LINUX Unplugged

Is it time to replace GitHub in our workflow? We git into it. Plus, our favorite features in the new Linux 7.0 release.

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Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• LinuxFest Northwest 2026 — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
• LFNW2026 Schedule
• Linux 7.0: Btrfs — A translation layer of logical block addresses that allows changes without moving or rewriting blocks for relocation
• Linux 7.0: XFS — Autonomous self-healing; delivers live filesystem health events to userspace for automatic repairs
• Linux 7.0: EXT4 — Improves write performance for concurrent direct I/O writes
• Linux 7.0: IO-uring — Adds support for BPF filtering to IO_uring for high performance async I/O
• Linux 7.0: Scheduler — Scheduler updates land with time slice extension, performance and scalability work for high core count systems
• Linux 7.0: Rust — Formally concluding the 'Rust experiment'; Rust for the Linux kernel is here to stay
• Linux 7.1: i486 — Begins phasing out Intel 486 CPU support; no known Linux distributions still ship with i486 support
• Give Up GitHub — We realize this is not an easy task; GitHub is ubiquitous. Through their effective marketing, GitHub has convinced FOSS developers that GitHub is the best (and even the only) place for FOSS development.
• opengist — Self-hosted pastebin powered by Git, open-source alternative to Github Gist.
• Forgejo on Codeberg — Beyond coding. We forge.
• Forgejo — Self-hosted alternative to GitHub; liberate your software from proprietary shackles with a familiar environment
• NixOS Wiki: Forgejo — Lightweight software forge; completely free software and a fork of Gitea
• Forgejo Actions — Reusable pieces of code for CI workflows; compatible with GitHub Actions
• NixOS Forgejo Actions Runner — NixOS configuration for turnkey deployment of Forgejo Actions runners
• Forgejo Federation (PR #10453) — Work-in-progress for federated repositories; enabling decentralized software development
• Forgejo Snippets (Issue #1069) — Create a shareable piece of text, be it code or plain text, publicly or privately
• Git Novice Guide — Free interactive tutorial; learn version control with Git from scratch
• Pick: sshroute — Network-aware SSH router - routes connections to different IPs/ports/keys/jump hosts based on active VPN or network
• Pick: rendercv — Resume builder for academics and engineers
• Pick: ESPHome Starter Kit — DIY sensor kit for Home Assistant with ESPHome; build your own smart home devices

The expensive, challenging, and humbling journey with open source agents.

Sponsored By:

• 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
• Preferring Local OSS LLMs
• Qwen3.5 27B vs Gemma4 31B
• Open Models have crossed a threshold
• Gemma 4 — Google DeepMind
• Welcome Gemma 4: Frontier multimodal intelligence on device
• Gemma-4-31B-JANG\_4M-CRACK · Hugging Face
• mesh-llm — Mesh LLM lets you pool spare GPU capacity across machines and expose the result as one OpenAI-compatible API.
• hermes-agent: The agent that grows with you — The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. It's the only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions.
• goose — An open source, extensible AI agent that goes beyond code suggestions; install, execute, edit, and test with any LLM.
• Lobehub — The ultimate space for work and life. To find, build, and collaborate with agent teammates that grow with you. We are taking agent harness to the next level; enabling multi-agent collaboration, effortless agent team design, and introducing agents as the unit of work interaction.
• LibreFang — LibreFang is an open-source agent operating system written in Rust.
• OpenHarness — OpenHarness is an open-source Python implementation designed for researchers, builders, and the community.
• Microsoft's Newest Open-Source Project: Runtime Security For AI Agents — Microsoft proclaims their new open-source project is the first toolkit that addresses all ten agentic AI risks identified last year by the OWASP
• Top 10 Risks and Mitigations for Agentic AI Security - OWASP Gen AI Security Project
• googleworkspace/cli: Google Workspace CLI — One command-line tool for Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, Docs, Chat, Admin, and more. Dynamically built from Google Discovery Service. Includes AI agent skills.
• Tunarr API Reference
• Euro-Office launches as Europe's open-source Office rival
• Pick: single-file-cli — CLI tool for saving a faithful copy of a complete web page in a single HTML file (based on SingleFile)
• Pick: html-to-markdown — Convert HTML to Markdown. Even works with entire websites and can be extended through rules.
• Pick: skim — Turns any HTML page into clean markdown.

