The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Linux mythbusting & retro gaming (Interview)

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

This week we're doing some Linux mythbusting and talking retro gaming with Jay LaCroix from Learn Linux TV. This is a preview of what's to come from our trip to All Things Open next week. By the way, make sure you come and check us out at booth 60. We'll be recording podcasts, shaking hands, giving out t-shirts and stickers...and speaking of gaming, you can go head-to-head with us on Mario Kart or Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch. We're giving that Switch away to a lucky winner at the conference, but you have to play to win. If you're there, make sure you come see us because we want to see you.

this week on the changelog we're doing some linux myth busting and talking retro gaming with jayla croy from learn linux tv this is a preview of what's to come from our trip to all things open next week by the way make sure you come check us out at boost 60 we'll be recording some podcasts shaking some hands giving out t-shirts and stickers. And speaking of gaming, you can go head-to-head with us on Mario Kart or Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch. And by the way, we're giving that Switch away to a lucky winner at the conference, but you have to play to win. Again, Booth60, make sure you come see us. We want to see you. Big thanks to our friends and our partners Fastly and Fly. Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly and Fly. Bandwidth for ChangeLog is provided by Fastly.

Learn more at Fastly.com and our friends at Fly. Let you put your app and your database closer to users all over the world. No ops required. Check them out at Fly.io. This episode is brought to you by Century. Build better software faster.

Diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of your code. More than a million developers in 68,000 organizations already use Century, and that includes us. Here's the easiest way to try Century. Head to century.io slash demo slash sandbox. That is a fully functional version of Sentry that you can poke at. And best of all, our listeners get the team plan for free for three months at Sentry.io and use the code changelog when you sign up. Again, Sentry.io and use the code changelog. so we're here with jay from learn linux tv jay thanks for coming on the show

hi there nice to be here. Awesome to have you. Excited to see you in a few days. Hopefully we'll see each other in the flesh at all things open upcoming. You're going to be a busy guy at this conference, aren't you? I mean, is there any other time that I'm not? You know, it's one of those things. Yeah, there's a few.

I feel like in some ways it's less work, but it's also more work because of the prep work that goes into the videos that I do in the channel. I'm pretty much always kind of preparing for something. So it's pretty much the status quo plus a plane trip. Right. Gotcha. Actually, getting out of the house this time, have you been to a conference yet in the flesh or is this a first for you? Because this is a first for us. That's why I'm asking. Oh, I went to Scale. I believe that was at the near the end of August or near the end of July. I don't know. Sometime in the

summer. Time flies. But that was my first Linux conference, actually. Surprisingly, I've been to other conferences that are shared and whatnot. But that was an amazing experience. I feel like I was really tired at the end of it just because I overworked myself as I always do, just bringing a camera everywhere and doing interviews and everything like that too. So I think I had like 200 gigs of footage after I left scale. So I'm expecting more of the same this time around too. That's a lot of footage. That's a lot of footage. You must be practicing the ABR method. Are you familiar with the abr method i don't think so let me explain it to you always be recording so with 200 gigs you must have been abr-ing yeah well

also there's the fact that i 4k all the things which adds a ton of space as well i think that's probably a bigger culprit in my case yeah yeah, yeah, for sure. We have not made it to scale yet. That is one conference that I know I want to go to, Jared, and I think you mentioned in the past you want to go to, and we just haven't made it there yet. So we should prioritize that next year. Don't mind the rumble in the background. There's literally people outside constructing. Construction happening in the backyard, basically. For me, it's lawn mowing that constantly happens. It's always something I have to, oh gosh, I have to stop. In my case, when that happens, I literally have to stop. And I think that was a little bit more reasonable. Well, we say this is a world-class podcast,

but we have our things that happen during the podcast. I mean, you just can't help it, right? Like I can't redo that. So we're going to leave that in. That's how we keep it real right there. Yeah. It's a little realness for you. I mean, life does happen't help it, right? Like, I can't redo that. So we're going to leave that in. That's how we keep it real right there. Yeah, it's a little realness for you. I mean, life does happen. We do aim to be, you know, the best possible podcast we can be. But there are going to be things that come into play that we can't help. That's how it goes.

So do you do all your own post-production as well, Jay? Are you doing your editing and everything? Or do you have help? I wish I had help. But I am everything for the company. I'm the only employee, all editing, posting, uploading, audio adjustments. I fumble my way through it until I learn it because Linux, I feel like I know it very well, obviously. But when it comes to video and audio, it's been a long time just looking into things and tweaking things.

And I feel like you see an incremental improvement on the channel pretty much every month. And it's not going to be immediately apparent until you compare it to videos from the previous year. Then you see like the big jump in quality that comes from that incremental process. But a lot of time is spent editing, and I would say that's probably the majority of the time nowadays because as I add more effects, it just adds more time to the overall projects. Right. We've had the same effect.

Essentially, go back and listen to episode 100, for instance. We're in the 500s now. And the audio quality, you don't notice it episode to episode and, you know, large noisy construction set aside, the quality of the audio has gotten better over time incrementally just because we've learned, you know, which knobs to dial in and dial down and et cetera. And you don't notice it.

So you go back to your older stuff and you're like, Oh, this is terrible. But it's, I think the worst part about it is it's one of the few things that YouTube can't help you with. I mean, there's a lot of people out there that make content about how to adjust your microphone and your audio strip or whatever it is you're using. And then, yeah, you could use their settings,

but it's their settings for their voice, their room and everything. And you'll never find a magic set of settings that works for you unless you just happen to have the same voice and the same construction, the walls and things. And I feel like that's what makes it hard because normally, you know, if you want to replace an alternator or something, you'd probably find a video for how to do that. You know, there's a way to do it. There's a tried and true approach to that. When it comes to audio, it's basically just keep trying things until it sounds good. Yeah, for sure. I think for us, it's been a labor of iteration, essentially,

over many, many years, more than a decade for us to just constantly iterate towards better quality. You know, everything from the love of our music with Breakmaster Cylinder to, you know, how we consider an edit, you know, how much do we cut out of an edit to make it more smooth. We always think about listeners like, is this annoying to a listener? Does a listener really enjoy what we edit? Even the pace of a show, because it may be slower paced in the actual recording, but we can speed up the pace a little bit for the listener's sake in post-production to

make the ending artifact a little bit better. But's sake in post-production to make the ending artifact a little bit better. But yeah, it's definitely a labor of iteration and you're right, podcasts or YouTube, that whole process is going to help you hone it down because who doesn't want to get better, right? I mean, that's the whole thing. Yeah, absolutely. And then video editing, of course, is its own animal. You know, when you started getting into that and learning how to do different things. At first it was overwhelming, but then I found I actually enjoy it. I was surprised by that. I didn't think I would enjoy it. I just thought it was one of those things you have to do that not everybody likes everything they have to do for part of a process. But I

found myself actually quite enjoying it, which was a very big shock to me. Now, do you edit your videos on Linux or are you doing that? Are you doing it on Mac OS? What's your, and if you're on Linux, it must be challenging, right? No, I would say it's. No, okay. This is part of the myth. Okay, this is myth number one, potentially.

It might be a myth, but then again, you could probably say that about anything on Linux because it was true that things were more complicated than they are now. I was using Kdenlive for the majority of the channel. And when I switched to 4k, it, it really got hard to use. I was, it was like three hours per render at that point, even for like a 15 minute video, take three hours to render. And that was in that's, you know, as long as it doesn't crash,

which it often did constantly. And then it would use up to like, I think it was 60 something gigabytes of RAM at idle when you just let it sit. So I'd have to constantly just close it and reopen it. And no offense to the Kdenlive developers. I believe it's one of the frameworks that they utilize that they themselves don't develop. That's probably the culprit here. But there came a point when I switched to 4k because 1080p was fine. I just had to switch to something else. And DaVinci Resolve is the direction that I went, I might still go back and look at Kdenlive again to see

if they've maybe improved some things. But having 10 or 15 minute renders versus three hour renders, I'd say that's definitely a win. And there's some challenges with DaVinci Resolve on Linux, but not many. It's actually surprisingly quite fine. Well, we bring up myth busting because that's one of your talks next week is Linux myth busting. So a little bit of our background, I guess. I was running Linux on my laptop in college in 03, 04, and loved it for many things and despised certain aspects of it. Mostly networking drivers was my thing. Oh, boy. Yeah, and I started around 2002, so not that long before you.

Okay, so same time frame. And so I ditched it for macOS on my desktop because it was kind of like the same underpinnings, the same Unix-y underpinnings with less of that headache. And I continued to run Linux on everything that was server-side pretty much for my entire career. Now, Adam, you've been getting more into Linux lately through the Raspberry Pi and stuff like that. Is that your main experience with Linux from the command line, or did you ever run a desktop

Linux? So I got a little bit of a semi-joke of my history. So I actually began in my Linux journey in 2002 because I had a neighbor who was a Linux sysadmin, and so that's my very first touch to it, was knowing somebody who actually was a Linux sysadmin, and that was the closest I got at that early year. But I think my first Linux server I ran was thanks to DigitalOcean and their amazing documentation.

This is back, I want to say, Ubuntu 12, maybe 10, I don't know, somewhere around there. It was many, many years ago. Actually, it was the WordPress server that I built on DigitalOcean for our earliest version of the changelog that was on, you know, as a blog way back when. So that's what got me into it. And then I think more recently when I got a Raspberry Pi

and started tinkering with PiHole and, you know, just stuff like that, like everything from Docker to Docker Compose and other fun things. That's, I mean, I tinker. You know, I do a lot of network-y stuff and sysadmin-y stuff. Less dashboards, less Grafana, less metrics stuff. But I still like to tinker. It's mainly time.

You know, do I have time to do all these things? You know, I want to do those things, but do I have enough time to actually do the job I need to do and then also have fun tinkering? That's the problem, really. Kind of makes you wish there was more hours in a day, right? Yeah. I wish there was actually less. The same 24

hours, just give me more atoms. That's another way of doing it. I say that because I'm a fan of Dennis E. Taylor's book, The Babaiverse. If you haven't heard of this book series, it's an amazing series. If you love plausible science, I mean, that's as close as it gets. It's Bob. He's an AI.

