You know, I've noticed recently there isn't really a maintained way to convert a website into a standalone desktop application. Like on Linux, you used to be able to use something like Natifier, where you could give it a URL and it would create an Electron-based standalone desktop app. There was also App Natify, which would do the same, but it would create an app image, which is kind of neat. Chrome and Firefox used to have these as just features built into them.
Oh, yeah, kind of like you could do on Android or whatever, right? So, yeah, make this into a web app, okay.
And this is, you know, there's so many web apps these days. I was looking for this and I kind of found something, but I'm wondering if anyone out there has something that works just a lot simpler. I think it's pronounced Turi. What do you think?
Tari?
Tari? Okay, let's go with that. It's probably a lot better. You can use Tari to essentially create a web app out of a website. And then there's some other tools around that you can use. You could even declaratively configure those in your Nix config, it looks like. But it's a lot of a process. versus something like Natifier where I just used to have a command line app, point at a URL, and boom, I had a local web app. I can't be the only one that wants this. This must be a thing on Linux,
right? This can't be just dead.
I just use a separate browser.
Yeah, I don't want to use a separate browser. I want a separate app.
Doesn't Linux Mint have a version of this that they have?
Yes.
In their X apps or whatever?
Yes, they do. They do. They do. But that doesn't work for me, and it isn't packaged in the distro I'm using.
I think you should go with the Tauri thing because I'm now remembering that Tauri is the term used for humans in Stargate SG-1.
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, we're getting ready for two of the biggest Linux events of the year. We've got some folks on the ground, organizers, and surprise guests joining us to give us the scoop before it all begins. Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, killer picks, and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that mumble room. Hello, Virtual Lug.
Hi, Chris. Hi, Wes. And hello, Brent. Hello, guys. Hello.
It's a tight team this week. Did we piss them all off last week?
Probably. We did have some hot takes.
People were not happy about Rust. They didn't like the Rust talk. But nice to have you in their mumble room. Thank you very much for being here. And a big good morning to our friends over at TailScale. TailScale.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to support the show and get it for free for up to 100 devices, three users, no credit card. TailScale is the easiest way to connect your devices, your services, your applications, whatever they are, directly to each other.
It's modern networking built on top of...
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And it's fast, like really, really fast. You'll never even know you're using it. And it's intelligent, too. If two nodes are on the same LAN, they talk directly to each other. But if one of those nodes happens to move off your LAN, they continue to talk like they're right next to each other, just whatever the speed of your connection is. And it makes it so simple and straightforward to build a flat network of, say, multiple different online providers.
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We love it. Lots of listeners love it. And thousands of companies love it. Try it and support the show at tailscale.com slash unplugged. We have a meetup to announce, Saturday, March 8th, 7 p.m. In Pasadena, California. Details at meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. And we're going to El Cholo, right? You think that's how you say it? And they have room for around 40 people. So last time we did a dinner, about 55 people showed up. So we do want you to RSVP if you're going to make it.
Plan on bringing cash or maybe paying for meals and drinks on your own. Cash app or Venmo is probably also the work there, I think, from the website. And we generally do this at the yard house, which we were going to. But they wanted to charge us, and I understand, but they wanted to charge us a $3,200 minimum. So we called up El Cholo and they said, we'd love to have you. We can only have room for about 40-ish people. Some will cycle though, so don't worry. You know, you might pop in.
Some people will be cycling out. There's a lot going on that evening. And yes, we are using the Meetup page for historical purposes for this one, meetup.com slash jupyterbroadcasting. Now, if you're listening, you can't make the meetup, but maybe you want to help out with the beer budget that night or something like that. You could always boost this episode. We'd appreciate that. And while we are in scale, boys, we have something special.
We got nerdy and dug into eBPF. So while we're away at Planet Nixon scale, we have a special eBPF coming out, eBPF episode coming out for you. And this really is a superpower that's just waiting for you to take advantage. It's in your Linux kernel right now, and there are tools that make it possible for anyone to use it. We'll get into some of the more advanced use cases and some of the, like, just grab this executable and run it, and you can start messing with eBPF.
We won't be live next Sunday, but our members will get a special bootleg episode, and that'll be episode 605, the eBPF special.
And, you know, it's not necessarily our normal thing, so do let us know what you think about it.
Yeah, I'm always a little nervous about these more technical episodes. We always get feedback from people saying they love it, but then sometimes the metrics don't actually support that. So we do want to hear your feedback on it too. So give us your thoughts. Why are we doing a prerecord? Because next weekend will be Scale and Planet Nix. So this is the Sunday before Planet Nix.
And we are so thrilled to go to the first Planet Nix because ideally, if possible, we would love to cover every single one of them. I mean, imagine for us how exciting this is. We get into Nix and NixOS a couple of years ago now, before these events really existed. And now here we are, you know, on this journey and these events are starting to materialize. And this is the first Planet Nix.
That's pretty exciting for us. And so we're delighted that Phlox is making it possible for us to get down there and cover it and helping with the travel budget and just really coming in clutch. And so we wanted to chat with Ron. He's the CEO at Phlox and he's joining us right now. Well, joining us now to share in the excitement is Ron Afani, and he is the co-founder of Phlox and the president of the NixOS Foundation, and an all-around great guy. Ron, welcome to the Unplugged program.
Super excited to be here again. It's almost been a year.
I am super excited about Planet Nix, and I think I want to start with the fact that this is technically kind of a new thing. It's the first Planet Nix, isn't it?
It is.
