind of stuff?

Because I just haven't gotten that far into it. And I feel like the next layer, of experimentation for me truly is building a creator PC that does not run Windows, let's just say. So that would be my next major fun project. I'd film

it. I'd talk about it. I would love that. Like, I love building machines, and I have no desire to build one more because I would have to put windows on it. And I just don't want to do that. It wasn't that bad, though.

It really wasn't that bad. It sounds like you're, pretty curious so you know honestly if i could just give one credit to windows is that they've got so many applications and i think once you're past a few things and you're using let's just say like notion or you're in slack or you're in zolip or something like that at that point the operating system sort of just goes away and it doesn't feel like you're somewhere wrong there's some things i really liked about windows but it was mostly ux things and that's because i had taken so much of the bad stuff away that is by default.

Chris Titus' script, I forget what it's called, but it's really awesome for helping you fine-tune, install, configure, and deconfigure Windows to be more enjoyable. If it wasn't for that, Windows would have sucked bad for me. I think you bring up a good point with the apps. I mentioned, like, you know, in the past trying to, like, convert people to Linux and, like, you know, huge choice of time. But what I would run into is, you know, I would say, like,

what do you do on a computer and they're like oh i get on facebook and check my email and i'm like what else do you do that's it you know maybe i'll you know look at some photos and i'm like okay well if you're just in a browser and don't have any specific application needs other than like a photo viewer like yeah here's xy z Linux distribution try this out for a while um and then they would always do it and then they would say they would call me up like a month later or whatever and say hey i bought this uh camera at walmart and it comes with an application and it doesn't install and I'm like, what's the camera? And I'll look it up.

Yep, that's a Windows-only app. And inevitably, something would happen like that. Nowadays, I think that would be a less common thing just because of the move to web apps over like native applications. So the problem's gotten better, but still it's a problem where I wouldn't recommend, you know, I wouldn't necessarily recommend Linux to friends and family unless they actually want to get involved and learn it. Like you're asking questions and want to know.

If I have a family member that wants to know and learn, then sure, I'll help them get started. started and whatever, but I'm not going to try and convince anyone that's perfectly happy using Windows or Mac or anything else that they need to change to anything. Especially because you become the de facto tech support, don't you? I mean, once you've done that. Yes. I have gotten to the point in my life where family call me asking Windows questions.

They're like, you work with computers, right? And I'm like, the last time I used Windows was Windows Vista. Sorry, can't help you. The best windows there was. The best, that's pretty accurate. One more thing on this note, I think the thing that bugs me is like when you use, Even when you build your own PC, you're under these issues with, you know, is the, you know, going back to the camera kind of thing, like is their software for it on the platform? Coursair, pretty popular brand, have a really cool power supply for your PC, a really good liquid coaler for the CPU.

And they both have, I'm not sure what they call IQ. It's more of a system. IQ is like this information system. you can get from the PSU, like how much power is using? What's the constant power draw? And the application is pretty much a Windows app. Right? It's not for Mac because you can't really use Mac

unless you're doing, I guess, Hackintosh stuff, which is not something I do. So you're pretty much relegated to a Windows application to leverage IQ, which is diagnostics and information. So if you're building a system on Linux, the API for it is not published. And you can probably reverse engineer one and have fun with that. But by and large, if you're using Corsair as a power supply or a water cooler,

you're not getting the IQ goodies in Linux, to my knowledge, you know? So it's kind of a bummer. You're building a PC. You're probably building a Linux PC because that's kind of the sundry more popular these days. But yet you don't have access to APIs or a CLA for this stuff. And it's just a shame. Yeah, you'll see sometimes third-party projects that'll come up for things like that where they'll say, you know, for in this, I don't know if there's one, an equivalent for the one

you gave, the Coursera IQ, but for example, someone could say here, you know, Coursier IQ is a Windows-only app. Here is a, here's an app, a GTK app that is designed for Nome that does sort of the same thing that works on Linux. But it'll be like just somebody's hobby project that, you know, maybe it works today, maybe it breaks tomorrow and it's just an as-is thing. Getting more manufacturers interested to make, you know, native applications, I mean, we've got the great example of Steam there,

