We each spent the week on our own projects, breaking then fixing things. Now we're back to compare progress, and a few lessons learned.

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• Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!
• Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• LinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
• PabloVitasso/esphome-chinbasto — A custom ESPHome component for controlling Chinese Webasto heaters using ESP32.
• Hacking the Chinese Diesel Heater Communications Protocol.pdf - Ray Jones - GitLab
• timmchugh11/Chinese-Diesel-Heater---ESPHome
• OpenCode | The open source AI coding agent
• anomalyco/opencode: The open source coding agent.
• Hunter Alpha - API Pricing & Providers | OpenRouter
• ESPHome - Smart Home Made Simple
• Home Assistant
• ESP32 Wi-Fi & Bluetooth SoC | Espressif Systems
• nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware: Lua based interactive firmware for ESP8266, ESP8285 and ESP32
• NodeMCU-32S Development Board Details, Pinout, Specs
• Amazon.com: ESP-32S USB-C Development Board + ESP32 Terminal Board
• agent-browser-protocol — Deterministic browser automation.
• camofox-browser — Headless browser automation server for AI agents.
• chrome-devtools-mcp — Chrome DevTools for coding agents
• firefox-devtools-mcp — Model Context Protocol server for Firefox DevTools
• LittleFOX-MCP — Model Context Protocol server for Firefox
• Chrome DevTools MCP Debug — Let your Coding Agent debug your browser session
• LFNW2026 - Back to Root
• Brunch with Brent: Jason Spisak Part 1 | Jupiter EXTRAS 40
• Brunch with Brent: Jason Spisak Part 2 | Jupiter EXTRAS 41
• Pick: LosslessCut — Simple and ultra fast cross platform tool for lossless trimming/cutting of video and audio files.
• LosslessCut on GitHub
• LosslessCut on Flathub
• Pick: CanIRun.ai — Can your machine run AI models?
• Pick: llmfit — Hundreds of models & providers. One command to find what runs on your hardware.

After experiencing Planet Nix and SCaLE, we come back convinced the next phase of Linux is already taking shape.

Sponsored By:

• Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
• SCaLE 23x — SCALE is North America's largest community-run open source conference.
• Jupiter Broadcasting's SCaLE Matrix room
• SCaLE 23x - YouTube — SCaLE 23x live streams, talks, and more.
• LinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
• Flox.dev
• Flox: Developer environments you can take with you - GitHub — Flox is a virtual environment and package manager all in one. With Flox you create environments that layer and replace dependencies just where it matters, making them portable across the full software lifecycle.
• Keynote: Privacy’s Defender - Fighting Digital Surveillance for over Thirty Years | SCALE
• Cindy Cohn | SCALE
• noblepayne/nix-anywhere-else-talk — A Slidev presentation about the "dark arts" of ELF surgery and Nix, built entirely with Nix. This talk explores how patchelf and a deep understanding of the Executable and Linkable Format can make binaries portable in both directions: bringing foreign tools into NixOS, and taking Nix-built artifacts out to the rest of the world.
• DeepComputing — Advancing the adoption and implementation of RISC-V
• Roxane Fischer - Anyshift.io
• Determinate is the future of Nix today: Wasm, provenance, and flake schemas
• EFF Privacy’s Defender - Fighting Digital Surveillance for over Thirty Years | SCALE
• Cindy Cohn - SCaLE — Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all the people of the world.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation - Defending your rights in the digital world
• llama.cpp: LLM inference in C/C++
• mangowm - Mango Wayland Compositor — Practical and powerful wayland compositor (dwm but wayland)
• The Open Source AI Definition 1.0 - Open Source Initiative
• Pick: sone — Native TIDAL desktop client for Linux. Modern UI, custom themes, and bit-perfect lossless audio up to 24-bit/192kHz via exclusive ALSA. License: GPL-3
• Pick: qmd — mini cli search engine for your docs, knowledge bases, meeting notes, whatever. Tracking current sota approaches while being all local. License: MIT
• Pick: mtr — Combines the functionality of 'traceroute' and 'ping' in a single network diagnostic tool. License: GPL-2
• MTR - Welcome Home Brent

We take KDE Linux for a spin and push it a little too far. Plus, a friend of the show stops by with a fresh tool: Nebula Commander.

