¶ Intro
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
And my name is Brent.
Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up, we have just one or two self-hosted apps that once you unlock will give you free legal TV, the same stuff you're paying multiple streaming services for. Turns out we were completely wrong about IPTV, and with just a few apps, a little bit of Linux, you can finally unlock something that I've been paying $100 at least a month for. I'm going to cut all of that out, save $100 a month, and tell you how I'm doing it.
I'm cutting the streaming cord, and there's some great tools to make it. So it's really great. Then Carl's going to drop by and give us an update on Cosmic and their big milestone that landed this week. Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and more. So before we get to all of that, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, and hello up there in the quiet listening, too. Thank you for being here.
Mumble Room's always going on a Sunday when we do the live show. And a big good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking. Go check out Nebula. They have managed Nebula, which you can sign up 100 devices for free, no credit card required, and take advantage of their decentralized VPN platform built on the open source Nebula VPN. And this thing is optimized for speed. I mean, it's simple, and it is the best security in the business.
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¶ Housekeeping
Always small improvements. Because it's developed out in the open, you can watch some of these features a year or two out. as they work on them and develop them. And Nebula had to be ready to go back in 2017 because that's how they secured the Slack network across multiple data centers around the world. I mean, we're talking the world's biggest businesses and enterprises rely on Slack security, and Slack uses Nebula.
And every Rivian on the road is communicating with Rivian HQ using Nebula to protect their customer data. You can use it as well, and then you can fully own your networking infrastructure. It's not some begrudging thing that you can somehow take advantage of and self-host, it's designed that way. Or you let them deal with it. Go to define.net slash unplug, support the show, and redefine your VPN experience. That's define.net slash unplug.
All right. So before we get into the show, I wanted to reflect on a theme of the year because we're almost out of episodes and there's no place else for us to talk about this except for now, because we are down to the final wire. Home Lab holidays just around the corner. We're going to have a live stream this Friday coming up. If you'd like to join us, it'll be Friday the 19th. We'll be doing the Holiday Home Lab live and we'd love to have you there.
¶ Carl's Cosmic Christmas
But before we get to our end of year shows I wanted to talk about something that I think maybe the show didn't pay as much attention to this year that it should have and that has been the end of Windows 10, and I think we saw more people coming to Linux than we initially expected because we have seen these Windows releases come and go over the years and I don't know if Vista and Windows 8 didn't convince people to try Linux I didn't think it would be Windows 11.
Remember when Windows 10 was Can it be the.
Last one? The one that went forever?
Yeah.
So Windows 11 does seem to have finally pushed at least some people to try Linux. And we saw a handful of distros this year focus on being a Windows alternative, trying to make it easy for people to transition. And many of them are trying to replace or recreate the Windows experience, while others are going their own route. And System76, I think, is a company that is positioned to help those Windows users transition that are looking for a full package, hardware support, and a Linux environment.
And you might recall during our recent Texas Linux Fest trip in October, on our way home, we swung by the System76 factory to see how things were going while they were in the final stretch of development for Cosmic. Well, this week, Pop!OS 24.04 LTS with Cosmic Desktop 1.0 shipped. It's here. It's available right now. It's real. And Carl, the CEO of System76, joins us right now to talk about it.
Carl, welcome back to the show. Last time we came to visit you, this time you're coming to visit us, and it's a big day, sir. Congratulations on the new release.
Oh, thank you very much, and thank you for having me on the show. It's always a pleasure with you guys.
Okay, so let's tell everybody what's happened. This week, Pop! OS 24.04 LTS shipped with Cosmic Desktop, and is this considered Cosmic 1.0 or Cosmic Stable now?
It is. We reached 1.0 after about three and a half years of work and a lot of design work that came even before that. So, yeah, it's a major milestone. I can't tell you the endurance it takes to build something over three years and then finally get there. It's actually a little exhausting, but it's really exciting, too.
Oh, I bet. Would you do it again?
Absolutely. I love making things. Yeah. You know, it took us longer to build Cosmic than it took to build a factory.
Yeah.
