LINUX Unplugged

Can we live with openSUSE Tumbleweed?

We try three different builds and prepare ourselves for our journey into SUSE land. Our setups, what we liked, and what we still need to figure out.

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• 2021 Tuxie Nominations are Open!
• SteamOS 3.0 will have an immutable filesystem - a first for arch? — During the Steam Deck Development live steam, Valve finally gave us some good news and said that SteamOS 3.0 will be generally available for everyone to install on their computers. They also revealed that SteamOS 3.0 will have an immutable root file system to prevent unauthorized access and use PipeWire for audio.
• Greg’s Company Buys Ads openSUSE Search Results — "Hey, @openSUSE have you been seeing a drop in downloads recently? I might know why..."
• They did this to AlmaLinux at the end of July.
• AlmaLinux AMA
• Setting up a containerized environment - openSUSE User Documentation Project
• Using the Linode Graphical Shell (Glish)
• How to switch from OpenSUSE Leap to Tumbleweed?
• Transactional Updates | Administration Guide | SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1
• The Transactional Update Guide
• Manpage for transactional-update — Transactional-update updates the system in a transactional way; this means updates are atomic, so either the patches are fully applied or nothing is changed. The update does not influence the running system and it can be rolled back. To activate the changes, the system needs to be rebooted. To achieve this transactional-update is using Btrfs' snapshot mechanism, combined with the default distribution tools
• YaST Online Update
• OpenSUSE System Updates
• Snapper rollback with btrfs
• openSUSE/transactional-update — Do transactional updates on openSUSE/SUSE Linux Enterprise products with btrfs, snapshots and rollback.
• Open Build Service
• OpenSUSE Conference 2017
• Post that explains some of the drawbacks of transaction updates
• Zypper cheat sheet VERY handy and recommend it
• JupiterGarage.com
• Pick: mp4grep — Command-line tool that searches audio/video files.
• JB All Shows Feed

Is the true path to mastering Linux fully embracing the command line? Why it's time to change our mindset about the terminal.

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.
• 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.

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• Mars helicopter Ingenuity aces 15th Red Planet flight
• 2021 Tuxie Nominations are Open
• System76 Reportedly Developing Their Own Rust-Written Desktop, Not Based On GNOME — Word of System76 making their "own" desktop not based on GNOME does follow some recent friction between Pop!_OS and GNOME developers over their approach to theming and customizations.
• System76 Engineer Confirms Work on New Rust-Written Desktop, Not Based on GNOME
• Carl Richell on Twitter — We celebrated 16 years of @system76 today. It was a nice surprise.

We check-in with Fedora Project lead Matthew Miller on the state of the project, then conduct our exit interview with Fedora 34, and review Fedora 35.

What's new, what's changed, and what's broken. It's a Fedora special.

Special Guests: Matthew Miller 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.
• Core Contributor Membership: Use promo code summer - Support the show, and take $1 off the lifetime of your membership! Promo Code: Summer
• 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.

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• Writing a Linux-compatible kernel in Rust — I've been working on a new operating system kernel Kerla, written from scratch in Rust which aims to be Linux-compatible at the ABI level. In other words, support running unmodified Linux binaries!
• Roving With Perseverance - NASA Mars — Displays including full-scale models of Perseverance and the Ingenuity Mars helicopter will be on exhibit in museums across the country
• The Museum of Flight – NASA’s Mars Exploration Program — NASA’s Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter models will be on display, October 30, 2021 - April 3, 2022
• Remote desktop and screen casting in Wayland - GNOME Wiki! — Remote desktop functionality is not implemented in mutter but in GNOME Remote Desktop. GNOME Remote Desktop currently supports "screen share", also known as "remote assistance" mode through VNC or RDP. VNC support is provided via LibVNCServer and RDP support is provided via FreeRDP.
• GNOME remote desktop RDP setup guide — The RDP server in gnome-remote-desktop currently doesn't have the UI to setup yet. To be able to use the RDP server, the server certificate, private keyfile and credentials therefore need to be created manually.
• Zoom Supports Continued Access for Basic Users with Advertising Program
• Worth the wait: Fedora Linux 35 is here! — We switched the default audio system to PipeWire in Fedora Linux 34, and now we’re improving this by adding the new WirePlumber session manager. WirePlumber allows for more customization of the policy and rules for audio and video. It provides a richer development experience and adds bindings for most languages.
• WirePlumber 0.4.4 documentation — WirePlumber is a modular session / policy manager for PipeWire and a GObject-based high-level library that wraps PipeWire’s API, providing convenience for writing the daemon’s modules as well as external tools for managing PipeWire.
• Tom Wagner / Helvum — Helvum is a GTK-based patchbay for pipewire, inspired by the JACK tool catia.
• Common F35 bugs - Fedora Project Wiki
• DNF System Upgrade :: Fedora Docs
• Fedora Spins Prereleases
• Fedora Docs
• Changes/Restart User Service after Upgrade - Fedora Project Wiki
• Fedora Flathub Filter List
• Plasma Discover rpm-ostree_backend
• Ryujinx - Nintendo Switch Emulator — Ryujinx is an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator created by gdkchan and written in C#.
• Ryujinx on GitHub
• Ryujinx Setup & Configuration Guide

We attempt a live production over Starlink, and dig into the secrets of this giant Linux network in space.