Sponsored By:

• Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
• PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
• Pasadena Linux Party, Fri, Mar 6, 2026, 6:00 PM
• KDE Linux - KDE Community Wiki
• Beta (Enthusiast & Stable editions) · KDE Linux · GitLab
• Install Software Not Available in Discover - KDE Community
• KDE Linux / Kapsule · GitLab
• suikan4github/Using-tailscale-client-on-an-Immutable-OS
• xuars/kdelinux-tailscale
• Nix - KDE Community
• Fitting Everything Together — TLDR: Hermetic /usr/ is awesome; let's popularize image-based OSes with modernized security properties built around immutability, SecureBoot, TPM2, adaptability, auto-updating, factory reset, uniformity – built from traditional distribution packages, but deployed via images.
• Nebula Commander
• DEMO Nebula Commander
• Nebula Commander GitHub — Nebula Commander is a self-hosted control plane for nebula overlay networks.
• Star Trek Comm Badge for Home Assistant Voice Control
• Pick: hcloud-upload-image — Quickly upload any raw disk images into your Hetzner Cloud projects!
• Pick: Launcher Studio — Launcher Studio is a GTK4 desktop application for creating and managing .desktop files on Linux.
• Launcher Studio on Flathub
• Pick: tinyproxy — A light-weight HTTP/HTTPS proxy daemon for POSIX operating systems
• Pick: socks-to-http-proxy — An executable to convert SOCKS5 proxy into HTTP proxy

Planet Nix and SCaLE are just days away, and we're getting a head start with two guests, the tech, and the trends shaping open source. Our trip starts here!

Sponsored By:

• Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
• PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
• Pasadena Linux Party Meetup
• stahnma (Michael Stahnke)
• Flox, Nix, and Reproducible Software Systems with Michael Stahnke - Software Engineering Daily
• Pro OpenSSH (Expert's Voice in Open Source): Stahnke, Michael
• Nix and AI, are we there yet? | SCALE
• stahnma/mandatoryFun
• Post by @kelseyhightower.com — Bluesky — I don't care about LLMs or AI. I care about people. AI is just a tool to me. Tools enable people to help or harm at a scale beyond their natural abilities. I care about how people treat each other using these tools.
• distrostru's gatus config
• Status Page On Demand | Gatus
• MimiClaw — MimiClaw turns a tiny ESP32-S3 board into a personal AI assistant.
• hrwtech/openclaw-esp32: OpenClaw on your Arduino ESP32 devices
• Pick: WebsocketCAM — Access Android camera via WebSocket client API and run AI / computer vision tasks with ease on live camera stream
• Pick: ChrisLAS/openclaw-mcp-bridge — OpenClaw plugin that bridges any MCP HTTP server as native tools. The missing piece between OpenClaw + Ollama and the MCP ecosystem.
• Pick: ChrisLAS/freshrss-mcp — A simple MCP server to stand in front of your FreshRSS Server
• Pick: wechsel — A Cli Utility to replace home folders with symlinks to project folders
• wechsel-extension: A Gnome Extension for Project Switching

We were minutes away from shutting down our Matrix server when the Discord news hit. Now we're not just keeping it, we're doubling down. Can open source seize this moment?

Sponsored By:

• Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
• PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
• Pasadena Linux Party Meetup
• Discord to roll out age verification next month
• Hack of age verification firm may have exposed 70,000 Discord users’ ID photos
• Discord's Age Verification Has A Weird Link To Palantir's Peter Thiel
• NULLFS and OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE Features Merged For Linux 7.0
• OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE To Provide A Security and Performance Win For Dealing With Containers
• All about initramfs
• pivot_root implementation and constraints
• TrueNAS Scale
• ZimaOS — A Simplified, Focused and Open NAS OS Supports all X86-64 hardware.
• Github: ZimaOS
• Clan — opinionated NixOS peer-to-peer computer management framework
• What is Clan? - Documentation
• clan-lol/clan-core: Build your own clan
• ConnecTen internet
• Case Study: Fortress Outdoor Router
• Pick: booklog — B{ook}log is a self-hosted, multi-user book tracking platform for avid readers. Each user maintains a personal library and wishlist, with per-user readings, stats, and timeline.
• Pick: whosthere — Local Area Network discovery tool with an interactive Terminal User Interface (TUI) written in Go. Discover, explore, and understand your LAN in an intuitive way. Knock Knock.. who's there? 🚪
• Pick: Weylus — Use your tablet as graphic tablet/touch screen on your computer.

