618: TUI Challenge Kickoff

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. Well, coming up on the show today, our terminal apps are loaded. The goals are set, but are we already having just a few snags? Well, we'll kick off the TUI challenge and tell you all about that, and hopefully you'll hear about some great apps. Then we'll round out the show with some boosts and picks and a lot more. So before we go any further, Let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.

Hi there. Hi, Chris. Hey, Wes, and hello, Brent.

Hello. Nice to have you in there.

Thanks for being here. Hello, hello, hello.

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You know, our audience, they're so smart. Surely some of you have some good talk ideas.

Great for the resume too, you know. And it's been a while, but we wanted to give a big shout out to our chat mods across the various platforms, often doing a lot of work without getting recognition. So we just want to take a moment of the show and thank all of you out there for doing that. And then we've had a request for folks' recommendation for where to buy sats in the EU. Some reputable sources.

I mean his whole life must be mailing lists and uh stress testing.

And writing benchmarking yeah over 52 000 articles and reviews have been published 46 000 news pieces 5 400 hardware reviews already.

I think this year once or twice uh he's caught performance regressions in the kernel that had to get fixed in the rc stage.

Yeah so there is a sale going on right now discounted through june 9th so not for much longer if you want to sign up if you're listening to this while it comes out you could go support for onyx at a discount for the birthday sale and i think it's you know even if you don't read it uh it is really important for the linux ecosystem as far as news goes because we need more original reporting not less so big shout out to mr larval,

I think that is actually quite correct. We were wondering what other challenges might change our lives, and I think this one's well on its way.

Yeah, we like to do these from time to time to make ourselves a little uncomfortable, get us outside our zone. But also, you know, even if you don't participate in the challenge as a listener, which you're totally welcome to, But if you don't, you're going to get a nice list of great applications and tools you can use at some point. So there's that, too.

Yeah, right. I mean, at least the last time that these were the primary interfaces, we all use the terminal more than, you know, your average computer user in 2025. But even still, you know, the web browser is this kind of king and you're not necessarily pressed to move any of this stuff unless you, you know, you get really fed up with the browser.

It's a bit of a browser detox.

In some of my initial research, I was also really impressed by just how modern some of these apps actually are and modern toolkits on the back end and all that. So I don't, I don't, it's definitely not fair to say that it's completely going back in time because, geez, some of this is really cutting edge.

All right, so let's start with your shopping spree, Brent. How did you go about, what was the process of researching and choosing your first two apps? Did you have any criteria, any surprising finds, anything like that?

Well, my number one criteria was to try to find apps that you guys wouldn't find. Because I feel like, I don't know. We're trying to round it out here.

Brent's getting weird with it. I love it.

It's really, I have a little competition with you guys you don't know about that I just like hold for myself.

Well, we don't call it a challenge for nothing.

There you go. Multi-challenge.

He brought his A game. He was talking up how worried he was, and then here he is with a secret plan.

This is going to get scored after all.

So I did know that, you know, some easy to find resources might be like Awesome 2E. And Chris, I did confirm that, yep, you had gone there. So I decided to just ignore that and go elsewhere. So I tried to find some like underground different suggestions and different apps to find. And I'm hoping I won, but we'll see a little later.

What about you, Wes? Did you have any methodology to your shopping spree?

Oh, not in particular. I mean, I kind of looked through some of the past stuff that I had bookmarked for the show. And then, yeah, I definitely browsed a couple of the popular awesome lists. And then I did spend a little time asking some of the LLMs, too, if they had any standouts that they could recommend.

What about things like how recently the application has been updated? or are you leaning towards like things like Rust and Go tools?

I will say a lot of these have been abandoned years ago. It doesn't mean they don't work, but they haven't been updated for years.

Yeah, you do have to kind of watch out. And for some things that may not matter.

Some of them are like super fresh too. Some of them are brand new.

Depending on what it is and depending on how much like whatever API or thing they talk to. Yeah, I mean, I don't care so much about the implementation if it's packaged in Nix. If it's not, then maybe that matters. If it's kind of fussy to set up, that would be a downside.

Okay, I'm glad you brought that up. So let's talk about that. But each of us probably took our own approach at how we got these TUI apps installed on our rigs. I'm guessing you went the Nix package repo. Yep.

I'm doing it on my NixOS laptop, so that was the easiest route for me.

What about you, Brent? How did you install these apps?

I decided halfway to change my decision, but I'm also going NixOS. It's just so easy.

Okay. So I went the hard way. And as you listening may know, I recently switched to Bluefin. And Bluefin, if you're going to install apps in the user space, there's really probably two routes to take, it seems, from what I'm learning. Again, I'm still learning, so go gentle on me. One is to use Brew and install a package via Brew. However, I don't love Brew on Mac OS, and Brew on Linux has even less packages, it seems, at least from my experience.

Or Flatpaks?

Well, for TUI apps, there's not very many things as a Flatpaks. Yeah, great for graphical apps, but for command line applications.

Can you install snaps?

I don't know. But it is ironic. I think I picked the hardest distro if you want to install them on the host OS. However, after about two hours of banging my head with that, I was like, screw this. I spun up using the uChange command, which is quite useful. I spun up a Arch distro box and then I got the AUR going in about 15 seconds and then everything got a lot easier. So everything I have to do, it's really most of my TUI apps is in that Arch container. I think that's okay.

But is it still bluefin? That's the real question.

Well, if you think about it in what I want, it is containerizing all the shenanigans that I'm going to be doing for the next seven days. And then when I'm done, I could just blow that away and my host system's totes clean.

And as long as you can mount in whatever stuff you might want to access to get your regular files for working with the two-way things, then it works.

