638: The Distro Everyone Should Copy

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October 26, 2025 • 64 mins

Fedora 43 arrives with polish, new spins, and a smarter installer; and one decision the rest of the Linux world should pay attention to.

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.

(00:00):
It's crazy stormy in the Pacific Northwest this weekend. Wes and I have been
sharing crazy weather notes back and forth.
Yeah, you know, you got to keep up to date on where the latest power outage is.
Did you ever lose power?
No, thankfully not.
The studio did not lose power either. And I thought I was doing pretty good
because I'm out in the woods, kind of up against the mountains. The mountains.
And the power didn't really seem like it was going to flicker.

(00:22):
The wind didn't really seem like it was blowing too hard.
9.50 p.m. I hear this chachunk. I'm like, uh-oh, that's not good.
It sounds like a transformer or something like that.
Large piece of electrical equipment.
And I sit there for a second, and I said, okay, I need to pay attention to that.
Yes, it's late, and I'm tired.
And I had to have a couple of drinks because we went trick-or-treating,

(00:45):
and they were giving out jello shots to the adults. I did not plan on that,
so I'm like, okay, thanks.
So I'm like, all right, fine. I go to check it. Sure enough,
we've lost our power. I pull it up on the map, and oh, yeah, we're out, we're out.
And I announced it to the kids. It's not really easy to tell because all the
lights are on because we have a battery bank.
The system just works, right.
So I announced it to the kids. I'm like, hey, guess what? The power's out. They're like, it is?

(01:06):
And the kids look around. They look out the window and they see the campground's
dark. I go, can't we at least turn out the lights? LAUGHTER,
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

(01:30):
My name is Wes.
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show this week, we'll tell you what's
interesting about the new Fedora 43 release and the thing that they're doing
that we think every Linux distribution should copy.
Then we'll round it out with some shout-outs, some boosts, some picks, and a lot more.
So before we go any further, before we get into that show, we have to say time-appropriate

(01:51):
greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Hello.
Hello there.
Hello.
It's quite the group.
It's on fire over there.
I know. I know there's like some work going on in the background.
Maybe I'm riding lawnmower. It's unclear.
Things are happening and I love it. Yeah, our virtual lug gets together every
Sunday and you're welcome to join us.

(02:12):
That's at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. And of course you need the mumble
app, which is like packaged everywhere.
So you'll be able to find that. Also a big good morning to our friends over
at Defined Networking. go check out Nebula.
Defined.net slash unplugged is where you want to go to support the show and
meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking.

(02:32):
It's a decentralized VPN built on an open source platform that we love called Nebula.
Top to bottom, you're in complete control.
They offer a managed product or something that you can completely self-host.
It's optimized for speed, simplicity, and it uses industry-leading security.
And Nebula's decentralized design, you know that's something I'm big into.
It means your network is resilient.

(02:53):
If you've got a home lab or a global enterprise, it will work for you.
They developed it for Slack originally.
Now, of course, it runs many networks. I can't tell you all of them,
but it still manages all of the Slack infrastructure. They run all of their
interconnectivity over that.
Also, every Rivian vehicle going down the road is using Nebula to protect the
data and the metrics there.
And, you know, one of the things that can be tricky if you want to self-host

(03:15):
would be setting up the lighthouse. That's kind of where you start.
That's where a managed Nebula is really nice.
There are easier ways to get going with a lighthouse these days,
and that's the thing that you host that's responsible for keeping track of all
your Nebula hosts and helping them find each other when they come online.
And they don't actually transfer data themselves. It's more like node discovery.
And Wes, one of the things that you and I have been watching is there's more

(03:38):
public nodes coming online that you can use, and there's now a way to make it
even easier to get set up.
Yeah, right. So there's this public Nebula lighthouse service.
One of the things that's neat is Nebula is so flexible that you can do this.
So you can have someone run the lighthouse, and with a little automation,
there's like a Python service that runs here around it, you can make it so you

(04:01):
can submit your Nebula info to it so it can work as a lighthouse for you.
There are a couple steps you want to take just for security so that you can
do this safely, but they have good docs for that that we'll have linked.
And listener Blumenstrong has taken it upon themselves to start a Nix package
for that as well. So it's even easier.
Ha ha. How cool is that? Is that something I should be looking at?

(04:24):
Well, maybe we should run one. I don't know.
Oh, a JB Lighthouse.
Right?
I'd be down for that. I'd be down for that. Well, thanks, Bloomin' Strong.
Nice work on that. So go check out Nebula. It's awesome if you want to self-host it yourself.
Or really, why not start with a managed product? Also could be a great option
for friends, family, or your enterprise.
It's a great way to support the show. Defined.net slash unplugged.

(04:46):
Redefine your VPN experience with something you can actually control.
Define.net slash unplugged.
Well, Fedora Linux 43 has been officially cleared for release probably just
about the time you're listening to this, October 28th.
That's a Tuesday, 2025.
And there's a lot to like in here. We weren't sure exactly what would land.

(05:07):
You know, they kind of have these windows of time and then the team gets together.
They have a go, no go meeting.
And then they decide if it's ready or not.
Yeah, it kind of keeps things interesting this time, anytime there's a release in progress.
And one of the things they do is they have a blocker bug tracker where you can
specifically see what's holding up the release. So if you're trying to kind
of plan when Fedora might land, most of you probably aren't,

(05:27):
but we do, it's really nice that they just publish a blocker tracker.
And you can say, oh, okay, oh, this doesn't really apply to me.
Well, then I'm going to go ahead and install it.
And true, open source, transparent, yeah, just great.
Yeah, and that's exactly what we did because the blockers that were there were
no big deal for us at all. And the rest of the bits looked good.
And this is the release where we finally get the new web UI installer.

(05:50):
And Wes, you've kind of been the biggest Anaconda hater on the show.
Ouch, you just had to say that.
I just put it out there.
Yeah, well.
I mean, I know you warmed up to it a little bit as time went on.
Yeah, hate's a strong word, but it's never been my favorite of the common installers. That's true.
Yep, so it's now the default installer.
It had been in use for Workstation, but it hadn't really rolled out wider. So now this time it is.

(06:11):
Yeah. Let's start there, Wes. Did you like it?
Oh, yeah. Actually, I am. I'm definitely a fan of the new web installer approach.
I'm still kind of getting used to the flavor and the limitations.
And, you know, I'm giving it early days and all that.
I did notice as part of that, just kind of poking around while I was getting things installed.
I wonder if our friend Neil could comment on this. Something called Slitherer.