Wow.
Has it been three years, five years, three years? How long has it been?
Yeah, it was about three and a half years of development time, development design time. I think the factory was up and running really in about 18 months.
Oh man.
Now that was, you know, first shot factory, but that's not actually that different than first shot you know desktop environment release like there's now you know we didn't have all the machinery that we wanted we didn't have all the capabilities we wanted and those grew over time but still just to get the point where we're doing the things we need to do to ship hardware uh to get all the things we need to do to ship cosmic took uh took about twice the time i.
Bet you probably got more pushback over launching a desktop environment than you did trying to manufacture in the States, too.
You know, not really. No? Yeah, I think... I don't know if we just didn't see it, but from my perspective, people were really encouraging.
I mean, yes, but it also seemed like a crazy endeavor, to be honest. I mean, like, who has time to build computers and laptops and support all of that and also create a desktop environment? It just seemed...
Super ambitious it is yeah it's it's ambitious but i think like you kind of you run up against some kind of limitation and you can either choose just ignore it and keep doing what you're doing or you take the dive and do something totally new and ambitious and kind of crazy and and that is definitely our mo i mean i mean you don't build u.s.
Factories either i think um the the history with pop i mean from you know cosmic sort of starting as customizations on top of GNOME setup and the years now that you've spent shipping, you know, a different, I would say improved version from this Ubuntu base. I think that built credibility that showed like, oh, you guys really can do your own thing and it has been worth doing. And I think that maybe bought some trust and willingness to wait for Cosmic in the community.
Yeah, it's a good point. Once you've like bitten off smaller pieces and shown what you could do and then you, yeah, you gain that trust over time. I'm almost the opposite. I give 100% trust and then it only can get shaved away over time. But I understand that, especially when this is something I think we proved what we could do in enabling hardware that wasn't there before and that was part of what we were doing with Pop! OS and then we started.
We always listen to our customers and what they're doing. So when we came up against things that we really wanted to do because we knew they were asking for it, we just worked on a new type of user experience inside of Pop! OS on top of GNOME with GNOME extensions. That worked really well. But our ability to continue to push the envelope, do the things that we were hoping to do, and do it in a frictionless way was becoming limited. And now the world's always true.
We could do anything, you know, it was a lot of work getting to the point where a customer can go from PopOS 2204 with GNOME that had been around for a very long time to a completely brand new desktop. And we felt like you could do that without feeling like you lost things and you actually feel like you gained things. Now, there are some things that are there that, you know, gaps we didn't fill. I think our Wacom tablet experience isn't great and that's something we're going to have to do.
But overall, I think we covered it with a basis that did more for users on the whole, for most users that are on PopQuest.
Carl, remember one of the big questions three years ago when Cosmic was first announced that you'd be working on that? But also I remember when Pop was first starting out, one of the big questions in the community in general was, is this going to dilute the efforts of System76 and their mission? I'm just curious how that has showed up for you and the team and how you've kind of mitigated that happening, considering that software is quite a bit different than hardware.
Well, we only ship Linux computers. That's all we do. We don't do Windows, we don't do anything else. And so... The software that we ship is how we're representing Linux to the world. It's not two different things. So you can have the greatest hardware in the world and not be doing the things that your customers are asking for with the operating system. It doesn't matter. You can have a great opportunity to have some terrible hardware and it's not going to work.
It is kind of shocking that I think we have 60 people at System76. And amongst 60 people, we're able to do all this. But I think we have the right 60 people that can do it at a very high level.
So I want to kind of shift gears and talk about what end users should kind of expect from release cadence and also availability on distros outside of POP. So let's take it one by one. So now that... We have 1.0. Is this a every six month release? Is this a one month? Is this every three years? What kind of cadence should users expect when they're using pop for a release? Or is it is it something else? Is it maybe all the time?
So we're going to adopt the same type of methodology we use building pop OS. For everything that we did on top of pop OS, it was a rolling release.