He replicates himself because he's a von Neumann probe machine that can self-replicate essentially, and he's an AI. But I'd love to have more Adams. If I can have Adam 1, Adam 2, Adam 3 and maybe different names. Maybe he's no longer Adam.

Maybe it's, you know, pick a favorite character or whatever. But more Adams. Yeah, I mean, just being able to clone yourself would be interesting for sure. Yeah. Yeah, but have you ever seen multiplicity? Well, that's, yeah,

that's the opposite side of it. It's like they get... Every time he clones himself or every time he makes a copy of a copy, it gets dumber. Mm-hmm. And hilarity ensues. Have you seen that one, Jay?

Multiplicity. I have not. I feel like when you're into content creation, enjoying other people's and other companies' content becomes really hard to find time for, unfortunately. So there's all these movies and things I need to get caught up on and TV series. And I have no shortage of people recommending things to me. And I really do mean to try different things. I feel like Strange New Worlds was the most recent thing I binged because I just decided to try one episode. And next thing

I know, I was like three episodes in. So sometimes that does happen. Well, Multiplicity was from the 90s, I want to say, like mid 90s, right, Jared? Yes. Early 90s, mid-90s? And it was Keaton. What's his first name? Michael Keaton. Michael Keaton, Multiplicity. It's an old one. And Andy McDowell as his co-star.

And he plays, like, five roles. They're all him. But they get dumber and dumber because he keeps copying them. And so, like, by the end of it, they're just, like, barely can put a sentence together. And it's all funny because they're all trying to act like. And his wife doesn't realize it's the copies. There's a lot of different setups that comes out of it. But I think if there was multiple Adams,

it might just get worse and worse as it goes. My hope is the better and better, Jared. So I'm favoring better and better. You're an optimist. But I do know the movie multiplicity. I am aware of the downfall potentially, but I'm erring on the side of the positive, which is smarter and smarter, better and better, not dumber and dumber. Yep, it really is. Yeah, for sure.

So Jay, you spend all your time doing Linux stuff and then producing the content. Is this your full-time thing and your hobby? Is it just your hobby? What else do you got going on? It's one of two main hobbies for me, which Linux being my number one and retro gaming being number two. So that's why sometimes I'll insert retro game stuff into videos where it makes sense to do so. For example, I might be talking about a Raspberry Pi project and I might slip in footage of a retro Pi unit because, you know, it's an example of one of the things that you could do with a Raspberry Pi. So you could build whatever, you know, you could think of as long as you have the resources and between

retro gaming and Linux that's that's the majority of of my time is mostly during the day it's all Linux and evening is probably retro games I would say it's how I spend most of my evening so that's generally status quo I mean I have other hobbies as well I really enjoy martial arts but I got to get back into that because the pandemic took me away from it. So that's not currently something I'm indulging in. But other than that, Linux takes up a lot of time, and I'm glad it does because I like having my time taken up by it, actually. What parts of Linux keeps you most busy? Like what has kept your curiosity the most around Linux?

Because Linux is a pretty wide ecosystem, so saying Linux is the biggest umbrella possible, really. Yeah, there's actually quite a lot. One of the things is paying a lot of attention to RSS feeds, knowing what's coming out. I run a tiny, tiny RSS server that I have subscribed to sites like Linux Today, OMG,

Ubuntu, a number of others. That helps me kind of stay informed of what's going on, you know, if Fedora is releasing on time or not, which is a very common thread. But also what Ubuntu is up to, Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu. So keeping up with the news takes a long time. Other than that, it's basically like this rehearsal process. I don't want to call it rehearsal, but I kind of have to, because I don't know what else to call it. It's when I have a set of, you know, commands or something I want to show in a video, and I go through it on my own, not being recorded, find out how it fails, how it breaks, start over, do it again, start over, do it again,

start over about four or five times until I have it so predictable, I can hit the record button. Things still happen even after that because IT and chaos theory, those things kind of intertwine. But that being said, a lot of it is off camera is preparing for the content. But one of the things I do, and I don't know how often I say this,

so I'm not sure how often or how many people know this. I do a lot of bulk recording as well, which is kind of like one of my secrets where when it comes to evergreen content, things that really don't change if I'm going over Bash. I mean, how much has Bash changed over the last five years? Probably not much. So those are videos that are not time sensitive.

I could record a bunch of those, you know, pretty much in a setting. I think my record is like 12 videos in a day, maybe even closer to 20. Because by then they're written, I have the commands, and I'm just in front of the camera for 10 hours, just banging out videos. And then that's also why if I leak the date in the footage and it's being released, let's just say today. And if you see the date, wait a minute, that was recorded like three months ago. Yeah, that's probably true. That's probably accurate actually.

So that kind of helps me get ahead of the game. But then like, for example, right now I'm in the process of evaluating Ubuntu 22.10. So that's something that needs to be done now. I can't record that and, you know, upload it three months from now because will people care in three months? Probably not as much. So there's a mix of evergreen and what they call hero content. I don't really like that term, but things that are trendy, you know. Right. It's like what's time sensitive and what isn't.

There's two kinds of content and you're kind of touching on both. We do a little bit of that as well. I think we do a little bit of newsy, trendy, what's going on kind of shows. And then we also do ones that are like based on the principles of engineering or this topic that aren't gonna stale out in the next month so are you a distro hopper then are you also just like taste making like you compare fedora to

boontoo to arch to like are you into all the different distributions or do you kind of have your one or two that you mostly stick to? I'm basically both. I'm a distro hopper and I'm not at the same time. My daily driver's Pop! OS because I feel like it hits all the marks when it comes to desktop distributions. But being what I do for a living, I can't stay on that all the time.

So what I find is having a dedicated recording PC is the best thing because at that point, I don't have to worry about wiping it, restoring my data later, as I used to do. I've actually automated all of my desktop installs going forward to kind of minimize this with Ansible. But I'll try pretty much every noteworthy distribution that comes out. There's some mainstays like Fedora, Pop!OS, Ubuntu, Debian, sometimes Suicide. I probably need to get more into that one. And when it comes to my Ansible config that I use to actually provision computers, which is

automated, that supports Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, and there's one more I can't remember. But basically my mentality, if you work in a business, you should never align to one distro. That's a very important thing because you would think that a distro. That's a very important thing, because you would think that a distro can't go anywhere, that it's always going to be here. It may, and it probably will, but you never know. We saw that with CentOS recently, where they decided to change their direction, and that left a lot of IT companies in a pinch in a very short period of time. And that's a reason why I always say you could have your primary, but have a plan B. Always test your company software or your configs or whatever on a secondary distro. You never know. I mean, is Ubuntu going to get bought out tomorrow? I doubt it. And I don't

really see that happening, but you never know, right? Anything could happen. But not only that, the distribution you're using might go in a direction that you might not want to go along with. For example, there's the ALP platform with OpenSUSE, which is kind of still in development. It's very early where you have, you know, the distribution is more of a big blob that could be replaced in one big chunk, which a lot of people aren't happy about. So if it does go that direction and you don't like it, well, guess what? You can use a different distribution and it's even easier to do if you test a couple in parallel.

And I have to say, if you're an IT employee and your company's distro of choice goes in a direction that you don't like, then you are a superhero. If you go into that meeting room and everybody is just frantically stressed out about what are we going to do? And then you raise your hand. Oh, I've been testing all of our software in this other distribution the whole time. So actually I have all the settings and I can show

you how to do it. What? What? You didn't. What? Yeah, I've been testing it on this other distro. And then you're a hero because now you've already done some testing. And granted, it shouldn't fall on just you or anything like that. But I feel like the mentality is that embrace the distributions. There's a reason why there's so many and any one of them could change directions

at a second's notice. Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, we've used or I've used Ubuntu pretty much for the most part, aside from, I would say, the Raspberry Pi's operating system, which is the Lite version of it, their RPi version of their operating system, which

is still Linux, but it's not Ubuntu itself. And I've never considered like, oh, we should distro hop or pay attention. Like, obviously, the CentOS situation was a big, potentially obvious, you know, outcome of Red Hat's acquisition of it. Like, it's almost like you can see the writing on the wall with the acquisition of the operating system and the community around it. Maybe you sort of expected that potentially, but, you know, that one was maybe less of one. But, you know, paying attention to more distros does make sense.

But I guess, you know, when you compare a distro distro what do you what are some of the obvious things you look at that are differences of like okay Ubuntu versus Debian versus Arch how do you look at the different distros and and just say okay these are the positives or negatives from them like what are some of the experiences you've had to to kind of determine what are good or you know good things or bad things well first of all it depends on if you're aligning it to your favorite desktop environment or if it's your company that you're working for. And, you know, there's obviously a different set of criteria there. There could be things like if you want a rolling release versus non-rolling,

you know, which one is better for you? I mean, rolling is going to have more maintenance, but you don't have to install it every six months either. So there's benefits there. One of the things that I look for is all my software available. I think that's the first thing to look at because if you're using Distro X

and you move to Distro Y or whatever, you want to know that what you had on your current one is available on the one that you're moving to. And I feel like that's less of a problem now than it used to be, because there used to be like, for example, I couldn't even use Fedora, even though I liked it, because most of my apps just weren't available in their repositories. Like one weird example, if I'm pronouncing this right, was CMuse. It was like a terminal music player. It just wasn't available on Fedora. It's open source.

There's no reason for it not to be. It's just nobody bothered to package it. But I feel like nowadays it's pretty much gotten to a point where I don't see any software that's available for one and not available for the other. But there's also distribution-specific features. A lot of people like Yast and OpenSUSE, which is like a configuration menu on steroids.