(06:34):
Yeah. What is Slitherer?
Jesus.
What is that?
So Slitherer is a alternative, purposeful web engine runner built on QtWebEngine
to run the Anaconda Web UI.
And the reason it exists is because the quote-unquote default is to use Firefox,

(06:57):
and that's what's used on Workstation.
Almost every other spin experience, whatever...
And using Firefox causes problems because then it confuses the window manager.
And if you, for example, preload window rules for like how Anaconda is supposed
to show up like on a tiling window manager, it will screw up because it will

(07:20):
also affect Firefox, the web browser, and all these other things.
So by having a dedicated web runner that has its own name that identifies as Anaconda.
Things like window management rules or you want to de-confuse the desktop shell
or whatever these things, if you have things that apply to Firefox,

(07:41):
they won't apply to Anaconda.
If you have things that only apply to Anaconda, they won't apply to Firefox.
It's basically avoiding the – and also it won't cause things like,
oh, hey, you have mixed up profiles.
You have settings coming gearing over for one or the other. like weird
stuff like that doesn't happen either and so slither is basically a very very
simple wrapper that runs the Anaconda web UI through Qtweb engine and and that's

(08:07):
that's used just to make it so that we don't have these weird complicated problems,
result in things like oh hey i can't launch firefox randomly because firefox
gets confused that anaconda is also running and anaconda is also firefox.
Yeah well nicely done because i mean i think it's kind
of the one of the things the flexibility you get and maybe problem you have

(08:28):
to solve when you make a big switch like this so it's cool to see you know how
do you actually make this possible to roll out wider and i do think you know
it's a more direct it's a simpler experience it felt a little faster to me just
going through the full install to get my system them down and I was trying the
KDE spin this time around.
Excellent.
I also noticed this time when you boot into it, it even has a nice little thing
that reminds you how much Fedora loves KDE and KDE loves Fedora.

(08:52):
That's great. Yeah. Also under the hood, the installer switches from DNF4 to
DNF5 for package management.
Finally.
That's pretty fun.
Not that you'll experience any of that. No, you shouldn't. Because the only
thing that actually uses that backend is Fedora server install DVD and the net install ISOs.
Everything else is just, you know, it's an image-based install.

(09:15):
Yeah. Also, I don't know what the impact of this is, but I read...
And hey, some of us love a good net install.
I read in the notes, too, that the RPM package format is actually still version
4, which is going to be upgraded in the future.
Yeah, so we have RPM 6, but it's set to the V4 format for backwards compatibility
because, like, the build system infrastructure is still running older Fedora.

(09:36):
You know, there's things that are still on RHEL in the infrastructure.
Like, moving to the V6 format would just break everything right now.
Yeah, that makes sense. Bite it off as its own thing.
Yeah, so that's going to happen separately later.
So let's talk a few details here. We got in Workstation, we have a version of
GNOME now that is deprecating X11 support.

(09:57):
So, of course, you'll still have X Wayland, but that's the only way you're going
to be able to run legacy X applications.
Other spins in desktop environments still support X11. This is an upstream GNOME change that lands.
And the future is here.
I guess so. The Wayland future, I guess, is here, right? I suppose so.
So I don't have a lot of thoughts on that other than we knew this was coming.

(10:19):
It was signaled for a while.
And I think all of my systems have been whaling for years. So it kind of makes sense.
I mean, there are other options, so I still have some remaining sympathy for
folks where it doesn't work.
But it really has progressed to a point of regular usability, which is great.
I don't often comment on this. But what is striking is the new wallpaper.

(10:41):
I love it. I really think it's great.
Yeah, it's one of my favorites in the last few releases, I think.
I think it's my favorite since the DNA wallpaper.
Oh, wow.
I feel like you're a little biased, Chris.
Oh, yeah? Why is that? Because it's a rocket?
Yeah, because it's a giant, like, JB rocket, pretty much.
I think it's fantastic. I love it.
It is really nice. The backstory is really nice, too.

(11:03):
Do you have a TLDR version, an elevator version of the backstory?
Well, it's basically inspired by Sally Ride and Sally Ride's legacy.
She was the first American woman to go to space.
I guess that was June 18th, 1983.
So just a nice little chunk of history there. And I like that idea of doing
wallpapers based on a little slice of history.
Let's talk about some nitty gritty stuff, because I always love these kinds

(11:26):
of like under the hood things. And I bet you were really excited to see this. And I'm not joking.
Slash boot on a new install is going from one gigabyte to two gigabytes.
Yeah, it's probably about time.
If you're just upgrading, of course, that's not going to be the case.
But yes, how big do you make your slash boot?
Yep. I mean, at least a gig, probably two. I've gone up to five before.

(11:49):
Yeah. Five is my max. Two is my minimum. Two is my minimum.
I like having some excess space.
Maybe you store like an emergency ISO on there or backups and stuff.
Brent, do you have a minimum size for your Slash Boot?
Yeah, I go at least two. I've certainly run into issues on encrypted systems
where kind of everything gets stored there.
And definitely Ubuntu is when my parents are using it, let's say.

(12:12):
It's not great at expunging things in there. So they have way too many kernels and stuff.
And that has brought down my mother's computer more times than I care to admit.
So I now have like a task every six-ish months I had to go through and clear
that because it's a tiny little boot.
So I say, you know, disk is cheap. Make it as large as, I don't know, just go crazy. Five?

(12:35):
Yeah, I'd be curious. I'd be curious. I say boost it and tell us how big your slash boot is.
Why not just run the whole system off your boot, you know?
Well, and I wondered...
Fat32 is fine.
This is crazy. My system was running 6.17.1.
I believe 6.17.5 is the latest. It came out on October 23rd,
so pretty fresh kernel in there.
You get some new hardware feedback interfaces, which I think mostly is going

(12:58):
to impact Ryzen processors. There's also some improvements for Intel multi-core
scheduling in there, which could mean smoother multitasking.
And then I think the one, for those of you that are trying to get higher res
webcams these days, There's been an update to the IPU 7 driver in Linux 6.17.
But speaking of...
The immutable distributions, Fedora KinoNite decided to enable auto-updates by default.

(13:23):
And this is done via Discover, which supports automatically updating the system
in a rather safe, you know, RPM OS tree staged update. So it applies at the next boot.
And, of course, you can roll back if you don't like it or something breaks or
you can disable it altogether.
But kind of an aggressive step. Do you have any thoughts on this one,
Neil, about automatical updates on the KinoNite?

(13:45):
Well, it's been a long-term goal of Timothy Reviere, who works on Kinoite specifically.
And I think in general, for these systems, I personally am not a fan of automatic updates.
I don't like them because I have been burned by them. But with these systems,

(14:05):
the risk is relatively low that you get screwed over by an automatic update.
It really, the main problems come in when you have bootloader and kernel updates
that come in as part of it, that things get a little dicey.
You know, I'll say I've been using automatic updates on Aurora since Summit.
Yeah, and it should be fine, right? Like it's in general, ideally,

(14:28):
if you are making releases of OS tree commits or OCI archives,
the new update bundles, you have made sure that they work.
You have some way of making sure that they work before they go out to people.
And if you don't, then you really, really need to rethink how you're doing your
atomic or immutable or whatever you want to call it distribution.