Well, so here's a bit of where it's not all sunshine and jelly beans in containers. What I find myself having to do practically is install things in multiple locations. So I've got, if I can, I've got it installed via brew, but then I often also need it in the arch container. Oh, now I've got an Ubuntu container as well. And what will we, oh, teammate. We were just trying to use Teammate because we're doing a shared Teammate session now with Vim to look at our show doc.

We're mob programming over here. It's working great.

We needed to try it in various ways. So I ended up having to install Teammate on my Bluefin host system. I installed Teammate in the Arch session and I installed Teammate in the Ubuntu session. And it started to get a little old. So I've just kind of landed on, I'm using the AUR for most of this stuff.

For this next seven days of the challenge, are you going to have to remember which environment certain tools are in so that you can call them up?

That was the direction I was going. And now I've just said, I'm going to use the Arch container for this.

So nothing on the Bluefin host at all?

I don't think so.

Okay.

I reserve the right to change my mind. But starting on day one of the challenge, I'm thinking everything in the Arch container and then it's just there. And, you know, I'm using, what's that terminal that I can't say the name of?

Zellage?

No, the other one starts with a P.

It's probably kitten.

PyTix or whatever, or P-Tix or.

Tixis?

Tixis. I just, I'm using that to get to the Arch container.

Yeah, I mean, you're set up to do it. It's a nice integration.

So with your fancy ass Nix doing everything for you, did you have any problems at all installing any of these things? No drama at all? There's nothing?

Well, I don't have my complete set of apps all set up. so so far no but i think um there's at least one already that i want to try that i'm not sure it's so i think i will i.

Spent a long time figuring out the right way to do this.

I uh installed all mine while we were prepping for the show online here so uh i probably installed 10 things and it totaled like 53 megs and it just happened way faster i thought it was actually didn't work because it happened so quickly.

Yeah okay here's one it's like c++ that looks like i'm gonna have to figure out how to build myself if I want to try it.

Okay.

So I will have some struggles.

I hope because that's where I've spent a lot of my time so far was just figuring out the right way to do this. And I'm just, I don't know. I'd be curious if other Bluefin users if you think I'm doing it the wrong way, but I've just decided I'm doing everything in this large container. I'm going to use it for the whole challenge and then pop goes the weasel when I'm done.

Well, unless some tools become part of your workflow.

That's true. That is true. That could happen. We'll get to that. So how are you feeling about the week ahead? I was actually feeling myself really good until we actually sat down and started using a terminal app to do our dock.

I'm feeling a little bit deeper. Well, I think this is just us having pre-gamed a lot of the rest of the challenge and not thinking through this part of that.

That's true, but it made us like an hour late.

Yeah, but I think now that we know this will be a problem, we have a whole week to get a better setup.

That's true. We did pre-game the other parts.

The kernel already suggested one better tool. I think if we got like a better, you know, there's a few options we have. I'm hopeful.

Okay, so as far as like apps you have yet to set up or tasks you have yet to do, Brent? What's your biggest anxiety for the week?

I think I'm afraid of how much experience you guys have versus me in doing this kind of stuff. So I don't think I've really done the TUI lifestyle at all, period. I've, of course, worked my way around the terminal to accomplish a bunch of things, and it's definitely part of my daily life. But in terms of TUIs specifically, I'm brand new at this.

So the idea of the challenge, right, is you're trying to use the terminal user interface as much as possible. We have specific challenges for each day that we have outlined and linked in the show notes. And Wes, I'm curious what you think might cause you to break out of a TUI and go to like a graphical browser or...

Yeah, I think there'll probably just be some sites. We've got a couple decent-ish, surprisingly decent options for browsing. But there might be things that just doesn't work for once you really try to get, you know, real serious stuff done.

Like an example would be the YouTube live page. Yeah, right. The show's got to go live, so we'll probably have to break out for that.

Yeah, so there may be some things, but I'm going to try to keep that as much to a minimum as I can.

Have you looked at any LLM command line apps?

Well, I do still have my Vibe setup, so I've been doing that a little bit. There are, I think, probably I should look, because there probably are a few that are more tailored to a chat, too, if you just want to actually chat. So that's one thing I have as homework this week.

Do you think you have a sense of what you're going to bite off first with a 2E app? Like what's going to be a slam dunk you're not even worried about?

Well, there are some cool file managers, but I think I was kind of delaying that because I'm actually pretty comfortable just doing that with Phish and in the terminal. So I feel like that might be cheating, but it's also feels like a slam dunk that I'm, I spend a fair amount of time doing that in the terminal anyway. It's more rare that I even open Dolphin. So feel okay on that end.

I'll say on day one going into this, I didn't expect the web browser to be such a solved problem. That was crazy. We'll get to that in a little bit. So I'm not too worried about web tasks to a degree. I also, I think I've solved chat, but I'm curious, Brent, like for you, what do you think is the most solved TUI problem? Like you're going to be able to just roll into a TUI app, no problem, and continue doing.

I think probably file browsing. It seems like there's a lot of options out there depending on what your preferences are. Surprisingly, there are like Slack clients and Matrix clients that seem pretty mature and are used quite a bit. I was wondering about the LLMs too, like pretty heavy browser-based, and I don't think your fun little browser setup that we were trying earlier was really amenable to that kind of thing.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

So I think, yeah, some things are quite solved. Others, I think we're really going to struggle.

Yeah, probably the trickier, like just basic chat should be easy. But if you're trying to do like image or music generate that, probably more difficult. Or you just have to go to a browser.

All right, so we're just kicking off the fun. So if you want to get in, you still can. We're hoping you'll also share some of your initial experiences at the beginning of the week and then follow up at the end of the week before next Sunday's show. So send the good and the bad, your TUI apps, your experiences. is you can boost them in or email unplugged at jupyterbroadcasting.com or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact.