It's actually kind of amazing because it's like almost everything you want to customize is right there in one menu, which is awesome. And that's only available on that platform. For Arch Linux users, they like the Arch User Repository or the AUR because, I mean, chances are when something comes out, it's available the same day on the AUR. It's actually kind of amazing. So there's a lot of that. But when it comes to moving from one distro to another, I feel like one of the biggest frustrations is the package names are not consistent between them. And I feel like that can bite some people, especially when you have like SUSE using camel case naming and then all the other distributions use lowercase. And, you know the

it's case sensitive what i find in my case is when i use ansible i just have um situations in which the package is different in different distros i have a variable might be called something like apache package name is a variable and then if it's you know boon2 it equals this if it's arch it equals that and i just kind of have a variable file that has a list of packages that are different which really does help but that's going to be the biggest thing the second thing is configuration files are not always in the same location so that's a little confusing but after you get past that it gets a lot easier because then the applications are you know you just feed them the config files and the rest plays out the same. As long as they're in the same spot and you have the right libraries installed, the rest kind of falls in place. You said rolling release, and that's something that I was like,

okay, what exactly is that? Because I recall logging into our ZFS server. So we have a, I don't know, 100 terabyte ZFS server here for all of our archives. You probably have something similar. And when I logged into it, I want to say about a month ago, it yelled at me about upgrading to 22.04. And I assume that Ubuntu is not a rolling release because I have to manually go and do that. What do you mean by rolling release for Linux?

How does that work? What is a rolling release and how does that work? So basically, the easiest way or simplest way to put it is install once, upgrade forever. So let's just say, for example, you have a distribution with GNOME 42 and GNOME 43 just came out. Are you going to get GNOME 43? Probably not. Most distributions are not going to upgrade that at all, ever. You'll have to upgrade the entire distribution to the next version to get those new pieces of software. I've never been OK with that. I've always thought that's silly,

but that's just the way it is. But a rolling release, you continually get new versions, even things as big of a jump, like your desktop environment will absolutely go to the next version by just installing your normal updates. And as long as you don't break it or anything like that, you just have the same install. And some people will brag about having the same installation

for a bunch of years, and that's actually pretty cool. Whereas with Ubuntu and other distributions that are not rolling, they do come out with a new release, and there's a time bomb on whatever one is current. In the case of Ubuntu, it's either nine months or up to five years, depending on the type of version that you install. And when that support runs out, you have to do a complete migration of everything all at once to the next version. Whereas with Arch Linux, there's really no new versions.

They do release new ISO images. That's just a snapshot of what's available at the time that they put it out. They might call it, you know, something like the October release or something of 2022. But it's really, if you already have Arch Linux installed and you keep up to date with it, I feel like you're already

going to have everything. Now, the trade-off can be that when something changes, you have to change with it. And just by installing updates, you might not think of this, but let's just say Ansible upgrades to the next version or maybe your text editor for that purpose. So you might actually find

yourself all of a sudden needing to learn something and you didn't know it was coming, but then it happens, you reboot your machine. Oh, wow, everything's different. So that could turn off some people, but I feel like we're kind of in between software delivery mechanisms and no one is really sure which direction it's going to go. There's some theories, obviously, and some technologies coming out. But I feel like the different release styles exist because, well, it's not always going to be the one thing that fits everybody. Different people like different things. Then also, you know, some people like bleeding edge software and some people kind of like just to stay on the same software for a very long time and not deal with change all of a sudden.

So it kind of depends on where you are in that mindset. I was logging into it for a second. I was like, I thought it was dealing with me recently because we're on 20, 2004. And I thought it was still yelling at me like, hey, you should upgrade soon or something like that. I remember doing it once. Yeah, 2204 is probably good to stay on that because it's LTS until the next LTS comes out. Tomorrow we have 2210 coming out, so that'll be fun. Okay, so that's tomorrow then.

Yeah, I don't even know what the process is to go from one version to the next. Do you cover that in some of your videos where you might say if you're going from 2004 to 2204, here's what you expect to break. Kind of thing if you're using ZFS or using this or that kind of thing. I sometimes do. It really depends because a lot of times when it comes to newer versions of things or actually upgrades in general, it's really hard to know what the user is going to run into because there's, I don't know, how many tens or hundreds of thousands of hardware and software combinations somebody could have in their computer. I've actually never been a fan of upgrades because

I feel like it's ripping the tablecloth off the table and expecting not to break any dinnerware. Like, is that going to happen? Maybe, but there's going to be all these edge cases and sometimes a distribution will test things very thoroughly and they are like very sure you're not going to have a problem and then I go to edit a video on DaVinci Resolve and notice that there's an audio lag in all my videos now because Pipewire needs to be calibrated for DaVinci Resolve and that might be one piece of software they didn't actually think to do that on. I do cover upgrades when it makes sense to but I normally don't honestly, I would rather just redeploy the whole thing than do an upgrade. Because generally speaking, you're probably going to

run into issues. I think Debian stable is probably the best when it comes to upgrades. Ubuntu might even be number two. But you have to understand always, there could be something that breaks. But when it comes to content, if something breaks for a particular person, it might not even be content worthy, because that particular combination that that person has in software and hardware might just be their combination. And how many people is going to have that combination? It's like the opposite of works on my machine. It's like didn't work on my machine. Right.

Yeah. That did not work on my machine, but it does work on yours. Those things are usually better for like stack exchange or, you know, random places where you can plug in the stuff that you're setting. Here's my list of software and here's my problem versus one video that's going to cover everybody's. Sometimes there could be an egregious failure. It doesn't happen very often. I can't remember the last time that it did. Lately, Pop! OS has been really good when it comes to upgrades.

I haven't had that break yet, knock on wood. I've actually been running through that process a few times, and it's worked fine for me. So that's great until it doesn't work for someone else, and then they hate it, right? Because you never really know. Hey, friends. Influx Days is back. This is a two-day developer conference from our friends at Influx Data and is dedicated to building IoT, analytics, and cloud applications with InfluxDB.

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Again, influxdays.com. Again, influxdays.com. All right, Jay. So share with us some Linux myths that you've heard around and the ones that you'll be busting. I stated one of mine earlier on. The reason why I moved off was granted two decades ago, which I still hold the myth is like any part of Linux that deals with drivers is going to cause you pain at some point. Specifically, it was network drivers. There's been a lot of people that complain about video drivers, audio drivers. And from my experience in the early 2000s with a IBM laptop, it was super painful. And I haven't revisited that. So I just carry that myth around. Maybe it's not true anymore.

Maybe it is. So there's my myth. Maybe you can bust that one, but also the other ones that you've heard and you'll be busting at all things open. Well, I mean, first of all, there's going to be so many people with your same mindset. Like you're in very good company. There's no shortage of people with that opinion, because when I first started with Linux, it was, I mean, all the myths are basically true. I mean, it was really hard to use. I mean, there was no internet access out of the box when I tried it, and I had to figure out the hard way just to get internet to work, which I'm not even talking about drivers at this point. The driver was there. It's just to enable internet access system-wide was a pain. Installing NVIDIA drivers risked bricking the

entire system, causing a reinstall, which was fun. Just installing MP3 support to listen to music, that took at least an hour to figure out. All these things that in general at the time was really not an issue on any other operating system because the vendors would make the drivers available. So I feel like a lot of the myths were true at that point. And it's really hard, especially in the Linux community, for reputation to go away because reputation is eternal in IT, especially Linux, because we hold grudges, apparently. But when it comes to Linux nowadays, I feel like it's equally as easy to use as any other operating system out there. And it might be surprising when I say that one myth

is that Linux has poor hardware compatibility. And I say it has the best hardware compatibility of any operating system on the market or market. It's not really a market, but available today. And that's actually surprising to a lot of people, but it is something I stand by. Just the other day, you know, my son uses Windows 11. I don't force people to use what I use. I'm not like that. So he comes to me and his computer is so slow. I have an extra motherboard lying around. I'm like, let's just add a new CPU motherboard in the computer and maybe an NVMe SSD and really get this thing ramped up. So I installed Windows 11 on this thing. And

this computer, this motherboard is not brand new. It's probably older than Windows 11, probably just before Windows 11 came out. And I install Windows 11. That's fine. I go to the device manager. There's 10 exclamation marks for drivers that have to manually go on Google and find. And it's still the case in Windows 11. And it's funny when people nowadays say that Windows has the best hardware support. I'm like, have you installed Windows lately? Because sometimes you get lucky and Windows does support everything out of the box and you have nothing to do.

But most of the time, probably nine out of 10 times in my case, anytime I see somebody install Windows, they have to search for drivers. Now on Linux, that could be true as well, but you'll probably have on average just one driver to figure out. On Ubuntu, there's literally an app called Additional Drivers. You click on it, and if there's a driver that's necessary for a piece of hardware, it offers you to just click this button and install it, which is actually easier than going on Google or going to the manufacturer's website for your hardware, downloading the zip file, putting it on a flash drive, put it on your Windows computer, and then go through that process. Now, to be fair, Windows will go on Windows Update and pull down drivers that it has in its database, but there could still be some that it doesn't find.

But then you run into the chicken and egg problem. How do you have Windows update download drivers if you don't have a driver for your network card installed yet? And that's when you go with the old sneaker net method where you download the driver to a flash drive from another computer, walk it over to that one, get the network card running

so you can hope that Windows finds everything. Meanwhile, a lot of times Linux won't need a single driver, depending on what your video card is. And it's actually such a smoother experience than, I think the only thing that comes close is Mac, but they own the hardware and the software. So I feel like they have an unfair advantage there. So there's that. Right.

That's part of their whole entire value add, right? Is that unfair advantage of the entire ecosystem, hardware and software designed to be together in sync? Yeah, man, I think there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, we have something like that with System76, although it's not quite the same thing and Tuxedo and a number of others. I mean, we kind of have that. Yeah. But there's going to be this mentality that comes in. And this is another issue that happens often is that people will try Linux on computers that they have no business trying Linux on. And then they'll hate Linux for its inability to work on the hardware that it was never meant to work on in the first place. And I feel like this myth comes from the Linux community itself. And I feel like there's good intentions here. I mean, if I like a movie, I'm probably going to tell you about it. You should check this movie out. It's really cool.

As human beings, we love to recommend the things to other people that resonate with us because it might build rapport with other people. So you can imagine somebody tries Linux for the first time. They love it. They think it's the greatest thing ever. Then they want to recommend it to all their friends.

They might say, it runs on everything. Just install it. It's great. And then the person installs it without checking compatibility and nothing works. And then we've lost them forever. They're never going to try Linux again because we recommended them to install it without checking first. Is their hardware compatible before they actually install it? And that also creates negative feedback. Even though I say, you know, Linux has really good hardware support, no operating system has 100% hardware support. And Linux is no question.