(14:50):
Because if you're not doing that, then you are just make you're putting everyone
at risk because everything is your fault That's how that works, right?
I have some thoughts. I tried a quote-unquote atomic spin for what we're going
to get into some of our experiences with 43 directly.
And so far the updates have gone smooth, but it's like, you know, I'm a weekend.

(15:13):
But I just love seeing them kind of push the envelope a little bit there.
And then it's a pretty accessible thing for users to disable. It's in Discover.
It's not like they have to go digging through a config or even the command line.
And I think that's a nice balance there too.
Wes, is there anything else? Like I know there's a new compression for init.
But, I mean, there's a few other things in here. Anything else jump out at you?
Yeah, I mean, you just get, like, a nice modern OS, right? So you get Python

(15:36):
3.14, which is an excellent Python release. Definitely worth upgrading.
Also, Postgres 18, which just came out, has some fancy new IOU ring support.
I mean, yeah, there's a lot to like. I do think better compression of the NNRD
that goes along with your improved slash boot support for just, you know, more robust.
Yeah, just get a little more out of that.

(15:57):
Yeah.
Let's get a little bit more. Let's squeak a little bit more out of that.
I did see downstream there's kind of some interesting things.
Build Fedora Core OS using container files.
Yeah.
Podman now. That's a big change. So look at that marching on.
It is nice to see. Okay. So that's sort of some of the technical stuff about
43 that we thought was interesting.
Now I think it's time to talk about our experiences with it hands-on and the

(16:19):
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(16:41):
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(17:02):
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(17:47):
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Well, while I was on the road this week getting back home, you boys really did a deep dive.

(18:54):
And Chris, I feel like some of what we learned on the trip might have spilled into this review.
Indeed. I thought this would be a quick visit, and I ended up moving in.
I really like the idea of pairing Cosmic Desktop with an atomic Linux base.

(19:14):
There's something to me that seems like it's a really nice match because the
way they do it, you get all the updates in one, and that desktop is fairly frequently
updated, so it all comes down as an image update.
If something doesn't work right, you just roll back, but obviously it hasn't been a problem.
And Cosmic has that kind of nice, it's already pretty simple,
but it's also kind of got that clean separation, right?

(19:35):
It does.
It'll just have all your data in your user location.
Yeah, and the config and the application state are separated in a way where
I could be backing that up too separately or taking snapshots.
So there's a lot of safety mechanisms I could put in here.
So you get a modern desktop that's frequently updated with sort of an insurance

(19:56):
policy that if something breaks, you can roll back in a pretty stable base.
So I find that to be true with Hyperland, by the way, as well.
I pull from the main branch on my system at home, and some days when I'm working
on something, I'll update Hyperland two, maybe the most has even been three times in one day.
I don't know, man, that guy's cranking it out like crazy. And it just works

(20:18):
because, you know, I'm crazy, I guess, but it's just worked.
And I'm months into the setup, and it's been working great.
So I really like it. And so I thought, well, let's take a look at all the different
atomic spins. And I saw the cosmic atomic spin.
Boy, was I surprised. Boy, was I surprised. I'm trying this on the Dell Knicks
book that Olympia Mike gave us, which is a low end. It's a bit of a dog.

(20:41):
It's a little tired. It's a little tired. The battery is dead for the most part.
And running Fedora Cosmic, I could not believe how instant. I meant to bring
the laptop into the room for you, Wes.
Like you click the file manager icon and it's immediately on the screen.
You click the terminal icon and by the time your finger is coming off the mouse,

(21:03):
the terminal is up on the screen.
The text editor, everything launches so fast.
It's like, I mean, how long have we been using this laptop? When did Olympia might give this to us?
I think LinuxFest Northwest.
LinuxFest, so since April. And I've been-
You've tried a lot of different things on there.
I've had Bluefin on there. I've had Nix on there. I've had Hypervibe on there.

(21:24):
I've never experienced the performance like this. I've just was absolutely blown away.
And, you know, if I'm using a really minimal desktop, that's not too surprising.
But this is a full-featured desktop, what I've customized the look on and everything like that.
And to experience it on what was – it's essentially – it was a thrown-away laptop.

(21:45):
It was a thrown-away laptop.
Okay. I mean, like it's blowing my mind. So I just had to stick around and keep using it. I was sold.
How much have you customized? Have you like made yourself a custom workflow?
You kind of just taken the defaults.
So the things I mean, I'm mostly doing is playing around with the theming. I have this.
I have the second desktop set to tiling. The first desktop set to floating. Loving that.

(22:08):
For me, like Firefox is still not great, but like the main desktop is so responsive.
Like I'm showing my wife. She's like, okay. I'm like, she's like,
that's probably how it should be. I'm like, yeah, well, I know that's how it
should be, but it hasn't been like that.
She didn't care. She didn't care at all.
I got a little windows on there to make a really good comparison.

(22:28):
I got the feeling you didn't choose
Cosmic specifically for its speed improvements. So was that a surprise?
Yeah, I was, I just thought, well, I wanted to try one of the more recent builds of Cosmic.
And, you know, after we'd gone down there, the one I had tried,
I rebased my Aurora to Cosmic, but it's an older build.
And because I think it's based on what's ever packaged for 42.

(22:51):
So I wanted to try it since this is, you know, the current hottest stuff.
And wow, really impressed.
So that was my review rig. I think I might have hit a bug in the Cosmic Software
Center because I had network connectivity issues when I was trying to add the
Flatpak repo and had to reboot the machine.

(23:12):
And when I came back, I didn't have any options to add either the FlatHub repo or the Cosmic repo.
I was able to add them at the command line just fine.
And so I haven't had a chance to reproduce that. But I'm not sure what happened there.
But it was otherwise so great. I mean, really,
other than I can't just, like, drop to the terminal and DNF install whatever

(23:33):
I want, I wouldn't even – actually,
for the first five minutes, I forgot I was on an atomic system because I was
just – you know, I'm just using Flatpaks and installing it, and it just completely
felt like a regular Linux box that was just super fast.
And I want to speak more to that when we get to what other distros should rip
off, but I think that's enough for me. What did you think, Wes?
I think you tried the Plasma edition, you said?
Yes, I did.

(23:53):
All right.
How'd that go? So I finally got the, yeah, the installer over there, which was great.
And as I was mentioning, right, when you kind of first come in,
you get this Fedora loves KDE, Katie loves Fedora.
Yeah.
And it really shows because it's like within living memory, right,
that the KDE spin was a little bit second class. And these days it is nothing but first class.

(24:13):
And it's totally usable outside of the box. And, you know, I'm running Plasma
all the time and it's just, it's a really nice, I don't find I need to do much
to be able to just use it as a very productive computer. Yeah.
Which I like. Except this time around, well, it turned out that just the way
things aligned, Plasma 6.5 had just come out, but it hadn't really made it into Fedora yet.

