LINUX Unplugged

Chris cooked up a wild remote-access trick for Jellyfin that skips VPNs entirely. One tiny toggle spins up a secure tunnel on demand. Simple, absurd, and shockingly effective.

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
• Old Fart Form (markdown)
• ngrok — Go from code to global in just minutes with a developer-friendly, idiomatic solution for managing traffic to your APIs.
• Jellyswarrm — Jellyswarrm is a reverse proxy that lets you combine multiple Jellyfin servers into one place.
• Sveske-Juice/declarative-jellyfin — This repository provides a Nix flake that allows for declarative configuration of Users, Libraries, Plugins, Settings, etc. Jellyfin 10.11 is NOT SUPPORTED.
• declarative-jellyfin full example
• Zigl3ur/jellyhub — JellyHub is a web app that allow you to fetch media from all of your jellyfin servers and regroup it in one place, so there is one place to search for specific media and tells you on wich server the desired media is located.
• Smiley-McSmiles/jellyman — Jellyman is a lightweight BASH CLI tool for installing and managing Jellyfin. As well as create a full backup (automatically or manually) so you can move or import all your metadata and user information to another machine.
• LSchallot/JellyRoller — JellyRoller is an open source CLI Jellyfin Controller written in Rust that works on Windows and Linux. Its primary purpose is to allow administration of a Jellyfin application from the command line.
• kjtsune/embyToLocalPlayer — etlp (embyToLocalPlayer) is a tool that lets Emby, Jellyfin, and Plex play videos using your local media players (like mpv or VLC) instead of the built-in web player, while optionally sending playback progress back to the server.
• Pick: subgen — Autogenerate subtitles using OpenAI Whisper Model via Jellyfin, Plex, Emby, Tautulli, or Bazarr.

We dig into the biggest Linux hardware news of the year, then fire up our new-to-us 1L PC server.

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
• Download DNClient Desktop from Defined Networking
• OLF Conference - Free and Open Software Conference and Expo
• Registration - OLF Conference
• Valve reveal the new Steam Frame, Steam Controller and Steam Machine with SteamOS
• Steam Controller — Steam Controller shares DNA with Steam Deck, with all the inputs to play all the games on Steam, wherever Steam is.
• Steam Machine — Made for powerful, versatile PC gaming on a big screen; quiet and small enough to fit under your TV, on your desk, or anywhere else you want to game. (It's a roughly 6-inch (160mm) cube!)
• Steam Frame — Comfortable, wireless, lightweight VR designed to give you a new way to experience your entire Steam library
• “The Steam machine is equal or better than 70% of what people have at home.”
• Anti-cheat will still be one of the biggest problems for the new Steam Machine
• FEX-Emu/FEX: A fast usermode x86 and x86-64 emulator for Arm64 Linux
• FEX 2511 Delivers More Performance Improvements For Linux x86 Binaries On ARM64
• Commits · FEX-Emu/FEX · GitHub
• PLF10 Smart Plug – Kaufman Home Automation
• Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1
• About Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 — Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 is the new name for Home Assistant SkyConnect. Despite the new name and look, they have the exact same hardware, capability, and support.
• libvirt: The virtualization API
• libvirt - ArchWiki — Libvirt is a collection of software that provides a convenient way to manage virtual machines and other virtualization functionality, such as storage and network interface management. These software pieces include a long term stable C API, a daemon (libvirtd), and a command line utility (virsh).
• Category:Virtualization - NixOS Wiki
• Virt-manager - NixOS Wiki
• Libvirt - NixOS Wiki
• Pick: easyeffects — Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications
• EasyEffects 8.0 Released In Porting From GTK4 To Qt / QML / Kirigami
• Easy Effects on Flathub
• Marcel Repo Email

We dive into your configs, the genius moves, the glorious blunders, and everything in between.