I saw you looking at it. But yeah, it's nice.

It's really nice. And then another one that I think is a little more popular is Terminal Trove, TerminalTrove.com. And they have TUI apps and all kinds of terminal apps. There's a whole world over there that you can get introduced to. So they have a good selection and kind of a neat, unique way of discovering as well. And then you heard us mention it earlier, of course, but there's several of these awesome TUI lists on GitHub.

It is nice that it just so happens that for the most part, these apps end up being pretty minimal, right? Like just in terms of dependencies and size, and they're usually pretty darn fast too.

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Well, as we've alluded to, each of us have been like secretly choosing the Tui apps that we think we'll be using. Of course, you're allowed to switch anytime throughout the week, right? That's not one of the rules. So I have made a list and I know you guys have made a list and we'll see where we overlap. I tried desperately to find things that maybe you wouldn't find. I'm not so confident anymore, but I'll start here. So I found a couple of file managers.

All right.

Now, the first one here is called Superfile. So it says pretty fancy and modern terminal file manager. And from what I could tell from the little gifs that they have there, it looks pretty sweet. So I figured I'd give that a try. But I did also have two more here. One of them that seems extremely popular. It's called Ranger. You guys heard about this one?

Oh, yeah. That's been around for a while.

The Vim-inspired file manager.

It's still quite actively worked on, which was nice to see.

I'm curious, what are you looking for in a file manager?

Well, actually, that's maybe a really good question. I want to be able to use shortcuts to move files around and stuff like that and create things pretty easily using shortcuts, which I'm assuming doesn't really narrow the list down very much.

I mean, that's beyond what I'm doing.

I'm just considering CP and MV. I mean, I have a pick for this, too.

Yeah, but I have an argument here.

Okay.

A console app is not a TUI.

Yeah, I kind of agree. Yeah, I kind of agree. If you can, do it in a TUI. I think doing it on the console is acceptable because sometimes you can't avoid that. But definitely the line is breaking out to a graphical file manager. That's definitely the line. Yeah.

We should try to be TUing it up, right? TUing it?

Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, I agree.

My thoughts, but I'm fine with it.

All right.

Wes has hesitations. I'll give you the third one I found here, which is really just an alternative to Ranger. I figured Wes would like this one because it's a Ranger-like terminal file manager written in Rust called Joshuto.

Ooh, it's got a fun name, too.

Joshuto. So I think I'll start with that one because it seems like the most fun. Joshuto is also in Nix packages, so that was easy to get.

You know, I should have said, too, just searching, like, 2E or terminal in the Nix packages search is also not a bad way to find some of these.

Oh, you guys.

Great point. Chris, you could do that and then just see if it's available to you.

We can also install Nix on there.

Come on. No, I'm not installing Nix.

Okay, I'll stop. I'll stop.

Oh, you guys are killing me for this one. Like, I'm really feeling it for this one.

So did either of you consider one of those apps?

No, you got me on all those. I'm familiar with Ranger.

For Ranger, I did. Yeah, it was kind of in the background.

But yeah, no, I did not consider them.

Okay, so audience, tell me if I should or shouldn't choose one of those because I actually didn't try them yet. So we'll see if I stick to either of these. The other category that I am probably the most worried about is the email category. So this is the category where I most tried to find something modern, because I know you could do it with, let's say, mutt. Sure. I've tried mutt before for about 15 minutes and got exactly nowhere.

This is an area I want input to.

But there is something called neomut, which I figured would be kind of like an old classic, but modernized.

Teaching an old dog new tricks.

It seems, from what I could tell, that it's basically all of the patches that want to be in MUT actually applied to a project. So we will see. I think that's a place to land.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, I can't tell you. I haven't tried it yet.

Yeah, same. I'm curious. MUT's on my list is a possible email solution, but I haven't picked it yet.

I also tried to find something hyper-modern, and I found something called MELI, M-E-L-I, which is a, well, they just call themselves a rusty terminal mail client.

Oh, okay. Interesting.

But I don't know. I think this is the category where I will fall down the most, or at least have to put in the most effort.

Yeah, okay.

We should probably send each other some verification emails.

Ooh.

Yeah, make sure it's working. I see you've got slack term on your list. That came across in my searching to see if you can get slack in the terminal.

Yeah, there are a couple other, I started to realize, like, if we're spending as much time as possible in the TUI, there's actually a lot more we do than just moving files around and checking email.

I think you made a mistake here.

Uh-oh.

So you're going to have to go get like a token and all of that. You're going to have to go through the Slack web UI and that would.

This ain't going to help.

That would have, see, your window of opportunity, because you're talking to the guy who thought this through, was to get that set up before the TUI challenge started so you could legitimately take advantage of your GUI browser to go get the token and all of that. But now that you've waited until the TUI challenge has begun, you have made that way harder, my friend.

I did not think of sequencing.

Yeah, I did.

Can i get your api i.

Want to win this thing.

So slack term is a program that i put on the list i didn't think it would be unique you boys probably forced forced to try this too i.

Was i was curious about it it doesn't look like it's been updated for a minute but i don't know if that matters especially if it's just basic slack it.

Could matter when it comes to slack but it has a possibility yeah.

I also listen to music almost 100% that I'm on my laptop. And, you know, part of the challenge is to play that through the terminal. So I tried, well, thanks to our dear Drew, I've been using Tidal for like about, what, a year or two now to do my music. And there's a client for that, but it, you know, I guess they changed their APIs like three or four years ago, maybe five years ago. And no one's made a TUI app for it ever since.

Fred's going to learn to vibe.