Now we want to give us, what's the background here on, is this going to be like a worldwide thing? Is this going to be a North America thing? Is this TBD? What's the kind of like high level picture of where Planet Nix is and where it's going?
I mean, I think there's a lot of aspects to it and a lot of things that were internal in the community around it and out of it. But I think bottom line is just we wanted to keep nurturing and growing and bringing Nix to North America, making it a little bit closer to this side of the globe. So that was the real first intention for creating a conference on this continent.
Well, I am sure grateful. You know, we often kind of feel on the West Coast like we're a little bit like we get left out of the fun a little bit.
Especially all the way to Europe where there's so much Nick stuff.
I have to imagine the first one is going to be kind of also a little bit of let's see how it goes, right? The results will speak for themselves and then you'll kind of decide the future.
Yes, 100%. I think what we're trying to do is definitely see how kind of our ecosystem here responds to it. We have a slight feeling that it's going to be a slightly more Nix at work feeling, if that makes sense, right? Like folks just seeing at the talks that are coming in from Kelsey Hightower doing the opening to folks from Anthropik and, you know, large companies talking about their use of Nix and how they're bringing it into their workplace.
I think it's going to definitely have a different flavor to it. And I think that's also why we want to make sure it has a new brand, right? there's a kind of like a different vibe to the entire thing.
It's interesting too because i wonder if that sort of is reflective of where nix os adoption is at right now do you think that's maybe there's a connection there.
Oh 100 i mean we're i think we're seeing again year over year we're seeing that crazy amount of of growth both on uh usage and the chatter and the different companies are coming in to nix coming to flox and talking about the you know it's not just about nix itself and even the programming language behind it's kind of also about the principles that nix brings in and and you're seeing more parts of the marketplace kind of look to adopt it.
I want to also make people aware of flocks a little bit can you tell me kind of the uh elevator pitch for flocks and maybe why you're connected so closely with nix.
Yeah definitely i mean the elevator pitch is that flocks fox helps abstract away the infrastructure complexity from whatever whoever is doing the coding, if it's your engineers, if it's the future AI overlords and agents, but that's for the non-NICS initiated. Bottom line, Phlox started from the fact that we, my co-founder brought NICS in for the first enterprise adoption motion almost eight years ago now. And our whole thing was, okay, how can we bring NICS to more folks?
How can we bring it to work? And that's where Flux generally started. So for us, it's all about environment management up into the build space of what Nix can do for us, and then into software supply chain security, where I think those are the three rising stars of Nix-based principles, obviously, as a biased person.
And I think what drew me to Flux and why I was excited to work with you guys to do the coverage for this is it's really sort of the evolution of building on top of some amazing open source and free software principles.
And it's not maybe fully consumable for the end consumer like an enterprise, but with a little bit of work and a little bit of innovation from a company like yours, you can take something so powerful and make it accessible to those groups, which is always what happens with this best great free software we see get built in the Linux kernel, like WireGuard and other things.
So that's what I really thought was sort of super great about Phlox and other companies in that space is taking Nix and Breen to that next customer.
This way I don't have to teach every single one of my team members how to debug all of the Nix config.
Wes knows the pain. He knows the pain.
Yeah, we've all been there on the Flock side. I think for us, it's genuinely Nix is amazing. And I obviously wear two hats. And I recommend everyone go check out Nix before they check out Flock. But then Flock comes in and it's just, you know, if you want to bring it into the workplace where folks don't need to get into the weeds of it, that's kind of what we made it for. And obviously there's a bunch of technical kind of IP that's built on top to just enable that enterprise access.
But for us, it's really clear. It's like, if you're coming in, check out Nix. And then when you're looking to bring Nix into the enterprise, come check out Phlox. And it's kind of like a cyclical motion because even Phlox has some Nix escape patches where folks can start diving deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole. So there's definitely some ideological open source bit.
I mean, for sure. It's like, you know, people listening to this show could become big Knicks fans, but it's like, how do you convince everybody else at work to actually implement this? Well, here's something that's actually digestible by them.
Okay i'm curious outside of the uh you know the keynote with kelsey which i think everyone's excited for uh what are you personally most excited for for this planet nix.
I mean one it's it's honestly just building up our our ecosystem on on this side and i know a lot of our awesome european friends and from other places are coming over which i think is even way more exciting i think you're seeing we mentioned that earlier right you're seeing that that adoption of it's It's not even about Nix, it's about the principles, right? It's about like, hey, we care about reproducibility, we care about our software.
Software is becoming insanely more complex, right? We are asking software now to write software. And Nix at its core just comes and provides this venue to say, hey, let's decomplexify the stack, right? And we're seeing more folks truly be intrigued about the concepts here and come towards it. So I think just the opportunity to keep growing this front of the globe is number one. The second one is, I think there's a few talks I'm pretty excited about.
Obviously, I'm excited about all the talks and all the speakers coming in. But my top of minds that I'm definitely going to be sitting in on are one talk from Fareed, who's going to jump into kind of like a concept of Nix is unapologetically fun. Farid has a really good way of kind of talking about Nix in a very blunt yet, you know, whimsical aspect to it.
And then there's actually a talk by Anish from Anthropic that I'm pretty excited about and how they're using some of the Nix principles to pretty much build the frontier of AI.
Yeah. Okay. I'm writing both of those down.
How did I get more excited? I don't know.
Now, okay. Kind of along these lines, do you have any tips or anything people need to know if they're going to show up, if they want to get some work done while they're there too? Do they need to bring a pencil and paper? What should they know? What should they bring with them?