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
• LINUX Unplugged 634: Config Confessions
• yechielw/dots — Nixos and home-manager config
• Shayne's budget Flake
• Shayne's Budget Packages
• Shayne's Budget Configuration.nix
• Chris' Budget Flake Fix
• Millak/guix-config: mirror of my guix configs
• Millak/my-guix: local guix packages
• efraim-home: Add mpv-sponsorblock-minimal-conf.d
• Distrostu's configs
• Distrostu's M Series Config
• Oly Mike's Nixbook
• writeShellApplication - Nix function reference
• writeShellApplication - Nixpkgs Manual — writeShellApplication is similar to writeShellScriptBin and writeScriptBin but supports runtime dependencies with runtimeInputs.
• rwiankowski/homeserver-nixos — My Home Server Setup using a single NixOS node
• Brandon's Homelab
• Brandon's Mac
• Brandon's brew defined by Nix
• Brandon's Mac Apps installed via Nix
• BeardedTek/nixos-router: NixOS Router Configuration — A declarative NixOS configuration that transforms a standard PC into a full-featured network router with integrated secrets management.
• blocky: DNS proxy and ad-blocker
• Deidrael/nix-config: My NixOS Config
• FuzzyMistborn/infra — 100% chance of id10t errors....and a slight chance of a credential leak
• william/nix-config: All my nix stuff, in a single flake
• Pick: SoltrOS — Immutable Linux designed for gaming & development
• Pick: Parabolic — A powerful yt-dlp frontend.
• Pick: Youtarr — Youtarr is a self-hosted YouTube DVR that lets you subscribe to channels, browse their videos in a web UI, and automatically download and archive the ones you care about to your own storage.

After all the AI hype is over, one change for Linux will be sticking around; we put it to the test.

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
• SeaGL 2025 — November 7-8, 2025 in Seattle, WA
• LinuxFest Northwest
• LinuxFest Northwest 2026: Call for Speakers
• SCALE 23x - Southern California Linux Expo — North America's largest community-run open source conference. Pasadena, CA - March 5-8, 2026
• SCALE - Call for Presentations
• Planet Nix '26 — March 5th-6th, 2026 @ Pasadena, CA
• Planet Nix 2026: Call for Proposals
• LINUX Unplugged 481: Just a Prompt Away — The Internet is going crazy with AI-generated media. What's the open-source story, and is Linux being left out?
• Red Hat eyes developer workflow efficiency, app modernization gains with new AI tools — An AI assistant specifically designed for application migration and modernization looks to reduce developer toil
• SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 Announced: "Enterprise Linux That Integrates Agentic AI" — SUSE's announcement today for SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 proclaims SLES 16 to be "the industry's first enterprise Linux that integrates agenetic AI" and "reduces operational costs and complexity through AI readiness."
• openSUSE on Hugging Face
• ChrisLAS/hyprvibe — A riced up Hyprland desktop running ontop of NixOS.
• Pull requests - ChrisLAS/hyprvibe
• feat: add comprehensive sops-nix integration by shift · PR #15 · ChrisLAS/hyprvibe
• Add options for username, group, home directory by samh · PR #8 · ChrisLAS/hyprvibe
• Create variables for user and home dir by F-bit818 · PR #5 · ChrisLAS/hyprvibe
• LM Studio - Local AI on your computer
• Zed — The editor for what's next
• Cursor: The best way to code with AI
• Nixbook — Convert your old computer to a user friendly, lightweight, durable, and auto updating operating system build on top of NixOS.
• nixbook/base.nix — Roast my Nix: Not-a-flake edition!
• Jupiter Broadcasting's Colony Events
• Pick: duf — Disk Usage/Free Utility - a better 'df' alternative.
• Pick: cheat.sh — the only cheat sheet you need.

Fedora 43 arrives with polish, new spins, and a smarter installer; and one decision the rest of the Linux world should pay attention to.

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
• nebula-lighthouse-service
• nebula-lighthouse-service: init at 2.0.0 by bloominstrong · Pull Request #454855 · NixOS/nixpkgs — nebula-lighthouse-service is aimed to be run a a public nebula lighthouse for those who cannot host their own, or who want extra lighthouses without the burden of maintaining another lighthouse.
• Fedora Linux 43 Cleared For Release Next Week — While Fedora 43 wasn't ready for release this week due to outstanding blocker bugs, at today's Go/No-Go meeting it was decided that Fedora 43 is now in a position for shipping next week.
• Velocity Limitless / Projects / Slitherer · GitLab
• Fedora 43 Wallpaper Wrap-Up – Fedora Community Blog
• Fedora COSMIC Spin
• Plasma 6.5 - Reaching the Inflection Point
• [Fedora KDE] Early Plasma 6.5.0 - Fedora Discussion — With Fedora 43 being a go, we will be doing an update on repos towards the middle to end of next week that will bring Qt 6.10 and Plasma 6.5.1 to F43, and Plasma 6.5.1 (Most likely, plans are not 100% final in that regard) to F42. That will bring the update to the usual architectures, such as aarch64.
• Pick: Millisecond — Optimize your Linux system for low latency audio
• Millisecond on Flathub
• noblepayne/millisecond-flake
• rtcqs — rtcqs is a Python utility to analyze your system and detect possible bottlenecks that could have a negative impact on the performance of your system when working with Linux audio
• How do I get an out-of-the-box working Linux audio workstation? - LinuxAudio.org
• Pick: lemurs 🐒 — A customizable TUI display/login manager written in Rust

The biggest failure in seven years, right before a trip. What broke, how Chris pulled it back together, and how Wes would fix it right.