and that's been just a huge, huge boon for Linux desktop is having, you know, whatever, I don't know what the percentage is, but say like, you know, 50 to 80% of the Steam Library just works on Linux now without any problems. Right. There's still some games that don't, but people can, you know, game all day long on with Steam on Linux, and as long as they stick to those games that are compatible, that's not a blocker for them anymore. And it's just going to be, you know, it's a slow and steady drumbeat of getting

manufacturers on board, getting more hardware manufacturers on board that will ship Linux pre-installed. We're getting better at that. Frameworks are real popular these days. They don't ship Linux pre-installed, but they have devices where they'll advertise it as bring your own OS, which is kind of code for go install whichever district you want on. here. We've got Lenovo offering pre-installed Ubuntu and Fedora laptops now. So I think the more of those we get, the better this application problem will get long term. But it's

certainly certainly been a long time coming, getting to the point we're at now, and we're still not in a great place with it. So it's probably going to be a lot longer trek up this hill, getting it more popular. Yeah. In my case, I'm using IQ as more of a diagnostic thing. I'm not trying to view the window and check out the power draw. I'm trying to capture that in Prometheus and just monitor across the server. So in this case, it's a power's upon a server. The GPUs is on the server. You know, the CPU is obviously the CPU of the server.

And I want to look at those things. I want to understand how the CPU is performing, you know, which cores are active, things like that, how cool it is. Those are things you can get from the actual CPU. But in terms of its cooling, you know, there's things you can tell about, like, what is the constant temperature of the water in the air? in the AIO and whether or not that pump is about to go away. You know, there's things you can do just to ensure durability of your server.

And that IQ system or the diagnostics in there is sort of stuck. And, you know, I'm thinking about not making it stuck, but I got to make some software. And I don't want to do that. It's, I'd rather than just do it, make it easy. But that's how it works. If you don't care about the graphical part, I imagine there's probably something on Linux that could reach into that data, usually. those type of things, they're not like, it's not like special secret data where you have to have the one special proprietary app to access it. It's usually just normal, you know, industry standard stuff exposed via the hardware. And then there's other, I mean, servers do this anyways that don't have any graphical environments at all. So there's usually a standard that you can plug into and find some kind of app. It might just be a matter of finding the right term to Google for, you know, I think this used to be known as monitoring. Now it's observability is the hot term.

You know, kind of like a lot of sysadmins went from sysadmin to DevOps to SRE. Observability is now the new lingo. So maybe look into some of that observability and then the exact thing you're trying to monitor, right? Like, you know, water cooling loop temperature. Maybe that one's too specific. It might not be out there. But there's probably something you can find, some kind of open hardware sensor. There was an IQ kind of Linux.

I'm not sure what you call. Probably a package if you want to call it that. But it was unmaintained, so it was written in C and I'm maintained, and probably for a good reason. I'm not going to see, but whatever. Depot is the only build platform looking to make your builds as fast as possible. But Kyle, Kyle, this is an issue because, GitHub Actions is the number one CI provider out there. But not everyone's a fan.

Explain that. I think when you're thinking about GitHub Actions, it's really quite jarring how you can have such a wildly popular CI provider. And yet, it's lacking some of the basic functionality or tools that you need to actually be able to debug your builds or deployments. And so back in June, we essentially took a stab at that problem in particular with Depot's GitHub Action Run. What we've observed over time is effectively get up actions when it comes to like actually debugging a build is pretty much useless the job logs in get up actions UI is pretty much where your dreams go to die like they're collapsed by default they have no resource metrics when jobs fail you're essentially left playing detective like clicking each little drop down on each step in your job to figure out like okay where did this actually go wrong and so what we set out to do with our own get up actions of observability is essentially Essentially, you built a real observability solution around GitHub Actions. Okay, so how does it work?

All of the logs by default for a job that runs on a Depot GitHub Action Runner, they're uncollapsed. You can search them. You can detect if there's been out-of-memory errors. You can see all of the resource contention that was happening on the runner. So you can see your CPU metrics, your memory metrics, not just at the top-level runner level, but all the way down to the individual processes running on the machine. And so for us, this is our take on the first step forward of actually building a real observability solution around GitHub actions so that developers have real debugging tools to figure out what's going on in their builds. Okay, friend, you can learn more at depot.dev. Get a free trial, test it out.