Hey, that's a good idea, actually. I never considered making my own app. So I don't know. Maybe I'll have to solve that one with some of the local music that I have. I don't know. We'll see.

There's a lot of options when it comes to playing music in the terminal.

I'm thinking of trying CMOS again.

I bet you there's people out there doing it right now just because they like it, not because they're doing a challenge. They just like that client. If they have, they should send it in.

Nice and fast. I did find Turr music for that.

Yep, yep, yep.

Which I don't think is not going to be on your lists, but it is written in Rust. So I figured why not throw it in the list.

You're a horns guy today.

Can we just say that we all have ZellG or whatever it's called on our list?

Yeah.

We all do, right? Like that's going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting where I might have multiple windows. Instead, I'm going to have multiple sessions.

I knew you would both have Zellage because it just, everybody seems to love it. So I tried to find an alternative and it's called MyNav, which is Go-based. It's a Go-based workspace and session management TUI. it is not a nix os yet uh but i'll see if i can get this one working ha.

Yeah you should be able to ai that up pretty easy goes easy with the nix right i will say i'm hoping maybe it's gonna be an excuse to learn zelige a little better because it kind of relied on a lot of its sort of tmux compatibility and other things and there's a lot it can do and it has like web assembly plugins and all kinds of stuff.

And they got more in the works west.

I kind of realize now, though, that I forgot to cross-reference my choices with the actual rules for the TUI Challenge. So is there a category I'm missing here? Maybe I didn't do enough research.

You should double-check. Yeah. So my approach has been just get comfortable and get working. And then after the show, I'm going to start picking off the challenges. Yeah, that's what I meant.

Too.

I had to get a working environment, and I think that's what you're doing, too, is just get a working environment.

Okay, so just to review here in the challenge rules, there are a couple categories. One is text editing. I think we've got that figured out. Email management, we talked about. Web browsing is the one I didn't have a choice for, but I think Browse is a good place to start.

Okay.

Music playback, did talk about that. File management, all good. Task management, huh. Yes, I do have a choice for this.

Yeah, that's one I have not. I have some ideas.

Yeah, same.

But it kind of depends on, like, am I allowed to plan for the fact that, well, this challenge is not permanent? Because that's one route. If not, then it's a different route.

All right, so where have you gotten so far? Have you gotten the groundwork for a working environment, Westpain?

Yeah, okay, so let's see. Email, I'm checking out. I've only just got it installed and started playing with it, but I get it connected to one inbox. It's AERC, Eric, a pretty good email client. It's an email client that runs in your terminal, highly efficient and extensible, perfect for the discerning hacker.

You just got me thinking about a, maybe a Tui app that neither of us considered is a password manager.

Yeah. I'm going to have to do that. or read a lot of stuff off my phone.

I use KeePass, and I know there's a bunch of terminal options there, but you boys, what are you using?

We'll have to see. I'm going to figure that out. I do have a couple of options.

There is Bitwarden CLI, so we'll be definitely giving that a try.

That looks like a pretty good email client. I might consider that one. But you also found what looks like a pretty decent matrix client if you like Vim.

Yeah, Iamb, I-A-M-B, a matrix client for the terminal that uses Vim keypindings.

I did by the way load up like four different terminal apps and I was like what am I going to live in? What can I deal with? And then by just the default of relying on DistroBox, I'm going with Texas or whatever it's called. But I did try out a whole raft of moves. It was a nice opportunity to go back and try a few new ones that I haven't even seen before.

Okay, so another thing, Brent was talking about file managers. So Yazzie is one that we should talk about.

Yeah, Yazzie's the hipster one.

Blazing fast terminal file manager written in Rust based on AsyncIO.

Good UI too. Yazzie's on my list.

And I think, I haven't tried this yet, but it's on my shortlist. I think it also is one of the ones that can support image previews via the KIDI protocol.

Oh, that's cool. Sweet.

And then here's a stretch goal that I haven't played with yet because it's not in Nix. TV Term, a terminal emulator that runs in your terminal.

Okay, TV Term, what? I don't understand what this means.

It's an experimental terminal emulator widget and application based on the TurboVision framework.

You're saying you have a terminal in your terminal.

This one is worth maybe pulling open a little browser to see its preview because you kind of get an idea. It's got a really nice legacy look to it.

Oh, yeah?

Uh-huh.

Oh, man, I wish I wasn't in a terminal right now. I'd like to see it. I'll have to figure that out once we can close this and open up our terminal. That's great. All right, nice pick. I did see TV Term go by, but I thought it was something for watching over-the-air broadcasts or something.

No, it's a TurboVision terminal emulator.

That's cool. Nice find. Okay, so can I get to my apps?

Oh, yeah, okay.

So I also am, I think we have a theme here. I am stuck on email apps. Melly, M-E-L-I, is one I'm looking at. It's a configurable, extensible email client with some same defaults, and Redmond Rust as well just happens to be. And I'm considering that one. They have a nice WebAssembly demo.

Ooh, okay.

And I struggled to use it. So then I thought, I have used Mutt back in the day. And, you know, like Mutt says, all email clients suck. Mutt just sucks less. So maybe I should give Mutt a go. But then Brent comes along with his Neo Mutt.

Neo must be better, right?

Yeah, right. I like better. So I'm really stuck here. This is where I think I need the most input from the audience is what's worked for you as a command line email client. I wouldn't mind finding something I stick with because, you know, I could SSH into my workstation and check my email.

See, so I want to say, you know, I'm sure Emacs has a pretty good email client. But it also makes me, I'm sort of tempted by that route because Emacs can do so much of this stuff.

Yeah.

Well, Wes, report back.

You could just build out the Emacs operating system.