I mean, first of all, shout out to Elon and the SoCal Linux Expo team, Scale. We love them. They help us make this possible.
The venue is incredible we have uh this year we have two two giant rooms for one for a workshop so you can get you know down into the details from beginner stuff to advance things by nix experts from the globe um and then we have the talk track but in the middle there's a huge huge huge kind of like open space where we do hacking and birds of a feather and uh flox, because Flux is hosting the entire thing we've been giving tables to different projects,
so there's going to be a lot of that if you're coming in come with like, your laptops, come with an open mind come with your biggest problems everyone and anyone that's going to be able to help you is probably going to be out there very happy to.
That's exciting and a GitHub token get your GitHub token sorted out before you show up, that'll help too well ron i'm sure you've got a lot of packing to do i have an incredible amount of gear to pack we are going to be hosting a dinner saturday night, so if you can sneak away for a little bit and uh you know we'll grab you a beer 100 all right ron thank you for joining us on a sunday and we'll see in a couple of days.
Well, after all that, I'm getting even more excited for Planet Nix. And I've already been taking a sneak peek at some of the talks. And I can see already I'm going to have to make some tough choices about which ones I attend and which ones I can't make, because some of them happen at the same time. But there is a keynote I think everyone's excited for, and we got ourselves a little bit of a preview.
Joining us on the show right now is Kelsey Hightower. And, Kelsey, I think people that are listening to this show that are familiar with the whole world of Kubernetes probably know who you are. But could you give us a brief introduction for folks that are new to you, especially like us Nix folks? A 25-year veteran, retired about a year and a half ago as a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud.
A lot of people know me from my work in the container world, spent time at CoreOS, a contributor to Kubernetes. Before that, I spent time at Puppet Labs working on things like Puppet Configuration Management. And then the rest of my career, I probably spent time having jobs like the rest of the listeners, from storage administration to software developer. Wow, that is fantastic. Down in the trenches.
And not that we were like, you know, e-stalking you or anything, but we did notice in December of 2024 on LinkedIn, you'd posted about dipping the toes into Nix, trying out Phlox. And one of the things that sort of appealed to me about your talk with Ron is this outsider's perspective. You have all this experience, but you're coming to Nick's now with sort of fresh eyes.
And that is intriguing to me because I think it's something we struggle with on the show from time to time is just kind of getting outside of that Nick's bubble a bit. And I'm just sort of curious to know what getting introduced to the Nick's community has been like and how that's gone. Yeah, it looks like there's this whole other world... Of software management that went down a different fork in the road. Yeah. You know, 15 years ago, I went down the RPM, Debian packages.
One app per VM to create isolation. And it seems like configuration management grew up around that, right? Like this idea that you will have lots of these tiny machines. So now we need frameworks to manage them all. And so if you come from the Linux distribution world, pick your package manager, app, git, yum, does it matter? And then we got this second wave of package managers, again, going down this fork in the road of, we just need a better package manager.
So if you're Ruby, you have RubyGems. If you're Python, you have 7,000 package managers. Just figure out what your dependencies need and you'll be all right. And none of that really worked. But then we came up with things like virtual int, which is these isolated ways of having dependencies match the thing you were working on. I mean, we went full brute force down this path, which ultimately led to things like Docker, right? Docker just says, you know what?
If this is the path we're on, and the challenge we have with one app per VM is that it gets super expensive. And if we can just leverage, you know, the low level details, like just create isolated file systems, you know, the old school charoot. And look, if you want to use RPMs and RubyGems, hell, you can use all of them together. And what we'll do is just put them all in one big bundle, call it a container image.
And then we did something I think that was unique at that time, which was we finally decoupled the application from the machine. And so when I arrived to Nix, you know, that's like a 20-year path. When I get to Nix, Nix is like, hey, wait a minute.
You don't need to do all of that. What you can do instead is just treat all your dependencies as a reusable thing, make them very explicit, lay them out on the file system, and then link them when you need them, and then you can ignore all this other brute force effort. And I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. That would have been good to know 20 years ago before we went down this road.
Yeah. I think we've heard a lot of that, especially with folks who are very comfortable with Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, and as you mentioned, things like Ansible or Puppet and configuration management. They've already solved these things at scale, so it's kind of hard to want to unlearn everything. 100%. And I think that's the big challenge now. So anyone that reads the Nix paper now, I think a lot of people will agree that that is a great way of solving the problem.
You know, the one thing that I'm still trying to comprehend is it just feels to me like Nix is still machine-focused, meaning it needs that file system to be a first-class entity for anything else to work. And then in many ways, you're going to have to modify... The binary itself, the startup and linking process, you're going to have to do a lot of work that assumes that you have access to the whole chain in order for it to work.
So I think there's going to be this happy medium between can I create reproducible software, but then decide how to distribute it. And I think a lot of people now are using, you know, things like Kubernetes, which is a way of managing thousands of machines if you wanted to, but decoupling the app from the server.
So you could imagine building a Docker image using Nix as a thing that brings in all the dependencies, creates that kind of chain of trust, if you will, but then allow me to use other tools to distribute. And I think that's the new crossroad that we face, given that Nix is a viable solution to this problem. Yeah, that strikes me. You know, I think we've got a lot of questions on that because it is a kind of new of like Nix being mature enough and the rest of the ecosystem to breed them together.
And then also just, unless you understand kind of both container orchestration tech and the NIC side of it, you might see how at the high level it's possible to mingle these things productively. But actually, how do you go about doing that in a concrete and battle-tested way is maybe an open question. Yeah, I mean, the answer I've been drawing out, I have my notepad, I'm looking at like, what would be the answers to this problem?