Instantly make your builds faster. So cool. Again, depot.dev. Let's talk about Texas Linux Fest before I put my foot in my mouth on sea So we got at the UT campus This is what is it this month In like a couple weeks basically 16 days Yes As a Friday it's like 13 days

Okay so if you're going to go to this Go to 2025 dot Texas LinuxFest.org I assume you're an organizer or because you reached out on LinkedIn. You said, hey, Adam, what do you think about Texas Linux Fest? You didn't come last year. You come in this year. And I said, well, the best case I could do here is pot about it.

Maybe I can come at least one day, maybe not two. But let's talk about this awesome fest called Texas Linux Fast. What is it? So it is an all-volunteer-run community event. We are the backing organization is a nonprofit. We're actually under the same nonprofit umbrella as the scale conference. in California. Okay. We have some of the same organizers that help out with both, like we use the same

registration system. But it is a, it's a really fun event. I got going to it, met some good, good people there. And at one point, I made a suggestion. I don't even remember what the suggestion was about, but I made a suggestion about something about how the conference operated. And they said, that's a good idea. You should come and help us with that.

And they hooked me in. And so kind of, that's the motto I'll tell people a lot of times when they give me ideas for the conferences. I'll tell them the same thing. Like, good ideas require volunteer, you know, time to implement it. Like, I'm not, you know, I'm not just taking all the good ideas from the good idea fair. You've got to come help us do this. And I've looped in a few volunteers to help make things happen that way. Some people, you know, it's kind of like open source, right? Like everyone's got an idea, but very few people are willing to do the work to make it happen. And then that when the person that told me that it resonated with me. So I've been involved ever since then.

I think the first year I got involved was maybe 2017, 2018. So, wow. We took a bit of a hiatus for COVID. We had the 2019 event, the 2020 event we canceled outright just because I was right when COVID was kicking off the pandemic. And then we tried, we were trying hard to bring it back in 2022, didn't really come together, 2023, the same thing. And then last year, 2024 was our first year back after the long break. the like many conferences in the years post-pandemic the attendance was down a little bit but we had we had a good number of people come out it was about 300 people that year we've had a few you know somewhere between four and 800 in the years before that so we're hoping to get the attendance back up to pre-pandemic levels this year and talking to other organizers with other events I've heard good things that conference attendance overall is trending up across community events so that that's that's a good sign. It's part of the reason I'm, you know, I brought it up to you, Adam,

to help talk about it on the show, let more people know about it. Some people haven't ever heard about it and they would be very interested. It seems like every year we have the event, someone will reach out like, you know, a month afterwards and say, I had no idea this existed. If I had known about it, I would have come. And so we try to get the word out, but we don't really have a marketing department. So it's all just kind of word of mouth stuff and podcast interviews and talking to other people at other events, just to try and get the word out and let people know. Well, we're happy to help.

Is this getting put on at the university? It's not at the, yeah, you mentioned the UT campus. It's not the main campus. It is an ancillary venue called the JJ Pickle Research Campus. Okay. It's called the Commons Conference Center at the JJ Pickle Research Campus. All the, the map is on the web is on the conference website that you already mentioned the link to.

It's also pretty easy to find in Google Maps. Um, yeah, it's, it's our first time in this venue. I just noticed on the schedule that you have different venues and one is the stadium. I was like, is actually the football stadium or like, what? No, no, no, that is the, uh, those are the names of the rooms inside that building. Oh, the stadium room inside of the pickle center. Yes. Okay.

That is, I was working when I was filling that out, uh, actually wrote in that part of the schedule and I worried about that about the name being a little weird. I was like, dang, they're going to have a set up in this. I'd go to that. I'd go see that. I was hoping people would look at that. at the other other names. Maybe venue's not the right term for that column. I didn't know at atrium. So I'm like, oh, hey, there could be an atrium. There could be a stadium. Then

Bivo. And I'm like, I have no idea that Bvo is. I'm going to skip that one. These are all just room names in the building. And it's all kind of, you know, unique. Stric it from the record. But no, that's a good point. I actually thought about that. The venue column on the website was a little confusing. And I should change it to room instead of venue. That was something from the website theme that we have. But that should be a pretty easy tweak to change. So what kind of stuff is being discussed? It's a Linux conference. but it's not only Linux. We have, we have basically,

we don't really have tracks for every room. We do kind of keep some of the same topics on themes, so they're not conflicting at the same time. So in the main room, we'll have pretty much Linux talks the whole way, a lot of distribution stuff, and then one talk about Linux kernel upgrades. We have another room that I think the whole afternoon

is all Kubernetes stuff. Another one where the whole afternoon is AI stuff. That's a real hot topic right now. I think we have one room where the morning is, it's two observability talks back to back, so like monitoring type things. So those are some of the leading ones. We have some stuff that's more developer oriented.