So if hardware is not built for Linux or has drivers for Linux, well, guess what? You're going to have a bad experience. And what's really strange is we have this feature that's amazing called Live Mode. You could boot your distribution in Live Mode from the USB and demo it first. And you'll know if your Wi-Fi card is detected right then and there. You could go on YouTube, play some music videos or something. You know your audio is working. But everyone seems to avoid using it.

And then, you know, they'll post messages. I installed Ubuntu, but nothing works. And I'm thinking, did anyone tell you about live mode that you could have demoed this first? And why did you replace your operating system before you actually verified compatibility? Maybe they're just that eager to try it out and just excited. And they impulsively just wiped their machine or something. But people do it, apparently. Well, I have to say, it's the first time I'm hearing about live mode here, so educate.

I haven't heard of live mode yet. I mean, for the desktop distributions, most of them offer this. Fedora, Ubuntu, even Debian makes these available. With Debian, they're separate downloads. With Ubuntu, when you go to install it, it's going to literally ask you nowadays, do you want to install it or try it first? Now, when you try it first, it's running off the USB. It's going to run slower because the read speed is going to be slower than your

hard drive most likely. So you don't judge it based on speed at that point, but you can absolutely demo it and at that point you have the full desktop. You can even install software until your RAM runs out because it's, you know, running off of read-only USB in most cases. Some USBs do retain changes on their own, but you could install apps on there. You can connect to Wi-Fi. It has Firefox built in. So you'll know pretty quickly if it's working. I also tell people while you're using live mode,

if you plan on using an external monitor, like a second display, plug it in. Just see if it works. Because it could look like everything's working and then you find out your video card is just so new and the driver is so old, it can't support external displays. So just plug in your printer, your scanner, your display,

anything you plan on using with it. And you'll know right then and there if you'll have trouble or not. There's a few circumstances that might happen where the installed version might be different. Very rare, but it does happen. But at the very least, it's just one of those things like, why doesn't

Windows offer that? How cool would that be, like a Windows installation on a USB key in your pocket if you wanted that kind of thing? And there used to be a way to do that. I don't know if there still is, but it's not something you generally find in other operating systems. That's great advice. So I guess for

the Linux stans out there trying to convince their friends and family to give it a try, it seems like maybe a little more hand holding would go a long ways versus saying like, hey, just go install Ubuntu. It's going to be great. Say like, here, let me help you. Here's a live, here's a bootable thumb drive that you can try

it out first and give them a little bit of that knowledge so that they don't have that first run experience, which you're right. I mean, you give it a shot, you know, we all have only so much time on this earth and it's like, I gave you a chance Linux, but you know, it just didn't work. I'm not going to just keep on trying. Now some of us will, but, uh, and those end up being the converts, right? But many of us just at one and, like once bitten, twice shy.

Yep. And that's very common for sure. I feel like it's even easier than that because rather than just recommend Linux in handholding, I mean, you can definitely handhold. It might even be as easy as, well, let me know what model of computer you have. Give me the model number. Then that person that knows Linux can Google the model number. Oh, you have this video card, you have this audio card, and this network card, and then you could just do a quick check and you could let them know. You're going to run into some problems with your Wi-Fi card on this one, so if you don't mind replacing your Wi-Fi card, you'll be fine. Or maybe everything's supported out of the box, and yeah, go ahead and give it a shot. I just checked it for you. Everything's compatible on that model. Assuming you didn't, you know,

replace any parts yourself that don't belong on that computer. If you have the stock config on that machine, you should be fine. I think that alone will go a long way. If people aren't buying Macs, Macintosh computers, laptops, you know, studio, minis, whatever.

If they're not buying those machines, which seems to be pretty common out there just because it's so accessible and it is software and hardware made together where are they buying their machines are they buying them at costco are they buying just like random laptops for inexpensive are they buying desktops from dell like where if they're not buying a macintosh computer not saying that that's the market leader by any means but it's it seems to be like the easiest button almost to push like if you want a computer or you want a phone of some sort of power, Apple is well-known, well-marketed, well-trusted in many cases,

secure in many cases, privacy first in many cases. But if they're not doing that, I'm thinking of people who are not you and me that care about the driver details and the which car do you have details. I just want a computer that works and I can get on the internet. I can do my things. That person, where are they buying their machine? What kind of hardware are they buying out there? I think there's so many possibilities.

I mean, sometimes it could just be down to the vendor doesn't support that hardware anymore. Because, you know, if Apple sunsets the model and someone is faced with a decision, buy a new computer or use this one unsupported with no security updates for a little longer. And maybe that person doesn't have the money for a new computer. So for them, if someone says, well, you could try Linux on it and that is still updated so you could continue using that machine, at least until you have the money to buy a new one, that happens. I've seen people getting computers secondhand off of eBay is common. Buying off of Dell's website is common. Sometimes going to Best Buy, they'll buy a, you know, like a yoga ThinkPad from Lenovo or something like that. It's really hard to know what everybody is doing

because what everyone has available in their area is also different. I think one of the things that I love about Apple that I wish we had an equivalent with Linux is that if you want to like get your hands on the new hardware and test it out, you can go to an Apple store and they'll usually have it the same day it comes out, you know. So if you want to try the newest MacBook and see if it's something that you'd like, you could just go there and try it, actually get your hands on it. And I feel like with Linux, we just don't have that. Now, I have that unfair advantage where I get review units sent to me all the time. So if I want to buy something,

chances are I've reviewed it anyway, or was at least offered a chance to review it. And sometimes I'll review it just for that reason. Maybe I don't even want to review a computer this week, but if I'm thinking about buying a new one, maybe I'll just see if System76 will send me a review unit and I could find out if I like it or not. But unfortunately, most people don't have that benefit. And some Windows users deal with that, too, because I really love some of the ThinkPad models for Windows.

And often Best Buy will stock the residential-tierPads and not the business class ThinkPads. And those are the ones that I always tell Windows users to go for because they're so darn solid. But those are also the ones you can't get your hands on. I feel like people really appreciate being able to see something and see it work before they dive in. Yeah, which kind of jumps the shark a little bit because I don't want to get into retro gaming, but that's one thing I love about the Raspberry Pi, at least for me. Like I was, my initial experience,

a little more than 10 years ago, building my first Linux server machine that actually ran something in production was on a DigitalOcean droplet. It was not a physical server in front of me. It wasn't something I can physically touch or boot up myself. I couldn't add things to it. It was intangible to me. And the first time I tangibly touched a Linux

machine myself was really with the Raspberry Pi. And then later on, we've been working with 45 drives. They sent me an AV15, which is that ZFS drive server that we have. And it's amazing. I mean, those are the two kind of like literally can touch them Linux machines. Of course, I've had Dell desktops and whatnot in the past that had Windows on them. And, you know, I could have put Linux on them. And I just didn't know how to do it back then. And didn't have that, you know, awareness or really, I guess, drive to go and do so because I had the pain that Jared had. I was like, okay, I'm done with Windows even. I didn't even try Linux. I went right to Mac and never turned back because it was just a good ride. But obviously, that kind of leads into potentially either two different myths. One is either Linux is only for power users or Linux is only for

servers. So choose the path. Yeah, and I feel like one of the reasons for that is, you know, people will use Linux and they might say it's hard, but it's just because they haven't really used it. And I feel like everything's difficult at first. And some people will say in general, and this is another myth that Linux is hard. So there's a myth right there. So let's bust that one. Now, playing devil's advocate, I feel reasonable in saying that nobody is born knowing how to use Mac. Nobody is born knowing how to use Windows. It's not like you learn to walk and then immediately you start using a computer because it's just that easy. None of the operating systems are that easy. And this was really made clear to me when I met somebody that was completely the inverse of this, where a friend of mine, she wanted a computer. This is like way before I was using Linux professionally.

She's like, yeah, do you have a computer, anything? And I'm like, well, I have an extra one. I could build it for you. And then I put Linux on it. Don't even remember why. And she gets a hold of it. She learns it. It's fine. She doesn't have any problem with it. And then some months later, I get a call. And she's like, I'm trying to help my friend on her computer load MP3s onto an MP3 player. And the MP3 player is just one of those flash drive kinds. I don't know if you've seen those where they're, you know, maybe four gigabytes of storage or something, and you just drop the MP3s right onto it, and that's all you have to do. There's no syncing app or anything needed.

So I ask her, like, what's wrong? I mean, it should be pretty easy. You should be able to just plug it in and drop MP3s on there. And then I tell her her did you check my computer she's like what's my computer I'm like there's an icon that says my computer did you double click on that because her friend uses windows and she's like why would I click on that just go ahead and try it and I'm like your flash drive or your mp3 player should be right there and then she goes on a rant she's like this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen why is the you know the mp3 player not

shown on the desktop like everything else that I plug in on my computer? Why do I have to go through all these extra steps on Windows and then I have to listen to this long rant? And she is not a computer professional, power user, none of that. She's the kind of person that checks Facebook and maybe goes on to some of those groups and things like that. And what she does for a living is absolutely nothing that even is remotely close to computer stuff. So in that situation, she started with Linux. That was what she was given at first.

It's what she knows. And to her, Windows is super hard to learn. She hates it. It's frustrating. She doesn't want anything to do with it. And I feel like that was one lesson that took me down a path of understanding that usually the first operating system you try is the one that really resonates with you because it's what you've learned. And when I learned a Mac for the first time some years ago, I mean, I got through it and I learned it. I was frustrated at first, just like anybody else.

And there were some things I really didn't like about it. But at the same time, I also like change. So it was a little exciting. But it took me a little hot minute to get used to it. So when people say, you know, one operating system is easier to use than the other, my counter is because yeah, that's probably what you've been using most of the time. That's why it's easier for you. But if you take hardware compatibility out of the equation, and you have a compatible computer that everything works out of the box on Linux side by side, it really just depends on what resonates with you and what you've started with. Is there a law that's like the first thing you learn is the easy thing for you forever and that's what you love forever? I wonder if there's a law around that, Jared, because I feel like that could be somewhat true.