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
• Home Assistant Community Add-on: SSH & Web Terminal
• HomeAssistent Yellow: EmberZNet Zigbee: failed to flash firmware · Issue #146293
• HA Yellow/Zigbee Issue - Home Assistant Community
• Home Assistant Yellow Radio firmware - Home Assistant Community
• Home Assistant on X: "⚠️ WE'RE ENDING PRODUCTION OF THE HOME ASSISTANT YELLOW ⚠️
• Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q 10T7 Tiny Desktop
• Dell OptiPlex 3070 Desktop Computer
• Beelink Mini S13 Pro Mini PC,13 Generation Intel N150
• Minisforum MS-01 Work Station
• Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2
• Home Assistant - NixOS Wiki
• home-assistant/component-packages.nix at nixos-25.05
• Pick: Hexecute 🪄 — Launch apps by casting spells!
• Pick: Lenspect
• Lenspect on Flathub — A lightweight security threat scanner intended to make malware detection more accessible and efficient.

We're back from Texas just in time to chat with Jon Seager, Canonical's VP of Engineering, and their new era with Ubuntu 25.10. On the way, we visit System76 in Denver where the COSMIC team has surprises waiting for us.

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
• COSMIC — Next generation Cosmic desktop environment. Use it on your favorite distro!
• System76 — Powerful Linux computers designed by nerds, engineered by experts, handcrafted by humans in the US.
• GitHub - pop-os/cosmic-epoch: Next generation Cosmic desktop environment
• GitHub - pop-os/cosmic-applets: WIP applets for cosmic-panel
• Pop!_OS 24.04 (with COSMIC Desktop) Just Hit Beta - OMG! Ubuntu
• Canonical releases Ubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka
• Ubuntu Engineering in 2025: A Retrospective · Jon Seager
• Ubuntu 25.10 Fix Pending For Broken Flatpak Support - Phoronix
• LINUX Unplugged 634: Config Confessions
• Hybrid Pick: ncspot
• Pick: poop (Performance Optimizer Observation Platform) — This command line tool uses Linux's perf_event_open functionality to compare the performance of multiple commands with a colorful terminal user interface.
• sharkdp/hyperfine: A command-line benchmarking tool

Our cross-continent race to Texas Linux Fest culminates into fantastic meat, meetups, and more.

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:

• 🤠 Texas Linux Festival Trip Support (Fake Boost)
• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Texas Tracker
• Texas Linux Fest
• TXLF 2025 Sat Oct 4 - The Design & Implementation of the Darwin Operating System
• TXLF 2025 Sat Oct 4 - Getting Started with Ansible on Linux
• TXLF 2025 Sat Oct 4 - Lessons They Don't Teach You in School: A Year in High-Performance Computing
• TXLF 2025 Sat Oct 4 - I got Malware, BTW. A quick look at the rising trend of Linux Malware
• A Gift for the Open Source Community: Chainguard’s CVE-Free Raspberry Pi Images (Beta)
• Chainguard for Raspberry Pi
• Chainguard's Images
• Wes Payne - Mesh Network Sidecars for NixOS Services - Texas Linux Fest
• noblepayne/meshSidecar: Mesh network sidecars for NixOS Services
• Pick: isd — isd (interactive systemd) – a better way to work with systemd units.
• ISD 0.6 Released For Interactive Systemd Management

From finely tuned to total config carnage. We review listener homelabs to share what works, and what really doesn't.