(24:34):
But SIG member Steve Cassette went ahead and made a copper that you could enable
and easily get that. So, you know, I had to.
That is awesome. Oh, great. So you get absolute fresh plasma.
Yeah, fresh kernel.
Yeah.
Fresh Fedora. Fresh plasma.
I do know he says, Steve says, every so often, KDE releases a new Plasma version

(24:55):
smack at the start of Fedora's freeze period for a new release,
forcing us to wait to create a new release in Fedora.
This is fine for most users, but for some of us with the shiny syndrome, I have to admit that.
Yeah.
That hit a little bit.
Us?
Yeah.
No.
Those of us that want to see what's new in KDE Plasma 6.5, and we want to be
able to update as soon as possible.

(25:15):
My name is Steve, and I'm one of the KDSIG packagers, and I got a bit annoyed
about the state of affairs, so I decided to do something about it.
And we sure appreciate it.
That's so great. So how did the installation go?
Easy. I mean, I pretty much, there's like a one-liner to add the copper and
then update your system, and I rebooted just, you know, for good measure, and I had it.

(25:37):
And then after that, it's just been great because I've been playing with Plasma
6.5, which is excellent.
Are you enjoying your rounded corners?
I am, yes. You get rounded corners. You also get automatic light to dark theme
switching based on time of day, which I don't know, just feels like it must
appeal to you, right? I do like that.
Based on your love of home assistant automations.
Uh-huh.
I like seeing, because I'm a huge clipboard manager, plasma addict,

(26:00):
and so they've added pinned clipboard items with 6.5.
Oh, brilliant.
Yeah, so if you have stuff you kind of just want to leave around,
you know, while you're working or forever. Your password, your password.
Something like that.
Yeah, you can do that. There's some drawing tablet improvements,
which is kind of nice to see.
They've also transformed what was the Flatpak permissions page into a general
application permissions page, where you can configure apps ability to do things

(26:22):
like take screenshots, accept remote control requests.
Speaking of big improvements for the built-in RDP server, you can share the
clipboard for one, which is pretty convenient when you're remote.
You're also no longer required to manually create separate RDP accounts.
You can just use the regular accounts
as you expect using the regular credentials in the RDP client app.

(26:45):
So be careful with that. Don't go exposing that everywhere. But it's nice because
it's been a long time to have like robust remote desktop Wayland era Linux world.
And it feels like both on Gnome and on Plasma. It's like you really got options.
It's just pretty much like check a box.
On most distros.
We tried this on our recent trip, and there's really mixed support in general

(27:07):
on platforms, but on Plasma, the QR code sort of sharing of Wi-Fi networks, that's getting better.
And they just actually show you the password too. So if the QR code doesn't
work like we were experiencing, you have the password right there to share as well.
There's been some audio improvements, which is nice just because there's a lot
you can do with Pipewire these days, and some accessibility improvements,

(27:28):
including the zoom effect can
now be configured to jump to the position of your text insertion point,
not just like to the mouse, which is kind of cool.
Yeah. I do like to see that.
There's also some new stuff like playing a sound when you plug in a device.
Just to make it super clear, you also get a notification as well,
but you can turn all of that off if you don't like it.
You know, I'm like back in the XP days.

(27:48):
Oh, yeah. I wonder if I can get that file.
If anybody has a link.
KRunner, the wonderful launcher on Plasma, that's getting some improvements too.
It now uses fuzzy matching to look up applications in a more robust way.
So even if you misspell an app's name, it'll probably still find it for you.
Boy, that'll be useful for me.

(28:08):
Yes. Also, the way that the search results are ordered has been improved and it's faster.
It now provides these results after the very first character is typed.
So all things that you want in a launcher.
Discover's getting nicer too, right? You talked about Kinoite getting updates
this time around. So Discover will be improving to help with that.
It's also got support now for Flatpak plus HTTPS URLs, which means the install

(28:33):
buttons on FlatHub actually work.
Yes, yes. Which is great.
A long-awaited feature.
There's also some improvements to the emoji picker, which is just nice,
because that's turned out to be a pretty handy...
People use that.
They really do.
Not us, of course.
No, never. There's also some nice KWIN improvements, including the much-talked-about
overlay panes, which sort of reduce compositing when you have a full screen or a game going on.

(28:57):
They've also optimized various stuff like the splash screen code,
rearranging some of the startup steps, reducing the duration of the login animation.
A lot of things to make, not only long-time applications and windowing faster,
but also just getting to your desktop.
I'll mention, because that's all great, I will mention that GNOME 49 ships in the workstation spin.

(29:21):
And we have talked about this before a bit, so I'll just mention a couple of quick highlights.
There's a new document viewer papers in here, new calendar updates as well.
But I wanted to actually touch on the similar thing here.
They've increased or improved, enhanced is the word they used,
the remote desktop capabilities. and they provide more capabilities for those

(29:43):
that want to connect to GNOME desktops from otherware, otherware like multi-touch.
So I guess probably if you're coming in from a tablet, that could be really nice.
Relative mouse input is required by some apps and it's particularly relative
to those playing games over a remote connection.
Okay, what? I want to see that bug report.
See, this is, okay, this is impressive. Extended virtual monitors.

(30:05):
It is now possible to have additional virtual monitors when using GNOME as a remote desktop.
Additional displays can be added to the remote desktop session from the remote
desktop client even when there aren't additional displays physically present.
Brent's going to make so many of these.
Oh, I want to do this.
That sounds like I want that.
I think we might need to have some sort of remote desktop competition.

(30:26):
Oh, that's a good idea. You should write that down. We've mentioned this before,
but just really quickly, the lock screen has had some security improvements,
specifically around media controls and the way it runs.
The Do Not Disturb toggle has been moved from the notifications is listed to
the quick settings for more consistent experience.
Power connected status with the battery icon on the top bar now indicates when

(30:47):
the computer is connected to power or if it's charging or not,
like the preserved battery health setting.
And you now have better HDR brightness controls. And you can also reboot and
shut down from the lock screen in a way that is implemented in the,
I guess you could say, secure and improved way.
And there's also image loading that's been sandboxed. We mentioned this too

(31:08):
before, but GTK apps now have sandboxed image loading.
That is a big thing.
Yeah, so a really nice GNOME 49, and you can get, if you like,
if you're crazy, you can even get the absolute latest Plasma in 43.
So there's a lot to like between the spins and just the flexibility of both
Workstation and the KDE spin. There's a lot to like.