And I just keep going back to thinking about things in layers, right? So I think we have the operating system, pick your flavor, you grab your kernel, those ABIs tend to be pretty stable. But then the next part of this layer has to be that programming language and its runtime. So if you're in a JVM, for decades, you've kind of seen yourself somewhat isolated from the low-level OS, right?
You have your class path, the JVM kind of abstracts your app and the bytecode away from the machine in hopefully a portable way. And then you have things like Golang that takes us to the extreme, that builds your app with the runtime bundled in and all of its dependencies, even to the point where you're not even relying on libc sometimes. So now you have these languages that are also self-contained, building statically linked binaries.
And so you ask yourself, like, what use does Nix have? And the truth is, there's still some use because not every app is going to be written and going. Not every app is going to create a statically linked executable. And also there's this trust problem. And this is where I think Nix jumps in. The trust problem is we have all of these dependencies. We're not sure who they're written by. We're not sure what version they're at. And so on one hand, we're trying to create things like S-bombs.
If you haven't heard of those, this is this idea that we can produce a software bill of materials when you buy a car or TV. Ideally, someone knows every component and where it came from. So if there's a need for a recall or to make sure that those things are safe, we can always go back to those hardware bill of materials. And that's what we're trying to do on this side. But how would you use them together? I think a logical first step for a lot of people is.
If you take Nix as the trust layer, meaning you trust that Nix packages are built by people that are doing the right thing, they're building from source, there's a lot of transparency with that. If I can take the Nix build process and let's say stick it inside of a Docker file, so in this case, Nix would be replacing RPM, Nix would be replacing kind of my ad hoc pulling things from GitHub and putting them in a particular directory.
Instead, you would say, all right, let's use Nix because Nix is going to give me hopefully a reproducible way of building my software and having that then sit inside of an image. So for the Docker people out there, you will still push your Docker image to a Docker registry. You can run it in a serverless platform. You can run it on a VM like you're used to.
But when you peer inside of it, now the Nix ecosystem opens up to you and you have a lot more transparency on how things are linking to other things. And I think that will be a really pragmatic next step for people coming from the Nix world or coming from the Docker world and looking for a little bit more transparency at the library and dependency layer.
Yeah, I think especially, you know, anyone who's had to look backwards and try to piece together, maybe it's a couple different layers of Docker files, and one of them's pulling from Alpine, and one of them's a custom node or a Go builder. And then all of that kind of gets munched together into one final layer. If a lot of that was Nix, yeah, maybe you'd have to learn next, but it might be a little easier to introspect. Yeah, that's the big opportunity. Can these two worlds merge?
And I think that's going to be key. User experience tends to dominate the tooling in this space because a lot of people are just not that interested in like building software. Let's just be honest. Most people are interested in capturing their ideas in their IDE, turning that into an artifact that they can ship to their customers and users and being done with it. And so if we make them focus way too much on this low level detail, my guess is they will skip it.
Right, I'm trying to get this feature done. There's a lot of pressure on me. I really don't have time to learn this thing that I don't really care about build systems anyway. They're just a detail. 100%. I mean, the other, I think, equation here is how many people or different entities do we need repackaging the same software, right? Debian does this work for themselves. Red Hat does this work for themselves. The Gentoo community, let's not forget about them. They do this work for themselves.
And now you have kind of the Nix maintainers doing all of this work for themselves. And I think the tricky bit here is if I go look at a NICS package. I have to ask myself, who is this person that packaged this upstream software? And typically what I find, it's not the maintainer. And so now we're adding this additional layer of trust, like did this person do something in between what the source code and the maintainer had in mind to what's finally inside of this next package?
And that's the part that the industry is still trying to work out. Can we have a really reliable software train of trust?
And that's where I think things get tricky and also what happens when packages go unmaintained and so you also have the quality question is this the best place to get this software or should I just go get the sources and build it myself, right and you know even now we've seen somewhat I think of a rise of more projects on GitHub having a default.nix or a flake.nix file but as you say there's still that question of okay well if I go with them maybe it's oriented for like nightly
development or exactly how they want it but then if I go with maybe the nix packages version or some other downstream Well, that's been maybe massaged a bit to fit more comfortably with the assumptions of the rest of the system and trade-offs abound. 100%. This doesn't sound like somebody who's retired, Kelsey, I have to say. You said you started by saying you're retired. There's no retirement. What I've learned is you will always do work. It's just how much control over the work do you have?
And for me, that means I like to do my own cleaning. I've learned some trade skills, everything from pulling permits to running my own electrical wires to patching up the drywall and spraying texture on it so it matches the surrounding area. And to me, I think that's the thing that you work for, right? The idea is that you want to work on things that you think make the most impact. So in this capacity, that's going to be a lot of startup advising.
You know, I still love the conference speaking. And look, I still have a knack for learning new technologies and putting my hands on the keyboard. Yeah, and I really appreciate your perspective on this, and it makes me even more excited to see the talk with Ron. Kelsey, is there anything else you want to touch on before we run? No, I think, you know, people always ask me, like, what's the future of this? What's the future of containers? What's the future of Nix?
And it's like, well, look, the future is typically determined by the people working on it. And so if you're working on Nix, it's on you to kind of draw that line from where you are right now and what you want the future to be. And there are people, if you're listening, they're giving you feedback. Here's why I can't use Nix. Here's where I've tried to use Nix and it didn't work for me.
