LINUX Unplugged

SUSE had an awkward week; we breakdown the very mixed launch of SUSE Liberty Linux.

Plus, we've cracked what's driving Linux Distribution adoption these days.

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• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.

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• Pictures of Brent's Server Cabinet Built — Some pics of the sweet server cabinet @brentgervais built this last weekend at the @jupitersignal studio.
• Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup
• Flathub to verify first-party apps and allow developers to collect monies — Flathub is going to gain a way to process and verify apps from first-party teams. As in, developers who directly publish their app and manage the Flatpak package process for Flathub.
• SUSE Liberty Linux Announced For Mixed Linux Environments — SUSE Liberty Linux is a new technology and support offering that provides customers a unified support experience for managing their heterogeneous IT environments.
• SUSE announces something for those who miss the old CentOS: Liberty Linux — SUSE Liberty Linux is a new technology and support offering that provides customers a unified support experience for managing their heterogeneous IT environments.
• Consistent-Lab-5595 comments on Suse Liberty Linux announcement - Is this a RHEL or CentOS clone ?
• New Features in Linux Mint 20.3 ‘Una’ Cinnamon Edition — Linux Mint 20.3 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2025.
• Edge ISO available for Linux Mint 20.3 — This image is made for people whose hardware is too new to boot the 5.4 LTS kernel included in Linux Mint 20.3. It ships with kernel 5.13.0-25 instead.
• mainline: A continuation of the free version of ukuu. — A tool for installing the latest Linux kernels on Ubuntu-based distributions.
• All Roads Lead to Arch: The Evolution of Linux Distros Used for Gaming Over Time — Ubuntu used to be a juggernaut, a staple in the world of Linux Gaming. Ubuntu was the default go-to distro for many users for probably a decade. It’s still an important distro at almost 20% share in our graph, but it’s not the first one anymore.
• Linux Desktop Gaming Product Manager
• Canonical hiring a Desktop Gaming Product Manager for Ubuntu Linux
• Fountain podcast app
• Pick: ssh-tools — Making SSH more convenient.

We make some last-minute changes to our server setup and catch up on a bunch of thought-provoking feedback.

Special Guests: Martin Wimpress and Neal Gompa.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Do You Put Linux/Distro Stickers On Your Machine?
• ChrisLAS Birthday Party Hang and Chow
• Jupiter Extras — Why Linux Will Win in 20 Years
• Denver Road Trip Memories — During our summer road trip to Denver we had the microphone's recording and captured some great moments.
• Denver Road Trip Tech — Our road trip machine is loaded up from solar to networking, the tech that made working, living, and recording from the road possible for 44 days and over 2,200 miles.
• Dev corrupts NPM libs ‘colors’ and ‘faker’ breaking thousands of apps
• Crypto Theses for 2022
• Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
• ZFS has a history of not handling 15+ drive vdevs well.
• bismuth — KDE Plasma extension, that lets you tile your windows automatically and manage them via keyboard, just like in classical tiling window managers (i3, dwm or XMonad).
• Ideas on growing the Flathub Community in 2022

A new initiative uses open source to keep podcasting decentralized and add new features.

We chatted with Dave Jones behind the Podcast Index.

Special Guest: Dave Jones.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
• Core Contributor Membership: Use promo code summer - Support the show, and take $1 off the lifetime of your membership! Promo Code: Summer

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• ClockworkPi DevTerm
• ChrisLAS Birthday Party Hang and Chow | Meetup
• Jupiter Extras — Surprise podcasts from your friends at Jupiter Broadcasting
• Jupiter Extras: Why Linux Will Win in 20 Years
• Podcast Index
• Podping — Distributed notification system for new podcast episodes
• No Agenda Show
• Podcast Index - GitHub
• Podcasting 2.0 Podcast
• lightning-keysend — Send funds to a node without an invoice
• Hive Blockchain
• Castamatic
• Fountain — Share podcast clips and support your favourite creators directly with Bitcoin
• Podcast Index - Apps
• Podcast Index - Docs
• Podcast Index Mastodon
• Fireside
• United States Dollar price calculator and converter
• Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI)
• Chris' Lightning Node — 037d284d2d7e6cec7623adbe600450a73b42fb90800989f05a862464b05408df39

Our new server setup is bonkers, but we love it.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Canonical Careers - Linux Desktop Gaming Product Manager — We are excited to create the role of Desktop Gaming Product Manager, to make Ubuntu the best Linux desktop for gaming.
• Arch Wiki - ZFS
• Kindle Comic Converter — Kindle Comic Converter is an app that allows you to transform your PNG, JPG, GIF, CBZ, CBR and CB7 files into EPUB or MOBI format e-books. Preparing comics and manga for your E-Ink device was never easier.
• Kindle Comic Converter on Flathub
• Linux Action Show Season 2 preview… Kindle Oops — Bryan and Chris give you a preview on Season 2's first episode of The Linux Action Show! Watch a take that you won't see in the final episode.