We have a workshop on the Friday of the event. It's a Friday, Saturday thing. One workshop about WebAssembly. Another workshop about WSL using the Windows subsystem for Linux, which is like a Linux sort of thing, layer on Windows. So yeah, lots of topics

all around the, you know, at least tangentially related to Linux and or open source in some way. One interesting talk we had on the schedule this year was about Darwin, which is the, as I understand it, kind of the underlying operating system for Mac. So I'm pretty interested in, I don't know if I'll be able to actually watch any of the talks live, but we're hoping to get the talks recorded this year and be able to go back and watch that. Because I'm curious, you know, the title is the design and implementation of the Darwin operating system. And that's interesting to me that one, that someone would propose that at a Linux open source conference and two, I want to know what he has to talk about

about it. And I'm sure there'll be a lot of comparisons to Linux itself. Who should come to this thing? Like, it seems varied. So it seems varied. Who would come? Anyone interested in Linux and open source? Like I said, I mentioned that there's a lot of AI talks this year. So I know that's a hot topic. People that want to learn more about that. We've got, you know, people

working specifically in observability. So if this is, some of the topics are things that you work with in your day-to-day job. It's certainly applicable. Maybe you can get your employer to pay for the ticket. The tickets are pretty reasonable. The entry-level tickets, we just, we actually just ended the early bird pricing,

unfortunately. That's been open for a while. It was $50 tickets. But now the entry-level ticket is $75, and you can upgrade to $100 ticket to get the swag pack that includes a T-shirt. But yeah, if you can, If it's related to your job at all, if any of the topics on the schedule sound good, I would definitely pitch it to your employer. And if your employer is interested in sponsoring the conference, since this is run by a nonprofit,

we don't actually have big budgets for any of this stuff. We are completely reliant on our sponsors helping make the conference happen. This year, my ex-employer, Rackspace, down in San Antonio, is our platinum sponsor. And they haven't, they sponsored in years past and they haven't in a while. So it was nice to see them come back around. and want to be involved in community events. We've also got Red Hat and my current employer and Percona and Elastic as our gold sponsors and then a few more silver ones.

And we're looking for more sponsors. If anyone's interested in helping make the event happen this year and in future years, that'll definitely come in handy. But also, having lots of sponsors also helps us, you know, control that ticket price and not have to charge too much so that attendees can come. And it's affordable for everyone. Yeah. I'm seeing speaker slots with sponsored by Red Hat and those examples. How does that, how does that work? I'd imagine it's obviously in the cases I looked at it was a Red Hat employee. But is it, is there like a promotion kind of thing there? Is it simply kind of covering that person's costs to be there to give that talk? And it's it's not like an advertisement. It's more like we enable that person while they may work here. to have the freedom to go to this conference and give this talk and share their love and knowledge with the community. How does that work?

So more of the latter, what you said is going to be more like for my case where I'm an organizer, but I'm not doing one of these sponsored talks. So I don't have like sponsored by Red Hat on any of this stuff. But I will be helping coordinate some of the stuff at the actual Red Hat booth. The actual sponsors, there's different sponsored levels. That's all listed on the website. Many of the sponsor levels will include what we call a sponsored work. workshop. And then the sponsors get to split that up however they like. I think the gold level

comes with a half day workshop, which will be works out to about three hours. The platinum gets a full day workshop that comes out to a total of six hours. The sponsor can use that time however they want to. Many years ago, actually the first time I spoke at Texas Linux Fest, I was still a RACs-based employee. And the way that I spoke was in the sponsored workshop. They had a session that was basically part of their sponsorship and they could fill it however they wanted to. And so among employees, they said, who would like to present at the conference about any topic? And then I got to get on with that and do a little small talk there. And I think that might have been my first public speaking thing.