I don't know how well these various plugins work and appear to me, but it's one way to find out.

That'd be a hilarious direction. Wes just becomes an Emacs guy. Oh, if he's not already obnoxious enough with the Vim system. So, I also came across Glow, which renders Markdown on the command line with Pizzazz, and it looks really good and has a nice interface to do it, and that's really useful for me because our show docs are in Markdown and my notes are in Markdown.

Yeah, this is one I actually already use. It's nice.

Mm-hmm. And then... I found Gomucus. How do you say it? Gomucus?

Gomucus?

Gomucus? Gomucus. Probably saying it wrong, but I really like that. And it is a matrix client written in Go. And it is pretty slick. It looks like an Incursus 2E. You've got all your rooms on the left hand. You've got your chat in the right column. It looks kind of like Element would if it were a terminal application. And I've been using it. People don't even know. But I've been chatting with them for the last couple of days.

Are you using it live right now on the show?

No. No. I don't think I have it in the tab. I closed it because we were sharing this screen. But it's great. It is great. So, go mucks, go muckus, go muckus, go create a ruckus. It's a great matrix client. And I could see just keeping that in a terminal permanently. No electron for me.

All right.

I also have a web pick that I think is a real winner. So before we get to that, I want to talk about a little escape hatch that I tried to set up. I thought I could be clever and maybe I could get away with doing a time appropriate escape hatch for browsing the web. I was on FlatHub and I noticed that the Mosaic web browser is packaged as a Flatpak now.

Wow.

Amazing.

And you can install the old school like 1994 Mosaic web browser on your machine. And I thought, well, okay, if I had to jump out of the terminal, but I jumped over to something that was age appropriate and mosaic, maybe the boys would give me some creative points, right? So I didn't say nothing. And I installed it and I was trying it out. But of course, it doesn't have SSL support because that didn't exist back then.

Yeah, certainly not TLS, you know, modern TLS.

And it doesn't have SVG support. And it crashes hard the moment it sees an SVG image. And a lot of the web is using SVGs now. So I had to bring Wes in on the conspiracy. And I said, Wes, I need you to create me a solution to this. And Wes came up with a little Perl proxy.

It's Python.

Oh, Python, a little Python proxy. that he helpfully set up as a systemd service on my local box. And so now I have a local port running on this machine that I can point the Mosaic browser at, and that local little proxy strips SSL and strips SVG images and then sends the HTML back to the Mosaic browser.

I mean, it hasn't been perfect. We've got to do some debugging now, it seems, but it got us a surprising breadth of websites.

So does this count at all for bonus points? I mean, I know I'm coming at this early.

How long did it take you to set it up? Because the longer it took you.

No bonus points. How long did it take you to create the proxy, Wes?

Probably a half hour, a little debugging some AI.

A half hour of Wes is like three for you and I. So I think it's pretty good.

So, yeah. All right. So, but that's just an aside. How do we say this? Do we decide? Is it Carnobl, Carnobl, Carbinole?

I was going to say Carbonyl.

Carbonyl?

Yeah, I'm going with Wes on this one.

I don't know.

Now, you found another one, Brent, and it was called...

Broush.

Broush is interesting because Broush relies on Firefox essentially running headless on a remote system, and then it proxies the results back to the Broush client.

Kind of like what Wes set up, I guess, but just modern.

This is really neat. If you think about it, you could put the Broush server on a really powerful high-speed server, and then you could have the Broush client on something that is a little more low-end, and it's just receiving text back. So I like that setup a lot, but I didn't want to have a server client setup. I wanted something that runs entirely on my machine.

Why can't I just run it on my machine?

You could.

That's what you're doing with yours.

Yeah, I just wanted one thing. I didn't want a server client thing. I just wanted one thing. Although I might give it a try. I'm not ruling it out.

But what I'm saying is you already have a proxy running.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're basically doing the exact same thing.

But I'm not really going to use that as a joke. I'm not really. I want something I can actually use in my terminal.

Oh, okay. All right.

So here comes Carbano. What are we calling it?

Carbano.

Chernobyl, this is chromium in your terminal, and it's mind-blowing. It is unbelievable they've managed to do this. It doesn't perfectly render images and text, but it's enough that you can click around and you can actually click and you can log into stuff and you can do stuff that is Chromium compatible. And it's wild. I mean, I've never seen this. I'm used to links. You know, that's the kind of stuff I'm used to on the web terminal.

That is super impressive.

It is really neat.

It feels like Doom a little.

Yeah. It's like 8-bit web, but it's enough to get around, and the text is all perfectly rendered. It's just the images look a little 8-bit.

Assuming the text isn't an SVG.

No, this renders SVGs.

Whoa.

It's a mosaic that doesn't.

I can even tell there's a video there with a play button and everything.

I know.

This is impressive.

It really is. It's amazing. There's a lot. If you install it by just installing packages on your system, you've got to get NPM working. You've got to get some sound libraries working. You've got to get some network name service libraries working. There's a lot of dependencies to get it working as a native application. But here on my Bluefin system, we're just doing a simple Podman run, and then we point at the container name, and then we pass a URL to it,

It's really pretty good these days.

So that's the browser I think I'm going with.

Yeah, that's what I've been mostly using, although I should try Browse too.

Yeah, I think so.

Or Browse Reportback.

Oh, I haven't mentioned MC, Midnight Commander, which is going to be my file manager.

Of course, a classic.

And so I've just answered this question. So for me, it's Midnight Commander. But what TUI app, starting right now, do you think for sure is sticking?

Oh, that's a good question.

We'll check in on this.

I think with you, I'm hopeful that the matrix experience in a terminal could be pretty good, because it would be nice to be able to, like, it just seems like such a convenient and quick way to be able to sort of check on things and do basic responses.