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.

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• Some users experienced data loss on 21.10
• Ubuntu Makes Firefox Snap Default in 21.10
• How to Remove Firefox Snap from Ubuntu (21.10 +) And Alternatives
• Element One — Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place.
• Space Exploration Technologies on GitHub
• U-Boot Changes by SpaceX
• Linux Kernel Changes by SpaceX
• SpaceX openWRT Pull Requests
• PTP Changes by SpaceX
• Notes from a talk given by then head of Software at SpaceX, Jinnah Hosein — On 1-Aug-2017, Jinnah Hosein, who was the head of Software at SpaceX at the time, spoke to my company, Orbital Insight, in Mountain View California, and I took some notes.
• Summary of SpaceX Software AMA
• Stack Overflow Blog — Network protocols in orbit: Building a space-based ISP
• starlink-grpc-tools — This repository has a handful of tools for interacting with the gRPC service implemented on the Starlink user terminal (AKA "the dish").
• Set a Static Route for the App to talk to the Dish
• Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
• Starlink Coverage Tracker
• Croc — A tool that allows any two computers to simply and securely transfer files and folders.
• crocgui — A nice simple GUI for croc, designed for mobile use.
• kdeconnect-ios — Native iOS port of KDE Connect.

We try out POP!_OS on the Raspberry Pi 4, and chat with its creator Jeremy Soller from System76.

Plus our thoughts on the perfect Linux laptop right now, and the clever initiative Valve just launched for the Deck.

Special Guests: Jack Aboutboul, Jeremy Soller, 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.
• 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.

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• SpaceCadetPinball — Decompilation of 3D Pinball for Windows
• Pop!_OS Raspberry Pi 4 Beta — THIS IS A BETA. Bugs are expected and re-installs are likely.
• Pop!_OS Software Engineer Job Opening (Rust)
• Valve Launches “Steam Deck Verified” Program For Games That Run Well On The Steam Deck — Valve says they are reviewing the entire Steam catalog of games and will be categorizing each game for its level of compatibility with the Steam Deck. These ratings in turn will show up within the Steam Store and for users own game libraries.
• Apple Announces The M1 Pro / M1 Max, Asahi Linux Starts Eyeing Their Bring-Up — Meanwhile the Asahi Linux crew is preparing for their eventual bring-up of the new hardware. They have pre-ordered the M1 Pro MacBook Pro model and will be procuring the M1 Max model too.
• Hector Martin on Twitter — Asahi Linux on M1 Pro bring-up stream ~next week. Thanks to all my Patreon supporters for making this kind of thing possible!
• AlmaLinux ELevate — ELevate enables migration between major versions of RHEL® derivatives. Easily go from CentOS 7.x to any 8.x of your choice.
• AlmaLinux ELevate Demo - YouTube
• Bryan lets us know some neat functionality in the kernel…
• UTM — UTM employs Apple's Hypervisor virtualization framework to run ARM64 operating systems on Apple Silicon at near native speeds.
• ytcc — Command line tool to keep track of your favorite playlists on YouTube and many other places.
• rust-motd — Beautiful, useful MOTD generation with zero runtime dependencies.
• Pick: onetun — onetun opens a TCP port on your local system, from which traffic is forwarded to a TCP port on a peer in your WireGuard network. It requires no changes to your operating system's network interfaces: you don't need to have root access, or install any WireGuard tool on your local system for it to work.

Wimpy stops by with a new tool that will change your virtualization game, and we share our thoughts on Ubuntu 21.10 and take the flavor challenge.