Yeah, I think that's it's definitely the case I mean we like what we're used to sometimes and when something new comes not just fear of change but like the actuality sometimes of change is presented as difficult just because it's different and so you know it's kind of the devil I know versus the devil I don't know not really it's more like I'm used to this. I get it. I've gotten over all the humps of, I go to my computer before I find out where the MP3 player is

because that's the way it works. You don't question the first principles anymore. I don't think I've heard a single Windows user ever complain about my computer being a thing, personally. I don't think I've seen a single Windows user complain about that. But something that one type of user is used to might not resonate with someone else, and they might not really understand why that's there. I mean, I could argue it could make the desktop more clutter-free if you don't have like

10 flash drives installed and 10 flash drive icons all over your desktop. So there could be even an argument to be made in favor of that style. But to someone who's never used it before, it's just probably going to be strange. I think every OS has these things. I think you're right, because there's lots of stuff that happens on the Mac. Like when I show my kids how to do stuff, they don't know desktop operating systems.

And so they question first principles. And they'll be like, well, why do I have to do this to do that? I'm like, well, that's just because that's how you do it. Like, that's what we do. And Linux has all its own versions of those exact same things.

The Windows start menu. Why do I hit start if I'm trying to shut it down? Well, it's buried in the side of the start menu. Well, why is that? I'm trying to stop it, not start it. Well, because that's where you start things. Stuff like that. Yeah, absolutely. And when I tried Mac for the first time, I had issues with it.

Honestly. Now, I replaced the Mac later and had none of the same problems. So I'm sure that it was hardware related or their choice of hardware. But I had the head at muscle memory anytime I did use the Mac that there's a good chance that no audio will work on any app whatsoever. So I got to kill the core audio D demon and I think it's called activities or whatever their system monitor is called. I have to kill that process and it restarts the audio server. Then my audio works again. And then also Bluetooth would constantly disconnect all day long.

And it passed every test at the Apple store. The hardware was certified as good, but I've seen other people complaining about the same thing. And then I replaced it sometime later and I've had none of those problems ever since, like not ever. It's just for whatever reason, maybe that particular model had some hiccups. It happens, right? So it's just one of those things. I think every operating system does have its quirks. And I also feel like some people might not be aware that they're a little complacent about the things that don't work well. Maybe they're using an Android phone, and I don't know, they're used to the phone dialer dying and having to restart the entire phone just to get the ability to make phone calls again. But to them, yeah, I'll just restart my phone.

It's no big problem. That's what they do. And my mindset is you shouldn't have to do that, right? So to each person, it's just such a different experience from their worldview versus others. So that leads into another maybe myth. It's just such a different experience from their worldview versus others. you name it, the stuff that most people use all of the Linux versions of those are subpar or lower quality or not as full featured or you name how they name it but it's basically like I'm so used to this

or I like this thing on Linux I got this other thing that's like a crappy knockoff is that a myth you're playing on, Bustin? Yeah, well sometimes it's true I just want to get that out of the way sometimes it is, sometimes it is true. So there's no one rule, you know, that's true across the board. I mean, I just gave you guys an example of Kdenlive versus DaVinci Resolve. I paid for DaVinci Resolve. It's proprietary software. Kdenlive I had for free. Now I'm grateful that Kdenlive got me through the majority of my channel's life and taught me video editing.

So that's great. But I got to a point where I outgrew it and it couldn't grow with me anymore. There's just nothing else I could do. So some apps are just that way. They just have a little bit further to go. Now, bringing up LibreOffice, that's a very common thing because it's assumed that it's not as good as Microsoft Office. And I put out a video recently that, you know, is just talking to people about the fact, I just wrote an entire book with it. So if it's so bad, then how was I able to do that? Because you're a glutton for punishment, Jay. Well, I mean, sometimes that's true, actually, with some of the software that I use, right? But

at the same time, I remember when LibreOffice was hard to use too, because compatibility with Microsoft Office, I've dealt with corrupted documents. I think it was maybe back in 2016 or so. So it wasn't really that long ago. But ever since sometime later, I've never had a single problem. And I've been able to send files back and forth. And I'll have some people, some people even commented on the video. They're like, yeah, I try opening up a Microsoft Office document in LibreOffice, and it just doesn't look right.

I'm thinking, how is that possible? I mean, there's a bunch of chapters and files, and I've been sending them back and forth. My publisher uses Microsoft Office, so they'll open my document that I sent them in that. They'll save it in their Office editor and send it back to me. I never had a problem with it. So one issue that happens a lot is if you're using an older version of LibreOffice, and I feel like this is Linux's fault, literally, that a user just uses whatever came with their distribution. So their distribution provides them with an older

version of LibreOffice, and they don't do a good job of keeping that up, then they're missing out on all the new developments that LibreOffice has made to keep up with Microsoft Office. So if Microsoft Office releases a new version and you're on an older version of LibreOffice, at this point you're using a version of LibreOffice that has no idea about this new version of Microsoft Office and the changes because now there's a disparency between the two. So there's a little bit of that, but because when we go back to the rolling versus non-rolling thing, and this is where it can become a problem, unless you sideload a newer version of LibreOffice, you're just going to be stuck with whatever version that distro gave you unless it's rolling for better or worse. And

you're probably almost always going to be one major version behind. So when someone says to me, you know, I've had issues and I'm still having issues with LibreOffice, then I'm thinking, what version are you on? Because that would make a lot of sense if you're on an older version. And it's very likely that you are unless you've, you know, yourself updated that. So keeping in mind, I mean, Microsoft Office is not going to slow down for LibreOffice. They're not going to say, hey, we need to like wait on these new features and let LibreOffice catch up with us before we release this new version. They don't care. They'll put out the new version tomorrow.

So it's one of those things where, in my opinion, using an older version of LibreOffice is just not an option if you work with actual Office documents. It might be enough if you don't have a real use for it. If it's just, I'm just writing something down. I'm using this as a note-taking app, or I just literally need basic document needs. Maybe the older version that comes with the distro is fine. But if you're trying to collaborate or do different things that require more advanced features and you don't have the newest, then you're going to be like, well, this LibreOffice thing is actually not that good.

Meanwhile, you have the old version and you have not caught up to the latest, greatest, best features. The question on LibreOffice, they don't make any money really this is open source software donation where like how do you describe LibreOffice I'm not schooled by any means in in this realm in terms of I know it's open source and free but like you know how does that keep up with or how can we expect something like that to keep up with and maybe this is a myth that's inside of Linux too is like all Linux software is open source and therefore not so much subpar, but not on the get paid

so there's innovative features or something like that. Like, I don't know. I'm just thinking like, how does LibreOffice keep up with Microsoft? It's a behemoth in the world of software.

How does it compare and keep up if it has no pricing model or business model behind it? Or does it? Well, it's simple. Developers just love working for free. They just love not having money and not having a paycheck. And actually, no, that's not true. They actually do need to make a living. So yeah, that is a very common thing to want to know about. Now, when it comes to LibreOffice, I'm not fully sure how they do it. I know the Document Foundation is the company

that steers that. And I am pretty sure they have a business equivalent. I don't know if that's a support kind of thing or a business version. I just never needed to even look into it because it works fine for me. But when it comes to Linux software in general, how a lot of them make money is by support agreements. So they'll give you the software for free. Go ahead and use it. If you need help, professional support, then come at us and, you know, talk to us about getting a support agreement. And then at that point, you'll have an SLA and you can call into a help desk and they'll help you out with whatever it is you need help with. So at that point, that really does help

projects make money. And that's very common where they give you the software for free. Now, a lot of companies out there will almost always want a support agreement because it's more than just wanting to call in. Like you'll never hear too many people say this outside of the meeting room, but a lot of times it's like they know they're never going to call, right? Support because they have a team of IT people. But if their CTO cracks the whip and says, you know, this server's failing, oh yeah, we have a support agreement and we'll just go there. It just takes the liability off of their own team and helps make that comfortable. And sometimes it's all about shifting liability, but companies love support

agreements, whether they actually plan to use it or not. And companies make a lot of money on that, especially Canonical. They have an entire wing of their business that supports people and other businesses and even different softwares and clusters and things. So there's quite a bit of money to be made on that with that model. So I think it's pretty smart. I mean, imagine if there was no license fee for Windows, because I think it is the only operating system that even has a license fee nowadays. Just make it completely free as they have done in the past and buy a support agreement for Microsoft if you need that support. But if you don't, then you have it for free. So there's that. I think that's a very common

way that these projects make a lot of money. There's also a cloud migration with applications as well. So where that like desktop office software has never been less relevant than it is today. Not that it's still not used and relevant, but it's trending downward. Even Microsoft just announced they're done with the term Office. So they're still going to have Word and Excel and PowerPoint, but there's no such thing as the Office suite anymore.

It's all like Live 365. It's all online. They're all pushing everything to there. Whether that's a good strategy for them or not remains to be seen. But more and more of our applications are moving into our browsers. And I think that does somewhat level the playing field

for operating systems. If they do have lack, I mean, GIMP is another alternative to a proprietary product that in my experience, maybe you can bust this one myth, but for me, it's always been less than proprietary offerings.

But Figma is in your web browser and is incredibly compelling. And so you can run Figma on Linux, just like you can run Figma on Windows, just like you can run Figma on macOS. And so that's probably helping people as well potentially be more portable with their operating system choices. It's like Google Docs, the elephant in the room. There's also that too for a lot of people. Yeah, totally. helping people as well potentially be more portable with their operating system choices. Google Docs, the elephant in the room,

there's also that too for a lot of people. Yeah, totally. That's what we use to do documents for our insertion orders and contracts. We have Google Docs and it's just easy. No installation required. Don't even use, what is Mac's version of that? Pages. Pages, yeah.

I mean, I use it so little, I forget what it's called. Well, every once in a while, I'll get a.docx file, and I'll open it in Pages, and it'll say, we cannot display this file as it was originally intended,

because you're missing X, Y, or Z. And I'm always like, I feel like I'm on Linux, because that's what used to always happen back in the day on OpenOffice. So there are incompatibilities even between macOS and Windows, even in 2022. Everyone, every operating system has the quirks, you know, no, no. And that's the that's one of the myths is just one is not better than the other. They all have problems. They also have benefits too. So there's a reason why you

might want to use one, but there's also a reason why you might not want to depending on how it is. But comparing pros and cons, I feel like they're all pretty much even nowadays. So let's set aside it's free because that's like the winning Linux thing, like no cost. What's awesome about Linux for you? What do you love about it? I love the fact that you can make it your own. Out of the box, you could choose to do nothing. You could choose to use it as is, change no settings. Or you could choose a different entire GUI. Like if you hate it, like you use it and you hate it, like you don't even like where the menus are. You don't even like the theme. You like none of it. Well, that's okay because there's other desktop environments or GUIs, so to speak. You just replace the user interface.