We do our best to predict what will happen in 2022, and own up to what we thought might happen in 2021.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Drew DeVore, and Joe Ressington.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.

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Links:

• Updated Rust Code For Linux Kernel Patches Posted
• Dell Technologies Announces Completion of VMware Spin-off
• Pop!_OS's GNOME Shell Repo
• Steam Tracker

It's the second annual Unplugged Tuxies; our community votes on the best projects, distros, desktops, and services of 2021.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.

Support LINUX Unplugged

We each try out the new Pop_OS! and Carl Richell from System76 joins us to get into the details.

Plus why we feel Pop might be the new Ubuntu.

Special Guest: Carl Richell.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Amazon Is Hiring DXVK, Mesa & Proton Linux Developers For Luna Cloud Gaming - Phoronix — As part of the work on Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service, the company has put out job openings of great match to our audience... An Amazon engineer did confirm that this indeed is for genuine Linux gaming engineers.
• New Server Christening Get Together — Lets get together, share some foods, and power up the new Jupiter Broadcasting local server. Then stick around and listen in to a live recording of LINUX Unplugged from the studio.
• System76 Blog — Pop!_OS 21.10 has landed!
• Pop!_OS 21.10 Introduces Mini Application Menu
• Jeremy Soller on Twitter — Pop switched the build system and repositories away from http://launchpad.net to our own system http://apt.pop-os.org/release for 21.10 in order to improve our control of package updates and reduce the time to build, test, and release them. It is not related to changing bases.
• Linode Security Digest December 12-19, 2021
• Pop!_OS Auto Tiling Tutorial
• Recovery Partition - System76 Support — The Recovery Partition is a full copy of the Pop!_OS installation disk. It can be used exactly the same as if a live disk copy of Pop!_OS was booted from a USB drive.
• Add Recovery To Your Pop!_OS — If you like me, fellow reader, you may be using a more custom partition setup. Unfortunately, anything other than the default clean install on Pop!_OS means you do not get the automatically generated recovery partition of goodness. Here's a small guide over how to get the setup on an already existing install.
• casper — A hook for initramfs-tools to boot live systems.
• pop-os/launcher — Modular IPC-based desktop launcher service.
• Raycast — Raycast is a blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher. It lets you complete tasks, calculate, share common links, and much more.
• Pick: n.eko — A self hosted virtual browser that runs in docker and uses WebRTC.
• Ventoy — With ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly.

This was not the year of the Linux Desktop. We’ve been slacking on the mailbag, so we go on a feedback frenzy and answer some hard questions about desktop Linux.

Special Guests: Carl George and Martin Wimpress.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
• Jupiter Signal Network Membership: Support all the shows, get all the perks, and save a bit for the holidays. Use promo code: thesignal

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Jupiter Extras: Cryptocurrency Chat with Chris
• Introducing CentOS Stream 9 — CentOS Stream is a continuous-delivery distribution providing each point-release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
• EPEL 9 is now available! — This is the culmination of five months of work between the EPEL Steering Committee, the Fedora Infrastructure and Release Engineering team, and other contributors.
• Linux Action News 218
• Linux Action News 064
• LINUX Unplugged 387: Tumbling Into the New Year!
• Changes/Switch RPMs to zstd compression - Fedora Project Wiki
• Search through all the show notes of all the shows!
• Pick: audapolis — An editor for spoken-word audio with automatic transcription.

The Director of EndlessOS joins us to respond to recent Flatpak criticism.

We take the opportunity to expand on the overall effort to solve Linux fragmentation.