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
• Texas Linux Festival 2025 - Austin, TX
• Texas Linux Festival Trip Support (Fake boost)
• JB Meetup: Austin Unplugged Birthday Lunch Party - Meetup.com — Saturday, Oct 4 - 12:00 AM to 01:30 PM CDT
• JB Meetup: Austin Unplugged Birthday Lunch Party - Colony Events
• Turnstile Coffee Beer Cocktails and Burgers - Austin, TX
• Dawarich — Automatically track your daily life with Dawarich. Never forget where you went or what you did. Relive your memories with precise location data.
• LINUX Unplugged 614: Self-Hosted Location Tracking
• Dawarich API Docs
• AlbinLind/dawarich-api — A python wrapper for Dawarich
• Texas Tracker — Real-time distance tracking and movement visualization
• JupiterBroadcasting/texastracker: — A static website that tracks our trip to Texas Linux Festival 2025.
• bitchat
• A Guide To bitchat version 1.2-1.3 : r/bitchat
• Geohash Converter - Find and visualize your Geohash
• Overland GPS Tracker on the App Store
• gpslogger: :satellite: Lightweight GPS Logging Application For Android.
• Zakk's (2kOS) nix config
• NotAShelf/nvf: Modular, extensible and distro-agnostic Neovim configuration framework for Nix/NixOS
• suderman's nixos — system configurations & dotfiles
• NixOS impermanence — Lets you choose what files and directories you want to keep between reboots - the rest are thrown away.
• numtide/blueprint: Standard folder structure for Nix projects — blueprint is an opinionated library that maps a standard folder structure to flake outputs, allowing you to divide up your flake into individual files across these folders. This allows you to modularize and isolate these files so that they can be maintained individually and even shared across multiple projects.
• gmodena/nix-flatpak — Install flatpaks declaratively
• Adam's (A Manzer) nix-config
• Prowlarr
• nzbhydra2: Usenet meta search
• Kieran dots
• Fortyduex's nix config
• Fortydeux's Firewire
• Brad's nix config
• Brad's SMB
• Monty's Ansible
• Monty's Nix
• Monty's NXC
• ChrisLAS/hyprvibe: A riced up Hyprland desktop running ontop of NixOS.
• Namespace nixosModules options under "hyprvibe" to avoid potential collisions - hyprvibe Issue #10
• Pick: vtunnel — vTunnel is a tool that proxies IP traffic between guest and host networks by using the VSOCK protocol.
• Pick: Tab-Session-Manager — WebExtensions for restoring and saving window / tab states

Can't get enough Linux? How about multiple kernels running simultaneously, side by side, not in a VM, all on the same hardware; this week it's finally looking real.

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
• nebula-tower — A user-friendly server to manage your Slack Nebula mesh network.
• Texas Linux Festival 2025 - Austin, TX
• JB Meetup: Austin Unplugged Birthday Lunch Party, Sat Oct 4 - Meetup.com
• JB Meetup: Austin Unplugged Birthday Lunch Party - Colony Events
• Turnstile Coffee Beer Cocktails and Burgers - Austin, TX
• bitchat
• Ad-Free Viewing By Showing Your Support During The Phoronix Oktoberfest / Autumn Sale — Through the end of the month (30 September), you can enjoy premium at the Oktoberfest rate. The normal Phoronix Premium rate is $45 USD per year or $250 for a lifetime subscription but for this year's Oktoberfest deal, you can go premium for just $30 per year or $150 for a lifetime subscription.
• GNOME 49 Release Notes — We code named the release “Brescia”, after a beautiful Italian city that hosted this year’s GUADEC.
• GNOME 49 Officially Released With Wayland Improvements, Showtime As Video Player
• Ubuntu 25.10 Beta Officially Released For Testing — Canonical today released the Ubuntu 25.10 Beta as they work toward the stable Ubuntu 25.10 release in mid-October.
• Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings — Ubuntu 25.10's transition to using Rust Coreutils in place of GNU Coreutils has uncovered a few performance issues so far with the Rust version being slower than the C-based GNU Coreutils.
• base64 implementation almost 8x slower than GNU for some large files
• sort does not finish for large one line file
• Fedora 43 Beta ISOs Released For Testing — Fedora 43 Beta ISOs are now available for those wanting to help in testing.
• Omarchy 3.0 — Omarchy 3.0 is here — faster installs, big MacBook support, and lots of polish.
• systemd 258 Released With systemd-factory-reset & Other New Tools — Systemd 258 brings systemd-factory-reset to request a factory reset on the next reboot, systemd-pty-forward to allocate a pseudo TTY/PTY, UEFI firmware images can now be embedded in a UKI, and many other new features.
• systemd 258-rc1 Is A Massive Feature Release With New Tools, More Than 260 Changes
• Kernel RFC: Introduce multikernel architecture support — This patch series introduces multikernel architecture support, enabling multiple independent kernel instances to coexist and communicate on a single physical machine. Each kernel instance can run on dedicated CPU cores while sharing the underlying hardware resources.
• The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems [PDF]
• mirdaki/computer-config — Config for server and personal deployments
• My Ultimate Self-hosting Setup — Matthew shares their ultimate self-hosting setup built on NixOS, ZFS, and Tailscale, balancing privacy, data control, and usability for family and friends.
• basecamp/once-campfire — Campfire is a web-based chat application.
• Pick: savr: Read it later. Keep it local. No server needed. — Savr is an app for saving online content to read later. It is file-centric, offline first, future proof, and favors decentralization.