Apple's software is going rotten, while Linux sneaks up as the better Mac. Linus grumbles through Git's 20th birthday, and we spot a hardware window Linux better not slam shut.

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• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Tailscale Community Meetup Seattle — Calling all Tailscale users, homelabbers, and networking enthusiasts! We’re bringing the community together for a casual, community focused meetup in Seattle.
• POLL: Would you tune into a Saturday LFNW Live Stream?
• Celebrating Git's 20th anniversary with creator Linus Torvalds — Discover the origins of the open-source version control system, why he handed over the reins a few months in, and what he thinks about adding new programming languages to Git.
• Two decades of Git: A conversation with creator Linus Torvalds - YouTube
• uemacs - Linus Editor — Random version of microemacs with my private modificatons
• Yes Linus' uemacs is pacakged in Nix
• Debian APT 3.0 Stable Released With New Package Solver & Refined Text UI — This new version introduces a significantly refined command-line interface and a completely new package solver.
• I Want a Better Mac, so I’m Cheering for a Better Linux — "Apple needs a real competitor, one alternatives such as GNOME on Linux could actually be, if only the hardware rose to the occasion."
• I'd love to see someone help Linux take the next step
• outdoorgeek's laptop sleep optimized NixOS config
• Rust is easy? Go is… hard?
• Pick: chat-gipitty: Terminal client for getting answers from LLMs — Chat Gipitty (Chat Get Information, Print Information TTY) is a command line client for ChatGPT. It allows you to chat with your chosen model of ChatGPT in a terminal and even pipe output into it.
• moreutils' sponge — soak up standard input and write to a file.
• GitHub - pgdr/moreutils — a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young.
• Pick: ALttP VT Randomizer — Each playthrough shuffles the location of all the important items in the game. Will you find the Bow atop Death Mountain, the Fire Rod resting silently in the library, or even the Master Sword itself waiting in a chicken coop?
• spannerisms/ALttPNG

We attempt to get one of the great gaming classics running on Linux, and dig into some of the technical issues still holding back Linux. Plus: Chris has a new handheld.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• LinuxFest Northwest 2025 Schedule
• POLL: Would You Tune Into a Saturday LFNW Live Stream?
• LINUX Unplugged LIVE@LFNW Sunday — Sunday 10:00 AM · 1h · HC 108
• Linux-Powered Payments: Running a Lightning Node with nix-bitcoin — Sunday 1:30 PM · 45 min · HC 204
• Lutris - Open Gaming Platform for Linux — video game preservation platform aiming to keep your video game collection up and running for the years to come.
• GitHub - ValveSoftware/Proton: Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components
• R36MAX Retro Handheld Game Console with 64G Built-in 18000+ Classic Games — The R36Max is a budget device that puts the common RK3326 chip into a vertical handheld. It has the same specs as the R36Pro, but with a larger, 1:1 screen.
• R36 Max Handheld Game Console with 4" Screen Linux System
• Kooha: Elegantly record your screen — Kooha is a simple screen recorder with a minimal interface. You can simply click the record button without having to configure a bunch of settings.
• vtt-summarizer: Summarize .vtt files into meeting notes — It uses open source LLMs to handle the data extraction and summarization, ensuring everything can be run locally and without the need to share with third parties.

Linux 6.14 lands with big improvements for gaming, laptops, and filesystems—but why is a Windows feature sneaking into our kernel?

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• LinuxFest Northwest 2025 Schedule
• LINUX Unplugged LIVE Sunday — Sunday 10:00 AM · 1h · HC 108
• Linux-Powered Payments: Running a Lightning Node with nix-bitcoin — Sunday 1:30 PM · 45 min · HC 204
• Linux 6.14
• Linux 6.14 from Linux Kernel Newbies
• Btrfs Support for uncached buffered I/O
• FUSE and io_uring
• Windows NT synchronization primitives for Linux
• NixOS/nixos-hardware: A collection of NixOS modules covering hardware quirks.
• NerfyGek0/MeshtasticIOAddon — Documentation of how to use Meshtastic serial and MQTT functionality to automation custom hardware
• Pick: Eloquent — Eloquent is a proofreading software for English and more than 20 other languages.
• Eloquent - Flathub
• languagetool — Style and Grammar Checker; it finds many errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect.
• LanguageTool standalone server

Canonical's VP of Engineering for Ubuntu reveals why they're swapping coreutils for Rust-built tools. Then we break down the GNOME 48 release, and why this one is special.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Jon Seager
• Engineering Ubuntu For The Next 20 Years — We should look deeply at the tools we ship with Ubuntu by default, selecting for tools that have resilience, performance and maintainability at their core.
• Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu — Starting with Ubuntu 25.10, my goal is to adopt some of these modern implementations as the default. My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.
• GNOME 48 Release Notes — The GNOME project is excited to introduce GNOME 48, a fresh release shaped by six months of hard work from our amazing community. Named “Bengaluru”, this release pays tribute to the dedication of the GNOME Asia 2024 organizers.
• awesome-tuis
• Pick: Ulauncher — Application launcher for Linux🐧
• Ulauncher on GitHub
• Hotkey In Wayland · Ulauncher Wiki
• Browse Ulauncher Extensions
• Gitmoji Extension
• Todoist task management Extension
• mariob88/ulauncher-todoist-integration
• Turn Off Screen Extension
• Home Assistant Extension
• qcasey/ulauncher-homeassistant
• Obsidian Extension