Now, when it comes to Mac and Windows, I feel like that's a major downside because you're stuck with the interface that they provide you. And when Microsoft decides that they're going to center the start button by default or whatever, obviously it could change that, I know. But the thing is, Microsoft is making that decision for you. Now, to be fair, the desktop environments are also making a decision for you. You do have a say in that decision because it's open source, but ultimately it might still go a direction you don't want to go in. And yeah, that's fine. Just replace the desktop

environment with something else. And you could still use the same system, the same apps, the same files, just changing that one thing. And you have a different user interface. And I've seen people do the same on macOS and Windows, but in my experience, it makes Windows and macOS unstable because Apple really didn't develop this to be changeable. So if you change the UI on macOS to a different UI, you're hacking the system and you're bypassing the way that they've designed it. The same with Windows.

I've seen instability because people will... I forgot what it was called. Was it window blinds back in the day that they've designed it. The same with Windows. I've seen instability because people will, I forgot what it was called. Was it window blinds back in the day that people were using to theme Windows in ways that Windows was not meant to be themed to make it their own? And then Windows crashes quite often because it's just really not made for that.

So I feel like the ability to remove a piece and insert a different piece onto Linux is great. But even if you don't care about that kind of thing, and if the desktop environment you're using is good for you, you could just ignore that capability and do no customization at all. And that's fine for some people as well. So you can go as little or as far into customization as you want. What's up, friends? This episode is brought to you by Sourcegraph.

With the release of Sourcegraph 4.0 and the Starship event just a few weeks behind us, it is super clear that Sourcegraph is becoming not just code search, but a full-on code intelligence platform. And I'm here with Joel Kortler, Product Manager of Code Insights for Sourcegraph. Joel, this move from code search to code intelligence is a really big deal. How would you explain this feature, Code Insights, if you're just talking to folks in the hallway track of your favorite conference? I would really start with the technical

because before I was product manager, I used to be an engineer as well. And it's really cool and exciting just to be able to say, we're going to turn your code base into a database. And the structured language that you need to interact is just the ability to write a code search, you know, literal search, that's totally fine. Regular expression, you know, that'll give you a few more advanced options, even a structural search. But the number of long tail possibilities that unlocks truly the

journey of building this product was just saying, well, we've just unlocked, you know, an infinite number of possibilities. We got to figure out some immediate use cases so we can start to, you know, invest in this product, build it and sell it. But we're only getting started in terms of the number of uses that we're uncovering for it. The story I told you about discovering like version tracking turned out to be a really important use case that wasn't even on our roadmap six months prior to discovering that as we were already planning to launch this product until we talked to enough folks, realized this was a problem and then found, well, oh, that's like a simple regular expression capture group that you can just plug right in because we really built this system to not limit the power of what we built. We don't want to give you like three out of the box templates and you can only change like

one character or something. It's truly like the templates are there to hold your hand and get you started. But if you can come up with anything you want to track in your code base, you can do that with Code Insights. I love it. Thank you, Joel. So right now there is a treasure trove of insights just waiting for you living inside your code base. Your code base is now a queryable database. Thanks to Sourcegraph. This opens up a world of possibility for your code and the intelligence you can gain from it. A good next step is to go to about.sourcegraph.com slash code dash insights.

The link will be in the show notes. See how the teams are using this awesome feature. Again, about.sourcegraph.com slash code dash insights. Again, this link is in the show notes. So Jay, the obvious turn is to retro gaming because you know, retro pie, you know, all those fun things. It's a good place for Linux to live, right? It's the hackable machine, the hackable hardware, the hackable operating system to do different things.

So RetroPie is something that you're talking about at All Things Open. What is your fascination with Linux and retro gaming? Oh gosh, there's so many things. I feel like one of the things is that the companies out there, they do such a poor job of keeping their back catalog available. So when you talk about RetroPie, which is a solution to play ROM images or dumps of games where you don't need the actual cartridge, a lot of times the first thought is, well, people are stealing games because they don't have to pay for them. So why would they? And then I can understand where that comes from. But the thing is, in my opinion, emulation exists because all the companies do such a poor job with their own things. But not only that,

if you're like me and you're a collector, because I collect physical copies of games, I think I have like 1100 physical games in my collection and like 30 game consoles right now. So my collection is not as big as some of those crazy YouTubers out there that, you know, have complete collections for different systems. I'm not at that level or anything, but there's some difficulties that surround this that I feel like emulation really helps with. And one of those, for example, is soldering batteries into cartridges when they go out because you'll lose your save files when that battery depletes and you have to solder to replace it. But with emulation, you could have your save file backed up to a file server. I use

SyncThing, for example, that syncs all of my RetroPies together. So if I'm playing in one room and I save my game and then I go to the living room, bring up the same game, the save file's there. So I could just actually have a save file that just, you know, goes through the network, which is not something you can actually do when it comes to, I mean, your Super Nintendo isn't going to be on the network, at least not easily, right? So you don't really have that capability. And, you know, I understand you get like a good 10 years or somebody might say, well, what's the big deal? Soldering's not that hard. And, you know, your save file will be there for 10 years. And I'm thinking, if I want to show my grandkids my level 99 characters in Final Fantasy VI, I better be able to do that. And if the hardware itself isn't

going to enable me to do that, then I have another way to do that. But even worse, you have companies like Nintendo, where they have the power to make a massive amount of their catalog available. Like if you think of iTunes back in the day, Nintendo could absolutely just release their games in an iTunes-like service on their systems and make those available to you. They tried to do that with the Wii and also the Wii U, but they didn't really make much of the back catalog available. There's hundreds of games on the Super Nintendo. What do they have, like 60 of them available? So it's always like they don't bother going the extra mile. But when I see what happens in the ecosystem, to me, it's clear that fans of retro games want those games to be available. If they're not made available, they'll find a way to get those things.

And in a way, emulation really keeps the classics alive in ways that the developers probably themselves would not even bother to do and i feel that's a shame because i personally think nintendo would make a ton of money if they released a service like that i think it would be a huge win but you know here we are and we're downloading games so in particular to nintendo i know on the switch they have where you can pay for a yearly service to a membership, I forget what it's called. And I have it where I can play

the classic NES games. It's just not very many of them though. Exactly. And I guess the problem there is that you don't have the full gamut of all games available. You have a limited selection. I haven't gone so far as like, well, how do I get actual Sonic,

not Sonic 2 when I play, you know, which is kind of interesting. You can play the Sega Genesis on Nintendo. I'm not sure that's a, how that actually happened, but that's a possibility. It does feel kind of strange.

Like if I would have told 13-year-old me that that was going to happen, I'm like, no, that's not going to happen. They hate each other. Yeah, Altered Beasts is on there. A lot of fun games. Yeah, they were arch nemeses back then. I'm like, no, that's not going to happen. They hate each other. Yeah, Altered Beasts is on there, a lot of fun games. Yeah, they were arch nemeses back then. Yeah.

Oh, they sure were, and the times sure have changed. And they do make a small number of them available, but it's just such a small fraction of what they could be doing. And I just don't really feel like they're doing everything in their best power that they can do. And meanwhile, we just want to relive the classics. Sometimes we get these all-in-one systems like the, I forgot, was it PlayStation Mini or something? I forgot what it was called now,

that they botched that so bad that they were practically on clearance for $15, whether the month, because the quality was so terrible. And for me, I'm thinking like, why is everybody doing such a bad job? Sometimes they do a great job. I mean, the Sega Genesis Mini, that was pretty decent. And so was the Super NES Mini and the NES Mini that Nintendo themselves has released, which was actually a great thing.

But then again, they could have released a Super Nintendo Mini that had a Wi-Fi card with just 32 gigs of storage on it and then have the ability to type in your credit card number you know let's say three dollars a game they could have made that like a platform very easily with you know not much more work than that but they didn't they get they always seem to give you the least possible everything just to check the box just to you to shut up the retro gamers, give them something to make them shut up, and then we'll move on.

They're all alone. I agree with that. I mean, it was even limited, too. You couldn't add more games to it, which is the whole reason for the network card and the credit card situation. You got what they gave you, essentially what they did on Nintendo Switch, too, which is like, here's the emulation version of it on the Switch, but here's a limited game set. Check the box, you know?

And while I appreciate that for the most popular games, like Castlevania or the different Castlevania games, all the Super Mario games or, you know, Tecmo Bowl or something like that, but you're not going to get, you know, the obscure ones that they're like, well, you know, Joust isn't on there from like way, way back on like Atari or something like that. You know what I mean? I want to play Joust. Well, that's the thing is the ones that we want to play aren't necessarily the best classics. It's the ones that we had when we were kids. Like, I want to play this game because that's nostalgic for me. Well, that was like not a top 20 bestseller. So it's not in your list that Nintendo allows. It's like, well, I still want to play it. If for only five minutes minutes like let me play it for five minutes and move on so is that where

the retro pi comes in then to to sort of fill that gap so if nintendo or playstation or any others aren't going to really you know till the fancy of people like us who want to go back to retro games and enjoy the nostalgia is that where that comes in is. And it's also one of many different solutions. I feel like that's why emulation itself exists. And RetroPie is just, you know, selfishly my favorite of the ones that do this kind of thing. But it allows you to convert your Raspberry Pi into a gaming PC for retro games. And it makes it very easy to do because it'll give you like a file share. So if you know how to browse file shares, even on Windows, whatever your operating system is, you can just drop the games right through that and not even have to know how to SCP or rsync anything like, you know, the more advanced people would do. You don't have to know all that.