Especially once I'm back on a GUI and I have, like, Quake or Dwake and I just, boop, pop it down, boop, pop it up. All right. So, yeah, I think for me it's that or it'd be like Commander, but what about you? What TUI app do you think is, like, at the end of the challenge, you're still going to be Rocky and you're going to be glad you picked it here at the beginning?

I think it's Matrix.

Oh, that's your answer, too? Oh, I thought you were saying for me because that feels...

Well, I am copying you.

Oh, okay. Well, I think I was copying you, but I think we agree. What about you, Brantley?

Well, I didn't really suggest this yet, but for a text editor, I think I'm going to lean hard into the Vim ecosystem. Probably the Neo Vim, but I'm open to suggestions only because- Oh.

It hurts.

Everybody seems to think it's great, and Chris, you and I, I feel like we're falling behind here. So I feel like I got to learn those Vim shortcuts.

Right in the back.

You were in the box at the ballgame, and you saw the live demonstration where we had people pick between Vim and Nano, and Nano won. You were there. You witnessed it.

You know what convinced me just now? You can't even scroll in Nano without destroying the document.

That could be a teammate issue for all we know.

So that's the one I'm hoping sticks the most.

That hurts.

No, no, probably NeoVim.

Yeah, well, of course. I don't know what I'm doing.

We should have you do like a little Vim training. Because they have like fun little- Oh.

There's a Vim game.

Right? Yeah, and we could record you trying it.

Okay.

It hurts. It hurts. Yeah, the text editor is so complicated, it needs a game. Okay. All right.

But I have a second pick.

Is it going to make Chris more or less upset?

I'm hoping it soothes things. Okay. I think I'm hoping that Zelage sticks around for me.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure.

I hope so too.

I think email is going to be a big struggle You think you boys are kind of on the same page I would.

Love for that to be a surprise But I do suspect that's when I will kick the bucket on.

Are you going to give a Telegram client a go?

Oh yeah I should I hadn't actually considered that but you're right.

I've got a couple in the kittiest possibilities But they're all What I don't like about them Is they're multi-clients They're like WhatsApp and Telegram and other things all in one And I just want a Telegram client And I have not found it to a Telegram I wonder.

How usable in Carbano it might be, the web version.

Well, you remember there is like a command line version of Telegram?

Yeah.

Could just try going back to that. I used to use that. It's just very chatty.

Okay, you set up a bridge to Matrix, and then you use GoMux too.

Right, right. Okay, and then last but not least, do you think there could be any long-term gains? I know this is day one, but I want to revisit this next week. For me, it's maybe eliminate a couple of Electron apps Could be a big gain. I have surrendered to using webmail for everything. I don't like it. If I could actually switch to using email in the terminal, that, I don't, I think it's a long shot, but that would be huge for me.

I think I'd love to see using something like Zellige to set up almost like a TUI dashboard. Like maybe there's a password manager always up in that particular session and there's, I don't know, a couple other tools that I just like having up.

Are there any Home Assistant 2E viewer things?

Oh, I didn't even think to look. Oh, there's so much to learn. So much to try. So here we go. We have the rules if you'd like to participate. And then we'll come back probably with the new apps we've discovered, the ones that didn't work and the ones that worked great and all of that in episode 619. So we'd love to hear your progress reports and how it ends up going for you. So to boost that in or if you email it, make sure you have hashtag 2E challenge in the subject line.

Well, Chris, I know several of your picks are a bit nostalgic, like using Midnight Commander, for instance. Still a great app, but, you know, it leans to the past a little bit. And there's a topic you want to share here that certainly leans to the past.

Is he calling me old? I think he's legacy.

Retro?

Experienced.

I was a little sad to note that after 25 years of publication, the Linux format is ceasing. And this was my favorite Linux magazine. It was a UK publication, so it cost a little bit more here in the States, but it was worth it because it came initially with CDs and eventually DVDs of Linux distros. And it's such a great way to experiment and try out new releases. And they had great coverage in there.

And there are plenty of podcasts like that.

It's what's happened to radio as well. In fact, I was telling Brent this morning, we have on ersatz TV, we have a bunch of old timey game shows. And one of them is Whose Line Is It Anyway? And this was like the very early days of television. and the ads are host-read like I do by the host. Like he tells, friends, let me tell you about this electric razor, right? And that's literally one of the ads and then they go back to the game.

You take your supplements and then you lay on your mattress and use your VPN.

Oh, the mattress one too. Yeah, yeah. Especially in the RV ones.

While you eat your, you know, pre-made dinner that gets delivered.

Oh gosh, it's true.

I mean, really. And so, you know, they over-indexed in the magazine business, just like podcasts are doing on advertising. They got the ratio off and then the advertisers left because they wanted to move on to different demographics because the tech industry is trendy. The tech industry thrives on the latest trends. And that means that the advertisers want to follow those trends because in theory, that's where the audience is at.

Maybe go look up the folks behind it and see what else they may be up to after.

And The Dude Abides is our baller booster this week, speaking of value for value and supporting the show. And he came in with 77,722 sets. Oh, there's a Boosty's leaderboard, I hear. He says, nice idea on the disposable server as well. You could go as far as use Terraform so you don't even have to connect to the VPS console.

Absolutely.

By the way, what song generation services do you guys like? I think Suno's one of the best. I know there's several out there.

Yeah, that's the only one I've tried so far.

Oh, there's a few. It's becoming quite the category. You know, it is. So I'd love to hear suggestions.

Turd ferguson boosts in with 33 222 sets, happy belated birthday to brent i bet you smell great oh.

