LINUX Unplugged

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.

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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!

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.

We unleash a networking monitoring tool to spot new devices, track changes in real time, and fire alerts straight into Home Assistant, MQTT, and your phone.

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
• Planet Nix 2026: Call for Proposals @ Sessionize.com
• SCaLE 23x | Registration
• NetAlert X — Network intruder and presence detector. Scans for devices connected to your network and alerts you if new and unknown devices are found.
• NetAlertX Docs
• NetAlertX GitHub
• NetAlertX docker-compose.yml
• NixOS OCI Config for NetAlertX
• Home Assistant - NetAlertX Docs — NetAlertX comes with MQTT support, allowing you to show all detected devices as devices in Home Assistant. It also supplies a collection of stats, such as number of online devices.
• home assistant mqtt documentation
• ntfy.sh — Send push notifications to your phone via PUT/POST
• Mosquitto - An open source MQTT broker
• Pi-hole – Network-wide Ad Blocking
• ESPresense
• mkellyxp/nixbook: LICENSE? - Issue #55
• Choosing a License - Find the Perfect Open Source License for Your Project
• License Selector - OpenLicr
• LicenseHub - Open Source License Tools Platform
• Open Source Licenses Explained: A Comparison
• GitHub - ErikMcClure/bad-licenses — A compendium of absurd "open-source" licenses.
• Podverse Alpha
• Podcasting 2.0 Episode 246: Crap Trap — Adam & Dave are joined by Mitch and Archie of Podverse fame
• Pick: MQTT — Your All-in-one MQTT Client Toolbox
• MQTTX GitHub
• MQTT X on Flathub
• Pick: mqtt5-explorer — MQTT5 Explorer is a simple yet feature-rich client to visualize data of any MQTT broker.
• MQTT5 Explorer on Flathub
• Pick: Unify — Unify is a web app aggregator built with Qt 6, Qt WebEngine, and Kirigami
• Unify on Flathub
• Pick: web-app-hub — A Web App Manager, written in rust with GTK and beautiful Adwaita.
• Web App Hub on Flathub
• Pick: Home-manager Webapps — Home-manager configuration file to get webapps in the system menu on a NixOS system

We make our big Linux predictions for 2026, but first, we score how we did for 2025.

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
• LinuxFest Northwest 2026: Call for Speakers
• The Launch 🚀: Nature Chose Violence
• PewDiePie - I installed Linux (so should you)
• James Lee - How I Broke up with Adobe
• Linux surpasses 5% market share on US desktops for the first time
• It is finally the year of Linux on the Desktop: free OS reaches 5% market share
• Introducing the Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed intelligent assistant
• ADHD is Awesome: A Guide To (Mostly) Thriving With ADHD: Holderness, Penn, Holderness, Kim, Edward Hallowell: 9781400338610
• Pick: eilmeldung TUI RSS Reader — A terminal-based RSS reader built on the news-flash backend.
• Pick: Zbridge — zBridge is an online bridge club where you can learn and play bridge. It is a full bridge platform with multiple features.
• Zbridge flatpak source
• Pick: Cavalier — Visualize audio with CAVA

The Great Holiday Homelab Special! Where our community brought their absolute best, from budget busters to beautiful disasters. Plus, a boosties celebration! Grab an eggnog and join us as we attempt to choose this year's winners.

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

We cut the streaming cord the Linux way with free, legal internet TV you can curate, DVR, and self-host via Jellyfin or Plex. Then, we talk COSMIC stable with System76's CEO.

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
• Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Released — This year, System76 turned twenty. For twenty years we have shipped Linux computers. For seven years we’ve built the Pop!_OS Linux distribution. Three years ago it became clear we had reached the limit of our current potential and had to create something new. Today, we break through that limit with the release of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with the COSMIC Desktop Environment.
• Dispatcharr — Dispatcharr is an open-source powerhouse for managing IPTV streams and EPG data with elegance and control.
• IPTV Link Search — Public IPTV live channels, m3u8 links are updated daily.
• Streamtest.in
• ptv-org/iptv — Collection of publicly available IPTV channels from all over the world
• iptv/PLAYLISTS.mdb
• epg — Utilities for downloading the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) for thousands of TV channels from hundreds of sources.
• iptv-epg.org
• TiviMate IPTV Player — Easy to use for beginners and deeply customizable for power users, TiviMate blends speed, clarity, and control into a seamless viewing experience.
• M3U IPTV — Stream your IPTV channels on the go or on Android TV.
• DangoPlayer — A fast video player and IPTV client for Android and TV
• iPlayTV - IPTV/M3U Player App — IPTV/M3U player for Apple TV. The one Chris has used the longest
• Chillio IPTV Smart Player App — New app, paid if you want quad box
• Open TV — IPTV player with many features.
• html-iptv-player — HTML IPTV Player with EPG viewer for M3U8 playlist
• hypnotix — An M3U IPTV Player
• IPTVnator
• VidGrid — watch multiple news channels in your browser
• M3U Magic • Free Private IPTV Player
• ErsatzTV — Your Personal IPTV Server
• kptv-fast — A high-performance streaming service aggregator that combines multiple free streaming platforms into a single M3U playlist and EPG. Perfect for use with Channels DVR, Plex, or any IPTV client.
• Pick: Jellify-Music — A cross-platform, free and open source music player for Jellyfin, powered by React Native
• Pick: DockerComposeMaker — DockerComposeMaker (DCM) is a self-hostable website to help you pick and create a docker-compose.yml file for your home server. Discover new containers, discover and share a config in a couple of clicks!
• Demo Docker Compose Generator
• Pick: Leantime — Leantime is a goals focused project management system for non-project managers. Building with ADHD, Autism, and dyslexia in mind.