That's cool. It's not always that. It's not always just, you know, employers, you know, paying for their employees to have a spot. Sometimes it might be like sales engineers trying to talk about, you know, how their products are working with an upstream. open source thing. We definitely try to have an upstream and community angle on it as much as possible. But because the sponsors are putting up money for

this, we like to give them a little bit of a little bit of the audience time. It's part of the benefit for the sponsors to come in. So any of the talks that are part of a sponsored thing, we disclose that right there in the title, is sponsored by whoever. So far, Red Hat's the only ones you see there, but that's only because Red Hat's the only one that has given me

the titles for any of those sessions so far. There you go. Waiting to get those back from the other sponsors. And then once they give those to me, I'll add them up on the website. And you'll see if you, you'll see Percona and Rackspace and Elastic on there in the schedule as well. All those workshops are on the Friday. The Saturday is, there's no sponsored content. The Saturday is all talks from our call for papers, which ended last month, I believe, in August. And that's just talks that people have submitted. Nobody is paying for the spot. It's all just submit your ideas. And then we have a committee of reviewers.

I participated in that also. We go through and read all of the submissions, rate them, and then we look through the top ranked ones and then try to come up with sort of tracks. Like I mentioned, we have like a full day of Linux distribution stuff and kernels, and then like a half a day, like an afternoon of like AI, and then like an afternoon of observability stuff. So we'll look through all of the submissions and the ones that we like

we'll put together into themes that makes sense for the conference. and then have all the community members speak in that. Some of those speakers do happen to have their employers paying their way to come speak. Not all of them. A lot of the speakers are local and don't have any travel at all. Like for me, I'm just driving up from San Antonio. So it's just like a short two hour drive for me, basically. We have some people, a lot of people local in Austin, some people that come down from Dallas or over from Houston.

Longer drive for Carl than it is for you, Adam. Oh, yeah. Well, San Antonio is far away, comparative to where I'm at. I'm 40-ish minutes from downtown-ish with traffic. You just never know about traffic, man. You can get you. We're a little further for you this year then because last year we were at the Palmer Events Center, which is right by Terry Black's barbecue, kind of just south of downtown,

just south of the Lady Burger Lake. This year, that J.J. Pickle Research campus is a little bit further north in Austin. Okay. But it's still in Austin, so it's not far. I was thinking downtown UT, yeah. Is there still barbecue nearby? Always. There's, yeah.

There's one I haven't tried yet called Interstellar that's out a little, I think about 10 or 15 minutes northwest from there. I really want to try that one. The one or two times I've gone out there, the line was really long, which I don't terribly mind. But the group that I was with was like, oh, I don't want to wait an hour or two. And I'm like, but it's like one of the top ranked ones. I got to try it. Adams, do you ever go out to Sagan to try Burt Bean? No, that's Sigeen's.

I mean, you might just go in the middle of nowhere to go to Sigeen, right? It's like, that one's like an hour for me. It's like a time warp. They won number one on Texas Monthly this past rankings that they put out. Really? Yeah. They're really good. One of my favorites.

Oh, what's it called again? Burnt Bean. Burnt Bean. All right. I'm putting on my lists on Adams list. Adams, Texas monthly list. There you go. Yeah, they were, they were number four on the top 50 like four years ago when they did the last list.

And they went from number four to number one. So, which I was kind of bummed about because I was. I was like, okay, the food's going to be still be great. All that means is the line's going to be longer. More people know about it because they want to have number one. Good for them, I guess. They get the business. Give us the Carl George list.

Give us the top three Carl George barbecue. And you want to do San Antonio and Austin? You want to do just Austin? You want to just San Antonio. They're all over. Top three. The one that I like going to, that I end up going to more often than any in Austin, probably is Terry Blacks. It's not the best barbecue in Austin.