That's very sweet i'm kind of blushing.

Used motor.

Oil but that's you know.

Some folks are into that and a little bit of gasoline although he tries not to yeah it was it was brent's birthday oh.

Gee thanks, okay okay.

That's all right all right get him out of here get him out of here.

Okay chard busan what's your experience with pipewire bit a lot of recent linux audio critiques popping up uh with negative experiences.

Ah good question i have i've seen a couple of articles going on hacker news about the linux audio experience is horrible have you seen those floating by oh one of them perennially one of them we had a good little discussion going in our private chat recently about one of the blog posts well.

Because they seem to have outdated experiences here compared to what we're experiencing.

Yeah, some of them are trashing pulse audio still and they don't even really know what they're trashing. And some folks are specifically targeting pipe wire. And we're all on Pipewire. We have been for a couple of years now, and we do some of our production on Pipewire, especially when we're remote.

I swapped out a PopOS install to Pipewire before that was supported because I wanted it so bad.

And our experiences have been, I think, I don't want to speak for you too, but I think very positive. I mean, what we ran into was Pipewire might do a default differently than how Jack Audio did it. But once you wrap your head around the way Pipewire does, you're like, oh, that's actually kind of a better way to do it.

Yeah, it's not necessarily a complete drop in if you have advanced or complicated workflows, right, especially at the interface between pulse and jack, because in the old world, they were like separate. And you could have, you know, various things like a pulse plug in the bridge to jack. That's a very particular setup that by default, pipewire integrates things. And so you need to either recreate that or change, you know, how you've got things going.

If you want to play around with it, go over to Flathub or whatever you like and search for Pipewire, and you'll see there's several GUIs that let you play around and connect application audio and things like that, and you'll start to, I think, get a real sense of the power of Pipewire. But as far as stability goes and things like that, it seems to be a net improvement over Pulse Audio, which was getting pretty tame towards the end of its run, too.

Yeah, and if you knew what you were doing, you set up Pulse with good settings, and you got... setup and going good on your system it was a nice setup and you may have to do some stuff to recreate exactly that workflow in pipewire but just out of the box the fact that it unifies those worlds and prevents like a single pane of glass into what's going on with your audio and supports a lot of the pro audio workflows you do you may have

I wouldn't sleep too on the performance they've been able to eke out just really top-notch pro-level audio performance and then also, a real masterful swap out for the most part a real api compatible swap out of jack and pulse audio where you could go distro hop and not realize you switch from a pulse audio system to a pipe wire system for the most part.

I felt like that was a bit of a golden example of moving to a new piece of tech like um just for instance the wayland transition was a.

Bit rougher pipe.

Just kind of happened and none of us really noticed.

Yeah.

It's also been very nice, I think, in particular for Bluetooth.

Yes.

Pipewire and Bluetooth is radically better.

Yes. Better than, I think, any other OS.

It's so great because I have Bluetooth connected just via KDE in the system and then I can have Reaper running via Jack, which actually goes to Pipewire routed for monitoring back in my Bluetooth headphones and it all works flawlessly.

Yeah, and just call audio stuff, you know, they connect way more reliably, all that kind of stuff.

Well, we have a boost here from user 56587013 for 5,100 sats. Sending my earned sats, I'll be switching phones and accounts. Thanks for the great shows.

Congrats on the new phone.

See you on the other side, we hope.

Yeah, hopefully so. And thank you for thinking of us. Wes, you had a hot one too. So you had another hot ticket. Speaking of hot tickets. Bazite with Brent.

Just saying.

We just need to turn him into a hardcore gamer. He's almost there.

I mean, he could use it as a non-gaming OS.

I suppose so. Yeah, well, but I think he's so close to slipping in. He's so close. VHH32 is here with 5,000 sats. Guys, sorry I didn't get the video player ready in time. I'll keep working on it as I can. Also, I'd be happy to take some contributions from anyone who would like to help out. He'll link to it in the show notes, which is if you go search for BHH32 on GitHub, you'll find it. He says, I hope the TUI challenge goes well.

It's never too late.

Even if you don't, after the challenge, we'll still make it a pick or something, right? I think we can make it a pick, boys. So thank you for the update, and good luck with that. And if anybody wants to help him with his TUI video player, go look up BHH32 on GitHub.

Ambient noise boosts in with $3,930. my approach if i wanted to share my library with a non-techie friend jellyfin i assume is to use one of the micro pcs i have laying around buy a cheap bluetooth tv remote or air mouse load bazite kde wire guard to auto connect back to my home set firefox to launch full screen on startup set jellyfin to be the home page and put the jellyfin client into tv mode like a good old-fashioned tv set top box this is great yeah.

That's a system that's a that's a full-on process you can make a checklist around that.

Build build a golden image roll it out yeah.

Interesting i love all the different ideas that we saw pop up over the week of different ways to do disposable servers everybody has taken a crack at this or not everybody but a lot of people have taken a crack at trying to solve this with jellyfin in particular i think if somebody came along and developed uh friend sharing with jellyfin ala plex.

There might be some interest yeah.

Yeah for sure.

Well pod bun sent in 5 000 sets, It's always great to hear that you boys use the stuff that you sponsor. I'm sure that there are plenty of sponsorships you could take where you say how great it is and you don't actually use the product. But here at JB, we actually use it.

So there's a few ways this works. There's a spray and pray advertiser out there and they mass email any podcaster that gets on their list. And if you bite, they'll do a deal with you. And there's really, there's only the conversation is around the terms of the deal. No conversation around the product. They don't tell you anything about the product. There's no education around the product. There's no demo.

Yeah, they do.