Just open Windows Explorer, look for the share, double click on it, drop some files in there, do a restart or a reload of the UI and you're done. So I feel like it's very easy to set up. But emulation is one of those things where it's always served a purpose that companies themselves don't want to serve. And the first example of this, what really blew me away is how sad I was as a kid that Final Fantasy V was not going to be localized into English. And with, I forgot the verbiage, but the Japanese people was basically kind of saying that we're not going to be into that. We're not going to care about that. We don't like those kinds of things, even though we do. And we didn't even get a say in the matter. It was just decided for us that this is not something

they felt would catch on, which it is what it is. But then I walk into somebody's house and he's playing Final Fantasy V in English. I'm like, how are you doing that? Like, that game never came out. What is this? I was just so blown away by this. I was naive. I didn't know anything about emulation. Then he explained to me that, you know, some people got together. They didn't like the fact that Squaresoft at the time decided not to release that game here. They wanted to play it. So apparently some people knew Japanese and they knew how to hack some code and they just went in there, they translated it themselves and released it, which, you know, technically is illegal,

but they just released the translation file and leave it up to you to combine the two. And that allowed me to play a game that didn't get legally released until much later. And that kind of started this whole thing where i realized that emulation is more than just availability i mean you have the save files you don't have to blow into cartridges even though technically that does nothing but not true not true i've got many games that work by blowing them i don't know people will say that too but you know there's there's these things and and then there's the stigma that everybody that downloads retro games is um a bunch of freeloaders and they're stealing but they but

it's like nobody's selling these games anymore so no company is losing money on these but if they wanted to make money on these maybe they should make them available but you know there's actually quite a huge collecting community so it's absolutely not true that ROM players are freeloaders. Are some of them? Probably. But here I am with a game collection, and I know a lot of people that have one. And retro gaming collecting is getting so popular that the prices are going nuts. So it's simply not true that people don't care about the classics. But then you run into issues like, how do I get it to look good on a modern TV?

Try getting a light gun on an NES game to work on a HDTV. Good luck with that. And a number of other problems that you'll run into. And then for me, it's like, I want the original and I want to play the original, but sometimes it's just better to like power on a dedicated retro gaming device and just go through the menu and not have to bother with going through the stacks of totes that I have to find that cartridge. I could just get going right now and maybe I only have 10 minutes of leisure time. I don't really have time to hook up something. I just want to play some Street Fighter 2 and I want to play it right now. How does the light gun work then? Does it work off of a CRT or does it, how does that, I never even thought about how the light gun works for like duck hunts or whatever.

I used to know the science behind this. it's something about um it's like a mirror and then there's something on the screen that it reads where its position is on the screen so i think when you press the button it's because it knows where you shoot it's like well the duck was over there was down here yeah so i think there's like a hit box behind the duck that only it can see and it's trying to see if it's actually visible in the mirror and if it's not then it's it's a miss. But if it is visible, then it's a hit, that kind of thing or something like that. I might be butchering it. HDTVs are quite different in how they show images and whatnot on the screen. Now, you do have companies that will make like guns that do work on HDTVs. But it's such a rabbit hole when you look at how to get like the the best picture on on an hd tv you start to look

into frame meisters and like these different cables that are specially made in converter cables and some are better than others there's like a i think it's my life in gaming if i'm i'm not mistaken as the youtube channel like a lot of their videos was just about how to make it look decent on modern tvs whereas with emulation you kind of don't have to worry about that. It's just pretty much set it and forget it. So some people even keep a CRT around just for this purpose because that's what the games were originally made to be shown on. No way. Gosh.

Yeah. That is insane. That's like going really deep into the appreciation of the nostalgia. So it's not only that. It's just that sometimes the games just look bad on CRTs. I remember playing, I think it was Wizardry 5 on the SNES.

I could barely read the text on the screen. The font was so pixelated, it was really hard to play, but obviously with emulation, that could be cleaned up and it might even make it more accessible. I think about, with retro gaming, I think, okay, where do I find the games? Then I think about controllers.

Because controllers, you know, are really a part of the system itself. Like I can think of like Super NES. You had like these really different controllers. And I know Xbox folks are like, oh my gosh, I love this big controller. And so like, you know, do you have one controller to rule them all? Like how do you get that going? And then I think about like, uh, specialty things like, like duck hunt and the, and the light gun, like there's certain things you need for certain things. You know, how do you, how do you get to appreciate all these uniquenesses? And like Atari

had a toggle switch and one single button, you know, I don't know what that thing, joystick. It's a joystick. You know, how do you get all these different controllers and especially things for all the retroness of retro gaming? Yeah, that's a big challenge. I was going to mention too the Atari Jaguar, which I was actually able to source recently. I have one.

They're really hard to find. They had these plastic overlays that would go over the controller because it'd have what looks like a phone dial pad that by itself looks completely useless but you slide this card over it and you'll have like a menu that you could just hit the button because the overlay basically tells you what each button does emulation is not going to do that not really but then again one option is that you can actually buy for very cheap USB adapters that'll adapt the original controllers to USB and then you can actually use the original controllers with the games even on RetroPie now the way that I do it I like the controllers by 8-bit do they have a

number of them they have some that actually are designed to mirror very closely the Sega Genesis controller Super Nintendo controller so you could just go that direction very closely the Sega Genesis controller, Super Nintendo controller. So you could just go that direction. I have a Sega Genesis one and a Super Nintendo one. I could just switch between the two. Or I could just go crazy and use a Super Nintendo controller on a Sega Genesis game, because why not? It's weird. But you could do those kinds of things. So it's a matter of just learning what's available. But this is a hobby where you can go as deep as you want. You shouldn't go deeper than you feel comfortable. If you could source an older CRT and the older games, that's probably the easiest way to go because everything is meant to work that way. But when you start to get into emulation, then, okay, how do I get this controller to work over here? And there's just so

many things there. But if the controller is important to you, you'll go that far, but probably no further than that. That's okay. If you don't really care, you have a general PC controller and it works good enough and you don't really care if it feels authentic, that's fine too. So you can go as deep into that as you'd like to and the thing is you can go very very deep to where again, you know, that YouTube channel I mentioned they have entire videos just about how to make your games look good when they're retro games.

So you can really go crazy, but you can go as crazy as you want to or you can just accept them as they are. Are there retro controllers available that are still wireless? I want all the retro feel, but I don't want wires back in my life. Can you get the Super Nintendo that's just a wireless version? I assume you can. They do. That's exactly what they are.'re bluetooth enabled controllers they they have some that are

not like the originals but they have some that are you can just choose the ones that you want they have versions with and without bluetooth and they also have bluetooth adapters where you could use the modern 8-bit do controllers with the original hardware so then you have the the same wireless thing. Now the systems themselves, they had wireless controllers but if you try to find a wireless, legit OEM Sega Genesis controller, the six button one

you're probably going to pay a couple hundred dollars for that controller used second hand. And that's another thing too, the prices are ridiculous. Like look up the price for a complete in the box Chrono Trigger copy for Super Nintendo. Great game. And if you want to buy it, watch your paycheck go away. It might cost you like $600 last I looked and that was a while back.

So it's probably climbed from there. I bought a complete Final Fantasy 3 in box for probably $70 and I think it's already up to $400. I mean, this stuff is climbing right now. It's actually kind of crazy. Scarcity in demand. That's an investment. So what's your pride and joy? Like what's your best part of your collection?

What do you love the most that you have? The Sega CDX. That's my favorite Sega console. It's one of those obscure ones. It looks like a Sony Walkman from back in the day, except it has a cartridge slot on there. So it's a combination Sega CD and a cartridge slot, but it has a very small footprint. And when I bought it before things went crazy, it was about $300 used for this. There's only maybe 5,000 made in the United States,

I think. So the price is, I don't even want to look at the price right now because I'd be a little nervous. So yeah, that's my personal favorite. I think the Atari Jaguar is number two with the Virtual Boy being number three, because I really love the obscure systems that especially the ones that failed because there's you know you could argue that the Jaguar failed for the same reasons that the PS3 struggled but it still made it so the times have changed a lot but there's such a huge story to be told about why you know what were they thinking when they made these consoles and the and everything around that the history is just so amazing a lot of interesting stuff around game nostalgia. I mean, even the way they went from Mario 1 to Mario 2 and how Mario 2 got created. There's an interesting story,

which we touched on in one podcast episode, Jared, on this show. I'm not sure which one, but I was telling you I watched the documentary on it. It was just so interesting how that came to be and why it was so different from Mario 1 to Mario 2. And then Mario 3 was back to like Mario as usual, except for just now, you know, more innovative, you know, left to right directional stuff like that

and flying and different tactics and whatnot. But like Mario 2's gameplay was way different. I think that was our show with, yeah, I think that was our show with Jessica Kerr because we were talking about what, what can software teams learn from game design. Right. And you brought that up. That's right, yeah. Now here's an obscure one for you, Jay. because we were talking about what can software teams learn from game design. Right.

And you brought that up. That's right, yeah. Now here's an obscure one for you, Jay. My dad's friend had an Intellivision when I was a kid. Is that one that's in your collection, Intellivision? The one that had the... Yep, the Intellivision by Mattel. I think I even have the voice module somewhere too, actually, which allows the games to talk to you.

And I have a number of cartridges that are unlabeled that I can't wait to see what the heck they are, actually, that I found at a thrift store somewhere. So I actually sourced an Intellivision about a year ago just so I could probably check out some of those. So that was a good one. And also to kind of piggyback off the Mario 2 story, that is such a good one because that, you know, Japan,

they had a real Mario 2 that was side-scrolling, but then in Japan they decided to get the game Doki Doki Panic and convert it into a Mario game. And then later on, Japan got our version of Mario 2 as Super Mario 2 USA, which is what they called our version there because they also had to have that version too. But yeah, so there's interesting trivia there, but the Intellivision was a really good system. And I don't remember why it didn't take off. And maybe it was popular, and they just didn't decide to do a follow-up to it, but I thought it was actually pretty good, and the graphics were better than the original.