(31:29):
But I think there's something in here, and you touched on it earlier,
that just about every other distro could focus on a bit more.
And Fedora's not perfect, so I'm not trying to, as the kids would say, glaze them here.
And the more familiar you are with anything, the more flaws you see.
But one of the things that we notice by going through the release notes of the

(31:49):
different distributions is Fedora is constantly...
tidying things up and moving forward in technical areas and in little areas
that I think other distributions maybe ignore for a few years longer than they should sometimes.
Yeah, not only is there like a sort of modern aspect to it, but you're right.
There's sort of like an attention to detail, a dotting the I's,

(32:12):
crossing the T's, making sure as upstream changes, you are still doing like
the integration and configuration of those components the best way that you can.
And sometimes, you know, people don't like some of the changes.
Like an example this time might be, they're rolling with GNOME removing X11 support.
But there's other things in here. In fact, I did some recent examples of just this sort of thing.

(32:34):
In Fedora 33, SystemD, ResolveD, and it was enabled by default.
ButterFS was also in Fedora 33. PipeWire landed in 34. WirePlumber in 35.
They were really early on that.
They were also aggressively early on smarter out-of-memory handling.
They rolled out a first version in 32 and improved
it in 34 switch to ntfs tables

(32:57):
in the 32 to 41 releases unified
user bin and slash user sbin with a
symlink in fedora 42 and so on and
etc like there's to small things to large
things like audio subsystems where they're constantly pushing
this stuff forward in a way that has
been a very consistent user experience the

(33:20):
end result that i get is something that feels clean and
modern it's a weird thing to say because all linux especially compared to its
commercial counterparts all linux is very modern but fedora feels especially
leading edge and modern even compared to arch and and rolling mix os it's just
because it's not just about the packages right.

(33:42):
Yeah there's something you get extra it's not just uh straight upstream,
In a good way.
Yeah. And I think this sort of attention to modernization in detail and trying
to track upstream is something that other distributions could ape from a little bit.
Some of our other large distribution friends out there, they kind of build up some technical debt.

(34:04):
And then they come along and they make big dramatic changes,
big sweeping changes. And that's very exciting.
Right. But Fedora is very iterative. It's always like and it's only when you
look back at three or four releases and you go, whoa.
Which is also meant I think as you've experienced yourself right like it's also
something where you get a lot of updates but you're happy to do the updates

(34:25):
especially with you know DNF under the hood which is every time I use Fedora
it's just it's a great package manager I'm.
Using RPMOS tree now Wes so I don't I don't use DNF but that's real nice,
Join crowdhealth.com slash unplugged. If you've followed me for a while,
you know I have really struggled with trying to figure out healthcare.

(34:47):
A small business that's a really small team, there's really no great options.
My wife also is a type 1 diabetic, and so that makes things extra expensive
for her, and she also runs her own small business.
This has been something that has just really been a big stressor for us.
But if you've noticed, I haven't really complained about it much recently.
That's because just over three years ago, I joined CrowdHealth.

(35:11):
And right now it's open enrollment, the season where the health insurance companies
are going to hope you sign up.
Even though things are getting overpriced, they're becoming a political football,
and there's lots of confusing fine print.
But don't take my word for it. Go over there. Check it out.
Just see if it might make sense for you and your family.
DrawingCrowdHealth.com slash unplugged. I wouldn't be talking about it if I

(35:32):
hadn't tried this for myself and my wife for a long time.
And it's something I'm very comfortable with. In fact, it's something that gives me peace of mind.
I found the entire game of trying to pick insurance, pay the different prices
all the time, and then, of course, you know on the back end they generally try
to weasel out of actually helping you.
CrowdHealth is different. It's a community of people funding each other's medical

(35:54):
bills directly. No middlemen, no networks, no nonsense.
Now, for me, when I signed up, I didn't really know what I'd be getting into
because it's a new idea. But CrowdHealth is actually something that's been around for a while.
The idea is just modernized with the ability to have apps and the Internet.
And now, three years into it, I'm really glad we went this route and we have saved a ton of money.

(36:15):
You've got to check out CrowdHealth, the health insurance alternative.
Healthcare for under $100. You get access to a team of health bill negotiators,
low-cost prescription and lab testing tools, as well as a database of low-cost,
high-quality doctors that are vetted by CrowdHealth.
They also have a fantastic app that they have improved on over the three years
that I have been a member, and it just makes it so easy to get started with the process.

(36:40):
From, oh, I think something's wrong to, hey, I have a bill.
It really is pretty powerful. And if something major happens,
you pay the first $500, and then CrowdHealth steps in with the crowd to fund the rest.
It feels like the options we used to have before Obamacare, in my opinion, messed everything up.
As a small business owner, it has been disastrous since then,

(37:01):
especially if you have two of us in the family.
And, of course, you'll join the crowd, a group of members just like you that
want to help pay for each other's unexpected medical events.
The system is betting that you'll
stay stuck. You'll just use the same overpriced, overcomplicated mess.
And this year, it's even more complicated because most of the ACA subsidies
are set to expire, which means your prices could go sky high.

(37:23):
So far, CrowdHealth members have saved over $40 million in health care expenses
because they refuse to overpay for health care.
This is open enrollment. Take your power back. Join CrowdHealth to get started.
Join the crowd with me for $99 for your first three months.
$99. Just use the promo code unplugged at joincrowdhealth.com.

(37:44):
Join crowdhealth.com, promo code unplugged.
CrowdHealth is not insurance. Opt out, take your power back.
This is how we win. Join me over at joincrowdhealth.com, promo code unplugged.
Unraid.net slash unplugged. Unleash your hardware with Unraid,

(38:05):
a powerful, easy-to-use NAS operating system.
For those of you that want control, flexibility, efficiency,
and you want to just take advantage of some of the apps we talk about,
with what you have in the closet right now.
Build your ultimate rig or take advantage of that laptop sitting in the corner.
You can really unleash the hardware that you have right now.
And Unraid is cooking, my friends.

(38:25):
The new RC is out for version 7.20.
5,000 different Unraid members help test the RC.
That's awesome. They have lots of nice fixes, polish across storage,
VMs, the web GUI, and the stable is just around the corner.
Unraid goes from win to win. And
recently, they have been laser-focused on making that web UI even better.

(38:48):
Their community app store is bonkers.
You get access to support, to the community, to all of those apps,
and the continuous improvements of Unraid built on top of a modern Linux kernel,
which means you get the best in virtualization, the best in containers,
and the best in file systems.
So check out Unraid and support the show. You get a 30-day free trial,
which lets you test out Unraid. no credit card required when you go to unraid.net slash unplugged.

(39:13):
It's pretty powerful and it just keeps getting better.
And they just recently crossed the 20 year mark. And it feels like they've got
all the steam and energy from like a startup. It's really pretty impressive.
Check it out. Support the show. Unraid.net slash unplugged.
Well, this week we want to do a nice shout out to Vadim, who's a new Jupiter.party

(39:35):
member. Thank you for joining the club.
Woo!
Thank you. Thank you, Vadim. Appreciate that. Boys, we got a bunch of emails
on recommendations for a low-power but semi-powerful home lab sent in via the
contact page in the booth.
Thank you, everybody who did that. I'm processing all of them.