Ubuntu wants a leaner, stricter GRUB, and your favorite setup may not survive the cut. We break down what’s really changing, and the practical ways to adapt. Plus, Chris moves on from one of his favorite open source apps.

Sponsored By:

• 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
• This Week In Bitcoin 97 | Jupiter Broadcasting
• Ubuntu 26.10 Looks To Strip Its GRUB Bootloader To The Bare Minimum For Better Security
• Streamlining secure boot for 26.10 - Ubuntu Community Hub
• Mitigating BootHole – CVE-2020-10713 and related vulnerabilities | Ubuntu
• There's a Hole in the Boot - Eclypsium
• Final Release · ErsatzTV — It is time for me to announce the final release of ErsatzTV in its current form. The existing repositories will be archived following this update.
• ErsatzTV/next
• Tunarr · GitHub — Create a classic TV experience using your own media — IPTV backed by Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, or NFO.
• Threadfin
• xTeVe
• Filler - Tunarr — Filler lists are collections of content used by Flex to pad time between episodes. One reason to use filler is to simulate traditional television by playing advertisements between episode airings.
• Dispatcharr — Dispatcharr (pronounced like "dispatcher") is an open-source powerhouse for managing IPTV streams, EPG data, and VOD content with elegance and control.
• awesome-iptv — A curated list of resources related to IPTV
• Tunarr API Reference
• LINUX Unplugged 645 — We cut the streaming cord the Linux way with free, legal internet TV you can curate, DVR, and self-host via Jellyfin or Plex.
• turnstonelabs/turnstone — Experimental multi-node AI orchestration platform. Deploy tool-using AI agents across a cluster of servers, driven by message queues or interactive interfaces.
• Open-Source "GreenBoost" Driver Aims To Augment NVIDIA GPUs vRAM With System RAM & NVMe To Handle Larger LLMs
• GeneBean's Cage Kiosk
• GeneBean's Pi Arm Build Setup
• Planify - Task Manager for GNU/Linux
• alainm23/planify: Task manager with Todoist, Nextcloud & CalDAV support designed for GNOME
• Pick: bore — bore is a simple CLI tool for making tunnels to localhost
• nixos-bore-module — Self-hosted bore tunnel server for NixOS
• Pick: kdeconnect-sms-tui — Terminal UI for sending and receiving SMS/MMS via KDE Connect.
• Pick: Busybridge — Complex calendar free/busy syncing across organizations for consultants who work inside multiple orgs.

The self-hosted app that turned Chris into a family Time Lord, then we iterate on a long-desired hardware hack.

Sponsored By:

• 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
• Keeper.sh — Keeper is a simple & open-source calendar syncing tool. It allows you to pull events from remotely hosted iCal or ICS links, and push them to one or many calendars so the time slots can align across them all.
• Keeper.sh: Calendar Syncing, V2 Release
• OneCal
• PiBox Overview - KubeSail Docs
• PiBox: A Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server by Dan Pastusek — Kickstarter
• RPi CM4 based local storage server launches on Kickstarter
• KubeSail — So Long, and Thanks for All the Pods
• ipetkov/nixos-pibox — NixOS modules for supporting the hardware present on the PiBox
• raspberrypi/usbboot — Raspberry Pi USB device provisioning tool (RPIBOOT)
• cage-kiosk/cage — A Wayland kiosk. A kiosk runs a single, maximized application.
• systemd: BirthDate Field Added to JSON User Records — "Add birthDate field to JSON user records, allowing for standardized age-related logic within the userdb framework."
• Azuay Province - Wikipedia
• Pick: fq — fq is like jq but for binary formats, allowing you to tool, language, and decode complex binary data into human-readable structures.
• Pick: file-fridge — move files that aren't accessed as often to cold storage
• Pick: sigrok — Portable, cross-platform, Free/Libre/Open-Source signal analysis software suite: logic analyzers, scopes, multimeters, and more!
• Pick: PulseView — a Qt-based LA/scope/MSO GUI for sigrok

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.

Sponsored By:

• 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