Kent Overstreet joins us for a full update on bcachefs. What's new, what's next, and the surprising upside of getting kicked out of the kernel.

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
• LUP's Great Holiday Homelab Form
• LUP's Great Holiday Homelab Old Fart Form (markdown)
• bcachefs 1.33.0
• Bcachefs Ready With Its Reconcile Feature As Biggest Change In Two Years — "Biggest new feature in the past ~2 years, I believe. The user facing stuff may be short and sweet - but so much going on under the hood to make all this smooth and polished."
• Kent Overstreet - Patreon
• bcachefs — A copy-on-write (COW) file system for Linux first announced by Kent Overstreet in 2015. It is intended to compete with the modern features of ZFS or Btrfs.
• LINUX Unplugged 545: 3,062 Days Later — Kent Overstreet, the creator of bcachefs, helps us understand where his new filesystem fits, what it's like to upstream a new filesystem, and how they've solved the RAID write hole.
• Git or not a Git man page?
• proxmox-nixos: The Proxmox Hypervisor, on NixOS
• Pick: Dotfiles Installer — Install dotfiles easy, fast and secure. Or provide an installation application for your dotfiles.
• ML4W Dotfiles Installer Wiki
• dotfiles-installer: GitHub
• Pick: SSH-Studio — Easy, GUI SSH config editor and validator built with Python, GTK 4 and libadwaita.
• LubeLogger, Vehicle Maintenance and Fuel Mileage Tracker, slips into December with some banging new features

We pull on a few loose threads from recent episodes, and some of them unravel into way more than we 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
• LUP's Great Holiday Homelab Form
• LUP's Great Holiday Homelab Old Fart Form (markdown)
• Jellyswarrm — Bring all your Jellyfin servers together
• LiveTV support · Issue #9 · LLukas22/Jellyswarrm
• pangolin — Identity-Aware Tunneled Reverse Proxy Server with Dashboard UI.
• Pangolin | Secure Access Platform
• NixOS Search - Options - Pangolin
• Youtarr — Self-hosted web app that automates downloading, organizing, and scheduling YouTube channel content with support for Plex, Kodi, Emby and Jellyfin
• Add ability to set subfolder for manual downloads · Issue #287 · DialmasterOrg/Youtarr
• Dawarich — Your favorite self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline (Google Location History)
• dawarich CHANGELOG.md
• CVE-2025-40090 | Ubuntu — Since commit 305853cce3794 ksmbd_session_rpc_method() attempts to lock sess->rpc_lock. This causes hung connections / tasks when a client attempts to open a named pipe.
• SMB3 & KSMBD See Performance Improvements With Linux 6.18 — KSMBD also now adds a max IP connections parameter to optionally limit the maximum number of connections permitted per IP address.
• ksmbd vulnerability research · Doyensec's Blog
• ksmbd - Fuzzing Improvements and Vulnerability Discovery (2/3)
• ksmbd - Exploiting CVE-2025-37947 (3/3)
• doyensec's KSMBD-CVE-2025-37947 PoC
• GrapheneOS bails on OVHcloud over France's privacy stance
• GrapheneOS exits France — what it means for encryption
• France's Encryption War Escalates: GrapheneOS Exodus Signals Dangerous Precedent for Open Source Privacy Tech
• Seems like the GrapheneOS phone collab may be with Motorolla.
• Rust For Linux Kernel Co-Maintainer Formally Steps Down
• Bcachefs Ousted from Mainline Kernel: The Move to DKMS and What It Means
• Red Hat Introduces Project Hummingbird for “Zero-CVE” Strategies
• Richard Hipp - Git: Just Say No - YouTube
• 2011 SouthEast LinuxFest - Richard Hipp - Fossilize Your Code - YouTube
• Pick: Gopher64 — Highly compatible N64 emulator.
• Gopher64 — simple64's official and spiritual successor - Libretro — It’s made by the same developer(s). Unlike simple64 however, it’s not based entirely on Mupen64Plus. And it’s aiming for a more LowSpec hardware overhang.
• Install Gopher64 on Linux | Flathub