We have stories to share, guests joining us, insights from our week at Planet Nix, and Brent's big bombshell.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Flox - Nix for Simplicity & Scale — Flox is all about simplifying your development workflow—think reproducible, portable dev environments powered by Nix, but without the steep learning curve. Whether you’re a solo coder or part of a big team, Flox lets you manage and share environments effortlessly, so you can focus on building great software instead of wrestling with setup headaches.
• Planet Nix
• Talk - Kelsey Hightower's Perspective on Nix
• Talk - Aneesh from Anthropic - Docker Was Too Slow, So We Replaced It
• Talk - Eelco Dolstra Intros Configurable Flakes
• Talk - Mike Kelly - Building a Chromebook replacement with NixOS
• Eelco Dolstra - Configurable Flakes
• Aneesh Agrawal - Docker Was Too Slow, So We Replaced It: Nix in Production
• Fireside Chat with Kelsey Hightower: An Outsider’s Look at Nix
• Building a Chromebook replacement with NixOS
• Why do people love NixOS so much? | Mike Kelly
• How to convert an old ChromeBook into a NixBook | Mike Kelly
• Olympia Mike's Nixbook | GitHub
• Flox | Nix in the Wild
• The NixOS Foundation Board Announced
• Guilty Pleasures | The Launch 🚀 13
• Pick: pyatv: A client library for Apple TV and AirPlay devices — This is an asyncio python library for interacting with Apple TV and AirPlay devices. It mainly targets Apple TVs (all generations, including tvOS 15 and later), but also supports audio streaming via AirPlay to receivers like the HomePod, AirPort Express and third-party speakers. It can act as remote control to the Music app/iTunes in macOS.
• Pick: atv-desktop-remote: A simple app to allow you to control an Apple TV from your desktop — The latest version works with tvOS 15 and up. It requires Python 3 to be installed on the system to work properly.

We are digging into a superpower inside your Linux Kernel. How eBPF works, and how anyone can take advantage of it.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• eBPF Perf Tools 2019 | SCaLE 17x
• SCALE2019_eBPF_Perf_Tools.pdf
• Oracle Releases DTrace 2.0.0-1.14 For Linux Systems
• Gentoo Linux Touts DTrace 2.0 Support
• bpftrace (DTrace 2.0) for Linux 2018
• Full-system dynamic tracing on Linux using eBPF and bpftrace
• A thorough introduction to eBPF
• BCC - Tools for BPF-based Linux IO analysis, networking, monitoring, and more — The BPF Compiler Collection: BCC or BPF Compiler Collection is a set of tools leveraging eBPF for kernel tracing, Linux IO analysis, networking, monitoring, and more.
• BCC Tutorial
• xdp-tools: Utilities and example programs for use with XDP
• ply: a dynamic tracer for Linux
• Liam's Multi-Monitor Setup
• Pick: netop — Network Top -- Help you monitor network traffic with bpf
• Pick: bpftune — bpftune aims to provide lightweight, always-on auto-tuning of system behaviour.

We're pre-gaming two of the biggest Linux events of the year. Engineers, organizers, and surprise guests are dropping by to give us the scoop before it all begins.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• SCALE 2025 Meetup — El Cholo Cafe Pasadena - Saturday, Mar 8, 2025, 7:00 PM
• Planet Nix — March 6th-7th, 2025 @ Pasadena, CA at the Southern California Linux Expo.
• Flox - Your dev environment, everywhere — Flox help teams focus on building fast by providing reproducible environments that span the entire software lifecycle. With Flox, developers can create environments that contain all of the tools and frameworks they need, binding them with the software they ship into the world.
• Kelsey Hightower on X
• kelseyhightower on GitHub
• Kelsey Hightower on LinkedIn
• Robert Hernandez SCaLE Profile
• Fireside Chat: An Outsider’s Look at Nix - Ron Efroni, Kelsey Hightower
• Learn Nix the Fun Way - Farid Zakaria
• Docker Was Too Slow, So We Replaced It: Nix in Production -
• Planet Nix FAQ
• nix.conf - Adding GitHub Access Tokens — Access tokens used to access protected GitHub, GitLab, or other locations requiring token-based authentication.
• Olympia Mike's nixbook
• peterfajdiga/karousel: Scrollable tiling Kwin script
• YaLTeR/niri: A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.
• paperwm/PaperWM: Tiled scrollable window management for GNOME Shell
• Libro.fm — Your Independent Bookstore for Digital Audiobooks
• Pick: OpenAudible-To-AudibleBookShelf — This script automates the process of moving audiobook files from OpenAudible or Libation to an organized folder structure and updates AudioBookShelf accordingly. It handles file organization, metadata mapping, and interaction with the AudioBookShelf API.