If you listen to those things in earnest and you chip away at removing that friction, and look, you're competing, whether you know it or not, you're competing with all the other solutions out there. And if you take those two things and create a feedback loop and you solve those problems, then you will decide what the future of Nix is.
And if it's usable, if it lives up to its promises, you might just find a world where, I don't know, 30, 50% of Docker images are using Nix at the base layer to provide the solution to reproducible software. And just make sure you zoom out and understand the big picture. Where does Nix fit in and what people are trying to do every day? And I think those are just the huge takeaways as a technologist.
I love the tech. I love it's cool. I know some people have a printed out version of the original Nick's white paper and sit next to them like the Bible. But you got to remember, that's just one component of the whole. And whoever bridges that gap will determine what the future looks like. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it very much.
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Well chris as you mentioned scale is coming up it's one of my favorite times of the year and we've been going for years now and i think you both would agree it's just a highlight of the year as well this time around we're lucky to have another guest joining us this episode one of the legends of scale who's been helping there for oh a decade now and giving us a little insight into the tech.
Scale is just days away, and one of the things that makes it one of the best events is it routinely has solid networking, which you can't say for most events, let alone community-run events. And I think one of the keys to that success, especially over the last nearly 10 years, has been Scale's tech chair, and Rob joins us on the show now. Rob, welcome to the Unplugged program.
Hey, Chris, Wes, Frank. Great to be here.
Hello, hello, sir.
Hello.
So you're just a few days out. Are you at peak anxiety right now? Are you feeling like everything's kind of going as expected?
You know, I'm feeling pretty good. Things are busy, but not up to my eyeballs and, say, tech debt or anything. The team works year-round. We do a couple of work parties to prepare for the conference. Uh so we've we've been able to do uh three three to four this year um and everything's looking pretty good uh and yeah we're we're i'm just packing up the car and i'll be heading heading to pasadena uh this evening okay.
You mentioned a team there what's the how many folks you got all working to make this happen.
So we've got about 30 folks uh that are contributing in various ways from cabling to the networking to servers access points even signage so that's yeah it's really just a group effort some folks are working across these multiple sub teams but we've really got a great group that's you know really focused on making sure that the conference is you know as good as it could be for our attendees.
And is everyone volunteer, Rob?
Yes. Yeah, actually, the entire conference is volunteer run. The thing we like to say is that it's the largest community run open source conference in North America.
I mean, the organization alone of just getting these work parties organized throughout the year is really commendable.
It's hard to manage a team that size, even when they report to you because you're paying them, let alone their volunteers.
Yeah, I mean, as long as it's fun, I think people want to come back. They want to learn new things. You know, a lot of folks, maybe they start out on the cabling team and then make their way to maybe helping out with signage or, you know, learning some things about, you know, Linux administration. So I think that's really one of the selling points is, you know, you can get your hands dirty with some of the tech that you might not otherwise have at hand.
Does it help for their resume too?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the things that, you know, that's why I started to show up nine, ten years ago was I was thinking, hey, you know, I don't necessarily get to do a lot of these things day to day. You know, a lot of at the time my job was on AWS and I was kind of losing some of the things that you were doing within a physical data center. Hands on stuff.
Yeah, the racking and stacking.
Exactly. Exactly.
I follow you.
I wanted to get back into that. And then also, you kind of add in the little bit of the stress factor where you've got to get this thing, you get this network set up in, you know, four days, right? We show up on Monday, and it's got to be ready to go by Thursday.
You know, this almost sounds like a TV show kind of set up.
Yeah, like a reality. It could be a reality show. Yeah, they should maybe stop doing the America's Talent thing and just film you guys. I mean, it's because it's not only do you have like just a few days to get it working. But it's a serious job for Wi-Fi, like the all the devices people have now, especially this crowd. I'd love to know a little bit about the back end system that makes it actually work.
Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things that you mentioned the Wi-Fi and one of the big things that has happened this year in partnership with OpenWRT and the Software Freedom Conservancy was the partnership that got us 120. Uh open wrt ones so we'll be deploying those across the conference as our access points so that we'll have wi-fi six uh and just to make sure that the connectivity is as best as we can make it uh while still having a open source uh software stack and hardware stack.
Wow that is so you know okay so two things strike me first of all that's so perfect for a conference like this But second of all, I thought I recalled last year there was a pretty big back-end switch over to like NixOS. Like it sounds like every year there's a pretty big infrastructure switch is on the table.
Yeah, there's a lot of iteration, right? So we have a year to kind of think about, okay, how did things go last year? What can we do better next year? And then just start to chip away at that over the course of these work parties and just, you know, async or remote communication, you know, throughout the year.
So is there a process during this if somebody wants to do kind of a wild card, like swap out all the Wi-Fi hardware or, you know, put everything in crazy VMs or use NixOS? Like, is there like this process where somebody pitches it and then has to like win everybody over? How does that work?
Like, I think it's a little bit of a, yeah, you got to sell the idea, right? You can't just have this crazy idea and, you know, then even if you wanted to implement it, does it really work for the attendees, right? So we've got to make sure that this is good for the folks that are showing up to scale that are going to be able to enjoy the conference. It's got to work.
So proof of concepts are always welcome. and then we just kind of iterate on it from there and just try to figure out, does this fit for what we're doing?
There's a couple of folks that have been doing this just as long as I have across the various platforms, things in the conference you know whether that be signage or the servers or the network and so we just kind of try to figure out okay if this can fit is this an appropriate next step in the next evolution and the you know you mentioned chris the the switch to to nix os um you know i i've done a little bit of uh the the server side management
like i've been the one that's managing some some of the services. And I just made that switch because we had had some other difficulties with the previous tools that we were deploying. And it was the, I think, the most stable thing we could go to. And that's the other thing is it's, you know, from my perspective, if it's stable and boring, that's fantastic.