It's really good. but the best thing about them is that they are cooking 24-7. They're only open like during normal business hours, but they still have barbecue at like, you know, 7, 8 o'clock at night. Most of these other places, they start cooking, you know, the day before, and then they close when they sell out,

which will be at like, you know, noon or one or two. So a lot of times you can't get barbecue for dinner. That's early day to sell out, man. It's crazy. Yes. So that's one of the things I love about Terry Blacks is you can still reliably go get barbecue, you know,

for dinner. and they're basically cooking 24-7 to accomplish that. You know, there may be sometimes late in the evening where they run out of particular things, but it's not too bad. Another one I really like is La Barbecue. They're really good. That's all in Austin. There's another one.

What is the name of it? They have a brisket taco that I really love. I'll think of the name of it in a minute. The hat I'm wearing is snows. They're outside of Austin. They're about halfway between Austin and Houston. and they were they were number one years ago on the list they actually got featured on a if you go on to Netflix there's a documentary about barbecue and one of the episodes is all about snow's barbecue

and if you've ever seen it and forgot it was the one where the had the little old lady that's the janitor at the high school is the pit master at the barbecue restaurant really it's a great story fantastic oh my gosh that does make sense too I mean like you know it's good if you're going to buy a hat for it's kind of be good. They're only open one day a week, too, so they definitely drive up their own demand. How big is the line? It is in a town called Lexington, very small. I think the population of the town is like 200 normally, and then on the weekends,

the day they're open, it swells up to however many people are in line, which is well more than 200. Which day of the week? Is it open Saturday? Saturdays, yes. Gosh. 5 a. m.

kind of thing, camp out all night? Is it like Friday every Saturday? I think when I've gone out there, it was like, yeah, 5.5.30 when I'm one out there and I would be you know 100th in line or so yeah we should do a barbecue crawl around around tejas someday I don't that'd be fun it would be fun there's a lot of good barbecue I mean

endless supply of places to go I mean I could name my own list which would not be exhaustive comparative but not as good as Carl's list is how you're saying well you know I used to live in tomball Texas as you know jerry you should call Tomball Tom ball Tom ball I know what you're about to bring up slight difference yeah teahas but see I knew Before it was in Texas Monthly, and you can go at any given time, there was always barbecue, and there was no line.

And then the moment they hit Texas Monthly, because they have chocolate and barbecue, it's a very unique place. They're chocolatiers. So is it, what do they call it, chocolatey or something like that? I don't know what they call it. But you can go there and get really good all sorts of chocolates. And it's, you got really good carrot. I think my favorite side there is carrot suflat. I've yet to find any

place to carry carrot sufly I've never heard of that before I know well that's the reason to go there because they have it it's a signature thing and it's really good

my sister doesn't live far from there so when I go visit her I'm like hey you're in the mood for barbecue let's go have you been to their the Tayhouse Burger place the same business

but just I was going to say yeah the Teahouse burger joint it's literally called Teahas Burger Joint and Teahas is spelled T-A-J-A-S that's solid too

I mean, they had... It's fantastic. They have smoked burgers there, smoked brisket burgers there. They've got amazing smash burgers there, which is something I personally have really worked hard to the last two years, maybe three years of my life to perfect. I've finally got it down. So if ever you're in my neck of the woods and I have some good beef, I will make you a good smash burger.

But it would be Teahouse barbecue. And near me, right here in Dripping Springs, I would say pig pen, which is good for downtown my other favorite which is better don't tell them is uh is the switch i think the switch oh the switch is good yeah i mean they've done some real special they have a really good menu across the board from turkey to ribs to brisket uh i like the specialty stuff the switch will come out with uh like the tomahawk steaks and other stuff that yeah like what um lamb ribs other other specialty items um the other one out near you adam is uh it's not it's not the best barbecue, but I love it, just because I like their sauce, salt lick.

That was one of the early ones I was going to. Controversial statements. Some people were like, oh, no, all these other ones are better. But it's a great social hangout place. And I do like their barbecue sauce. Not many Texas places do mustard-based sauce. Well, I go for the barbecue and stay for the pecan pie, you know, so. And back when I drank beer, they would have a few good beers there, but I don't drink beer anymore.

But they're, the pecan pie is awesome. I think the cool thing about Salt Lake is that it's, if you want to go to OG Barbecue, it is the OG Salt Lake. And so this is like a property that was probably somebody's backyard at some point, turned barbecue joint. And it's just, that's the kind of site. It's a, it's a destination. It's a landmark. It's not just a place to go get barbecue. It's a place to go see barbecue.