There have been major Rust developments in the Linux Kernel; we discuss what's new and how it will impact the future. Plus, we're joined by a special guest.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Get started with River
• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Planet Nix - Speakers
• SCALE 22x
• Greg Kroah-Hartman Makes A Compelling Case For New Linux Kernel Drivers To Be Written In Rust — Yes, mixed language codebases are rough, and hard to maintain, but we are kernel developers dammit, we've been maintaining and strengthening Linux for longer than anyone ever thought was going to be possible. We've turned our development model into a well-oiled engineering marvel creating something that no one else has ever been able to accomplish. Adding another language really shouldn't be a problem, we've handled much worse things in the past and we shouldn't give up now on wanting to ensure that our project succeeds for the next 20+ years. We've got to keep pushing forward when confronted with new good ideas, and embrace the people offering to join us in actually doing the work to help make sure that we all succeed together.
• Kees Cook on Rust in the kernel — In other words, I don't see any reason to focus on replacing existing code -- doing so would actually carry a lot of risk. But writing new stuff in Rust is very effective. Old code is more stable and has fewer bugs already, and yet, we're still going to continue the work of hardening C, because we still need to shake those bugs out. But new code can be written in Rust, and not have any of these classes of bugs at all from day one.
• Linus Re: Rust kernel policy — You are not forced to take any Rust code, or care about any Rust code in the DMA code. You can ignore it. But "ignore the Rust side" automatically also means that you don't have any say on the Rust side.
• Texas Linux Fest is back again in 2025!
• Pick: treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader — Allows you to bulk download all your Kindle eBook in a more automated fashion. This tool allows you to create backup copies of the books you've already purchased.
• Amazon removes your right to download Kindle books
• Amazon will stop allowing Kindle book downloads to your PC soon
• How to Download Kindle Books to Your Computer Before Amazon Kills the Feature
• Simplest Way to Remove DRM from Books – No Kindle Serial Number Needed!
• Pick: nping — 🏎 Nping mean NB Ping, A Ping Tool in Rust with Real-Time Data and Visualizations

Our FreeBSD Challenge comes to a close, and chances are one of us will be paying the Windows tax.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Planet Nix
• Flox — Your dev environment, everywhere
• The Launch 🚀 09: The Eagle has Landed
• The Rules of the FreeBSD Challenge
• libluksde — Library and tools to access LUKS Disk Encryption encrypted volumes
• linuxulator-steam-utils — Linux Steam on FreeBSD
• bhyve/Windows - FreeBSD Wiki
• Chapter 12. Linux Binary Compatibility
• doas - dedicated openbsd application subexecutor
• doas mastery
• Chapter 33. Firewalls
• ardour « audio - ports - FreeBSD ports tree
• jellyfin « multimedia - ports - FreeBSD ports tree
• Hank wrote in about his testing with a Pi4
• FreeBSD pi4 tweak — I got lucky - that was posted two days before I gave this a go. I installed on a 4GB Pi 4B.
• Hank's BSD Notes — IMO should get a point just for figuring out how to configure NTP and time zone. Sheesh!
• Mizutamari — User-friendly Wine front-end primarily for FreeBSD
• Oldschool Gaming on FreeBSD
• Games - GhostBSD Wiki
• What’s Coming for Future Releases of GhostBSD? — We're making some important changes to how GhostBSD is built and released to provide a better, more stable experience for our users.
• Annual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!
• Gene's Portable Screen
• NetBSD Root on ZFS
• Music Assistant — Music Assistant is a free, opensource Media library manager that connects to your streaming services and a wide range of connected speakers.
• Pick: HedgeDoc — HedgeDoc lets you create real-time collaborative markdown notes.
• Pick: Add Water — A utility app to easily install the Firefox GNOME Theme and automatically update it in the background. This theme keeps Firefox fashionable within the GNOME design ecosystem, and provides many helpful features to customize the interface to make browsing even more pleasant

It's week one of our FreeBSD challenge, and for one of us, that penalty Windows install looks uncomfortably close! Plus, Zach Mitchell joins us to update us on Planet Nix.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• LINUX Unplugged - 2025 FreeBSD Challenge Rules.md
• Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit
• FreeBSD 14.0 on aarch64 Raspberry Pi 4/400 - Download, Install & Configure
• LinuxBoot: Booting FreeBSD from Linux
• EuroBSDCon booting FreeBSD using Linux
• Provisioning LinuxBoot Images for FreeBSD
• FreeBSD Handbook: Chapter 1. Bootstrapping and Kernel Initialization
• FreeBSD Handbook: Chapter 15. The FreeBSD Booting Process
• How to Manage FreeBSD Boot Process?
• LinuxBoot: let Linux do it!
• LinuxBoot Introduction
• LinuxBoot on GitHub
• Annual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!
• Planet Nix — March 6th-7th, 2025 in Pasadena, CA
• Zach Mitchell
• LINUX Unplugged 554: SCaLEing Nix
• LINUX Unplugged 538: Surprisingly Smooth Transition
• LFNW2025 - April 25 - 27, 2025 • Bellingham Technical College
• Pick: GarminDB — Download and parse data from Garmin Connect or a Garmin watch, FitBit CSV, and MS Health CSV files into and analyze data in Sqlite serverless databases with Jupyter notebooks.