A lot of these services are, you know, they're core networking services, so they have to work or else really no one's going to be able to present or be able to, you know, just kind of have basic network functions. So, you know, running that stuff on NixOS gets us those guarantees. That was, you know, from a group or team perspective, that was, I think, a pretty straightforward next step for us.
And a lot of the folks are also in the NixOS community, the Nix community, and everybody was pretty on board with that.
And you got the Planet Nick's crew there, so you got some of the heavy hitters in case something really goes sideways, right?
Yeah, we've got plenty of folks on hand should something really come up that we were stumped on.
So I was wondering, and maybe this does happen, I don't know how you'd have the bandwidth for it, but do other conferences like Texas Linux Fest or others, do they reach out to your expertise and be like, can you help us have a great Wi-Fi and networking and internet setup?
You know, we've offered that. No one's taken us up on it.
But that that would be i think a really awesome partnership to have you know the the equipment we don't have a use for it except for the you know the four days uh for scale so if it can be used elsewhere you know that we would be happy to figure out how to make that work and that's also why you know all of the the code all of the utilities and and the um scripts and things that we have that go into building the conference and provisioning it and running it are also open.
And that's kind of the whole intent is someone could take this and then apply it. Maybe that, like you said, if that's Texas Linux Fest or another conference, that's definitely something that we're interested in figuring out how to make work.
Rob, I owe you a beer or three. So if you're around Saturday, 7 p.m., we're doing a meetup and we're going to have a dinner and we'd love to buy you a beer, too.
Oh, fantastic. I will be there. That sounds awesome.
Good, good, good. Well, Rob, thank you so much for sharing all this with us. And I look forward to actually seeing you at the event. And we just really appreciate the work you and the whole team does. I gained a much better insight and appreciation for the level of work.
You know, especially as tech folks here, it's just so nice to have us all work and not have to be involved with it at all.
Well we're happy to do it you know we just want to make sure that there's, uh you know a great experience for all of the attendees and just keep that going forward year after year so i hope everybody uh that's going to be there enjoys the conference and swing by the knock if you want to check out anything about you know what goes into the network i'm happy to give a behind the scenes tour uh so just go ahead and find me uh we'll be in the conference building Very good.
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We received a little digital postcard here from longtime friend of the show Olympia Mike. Thank you Mike for sending a little note. It reads, Hey guys, it's been far too long since I've been able to hang out with the Lupp family. I'll be attending and speaking at both Planet Nix and LinuxFest Northwest this year and really hope to see as many JB community folks as possible. The talk I'm giving at both events is called Building a Chromebook Replacement with NixOS.
Ha ha ha. Love it.
I've been working on it for about a year, and it's my attempt at a Nix OS that you can give to your kids or parents who know nothing about Linux or Nix. It's a Chromebook-type experience without all the creepy Google stuff. If anyone wants to check it out, the project or the talk, I'd love all your feedback. But most of all, really, I can't wait to hang out with the JB crew again.
Oh, Olympia Mike, I hope you can make it to our Saturday dinner. Check out his project. It's github.com slash Mike Kelly XP slash Nick's book. We'll put a link in the show notes too. Good to hear from you, Olympia, Mike, and looking forward to seeing you and looking forward to your talk too. I think it's a great project. And I know you've been iterating for more than a year. You've been iterating on the idea.
One of the things Mike does is he goes out and finds discarded but still quite usable old ThinkPads. And he's been iterating on this idea with those too for a couple of years. So Chromebook idea is a great angle.
I love it, too, because we've all talked about personal successes with being able to deploy things like NixOS for family and friends. And this is just taking that to the next level where, you know, you don't even need the curated levels of support that we provide.
Yeah, it's pretty great. Well, we don't have any baller boosts this week, but we still have some great boosts to read, and Promise Kunix comes in with 2001 sats.
Promiscunix!
I thought you had a read on that. First time boosting, I think, at least live. Keep up the Knicks love and watch out for my new Knicks YouTube channel coming for newcomers to Knicks. Love you guys.
Yeah, this was actually a live boost that just missed our live boost cutoff last episode.
Top of the stack. Thank you.
Maybe boost us back or send us another way, your channel, when you get it all going, because we'd love to promote that.
Yeah. Once you've got it launched, send us a boost and let us know. We'll promote it.
Lime Elephant comes in with 5,000 sats. Got a challenge idea. Daily drive a scrollable tiling window manager, like Paper WM, Neary, or Carousel, for at least two weeks. Not as hard as BSD, but it could be fun.
Hmm. This is an interesting one, actually.
I like this, too, because there's always a background pressure on Chris from the audience to, like, you know, just go tiling already.
Paper WM is a GNOME shell extension which provides a scrollable tiling of windows and per-monitor workspaces.
Hey.
It's inspired by paper notebooks and tiling window managers. Technically an extension. It's a large tent built on top of the GNOME desktop rather than merely extending it. Okay. All right. This is weird, but I think worth considering. Looking at screenshots, it's a little weird. But I think we'll put it up for discussion when we get back. I like that. That's a good suggestion. Thank you for the boost.
Well, Soham sent in 3,000 Satoshis. A little bit of an opinion here. They read, I'm sorry, but this needs to be done.
Uh-oh.