Thank you. Appreciate the boosts. Firefly Go is here with 4,000 sats. Please keep the Red Hat content going. Having drifted away from it in the last few years, I'd love to hear more about it, not just as a desktop user, but as a server and how the image-based approach could work for the Homelab. Thanks.

Look at Chris. He just wants to virtualize. You can see it. Free KVH boosts in with 8,472 SATs. Nice that you're moving on from NixOS. You leave a deep understanding of different computing concepts in your ADD wake. Most of my repos now have a shell.nix setting paths and installing dependencies to get going super quick. So I'm curious to learn if I'll follow you down this new path again. By the way, this is not a zip code boost, but a species designation boost. Love you guys.

Keep it up.

I see species 8472.

The one and only.

I'm on to him. That's pretty great. Yeah, you know, so far it has been a big shift, and some of it's been painful. But every now and then a workflow clicks, and I'm like, oh, crap, this is nice. So I'm hoping I stack more of those as the week goes on. you know it's early days we'll see.

Well outdoor geek came around left 5 000 sets, The KSMBD CVE, which is number 37899, mentioned in the live feed, is also an AI story.

Right, so quick pause. This is Samsung-sponsored development of a Samba server for their Android devices to get built into the Linux kernel. And then surprise, surprise, there's a remote code execution vulnerability in the Samba server built into the Linux kernel.

That's why we call you Chris KSMBD Fisher.

Sean was benchmarking OpenAI's O3's ability to find a vulnerability that they already knew about when it found this CV. Also note the false positives rate is very high. They indicate a signal-to-noise ratio of about 1 to 50.

Yeah, right. So as you might suspect, it's more in the, okay, so like an experienced security researcher might be able to use this as a tool and not in the, anyone can walk up to a LLM and get legit security vulnerabilities.

Yeah well i mean i suppose if you could then farm those out and have a human go over it boy that sounds like reviewing ai slop sounds like a real bad job though but interesting thank you for pointing out that angle that is good to know tomato's here with 5 000 sats thanks for the great coverage of red hat summit i'm looking forward to finishing the tui challenge in sync with the rest of you that's great nice we really appreciate

Jordan bravo boost in with 1111 sats.

Yep that's right we have the boost on sale we could do it for one more week a thousand sats is a two thousand is usually the cutoff but we're putting them on sale at one thousand sats.

Woohoo boost on sale.

Chris sorry.

To hear you bailing on nix os but at least you're sticking with an atomic and immutable distro hopefully wes will keep us nix heads up to speed i'll do my best.

Yeah you definitely will i tell you what yeah jordan bravo thank you i'll report in on how it's going in the future.

Well moon and i also passed the cutoff with a thousand sats.

Hank's confused 1,000 sats.

My vote is to keep doing conference coverage. I don't go to these sorts of things or follow any news, so it's great to hear what's going on from you guys.

That's useful. Thank you for the feedback.

Yeah, really. Thank you, Moon Knight. Nice to hear from you as well. We appreciate you. Thank you for boosting. We're going to do one more week, and that's it. If you'd like to boost in, the sat cutoff will be 1,000 sats, just to help everybody.

Dip your toes in.

A little bit to dip your toes in, try it out. The easiest way to really get involved is Fountain FM because they host the Lightning Walt for you. They make it simple to integrate with Strike, and they have other methods coming soon to make it even easier. Fountain also has recently had some very nice UI updates, some back-end changes, and even more UI changes on the way. So if you haven't checked out Fountain FM, we're having some issues, some bugs, give it another go.

Ooh, this looks nice.

Yep, MIT licensed. There's a couple of these, but this is the one that I kind of like the best.

Yeah, it's a little more full-featured. I've been using so far the WTTR.in website that you can curl and it'll give you a little terminal display.

That's neat too.

But I think they only license like three days of data. And so you kind of just, you get what you get.

Now, the second pick, we've been taking a crack at this theme for a long time now, a while. And it's downloading YouTube videos and playlists and whatnot, scheduling downloads in a way that is simple, either for ongoing use or single shot.

We almost changed the name of the show to YTDLP Unplugged.

So this week, maybe it's the last one in the series, it is YTP Tube. It's a web GUI for YouTube DLP that supports concurrent downloads, presets, and scheduled tasks. And it's a pretty straightforward web-based UI. You could put it on any of your machines, and then you load it up, you queue up the thing you want, and it just goes. So maybe you just install this on your Jellyfin server. And you point the download

So you can watch our live stream.

And it also supports different notification platforms. It has a built-in video player if you just want to watch it back in the web browser locally. So it's YTP Tube and I'll have a link in the show notes. It's also MIT licensed. So I don't know, maybe you use one of our web browser terminal apps to load this thing up and then if BHH gets his video player working you could watch your vidges on the terminal. It's all possible. You never know.

I do. I do.

You don't love them.

Well, I'm a little thrown off because the second one I got to like get Carbano going again to check out, but I like Tempe. Tempe, I'm, I'm here for Tempe.

Yeah, you actually, you do like Tempe. I could tell you did like Tempe. All right. I'll take what I can get.

Brent, he's just skeptical. Skeptical Brent.

Yeah, he is. It's probably because he's getting hungry.

No, I just started thinking I usually check the weather on my phone and maybe because we're here now, maybe I could just run terminals on my phone too.

You could.

And do it that way, but...

That might be worth some bonus points. I don't know.

Okay, all right.

You'd have to ask the advisory committee next week. That's right. The TUI Challenge will wrap up next week, so send your progress and your results into the show, either via boost or by email. If you do an email, make sure you put hashtag TUI Challenge in that email so we can read them on the show because not only do we want to share our experiences, of course, but we want to share your experiences as well. And now we're back to our regular live schedule so you can make it a Linux Tuesday