And in particular, if you get a chance to go there, what's cool about it is you get to walk by when you order, you get to walk by. You get to walk by where they actually, like, roast and smoke a lot of the things. And so you can see the years, decades, decades upon decades, seasoning, you know, around their pit. It's just really, really insane. It's an open fire pit. They'll give you a tour of the place if you ask nice. And it's an experience for sure. That's what I was going to use, experience.

I like it. Yeah. I haven't been out there in a couple of years, but I do want to go back. And you're right that it's the original one. They have another location up further north in Austin that is, it's good, but it's not the same. You're not getting the same environment. Mm-hmm. I mean, it's just not the same as the OG location.

And in fact, when we became friends a year or so back, we had said, hey, we live close to each other. Let's meet at Salt Lex. That never happened. Kind of sad about that. So much shorter drive for you. Well, you know, on your way to something called Texas Linux Fest. Oh. there you go it pretty much is on my way it is you'll you'll go 150 to get here i'm sure you'll

probably go one miles per hour 290 no the highway the road or both the 50 on 150 on 150 i 150 i mean maybe if you want it to you could you might die yeah the uh anything to avoid i 35 yeah i like what i love most about where we live is the back roads like unless you want to you don't have to really and not if you're going to downtown You have to take some highways. But if I'm going between here and San Antonio, except for once I actually get into San Antonio, I don't have to drive a lot of highways to get there.

It's a lot of really cool, fun, adventurous, beautiful back roads with just views, just beautiful views. Hill country. Yeah, I love that. So Texas Linux Fest, second year back of fishy since the vid. Is there any particular talk that you're looking forward to? One thing I noted actually was that I didn't hear you say HomeLab. And that kind of made me sad.

It's kind of like all home lab in a way, but are there any particular home lab flavored conversations happening? Let me see. I know last year, my friend Alex that works at Tail Scale gave a talk, but he wasn't able to make it this year. I know Tail Scales were popular among Home Labbers. Mm-hmm. For good reason. One of those guys, one of those NixOS fans from the J.B. network, my friend West Payne, he's given a talk Mesh Network sidecars for NixOS services. So if you're getting into NixOS for your homelab setup,

that is something he mentions tailscale in the, and mesh network clients in the talk description. So I'm sure he'll delve into that and probably talk about ways that it can fit in homelab type stuff. Let's see. There's an EngineX talk that may be applicable for depending on what you have set up. I don't know how often home labors get into observability type stuff. stuff in monitoring all the time man i'm sure some some homelab setups are just like oh whatever if

it goes down like you know my kids will tell me like the you know theplex ain't working or whatever uh but other people get all into it and want to know like you know real time analytics and other things like that uh so definitely the the monitoring talks and observability talks will be applicable to this uh to that yeah that's what i'm doing more so of i want to do a little bit more i would say metrics tracking which is observability in a way i just want to see how it's performing. I guess it is observability. And I think about it, I'm not trying to build dashboards and go crazy with it. I'm just trying to

like monitor what's happening there and just kind of get feedback. More more so kind of like the pilot filling the rut. Like, I just want to feel it. I want to feel how it feels. You know, that's what we do have a talk about getting started with Ansible. So homeowners that might want to improve the

repeatability of their setup. That might be applicable for them. We do have a SteamOS talk on the schedule. That, that's one that I am really interested in that I'll be bummed if I can't sneak away from organizing duties to go watch live. I was chatting with the presenter, and he was asking details about the presentation setup. And a little spoiler,

he's trying to figure out if he can, it's about SteamOS on the Lenovo Go S hardware. And he was trying to figure out if he'd be able to do his presentation about it from SteamOS on the Lenovo Go. And I was just like, that's a fantastic idea. I would love to help you get that working. Hopefully it can, you know, bring any other. adapters you might need and presentation-wise, and I'll try to help you get it set up and going.

There's a databases talk. There's a no-sql talk. Good number of Kubernetes things, if you're getting into Kubernetes in your home lab. Yeah, but lots of various things. Nothing that is exactly home lab specific, but, you know, home lab is just, you know, the environment. It's all the other technology you're using in it anyways. Yeah, sometimes it's like, well, I'm trying to use this in enterprise. And it's like, well, can we talk about it in a home lab? We do have a CI pipeline workshop on Friday, that might be for home labors that want to do, you know, automate their deployers at home, that might come in handy. Yeah, absolutely.