Special Guest: 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.
• 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

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• Carl George on Twitter — "I’ve been playing around with matplotlib to chart this data over time. Due to the difference in scale it’s necessary to split into different ranges. The “Liberty” systems started showing up in August, with a high of 79 systems the week of 2021-09-06 to 2021-09-12."
• Microsoft transforms the Windows Subsystem for Linux into a Windows 11 app — “Our goals are to make WSL in the Microsoft Store the best way to install and use WSL, as you’ll be able to get the latest updates fastest through that route, and in the long term we’d like to move WSL users to use the store version.”
• A preview of WSL in the Microsoft Store is now available!
• Craig Loewen on Twitter — "A preview of WSL inside of the Microsoft Store is now available for Windows 11 machines!"
• Hayden Barnes on Twitter — "So many new goodies today! WSL in the Store, WSLg bundled with WSL, new WSL2 kernel version, a bunch of fixes for ARM64 👀, wsl.exe --mount, and a handful of nice refinements and fixes."
• Ubuntu 21.10 Release Date & New Features — Ubuntu 21.10 will be available to download from October 14, 2021.
• Ubuntu 21.10 Impish Indri - New Features and Release Date
• Ubuntu 21.10 is upon us, and it’s small changes for major improvements
• Ubuntu 19.10 To 21.10: AMD Zen 2 + Radeon Performance On Linux Over Two Years — Ubuntu 19.10 was the first release following the Zen 2 debut in the summer of 2019. The benchmarks today are looking at the Ubuntu 19.10 performance up against the Ubuntu 21.10 daily ISO in its near final form ahead of the official release on Thursday.
• MATE 1.26 released | MATE — The theme for this release has been adding new functionality to the MATE Desktop while maintaining the look and feel that we all know and love. While all the added features are surely quite exciting we also did not forget to do tons of bugfixing, modernising the code base and optimizing the performance.
• KDE Plasma desktop 5.22 Release Announcement — This time around, the big new feature is Adaptive Transparency: This means the panel and panel widgets will usually be pleasantly translucent, but will become entirely opaque if there are any maximized windows, to avoid any visual distractions when you need to focus.
• Bug #1944468 “Electron applications all crash upon launch”
• quickemu — Quickly create and run highly optimised desktop virtual machines for Linux, macOS and Windows; with just two commands. You decide what operating system you want to run and Quickemu will figure out the best way to do it for you.
• A GUI for Quickemu — Provides an interface for setting up new VMs with Quickget, starting and stopping existing VMs.
• PN50 review from Anandtech
• Phoronix Test Suite 10.6 Released With Various Improvements For Linux Benchmarking — Windows 11 support and various Windows improvements, a wide variety of Phoromatic fixes and improvements from cleaning-up/unifying the CSS to log improvements and making use of the new log viewer, and more.
• Why I have decided to step down from the AlmaLinux OS Foundation Board — "So, here we are. I am no longer on the board - and I am no longer deciding what is next for AlmaLinux OS Foundation. I will continue to be heavily involved in the day-to-day of AlmaLinux. CloudLinux and TuxCare will continue being just one of many corporate sponsors. benny Vasquez was voted to become a new chair of the board, and I am sure that the foundation and the board will flourish under her guidance."

It's the worst time ever to upgrade or buy a new PC, so we cover our favorite tips for getting the most out of your current hardware. Then we pit a 2014 desktop against a 2021 laptop and find out if our old clunker can beat the Thinkpad.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Christian F.K. Schaller, Jack Aboutboul, 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.
• 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.

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• It Seems Pop OS Linux Will Soon be Available on Raspberry Pi and Other ARM Devices — System76’s Principal Engineer and maintainer of Pop!_OS, Jeremy Soller shared a teaser photo on Twitter recently.
• PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack — With PipeWire having stabilized a lot for audio now we feel the time has come to go back to the video side of PipeWire and work to improve the state-of-art for video capture handling under Linux.
• PipeWire
• Linux Action News 209 — Why Linus believes keeping Linux fun is critical, the massive investment Fedora is about to make in video, and why we suspect Cloudflare's R2 service will make Amazon squirm.
• AlmaLinux OS Foundation Membership Opens to the Public — An individual can qualify for membership as anyone who uses AlmaLinux OS, contributes to AlmaLinux OS, provides services to the AlmaLinux OS community or otherwise supports the AlmaLinux OS. All past and present contributors or mirror maintainers would qualify as Contributor members.
• What AlmaLinux Foundation Membership Means for You - AlmaLinux OS Blog — We all own AlmaLinux now and no one can change that. Forever. Not CloudLinux, not any other corporation or anyone else. Our fate and future are in the hands of every member and is ours alone to control. We're no longer bound by one person, group or entity. It can not be bought nor sold, nor transferred or fought about.
• Unofficial user repositories/Repo-ck - ArchWiki
• tubearchivist has a docker-compose.yml
• Which “server” distro should we go with next? | StrawPoll.com
• Pick: Helvum — Helvum is a GTK-based patchbay for pipewire, inspired by the JACK tool catia.
• Pick: tubesync — Syncs YouTube channels and playlists to a locally hosted media server.

Sometimes things go wrong; this week, we admit we've got a problem.

Plus new details about the Steam Deck everyone has missed, and an old friend stops by the show with an update.

Special Guest: Danielle Foré.