(39:56):
And yeah, a couple of themes came through.
Some Lenovo hardware and some Beelink hardware, a couple of themes,
definitely. And they're really good options. So, yeah, I'll have more on that in the future.
Tell you more about that. We got an email from Lep Listener,
and I feel like maybe we've had a blind spot here, and he kind of brings it to our attention.
He says, I'm moving off of Windows 10 now, and I'll be trying out Zorin OS or

(40:22):
Winix for moving from my SDR and HAM software and hardware.
At first, Winix seems better, but time will tell.
That's a Linux, but with a W.
Maybe this could be a topic and could get some new listeners.
And, you know, I don't think we've given much attention to this end of Windows
10, but this is a big moment for a lot of Windows users.

(40:43):
Lupfan brings up a good point.
This is true.
So I'm not a big fan of Winux. This is my opinion, and it's not a particularly well-researched one.
But what it is, and this is not necessarily a bad thing, and this is,
I'm just, it's a paid distribution.
And what they've done is they have packaged Ubuntu and they put a Windows theme

(41:07):
on top of it and then they sell that to you and you buy a pro key.
So Winux 64-bit is based on Ubuntu 24.03 LTS and you could just get this theme
for free on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and the pro key. Let's see. Does it tell us?

(41:30):
They call it a donation. Isn't that interesting?
So the Pro Key is $35. You get the appearance and the control of Windows-inspired themes.
You get a Windows-style control panel, improved support for .exe and MSI applications.
So they're basically making wine.
Yeah, I think they say they have Winboat.
Oh, okay. Active Directory support, native graphics, support for OneDrive,

(41:54):
native OneDrive File Explorer, Android subsystem, power tools,
improvements to the Copilot and ChatGPT subsystem, lifetime key is $35.
Yeah, I think it's your decision if that's of a personal value to you.
I think you would probably be better served by just using Ubuntu LTS.

(42:16):
There's kind of an idiom in Linux that goes the further out from the most commonly
used system, the harder that is.
And like, so you're picking something that's a derivative of Ubuntu.
and so if it ever breaks you're only going to get support from them and their very small user base or.
If the thing that supports Ubuntu that you try to run on it that that breaks,

(42:41):
probably on you to figure out the delta.
Yeah there's that where there's millions of users that use Ubuntu and there's
a giant support community out there and there's also people you could contact
that's just something to consider,
Zoran may be worth trying I haven't spent a lot of time with Zoran,
maybe we should I'd be curious to know if people would like to know our opinion

(43:02):
on Zorn I'd kick the tires we should.
Probably run some windows again for a bit and then,
switch to Zorin.
I would be concerned about the people who rely on these pseudo-Windows experiences,
to adopt Linux because you're going to get burned eventually.
Yeah.
I know people often say, oh, you know, KD Plasma is the Windows-like experience

(43:26):
and GNOME is the Mac-like experience, which is completely and utterly wrong for a lot of reasons.
Neither KD nor GNOME are actively trying to aim towards that direction but there are people who,
want to see patterns that aren't there, for example, and the problem is that
if you start reinforcing it with other things then what you wind up having is

(43:48):
you're subtly tricking the users into thinking this is the same system that they had before,
and as soon as that superficial skin breaks,
the users will be more upset than they were before.
I'm glad you're touching on this. I think another way to put this because i
i thought about this when it came in and i forgot to mention it neil but you
reminded me is it creates a misalignment of expectations exactly and i think

(44:12):
that's the core problem is people expect it to be to behave and function and
do the things windows does and it's not windows well.
We got another email here from adam who's also a member thanks for reviewing
my nix config it was really fun hearing what others thought of it so another
plus one for nick's config.
Oh all right uh.
Chris you were right my machine boomer oh i remember this one.

(44:35):
Of course yeah yeah isn't.
My only host it's named after the battle star galactica character and because
it's my desktop with the most horsepower it booms.
I like it i do i do prefer our theory that it was this config for your parents,
that makes sense too.
Uh does send you a little shame uh shade here though uh chris yeah not sure

(44:56):
how you missed my prowler.nix file sitting right next to sonar.nix and radar.nix.
That's my bad i will uh i will count those points towards you again sorry i
docked you for that that's good i'm glad to hear those are by the way things
people should look into if they haven't that's all i'll say about that uh he
does call you out a bit but not in a bad way.

(45:17):
Yeah i mentioned um that but Adam has a nice structure with explicit modules in his Nix setup.
He credits his old Puppet experience showing, because in Puppet you write generic
modules that you can reuse across machines, and Adam's trying to do the same
thing with Nix, and it definitely shows.
Portable configs makes a match anywhere.
As an example, Adam mentions his Telegraph module, which runs on every host.

(45:41):
Also using my Flake for Ursa, which I need to update. I started doing that and
got distracted with other things.
sounds like maybe here though reports on getting hardware acceleration when
i play stream and vtop shows gpu activity,
Ersets reports hardware acceleration as enabled, but the logs always complain,
unable to determine VAPI compatibilities. Please install VA info.

(46:04):
But you're seeing activity in...
Oh, so we commented, yeah. So that last commit was my vain attempt to fix that.
Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. Oh, the newer QSV method, he notes, has a bug where the
audio lags about two seconds behind the video. Oh!
Yeah, so had to set the FFmpeg profile to use VAPI acceleration with the IHD
driver for the N100 media server.
Also mentions maybe to fix some of those issues with vappy maybe we need libva

(46:26):
utils yeah we could definitely i could take a look at that when i touch ersatz
next so thank you for uh testing that because i've only i haven't had as much
time to actually get it really going as i'd like.
I had ersatz going on three screens over the weekend i.
Was looking that they've done some nice looking updates like their changelog is full of good things.
One of the things that i like doing this is an aside

(46:47):
but i like to set up holiday channels so i have
right now a halloween channel which i'll turn off and then
i'll start i'll turn on a Christmas channel and then I turn them off after
the season's over so that way people don't otherwise the kids
just watch them and yeah being able to have a go on multiple screens is so great
it's so fantastic and I'll just I'll sometimes I'll just go on YouTube and find
some of those long Halloween video loops you know with the different music and

(47:11):
stuff and throw that in there you can throw all kinds of stuff in there it's
such a great application and then another fun thing you can do is,
have the kids pick the colors for the different smart lights that can change
colors go around and have them pick they love that Well.
We have another note here from Alan Bacon, who says, hey there,
long time party member, first time writing in.

(47:31):
Hey!
I was just listening to the latest Unplugged episode where you guys were looking
for a name for the audience, and I think I have something not half bad that
might just fit the Jupiter Broadcasting brand.
The Colony. It keeps in theme with that space theme, Star Trek,
the launch, et cetera. What do you think?