My favorite game on the Intellivision is called Happy Trails. It's not released on any other system. And what it is is a sliding block puzzle game, which is just so addictive. And it's so much more addictive than any game that I've ever played in that time period. Because a lot of those games, you just play 10 minutes of them and you're done, right? But imagine a sliding block puzzle where each piece has a path. And you have to slide the blocks around while this person's walking to stop them or to keep the person walking and if you don't rearrange them the right way fast enough then the person just falls into the abyss and you have to

start over so it's like lemmings it is but imagine it like you know those number sliding block puzzles where you have like numbers one through nine and then one's blank and you can kind of just swap them around it's exactly that but instead of numbers, you have pieces of land that you're moving around. So it's more over the top view than Lemmings was. And that's something on the Intellivision, I could play the heck out of that game. And they had the best Dungeons & Dragons games in that generation

by far that were ahead of their time. So that was a pretty good system. Here's something that's a little self-serving, but let's say I wanted to take Symphony of the Night, Castlevania from PlayStation 3, and I want a retro game because for some reason my PlayStation 3 that I still own broke

and no longer works anymore, but maybe I can boot it up, the hard drive's still there, but it just won't play the games anymore for some reason. It's hypothetical. How do I take my save file from a system into this emulation world? Is that possible?

Do I got to replay the game to get back to where I'm at? Or even transpose that to something like a different system, not just the PlayStation 3 in particular, but like, is that a possibility to go into this retro world? You know, I lost my console. It doesn't work anymore. Something happened to it how can i get my save data out of it and into this potentially you know longevity focused retro gaming world where you have emulation and you know support through the generations or that one will eventually die well first of all i would say the the biggest problem with your way going about is that you should be replaying castlevania symphony in the

night from the beginning at least twice a year and if you're not you're doing wrong so because it's one of the best games ever made but i mean that's one of those i from the beginning at least twice a year. And if you're not, you're doing it wrong. So because it's one of the best games ever made. But I mean, that's one of those I try to beat at least once a year. But to answer your question, though, you can. It's just going to be very time consuming. And Castlevania Symphony of the Night is going to be one of those that you kind of have to beat it more than once to really appreciate it because there's going to be unlockables and things.

There's a memory card adapter for the PS3, but you'd have to have a working PS3 to use it, which is the hard part. I'm not aware of a way to kind of like just grab it off the hard drive. But if you could get it to boot and then source that memory card adapter, you can get a PS1 or PS2 memory card. And I don't know if it has to be one or the other, but you could basically copy that save file from the PlayStation's menu to a physical memory card and then use a memory card to USB adapter to dump it to your system or your PC or whatever, it's going to be a little bit of work. And the memory card adapter was, at least it was rare. And I know it was very collectible. So you might be actually

needing to prepare to spend some money on this and it may not be cheap. Just play it again, man. Just play it again. I think that's the best way to go about it. It's probably worth just playing it again. But, you know, well, like you said with your Final Fantasy V situation, like I want to show my grandkids. It's like my son. He's getting into gaming more, and that's, you know,

I would say a bit darker of a game. He's six, so he's not quite ready for this darkness that is in Castlevania. But eventually he will. And, you know, I want to be able to show him like my 201% save data. Like I want to show him all the things in there. And like, you know, it's so hard to get to that percentage, you know, unless you like go through all the process of like getting all the map discovered and all these different things. It's like, you know, do a, and that's such a long time and I'm getting older. I have less time in my life. And that's

while, when I was younger, that was how I want to spend my time. In my older years, I'm less desiring to spend it, eking out the percentages. So I want to just pull that 201. Just tell him, hey, that your dad made it this far when he was younger. You can play that game now. And if you want to be like dad, you know, you got to go get that 201%. And then he'll get it for you. But then we run into proprietary software anyway, because I mean, to get that information

off the hard drive, I mean, however, the PlayStation plays the classics that they make available. They created the emulator. They created the file format. They created the save file format. And it's not going to be the same anything as it is in emulation in general. Now, sometimes you do look closely at the credits or something and you might see open source software that companies like Sony and Nintendo hate because it allows people to play retro games, yet they absolutely use the same things themselves to do

the same thing that does happen. But my understanding with Sony is that they're using a custom implementation on that platform. And I know, too, that there's a, at least there was in my area, a service where they would get failed PS3s, and for a fee, they would get you your save data because they could make it work long enough to get it booted and get the information off the drive. And some people will even go as far as to tell you that they could permanently fix the PS3, which isn't true because if it breaks once, it's going to break again. So this company literally says, you know,

we can get it running one time and we can get your save files for you, but that's it, get a new PS3, which is not what you want to hear. No, and I've been baby of mine. I take care of it. It's, you know, it's well taken care of. I've never, you know, let it be in a dusty area or a high humidity area. It's always been well taken care of. So think it'll last many many years i've even way back i had the remote control that would for a while there was my blu-ray player even you know so i i didn't actually have a blu-ray player i'd had that i would use that to play dvds and blu-rays and whatnot it's not the original

model is it very first um it's the it's the the flat one i is it? The very first? It's the flat one, I guess. It's black and silver. Okay, good. It doesn't stand horizontally. It lays down. I don't know which model it is. It's a PlayStation 3. That's all I know.

The original models had a very bad issue with the soldering between the heatsink and the CPU, and they would just fail. Even if you're just doing nothing wrong, all of a sudden, it doesn't work anymore. Mine is probably not the original then, because it's lasted for many years. I can double-check that after the show and get back to you if you really want to know. If it plays PS2 games, it's, I mean, that's one tell.

Not all of the original models did, but if yours is not curved, you're fine. On the top, you're fine. If it's a flat one, you're good. Even the newer one, they do have a newer one that's curved, but generally speaking, if you have anything but the newer or the first generations, you're totally fine. But that's another example of the control that open source software gives us, because we could do that ourselves and not have to be beholden to a company to do the right thing.

They might not. But if they don't, well, we could do what they should have done along the way. And I think that's one of the reasons why open source is so powerful it's like either the companies are going to solve the problem but if they're not interested we're going to solve the problem someone's going to solve it so amen to that we've been in the deeps of like talking about this and then we're going long on this but you know is there do you have a video is there a guide like how do you take the raspberry pi and turn it into a RetroPie? What is the process?

I mean, don't give us the long version of it, but give us the, I'm done with this show. Tell me how to do it already so I can go RetroPie myself. You could just search for RetroPie on my channel. You'll probably find a bunch. I have one that I'm working on. I just don't know when it's going to come out, so I don't want to guesstimate on that.

I have parts to build a handheld RetroPie system. I've done one in the past like this too, but there's like a newer version now. So I really want to dive into this because it even has a dock, like a Nintendo Switch, where you can play it handheld and then dock it to your TV. And it's Raspberry Pi based. It's so cool. And I have two of them in the studio right now. I just haven't had time to do a video on them yet but I really do want to because it's just really amazing. I think the biggest problem is sourcing a raspberry pie right now because there's kind of a shortage so you're paying a lot more for a raspberry pie nowadays than normal which is a big shame but if you do have

access to a raspberry pie you could just go through the videos I have. I think they're still relevant because we haven't had a new Raspberry Pi version since the ones that I did. So yeah, just search my channel. You'll find RetroPie on there. I've been wanting to start a secondary classic gaming channel. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. So hopefully that's something that'll happen next year if I can make it happen. Yeah. I got to imagine being an influencer. I would say you can influence with one video like that. Like you can influence 30, 50,000 people to be like, I want a RetroPie right now. And then now there's no hardware out there.

Anything left unsaid? What else have we not laid down on this show? I feel like we put a lot down, whether it was the myth busting of Linux to how that transpires into your fascination with gaming and retro gaming and the RetroPie. What else has left unsaid? I would also say UbuntuServerBook.com. I bought the domain. It goes right to a little mini, honestly, not the greatest thing I've ever designed, but it goes to a static website where you can go there and there's various places to buy the book. So that just came out recently. But LearnLinux.tv is my main website. It links to

my YouTube channel and various things that I do there as well. So other than that, I think people will find what they need by just going to one of those sites. I'll mention one for you too, since you didn't do it. I'm a fan of this is the home lab show to my home lab or myself, at least practicing. I'm a fan of Tom. We met Tom a couple years back. We were at a Microsoft event in New York City, Tom Lawrence, and he runs Lawrence Systems. I'm a big fan of Ubiquity and a ton of networking stuff, thanks to Tom and other folks that are in far. And someone's like, I was just listening to you in the car on the way here to Micro Center and here you are. And he shows me his phone and, you know, the Homelab show is on there. Like that is awesome. Like that is just such a great moment whenever that happens. It's doing really well. And the Homelab show is something Tom and I, we were talking about for at least four or five, six months before we did it.

And then eventually we're like, let's just do it. Let's just see what happens. And I'm so glad we did because it's a lot of fun. Yeah. It is a good show. I like it. I dig it. I keep doing it.

You're doing a great job at doing it. So I think it's on YouTube if you just search for it, but also the homelab.show on the actual web and links out to YouTube, of course. But yeah. Cool. All yeah. Cool. All right. Well, we'll see it all things open 10 years later. All things open is still here. We'll be kicking it there, right, Jared? We'll be at our booth, number 60. So if you're going to be there... I can't

wait. I cannot wait to go. Like, it just can't happen fast enough. And then when it happens, I'm going to want it to take a long time to end, right? That's how it is, right? You can't wait for it to happen, then it just goes by. All right, Jay. Hey, nice meeting you. Thanks for coming on the show.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Appreciate it. Oh, yes. Linux and retro gaming in the same episode. That's what I'm talking about. That is the winner right there. Linux myth-busting, retroro Gaming, Retro Pies, Raspberry Pies, Retro Game Controllers, Light Guns, Retro Music, all the fun things.

You know we love music around here. We love BMC. We've got all these awesome retro banging beats in our podcasts all the time. But I threw a couple extra sprinkles of awesome music in this episode. I hope you liked it and big thank you to jay lacroix for joining us today to go on this fun adventure it was awesome if you enjoyed it let us know in the comments the link is in the show notes and of course a big big thank you to our friends and our partners fastly and fly yes breakmaster those beats are banging retro banging

beats are awesome and we love them. And hey, we have a bonus for our Plus Plus subscribers. Hey, if you're not subscribed yet to our Plus Plus feed, that is our membership. $10 a month or $100 a year gets you in the game to directly support us, make the ads disappear, and get bonus content

like what we're giving today with Jay LaCroix. Check it out at changelog.com slash plus plus. It is better. That's it for today's show. Thank you for tuning in. We might see you at All Things Open, and if not, we'll see you next week. Game on.