Special Guests: Martin Wimpress, Neal Gompa, and Will Thompson.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Pocket Popcorn Computer — Finally, a handheld Linux device with a high-definition 1080p display and large battery life. Pocket P.C. is your hacker terminal on-the-go.
• On Flatpak disk usage and deduplication – Will Thompson’s GNOME-ish blog — There is a blog post doing the rounds asserting that Flatpak Is Not The Future. The post is really long, and it seems unlikely that I and the author will ever agree on this topic, so I’m only going to talk about a couple of paragraphs about disk usage and sharing of runtimes between apps which caught my eye.
• Bustle — Graphical D-Bus message analyser and profiler.
• Gnome Initial Setup
• Endless OS Foundation — Our mission is to help all people and communities connect with technology.
• Will sometimes does other stuff and writes about it
• Flatpak Is Not the Future - Ludocode — Flatpak calls itself “the future of application distribution”. I am not a fan. I’m going to outline here some of the technical, security and usability problems with Flatpak and others. I’ll try to avoid addressing “fixable” problems (like theming) and instead focus on fundamental problems inherent in their design. I aim to convince you that these are not the future of desktop Linux apps.
• docker-slim — Don’t change anything in your Docker container image and minify it by up to 30x
• Flatseal — Flatseal is a graphical utility to review and modify permissions from your Flatpak applications.
• Bruch with Brent with Stuart Langridge — Brent sits down with Stuart Langridge, co-host of Bad Voltage, for an exploration of open source’s “final mile”, the text and language interface as a UX opportunity, terminals vs. search engines, Darwinian processes and crab-bucketism in software development, and more.
• Seeking contractors for work on Flathub project — GNOME has a donor who is interested in supporting financial sustainability for app developers and removing barriers to an inclusive ecosystem. Flathub would like to use these funds to work with a contractor for a short-term project and make steps towards supporting application developers being able to request payments (whether donations or subscriptions).

We revisit some old assumptions about the open-source Plex-alternative, Jellyfin. We each try it out, and along the way, gain a few insights about open source.

Sponsored By:

• Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
• A Cloud Guru: By the end of this course, you will feel comfortable working with a large variety of networking tools and configurations to manage complex Linux networking implementations.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Register for Ohio LinuxFest 2021
• Kodi “Matrix” 19.3 Release — Okay, we know that we've only just released 19.2, and some of you are probably even still waiting for that, but that's a big part of the reason we need to push out a new build. We still had some challenges with the Xbox release, and some other issues came to light that we didn't want to ignore - so, rather than get into platform-specific point releases, we thought we'd just nudge up to 19.3 and go for it.
• Jellyfin — Jellyfin is the volunteer-built media solution that puts you in control of your media. Stream to any device from your own server, with no strings attached. Your media, your server, your way.
• Plex — Plex brings together all the media that matters to you. Your personal collection will look beautiful alongside stellar streaming content.
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet Carrier Board for Raspberry Pi CM4 4 with 4GB RAM/ 32GB eMMC — It features a variety of I/O peripherals such as MIPI CSI, MIPI DSI, micro-HDMI to connect displays/ cameras, a standard 9-pin USB 3.0 header for more USB expansion, a micro-SD card slot, and an FPC connector while maintaining a compact form factor! This board is ideal for HTPC makers, Linux developers, software router enthusiasts, and the majority of regular Raspberry Pi users.
• Client Spotlight: Infuse for tvOS and iOS - Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System — With Infuse, it's easy to connect to with automatic server discovery. Once connected, you can enjoy direct playback (no transcoding required) for almost all formats.
• Jellyfin Plugin for Kodi — The Jellyfin for Kodi add-on combines the best of Kodi - ultra smooth navigation, beautiful UIs and playback of any file under the sun, and Jellyfin - the most powerful open source multi-client media metadata indexer and server. You can now retire your MySQL setup in favor of a more flexible setup.
• catt — Cast All The Things allows you to send videos from many, many online sources to your Chromecast.
• Self-Hosted Podcast — Discover new software and hardware to get the best out of your network, control smart devices, and secure your data on cloud services.
• Perfect Media Server — Perfect Media Server began life as a series of blog posts over at blog.linuxserver.io. Those posts continue to be very popular but a blog post (or three) can only get you so far... I therefore introduce perfectmediaserver.com - a wiki format information repository detailing all you need to know to build a free, open and modular media server that will last for many, many years.
• Jellyfin Android App
• Jellyfin for Android TV
• Jellyfin Roku App
• Jellyfish Bitrate Test Files
• jellyfin-mpv-shim — MPV Cast Client for Jellyfin.
• Pick: Junction — Set Junction as the default application for a resource and let it do the rest. Junction will pop up and offer multiple options to handle it.
• Junction on Flathub