I've been running, is it pronounced, Git, T, or is it giddy? I don't know. It's GIT, E, A, and I'm just not sure, is it Git T, or is it get T? Just not sure. I've never heard an official ruling on that. Okay. I know sometimes people ask me about CentOS versus Centos, and I'm like, sure, choose whichever want you want there's no official pronunciation very cool well glad to have you on the pod again a friend

of course 2025.Lenixfest.org tickets are now 75 bucks if you want some swag it's 100 bucks I might know somebody do you want to can you give out a coupon go is it too late for that and you just can't do that oh a coupon that would have been a good idea like yesterday to get ready maybe a short lived one like 10 the first 10 get a bonus kind of thing I don't know like 10 bucks off or something, anything. We had a coupon code for people that submitted to the CFP to give them a, basically give them the $50 ticket even late, like basically let them get the early bird pricing continuously if they submitted a talk

and didn't get accepted. So I would definitely encourage people to do that next year, submit a talk, even if it's your first talk. This is, I would say, a really good event for first time speakers. The organizers, we've got several first-time speakers on the schedule. We try to be supportive, help people get started. A lot of regular conference presenters help organize. So we're familiar with all the little things that you would need,

things we wish someone told us when we were getting started. So if you've never presented at a conference before, the community events like this, whether you're in Austin or can travel Austin, or you have another community event in your neck of the woods, like Linux Fest Northwest or South. East Linux Fest, those other conferences, if you've got something near you that's, you know, advertises itself as, you know, a smaller community event, submit a talk.

See if you can get it accepted. The hardest part a lot of times isn't the presentation itself. That's one that, you know, I tell people, you know, they're like, oh, do you get nervous when you present? I'm like, yeah, every time still. But the thing is you just figure out how to just, you know, move forward and present in spite of being nervous. And it's just part of the, part of the thing is, okay, I've got my talk jitters now.

the harder part's coming up with a good idea that will, you know, look good in that call for papers where, you know, the reviewers look at it and say, yeah, our audience does want to hear about SteamOS on the Lenovo GoS or smart cities built with Kubernetes or whatever it is topic-wise that you have. So coming up with an interesting pitch, send it out there. And then a lot of conferences will, even if they don't accept, if they accept your talk as a speaker, you can pretty much guarantee you're getting a free pass for that. as a speaker, you're part of the content. A lot of conferences, including us, will also give free passes to speaker alternates. And that is where, like, we accept so many talks right off the bat. And then a certain percentage of those will drop off,

just scheduling conflicts or they don't show up at all or whatever. Hopefully it's a small percentage. It's not too bad. But we have to plan for it. So we, right off the bat, you know, the next, whatever, 20 or 30 talks that we would have accepted, we put on the wait list and tell them, like, you know, something may open,

up and we'll fit you in. And we've already pulled up, I think, four or five talks from the wait list and put them on. But all of the speakers that we put on the wait list, we gave them free passes as well, mainly to encourage them to be there present in case we have a day of cancellation. I want to be able to tap one of them on the shoulder and say, you got that talk ready, right? And you're already here because you got a free ticket. But anyone that we rejected in the CFP, we gave the $50 price ticket, the early word pricing permanently so they can get in, still get in. So I definitely encourage people to do that. I wish I'd have had the forethought to get a special coupon code just for your listeners.

If I did get that later on, is there a good way to push that out to people, maybe in the show notes? We can even, we can easy sprinkle it in there. It's not a problem. Yeah. Okay. Stay tuned, listener to the outro. That's right. You'll hear that coupon code.

I will harass some people today about giving me a coupon code for your list for the change log listeners. Maybe a code like change log might work, possibly. We'll see. It sounds pretty complicated. Can we make it easier than that? Easy to remember. Cool. Yeah, we'll look forward to that.

Stay tuned to the outro. Right on. Bye, Carl. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Carl. Well, thanks for having me on, guys. Bye, friends.

What a fun time talking to Carl again. It's been a bit. I like Carl. He's cool. Love talking about Linux, of course. Big fan of Linux. Are you a daily driver Linux user? Is it the year of the

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