(47:52):
We have in the past. In fact, that's the domain name for our matrix server.
I think that's the way to lean into then, the Colony.
So that's when we're talking about the audience, we'll just refer to it as the Colony.
That'll be our, you know, our cute love name. Only those of you that listen
to this specific episode will know what the hell we're talking about.
Subscribe. Grow the colony.

(48:15):
Mr. Bacon also says here, have a good one from up north in French,
Canada. The real French, not like that wannabe Brent.
Oh, Brent. I'm sorry. I didn't know that was in there.
Well, those Acadians, you know, you gotta.
Is that a thing? Is there tension between the, you know, like the half French
Canadians and the real French Canadians? Hey, what?

(48:37):
What does half mean? I mean, I think what you're hearing in my voice is the answer is yes.
You know, after like 5,000 miles in the States, you're really becoming one of us.
Louisiana has some French down there.
I mean, Chris, it's a problem in all the Francophonie speaking areas.
Francophonie?
That's a whole.
I love humans.
They're so great.

(48:57):
We're just the best. Love it. Thank you, everybody, for the emails.
Appreciate it very much. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact.
And, of course, you can also send a boost into the show, support us,
and get a message. If it's above 2,000 sats, we read it.
And our baller booster this week got it on discount. It's Turd Ferguson with 43,000 sats.

(49:23):
43,000 sats for Fedora 43 Review. Always look forward to hearing your takes
and realize it was valuable to me. Ah, this is a live boost.
Nice.
Thank you, Turd. Appreciate that.
Now to the pending. Cool.
I appreciate that, Turd. Yeah.
Yeah, we mark, if you have a podcasting 2.0 app, we mark the live stream.
and schedule it pending ahead of time. So if you ever wonder,
the guy's going to have a live show today or what time is it at or did it get

(49:45):
rescheduled? We mark it as pending.
I try to do it about 24 hours before the live stream and it'll show up in your
list of apps. Or I'm sorry, your list of podcasts.
As a baller here, I'd like to mention that about half the fuel that went into
the van on the way home was from sats that we received from listeners.
And I got those just directly into the gas tank.

(50:06):
So I wanted to say a huge thank you everyone who boosted in and also fake boosted
in to allow me to get home. Thank you. That made a huge difference.
And get there.
Right, right, right.
Thank you, everyone. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, indeed.
Tom H.O. comes in with 9001 Satoshis.

(50:28):
Here's a little power usage data point for you, Chris.
Okay.
My NetBSD desktop, so not a big hog like Linux, but is a ThinkCenter M710Q,
generation older than the 720.
The M710Q, I think, was probably one of the number one recommendations.
Aha.
Okay, so I'm interested to hear an in-the-field report.
They can both take 32 gigs. Mine has 16 in the second disk.

(50:52):
Measured from mains, it idles at 12 watts and uses around 25 to 30 under load.
and for the listeners how about jovenauts.
Jovenauts well.
If you want to opt self-opt into that.
Yeah we won't complain uh 12 watts idle
is a bit high but not unreasonable 30 watts
is dangerous but if it's only under

(51:12):
massive load and i've consolidated i can see that working
if i could get 32 gigs of ram in that puppy and a couple of discs and then you
know i probably have to do a couple external discs that's the thing i don't
like is i don't see a way where i could have a large internal array and it needs
to be solid state so it gets expensive pretty quick externally but uh that is nice considered.

(51:34):
Um towing a small fission reactor.
Good idea that's some good real world uh i really appreciate the actual power
usage numbers if anybody else has that for their mini pc home lab machine please
do send it in especially if you could beat 30 watts under load love to see that.
We've got op1984 here with 4 000 sats,

(51:56):
Well, this was a timely episode. Thanks to the AWS outage, my smart things automations all failed.
And that was all I needed to stop putting off making the switch.
Bonus, my 70-plus-year-old mother has, after 10 years of resisting, agreed to try Linux.
Linux Mint specifically, since her Windows 11 laptop is having tons of issues

(52:17):
and I'm always having to fix the darn thing.
A year with LibreOffice instead of paying for Microsoft 365 five just got her
to see FOSS as a user friendly option and not just for the hacker man.
Wow, that's wonderful to hear.
LibreOffice coming in as the sale closer there.
Well, you can tell you're taking a thoughtful, long term approach to make this

(52:41):
happen and it's finally really paying off and that's that seems great for not
only your mom, but also you as the support person.
Yeah, love that. Nice win there. Thanks for sending that our way. Love hearing those.
I always love when some kind of power outage or service outage also moves people
to bigger and better things. I'm assuming home assistant here.
So go call any members.

(53:03):
A follow-up, since I did the YOLO delete of the random zombie adapter,
the Zigbee network has been totally solid.
Nice.
Totally solid. And that's even after going down and relocating,
which you never know. It's all been good.
Thor comes in with a supercharged roe of ducks, 2,444 sats.

(53:26):
More Nix is good, and yes to more config confessions, please.
Also, I can identify with Colony. It's on the theme of JB.
Well, there we go.
Thanks, Thor. Appreciate that.
Augustin Bussin with 3,714 sets.
Just wanted to give a shout-out to an email server called Mox, M-O-X.

(53:48):
Oh, yeah.
For anyone who feels crazy enough to self-host your own email,
it's a modern Go-based email server that I found very easy to set up,
which is saying something because email servers are not always easy to set up.
Been running it for the past year on a VPS without issues. There's even a NICS package for it.
You know, this had come across in one of my searches, and I had not heard any

(54:08):
reports of it. And I'm just looking at it now that you bring it up.
This is great. We're getting some super good in-the-field reports.
Really, really high value there. Appreciate that a lot. All right,
so that's mox. It's xmox.nl.
That's xmox.nl.
If you want to check it out.
Thank you for that. Appreciate that one.

(54:30):
Distro Stu comes in with 11,111 sats.
I loved the NixConfig reviews episode, and there are so many interesting ones in GitHub as well.
Every system I have has an alias U that updates everything regardless of package manager.

(54:51):
And I did it this way in Nix for quite a long time, but eventually it started causing issues.
So now I have it broken out into more granular aliases, and he does link us
to those aliases in their NixOS repo. feel free to roast the configs of course
while you're there and p.s.
Uh thanks.

(55:12):
For showcasing my reader app saver.
Oh yeah yeah well done that's great
all right we'll save that one i think we're gonna have to start building a stash
i think so thank you distro stew appreciate that kiwi bitcoin guides here with
3456 sats i like that thank you kiwi says uh thanks for the explainer on the

(55:34):
distros uh more questions to follow and plus one for a deep dive on the albi hub stuff,
yeah indeed we're talking more about that something we'll do i don't we don't
have anything planned yet so if you have any specific questions you can still
get them in and we'll it'll help inform the coverage.
Anonymous boosts in with 2021 sets about to start my home assistant journey.