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

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• Amazon’s Astro home robot is like having Alexa on wheels — Amazon claims the Astro can do a wide variety of things you might want from a home robot. It can map out your floor plan and obey commands to go to a specific room. It can recognize faces and deliver items to a specific person.
• “Intel Software Defined Silicon” Coming To Linux For Activating Extra Licensed Hardware Features — The Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) driver is for supporting the "post-manufacturing mechanism for activating additional silicon features."
• One of the Steam Deck’s biggest hurdles just disappeared: EAC has come to Linux and BattlEye is inbound — While developers would still need to patch their games, this immediately means some of the most popular games on Steam are now theoretically within reach, including Apex Legends, Dead by Daylight, and War Thunder, which are all among the top 25 games on Steam.
• Syscall User Dispatch — The Linux Kernel documentation — Compatibility layers like Wine need a way to efficiently emulate system calls of only a part of their process - the part that has the incompatible code - while being able to execute native syscalls without a high performance penalty on the native part of the process. Syscall User Dispatch brings the filtering of the syscall dispatcher address back to userspace.
• Steam Deck :: FAQ
• Poll: Which “server” distro should we go with next? — So it's time to replace our garage server... We've been running Arch, and so far it's worked mostly great. Should we keep pushing our luck, or try something new?
• PowerEdge R820 Rack Server Details
• PhoneTrack - Nextcloud Apps — PhoneTrack is a Nextcloud application to track and store mobile device's locations.
• Pick: tubearchivist — Your self-hosted YouTube media server.

A serious problem is brewing in Desktop Linux that hasn't impacted end users yet, but will soon. We break down why distribution makers are getting upset and explain what's next.

Plus, an update on Matrix and the recent upgrades we made to our server.

Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Joshua Strobl.

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

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• Building an Alternative Ecosystem | Joshua Strobl — While we have been consistent in this vision, though certainly not without flaws in its execution, we have seen a significant shift from GNOME’s development efforts and vision being focused from their desktop experience, to a heavier focus on mobile-to-desktop application scalability and a more touch-oriented, almost iPadOS like user experience that does not (in our opinion) provide the most optimized experience for laptop and desktop users.
• The Truth they are not telling you about “Themes” – Rust in Peace — There seems to be some confusion when it comes to libadwaita’s stylesheet and coloring APIs.
• Red Hat’s Upstream Contributions Are Making For A Great Fedora Workstation 35 - Phoronix — Fedora Workstation 35 will hopefully be out at the end of October (currently the beta is running behind schedule) and when it does ship it's once again at the bleeding-edge of Linux features.
• GNOME 41 has new multitasking settings!
• SeaGL is coming up soon, and is virtual this year — November 5th & 6th, 2021
• This Week in Matrix
• Spaces: The next frontier — Using Spaces and Subspaces to build hierarchies effectively turns Matrix into a global decentralised filesystem for conversations and other real-time data!
• toger5/TheBoard — A collaborative Whiteboard powered by the [matrix] protocol and infrastucture.
• Matrix Live
• Compressing Synapse database | Levans’ workshop — Anyone running a federating instance of the Matrix homeserver Synapse will likely have seen this: synapse is database-hungry. It tends to take a lot of space. In this post, I'm documenting how I shrunk my homeserver database from 100GB to a little under 8GB, during a long maintenance cleanup.
• Pick: Wayfire — Wayfire is a wayland compositor based on wlroots. It aims to create a customizable, extendable and lightweight environment without sacrificing its appearance.
• Garuda Wayfire Download

Why it might be time to re-think who is and who is not a Linux user, plus we do a reality check on the state of Linux phones.

Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

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

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• Email from Purism — As previously announced, we will be increasing prices for all new orders of the Librem 5 in stages (the phone will be priced at $1199 from all orders received on or after Nov 1st, 2021 and we expect this price to go upward to $1299 in March 2022) as component prices change and as we deliver greater quantities of product.
• Linux Phones | Madaidan’s Insecurities — Linux phones lack any significant security model and the points from the Linux article apply to Linux phones fully. There is not yet a single Linux phone with a sane security model.
• Linux kernel needs more phones and tablets, says developer — "Especially for guys even running upstream kernel on RPI CM4 like me, more ARM devices with upstream kernel support will just be more happiness. Not to mention this also means super long time support, way longer than the lifespan of those devices."
• Steam Deck dev-kits are on the move Valve say, as some already have it — "All packaged up and ready for devs! This is one of the limited batches of Steam Deck dev-kits heading out today for partners to test their games."
• POKE 756,224 on Twitter — @ChrisLAS I admire your quest to get Linux running on your Thinkpad with the same battery life and perf you get on Windows. I've gotta admit, I've given up and just run Windows on mine, and the ugly truth is that Windows 11 is, for my needs anyway, really nice!
• Pick: Flatseal — Flatseal is a graphical utility to review and modify permissions from your Flatpak applications.