The matrix protocol is far too complex, and the implementation is just bad. Firstly, I don't need a miracle dags happening each time I send a shitpost meme. Then, what are the room upgrades? Also, if Synapse source code is readable, then I am the king of France. For the longest time, they had an environment variable which they themselves didn't know the behavior of.
Dendrite replacing synapses like ibv6 replacing v4 and we know how that goes, i recently found out they anyway don't bridge with the most popular irc liberal chat no wonder they keep running out of money every two years that's.
A solid spicy take that's a that's a hot take and um boy what do i think i do kind of agree dendrite replacing was sort of a uh I guess a mislead. Like, I'm glad we didn't go down that route now that it's sort of end of life.
Yeah. And I mean, I'm impressed in many ways with Synapse, but it is a sprawling app. That is for sure. And I think that, you know, I don't need a Merkle, Dag, et cetera comment. I interpret that one way is sort of hitting on that thing I said, right? Like, I think maybe the goals, the enterprise-y goals of Matrix are not what everyone is looking for necessarily. And to solve that maximum case has meant, you know, a complicated implementation.
I love that boost. That's great. Thank you very much. Magnolia Mayhem's here with 2000, one set. Well, I finally got bound and fixed right before you guys skip a week. Oh, face bomb. With that the case, I'll just hold off on my BSD boost and tell you about my monitor setup. I've always had at least two. My optimal setup was three horizontal screens with a vertical off to the right for monitoring things like maybe documents.
Most I've ever had, though, was eight screens, and that was just out of screwing around. We just got married, and I remember my wife walking past the room and noticed me surrounded by monitors like a crazy person. She just shook her head and walked away. Yeah. Yeah, I think I get that look whenever I use the VR headset, but I don't know for sure because I can't see. But I assume I'm getting that look. It's kind of awkward.
I had a landlord I just moved in. This was in a past relationship, and she had a lot of monitors too. So we probably had like six or seven monitors between us when we'd set up both of our desks, and the landlord was just like.
What's going on? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, we're day traders. No. Thank you, Mayhem. Good to hear from you.
Outdoor Geek comes in with 10,000 sets. Chris, in response to your AM LAN ping woes, I wonder if maybe your router's power is dirty for some reason. Like, is there a new large load nearby? EV chargers? Although, if other devices on your LAN are working okay, then the issue is probably something else. But regardless, I hope the fix is quick and cheap.
I can't imagine it would be PJ or Brent's wiring. Can't imagine it'd be that. Right? No, that's impossible. So I do have new neighbors. We do share that wall where the router and switch are plugged in. I love that theory. I don't think it affects my other devices though.
I thought we burned it all down and built it up again.
All right. All right. I like this.
Token ring this time.
Well, Bronze Wing sent in three booths for a total of 6,666 Satoshis. Number one here RIP Coder Radio.
Aww yeah we do have a temporary not a replacement but some content out there called The Launch New Show and we got about three new episodes out right now weeklylaunch.rocks if you want to check it out The Coder Show continues under Mike's stewardship but it is not a JV production anymore, Bronzo Wing's also switching to Fountain. They did try AlbiHub for a bit, but they've had issues. I think one of the things people run into with AlbiHub is it does sometimes cost money to open channels.
So if you're not using it, this is my commentary, if you're not using AlbiHub for anything other than boosting the shows, something like Fountain or Breeze is a much simpler setup. So that's what they switched to, but now they want CarPlay to work like other apps where you don't have to open it on your phone first. Well, here's a little insider scoop. I don't have all the details I can share with you, but CarPlay and Android Auto are about to get major attention in Fountain.
And I think you're going to see much, much better CarPlay implementation and Android Auto implementation probably in the next couple of months. And also, yes, Graphene OS does have Android Auto. It's one of the apps you can install. It is sandboxed, and it seems to work great. I've had it crash on me once or twice, maybe ever. So that's pretty good, right?
Yeah.
That's pretty good.
I will say, just for the AlbiHub curious out there, one of the nuances here is that AlbiHub is not necessarily optimized out of the box for boosting as your primary use case.
Yeah, right, right.
If you get what they call a liquidity service provider, an LSP, that's kind of optimized like if you were a merchant wanting to receive payments from your customers. And so you pay them and they open a channel for you. But most of them say like, well, if you don't use it enough after a month, we're probably going to close it.
The alternative is if you have money you're willing to commit, because it takes committing some liquidity to a channel, you can also open your own channel to one of our nodes or a big node out there. So there are some options, but all of that takes the desire to want to run this infrastructure. So fountain and breeze are way better if you just want to send an occasional.
And sometimes there's, you know, there's the Bitcoin questions chat room and the Bitcoin main chat. And you can sometimes find people in there that are exchanging nodes, too.
And actually, Hybrid started a boost support room. I'll get a link to that, and that's another spot you can ask for help.
Well, there you go.
Turd Ferguson boosts in with 9,333 sats. Aw, here's to a great trip, boys. Buy a beer on me. Done.
Thank you, Turd. We'll get Brent a nice gluten-free beer on you.
If we find gluten-free beer, that would make me happy. Cider will do.
No, it's going to be in Cal. Okay, all right. I'll join you in a cider.
Well, Spectra sent in 5,000 sets. On the topic of owning your books versus leasing them, I think I learned of it on Linux Unplugged or self-hosted, but someone boosted in about Libro.fm, and gotta say, it's great. DRM-free downloads. If anyone is interested, my referral link is linked in the show notes.
Haha, nice.