The news this week highlights shifts in Linux from multiple angles. What's evolving, why it matters, and that moment where the future actually works.

Sponsored By:

• Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
• PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
• Pasadena Linux Party Meetup
• Valve explains why it hasn’t announced release dates for its new hardware, now plans for “first half of the year” — Valve now says all three products will ship “in the first half of the year.”
• Latest VirtualBox Code Begins Supporting KVM Backend — Support for KVM or other native OS hypervisors in conjunction with VirtualBox has long been sought and it's finally becoming a reality.
• bcachefs-tools v1.36.1 — Interactive TUI for monitoring various filesystem internals, slowpaths and device performance, with duration and frequency tracking for various events. Helpful for diagnosing performance issues.
• bcachefs v1.36.1 is out - next release will be erasure coding : r/bcachefs
• bcachefs PSA: if you're on 1.33-1.35, upgrade asap — Several people have been hit by this, so - please upgrade asap.
• Mattermost — Mattermost is an open source platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle.
• Debian's CI Data No Longer Publicly Browseable Due To LLM Scrapers / Bot Traffic
• Venice AI - Private AI for Unlimited Creative Freedom
• ThinkBox V2 - A Custom 4-Bay SATA/SAS HDD NAS for Your Lenovo M720Q
• Code for Climate 2026 — The Mad Botter Earth Day Open Source Challenge — We're doing our Earth Day open-source competition again The Mad Botter INC. Once again featuring System76 hardware and this time with dual tracks for college and non-college students.
• Michael Dominick on X - Earth Day Open Source Challenge
• Red5d/podcast_mcp — MCP server for accessing Podcasting 2.0 RSS feed episode data. "I've really only tested it with JB feeds!"
• Pick: Plexus — Remove the fear of Android app compatibility on de-Googled devices.
• Plexus-app: GitHub
• Pick: ReinschriftTodo — Reinschrift combines a native GNOME interface with the simplicity of plain text. Your tasks remain a normal Markdown file – easy to back up, versionable via Git, and editable on any device with your favorite editor.
• Reinschrift on Flathub

We stress tested open source AI agents this week. What actually held up, and where it falls apart. Plus Brent's $20 Wi-Fi upgrade.

Sponsored By:

• Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
• Agenda - PlanetNix 2026
• SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
• Pasadena Linux Party Meetup
• LINUX Unplugged 650: This Old Network — We rebuild a small office network around Linux, with an Unplugged twist and real-world constraints. Things don't go quite as expected...
• OpenWrt Wiki - Ad blocking
• AdBlock-fast — AdBlock-Fast is a high-performance ad-blocking service for OpenWrt that integrates with Dnsmasq, SmartDNS, and Unbound.
• OpenWrt Wiki - Supported Hardware Table
• Abe's volition — This is a public, sanitized version of my Abiverse repository for people to use and run their own Abes
• OpenClaw — Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use.
• Introducing OpenClaw
• openclaw on GitHub 🦞
• openclaw security Issues
• Practical changes could reduce AI energy demand by up to 90% – University College London
• moltbook — the front page of the agent internet
• SeloraBox - NixOS Edition — SeloraBox is a self-configuring home automation appliance based on NixOS, featuring automated installation, device claiming via QR code, and self-updating configuration management.
• nixtcloud: Nextcloud with NixOS in the backend and P2P connectivity enabled — Nixtcloud turns a Raspberry Pi or NanoPi NEO3 into a privacy-first, zero-config personal cloud — powered by NixOS, Nextcloud, and peer-to-peer remote access via Holesail. Built for the self-hosting crowd who want full control without constant babysitting.
• Holesail.io - Open Source P2P Reverse Proxy
• Pick: ml-sharp-pinokio — One-click 3D Gaussian Splatting generation from a single image.
• Pick: Gradia — Gradia helps you get your screenshots ready for sharing, whether quickly with friends or colleagues, or professionally with the entire world.