(55:55):
Oh let's take a moment oh to be at the beginning oh coming in with.
Podverse too nice.
This is my Picard moment when he's dying in the cave and Wesley's,
you know, leaning over him and Picard's like, to be young again.
You know that moment I'm thinking of? That's how I feel right now.
Do keep us posted. Very excited. I think you're going to love it.

(56:15):
Start, you know, start with like a small win. Don't go crazy.
Don't go crazy. But then once you get the small win, go crazy. Obviously.
Well, adversary 17 is here. 16,384 sets.
Yeah, I got a name for us listeners. The Jupitiers. We are pioneers of the false space.

(56:41):
I can't help but picture the Rocketeer, you know?
Oh, yeah?
Remember that movie?
Uh-huh.
I don't know, adversaries. I don't know.
You have to unsee Colony, I think.
Yeah, I love Colony because we already have it in so many places.
The Jupitiers, maybe the Jupitiers are the individual members of the Colony?
I don't know. You know, because the Colony could be the whole.

(57:01):
We could workshop that. We could workshop that. Hey, look who it is,
boys. The Golden Dragon is here with 2,222 sats.
I listened to this week, but I don't remember what I had to say as it was late.
Here's some support for the excellent episode, Howard.
Oh, you still boosted. That's so sweet.
Oh, God, that's great. I love it. Thank you. I appreciate that.

(57:26):
That's pretty good. That's pretty good, Golden Dragon. Also,
thank you to everybody who streams sats as you listen.
We had 24 of you do that, and collectively, You stack 26,238 sats.
When you combine that with our boosters, it's not a super strong episode.
But you know what? It's not also a disaster. I'll say that. We stacked a grand total of 123,691.

(57:48):
123,691 sats.
The easiest way to boost the show is with Fountain.fm. It's also a podcasting
2.0 app, so it means you also get the podcasting 2.0 chapters, you get the transcript,
you also get the live stream integration with the pending, and a bunch of other

(58:10):
special features, including the ability to boost, and they self-host all of that.
Or you can go down the adventurous route of AlbiHub, and then you compare that to a number of apps.
On iOS, Castomatic is absolutely fantastic. Podverse is a popular one in our
community because it's GPL3.
You can also just boost from the podcast index.
There's lots of options. And of course, we want to take a moment and say thank you very much.

(58:31):
Let's just pump the brakes and say thank you to our members who also said it
and forget it with either the party membership or their core contribution.
We couldn't do it without you
either. So thank you everybody who supports this show. We do it for you.
Okay, two picks. And I put this first one here for you, really.
I just felt like this is something you and I could geek out on.

(58:52):
But every now and then we get into this stuff, and somebody else in the audience loves it too.
And so this week we're highlighting Millisecond.
It's an app that lets you sort of audit and optimize your Linux system for excellent,
low-latency, beautiful audio.
And that's why it's called Millisecond, because it does just that.

(59:12):
Yeah, I like the name. That's clever. and it just does one thing really well.
So you get a clean little GTK application with some different groups like user,
CPU, kernel, and then some nice little icons and displays where it'll tell you
just sort of default, like how do your real-time priorities look?
What about group limits, CPU frequency scaling?
Gives you like a warning or this is bad or you're looking good with a green check mark.

(59:36):
And there's a link with explainers over at the Linux audio wiki where a lot
of these tips are accumulated and you can just kind of drop things down to get
like more of a inline help tip as well.
This kind of is in the broader context of a collection of tools now that makes
audio production on Linux absolutely just top notch.
And it's GPO 3.

(59:56):
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay.
And I made a little flake for it too if you want to run it on next.
I saw that.
Okay, how about this next one? I never even thought about this,
but would you like a lock screen for your just standard old TTY?
Then I would like to introduce you to Lemurs. It's a customizable TUI,
and it's kind of a login manager written in Rust, sent in by Lupfan,

(01:00:20):
who we read his email earlier.
It's got both Apache and MIT mixed in there. It creates a small,
robust, yet customizable login manager, which can be served as a front end to
your TTY, X11, or Wayland sessions, as also the backend support for PAM.
So it just plugs into your existing authentication infrastructure.
And the UI is a very simple login and password lock screen.

(01:00:42):
And I've never thought about locking my TTY before until now.
And I can't believe I've never thought about it.
You're going to keep them all locked now.
Yeah, dude, I'm going to log all of them in and then I'm going to lock them.
That's what I'm going to do.
Because I like it that way. I don't know. I just, or maybe you're SSH'd in and
you got to leave it up on a machine that you can't lock the screen of or something.
Like, there's times where you want to lock this stuff.

(01:01:04):
It does have a very classic 2-y look to it. You know, it kind of looks like
an older DOS machine almost vibe.
Yeah, and if maybe you were ricin' towards that vibe for your Wayland desktop,
you could just use this as your lock manager for Wayland, too.
It doesn't have to be for your TTY, but that's what drew me to it. What a great idea.
And how did I never think of that before? I'm embarrassed. It never even crossed my mind.

(01:01:25):
I, you know, I just log in this route.
Yeah, well, it seems to be a dual license, It's Apache 2 and MIT.
I don't really log in as root. Don't do that. I mean, I pseudo a lot.
And maybe I pseudo without a password. I might do that. But I don't run as root
all the time. You know what I mean? I don't do that.
Yeah, but you're always in the Docker group.
Definitely, definitely in the Docker, in the wheel group, in the video group.

(01:01:49):
You know what? Sometimes I'm in the floppy group.
I love the floppy group. All right, so I have a few things to let you know before we get out of here.
This show is live. We do it on a Tuesday, which is actually a Sunday.
And it starts at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern, over at jblive.tv.

(01:02:11):
Wes Payne, we have a few pro tips for them as well. You know,
I mentioned it earlier, but I think it's worth iterating because we work hard
to make these things nice.
Yeah, that's right. If MPEG layer 3 is not enough and you want more metadata,
We've got a JSON file in the cloud with chapter information.
Yeah, skip right to your favorite stuff. Skip the boring parts if you want to.

(01:02:32):
One would think, too, that it would be a pretty easy way to sort of parse through
the topics of the show. There's some data you could work with there.
Yeah, indeed. Those are the major moments.
And speaking of data you can work with.
That's right. Yeah, if you want way more data, how about VTT and SRT files for
you? Also in the feed for transcripts.
more and more of the players out there can use and display and even play and

(01:02:55):
show the transcripts as you move throughout the episode.
With speaker names.
Yeah, and since they're in the feed, you can download them, process them,
throw them at an LLM, whatever you want.
And we go extra far and above. We process each host track individually so that
way it has the best chance of recognizing the speech correctly and identifying it.
So we really put some effort into those transcripts. Check them out.
Links to what we talked about this week, those are over at linuxunplugged.com slash 638.

(01:03:18):
Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday!

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