Also, since I don't stream sets, any suggestion on how to set up a recurring payment with AlbiHub? I see a Zap Planner, but that doesn't seem to support splits, so suggestions are welcome.
I gotta look into that.
Yeah, good question.
There has been other options in the past. Zap Planner, it doesn't seem like it.
Maybe in conjunction with something else.
We will have to investigate. Thank you for the boost. The Doodabide is here with 10,000 sats. Peace, NixOS and Justice? No, rock and roll, NixOS and Justice. Right? Is that how you read that? It's emoticons.
I get it. It's rock, Nix, and scale.
Oh, scale. Of course. Ah, well done. Well done. Well done. Thank you, everybody, of course. We really appreciate everybody who boosts in above the 2,000 sat cutoff for time. And then, of course, a big tip of the hat and shout out to our sat streamers. 37 of you just streamed those sats as you listened. You did a heavy lift this week. You guys stacked us 90,126 sats, which is pretty great.
That's over half. Wow.
Not bad, right? And then you combine that with our boosters. It wasn't a particularly strong episode. I think maybe the Rust and Colonel stuff didn't go over super well is kind of my takeaway, but that's totally fine. That's on us. But we really appreciate everybody who did step up. Collectively, we all stacked 144,427 sats for this episode. We really appreciate you. And don't stop at one bit. If you'd like to boost the show, like I said earlier, the easiest way is probably with Fountain FM.
Or if you just don't want to hassle with accounts or anything like that or even switch podcast apps, Breeze Mobile, B-R-E-E-Z, Breeze Mobile, makes it really easy. Thank you everybody who supports this Value for Value production. We distribute this episode for free, and our members make it possible. Thank you to our members. You also get a fantastic bootleg special only for you next week. Thank you, everybody, who supports this production. That is our supporters for episode 604.
If you pick music this good.
I know. We just listen to the music. We do have a really fantastic pick. You should see if you can get this working while we talk about it. Okay? So Steve Ovens, longtime listener of the show and co-host of the Ask Noah program, has worked on making a dream of mine reality. It's called Open Audible to Audio Bookshelf.
Now, you guys know I've talked about how I purchase books on Audible and then I extract them off of Audible and then I manually, like a caveman, load them over the network onto my audio bookshelf server. Well, what Steve has created here is a script that automates the process of moving audiobook files from the open Audible app, or Libation, your choice, to an organized folder structure, and then updates Audiobookshelf accordingly. I think it pings the API.
Yeah, he says here, it handles file organization, metadata mapping, and interaction with the Audiobookshelf API. And, of course, it is GPL3.
Yeah i saw you uh tag this for the show and immediately that just seemed brilliant.
This is something that the people have needed it's uh you need python he's got he's got the prerequisites just requests.
And py yaml for dependencies though.
Totally reasonable i also asked him if he's open to the community contributing ideas or fixes or updates and he said he totes is he would welcome uh the feedback from the audience out there this is such a great idea right like you could see yourself just pulling down your books from time to time this kicks in moves them up to the uh to the bookshelf server just so ah you know because the problem is now it's like i've actually even resisted buying books and like ah then i have to go
fire up libation copy and it's not like it's a huge deal but libations ui is weird it's just enough friction so.
What are you going to do with all your time chris.
I'm going to listen to more audiobooks clearly you know now, nothing holds me back it's pretty cool so it's uh open audible to audio bookshelf and uh we have a link in the show notes gpl3 made by mr steve ovens fantastic work sir you know what you get a you get a nimoy for that that's so good here you go right here steve, That's some serious value for value right there.
Well, I'm not quite there, but I'm pretty sure a flake can come pretty quick if we want one.
You think we could have it before the end of the member stream? I mean, that's a big task. We've got other work to do. But, I mean, come on. I've got to get this going. I need a flake. All right. That's it. Remember, we have the eBPF special for you next week. We'd like to hear what you think of that. And if you'd like to buy a beer at the meetup on Saturday, even if you can't make it, boost the show and just say it's for the beer budget. And we'll allocate it as such.
Yeah, and then maybe we cheers to the folks that do that at the table.
I like that idea. Yeah, we'll pull up the report on the laptop and we'll give you a shout-out there at the meetup. Now, we won't have the live stream. We do have a bootleg for our members, but we won't have a live stream since we're going to be on location. We've decided to just sort of focus on getting the content for you, and then we're going to bring you back the best stuff when we get back from all of it. So join us in two weeks on Sunday at 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.
Maybe one day AI can generate a version that says, see, in two weeks. You know, because right now there's nothing I can do.
Jeff could do it.
Links to everything we talked about and more, linuxunplugged.com slash 604.
Also, do remember we won't be live next week.
Yeah. So, yeah. But you can find Mumble info. So when you do want to participate, contact page over there, our matrix info, because the matrix is always going. We do have a scale chat. And so we'll be poking in and out of there during the event. You can always find us in Scale Chat if you want to know where we're at. I think that's it, though. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.
Okay, real talk. Have any of us actually packed yet?
No.
I've been thinking about it.
Oh, I've been thinking about it.
I've got like a semi-sorted list in my head.
Yeah, I don't. I haven't packed clothes or gear yet. I mean, I kind of have a, I kind of know, but I'll tell you the truth. We have not done a live event since Linux Fest Northwest last year. And so like everything's in the, we got to pack up the booth in 25 minutes and put it in this huge crate box.
And you told me it was safe to store that info on tape and that you'd get the archives ready so we could load it back into our brains, you know, a couple of weeks ago, but that hasn't happened yet.
Yeah. Turns out it wasn't a good plan.