When your self-hosted services become infrastructure, breakage matters. We tackle monitoring that actually helps, alerts you won't ignore, and DNS for local, and multi-mesh network setups.

Sponsored By:

• Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Using Experimental Lighthouse DNS with Nebula | Nebula Docs
• PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
• SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
• Pasadena Linux Party Meetup
• NACME: ACME for Nebula PKI — ACME for Nebula PKI
• uptime-kuma — A fancy self-hosted monitoring tool
• telegraf-bcachefs-input
• bcachefs collector by ananthb
• ntfy.sh — Send push notifications to your phone via PUT/POST
• meshSidecar — Mesh network sidecars for NixOS Services
• Become a Core Contributor Member
• Jupiter.Party Network Membership
• NixOS Clinic Config
• NixRTR/nixos-router — NixOS Router Configuration
• Next Steps for Funding Contributors - Actual Budget
• WiFiman - WiFi Analyser
• RichARCH Install Guide
• RichARCH Hyprvibe Screenshot
• Pick: Switchyard — Modern rules-based URL launcher ready to replace your default browser.
• switchyard on GitHub
• Switchyard on Flathub

We rebuild a small office network around Linux, with an Unplugged twist and real-world constraints. Things don't go quite as expected...

Sponsored By:

• Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
• SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
• GEEKOM IT13 Mini PC 2026
• OpenWrt One
• Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus-E
• Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 — An updated Zigbee and Thread chip gives it the highest performance available, while providing a rock-solid, stable network.
• SYMFONISK Sonos WiFi bookshelf speaker — The speaker is a collaboration between IKEA and Sonos, so it easily integrates with other products from Sonos.
• IKEA SYMFONISK - Home Assistant — Support for devices by IKEA SYMFONISK in Home Assistant is provided by the Sonos integration.
• OpenCode — The open-source AI coding agent.
• OpenCode on GitHub
• [email protected]
• Actual — A local-first personal finance app.
• Pocket ID — A simple and easy-to-use OIDC provider that allows users to authenticate with their passkeys to your services.
• Pick: Pocket TTS — A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice.
• Pocket TTS on GitHub
• Pick: WebView Kiosk — Turn your Android device into a locked-down web page in fullscreen mode.
• webview-kiosk on GitHub

The storage apocalypse has arrived. An old friend drops by to talk survival strategies as prices explode, and we pitch our own unapologetically 90s approach to stretching storage.

Sponsored By:

• Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
• Planet Nix 2026: Call for Proposals
• SCaLE 23x | Registration
• LinuxFest Northwest 2026: Call for Speakers
• Michael Tunnell - YouTube
• TuxDigital
• LINUX Unplugged 596: Perilously Pontificated Predictions
• Phison CEO: SSD "Pricing Apocalypse" to Continue Through 2027
• HDD Prices Spike as AI Infrastructure and China’s PC Push Collide
• 2025 Cloud Pricing Trends: Big Three Shake Up Storage Costs
• Storage Apocalypse: Why SSDs and HDDs Are Becoming Impossibly Expensive
• Jensen Huang Flagged Data Storage as the Next AI Bottleneck
• Manufacturer Recertified Drives - ServerPartDeals.com
• Hard Disk Prices (US)
• Storage Price Tracker
• RackRat - eBay Rackmount Server Deal Finder
• r/HomelabSales$£€ - Reddit
• Smart Buy 10 Pack Bd-r Dl 50gb 6X Blu-ray Double Layer Recordable Disc
• BlueVault — A top-quality TUI app to manage Blu-ray cold storage archives on Linux.
• Pick: Kopia — Cross-platform backup tool for Windows, macOS & Linux with fast, incremental backups, client-side end-to-end encryption, compression and data deduplication. CLI and GUI included.
• Kopia Repository Server
• Pick: PowerISO — Create, Burn, Mount, Edit, Compress, Encrypt, Split, Extract ISO file, ISO/BIN converter, Virtual Drive
• PowerISO on Flathub
• Pick: CDEmu — CDemu is a software suite designed to emulate an optical drive and disc on the Linux operating system.
• Tellico — Collection management software, free and simple.