So popos always has newer kernels newer mesa the extensions evolved, throughout during the release there weren't you know big drops after you know every six months or something like that so we're going to use the same kind of games with cosmic and it'll be interesting because, I think it'll be the only desktop environment that's using a rolling release style. But some of the foundational architectural ways that it was developed enable us to do that in a high-quality way.
So we don't have to break APIs to continue moving forward with the desktop. In GNOME Shell, extensions need to be rebased for the new version of GNOME that comes out every six months, and that's not necessary for applets in the Cosmic panel, for instance. So just some of those fundamental early architectural decisions means that we will be able to move faster and do so without breaking things as we go.
We still have things to learn. We learned stuff during the beta period that sometimes it's like the compositor touches so many things that it's, it's. Almost impossible without wider, even with really extensive testing. It's almost impossible to catch everything. So we need some time where the community is also helping us with running a testing repo, just to help us with some of those corner cases.
But I'm confident we'll get that nailed down to the point where we can move really quickly and deliver features. Just as an example, when we finished HDR, why wait four months to get HDR? How about we just ship HDR? You take that frosted glass in the compositor and in the UI. When we have that ready, if it's been fully QA'd, it's been fully tested, why wait up to six months to ship it? We can just ship that to our users.
So we'll continue with that process and continue refining it and do it in a way that you can trust a stable release to operate. So we're not going to see regressions. I'm sure we'll have a couple little ones here or there. But we will forever get better at that process because I think moving fast is really, really important.
And I kind of know the answer to the second part of the question, which was it's already available on other distributions. That's just sort of inherent to how the community is built. There's people that are for the Fedora distribution and for NixOS that are actively packaging it. So that part is actually already done, right? I think it's pretty close to when you release something, it can be packaged up for the other distributions.
I don't know why, but I was kind of surprised at the uptake and how broad it was. It's really across the whole ecosystem. I think I had memories of Unity. I think Unity was difficult for other companies. Other distros to package because they were using forked versions of GTK. So GNOME and Unity on the same system without these forks wouldn't work.
So that's something we were careful to do to make it easy to package Cosmic and make sure that Cosmic wasn't conflicting with other desktop Linux, Linux desktop experiences or environments, so they could be packaged and shipped alongside those others.
So I have one question that's just a weird Chris question, if I could say it right. And I was wondering, I thought when you told me in the summer that we'd see it ship, I thought maybe you'd be kind of aiming, and maybe you were, this is my question, for October to kind of nail that Windows 10 end of life. And I'm wondering, second part of this is, is System76 picking up some Windows users that are not happy with Windows 11? And is the timing of Cosmic 1.0, is it kind of related to this at all?
Is this part of the goal is trying to pick up some Windows converts?
We always want to show Windows users how much better it can be on Linux. Sure. That's always our objective. But the timing was about the product being completed, not about Windows phasing out Windows 10. For Microsoft phasing out Windows 10.
I thought so. But I thought in a weird way, wouldn't it be great if Cosmic could just sort of be there, landing at the right time to pick up some of those expats?
Well, and that's an ongoing thing. It only started in October. Now I think they're looking for a new home and it's going to be some time where, especially when you think about the enterprise that has these huge fleets that they're thinking about how they're going to migrate and what they're going to do.
And I don't know how viable Linux is, depending on what their enterprise networks are like, but those will take even longer before they start making their decisions and moving over different platforms.
Well, I think if they can look at the specs and the interesting details, I think you've got a really compelling story here for them, right? Because it's a 24-04 LTS base, but with a modern, updated desktop environment. That's kind of an exciting combination because the parts that you want to stay kind of fresh stay fresh, and the bits you want to be old and reliable stay old and reliable, and that's going to be really appealing to a certain set of Windows users. So I hope they find it.
Back to us Linux users, as just people listening to this show, what's kind of the number one way they can help you guys out going forward now that the 1.0 is here? What sort of necks that you need from the community?
The community that's built around it, because we've been doing alpha releases, I think it's maybe been 18 months or so. Between the alpha releases and the beta releases, we have this fantastic community of people that are building apps and applets and testing and filing bug reports. The thing about computing is that it is exceptionally broad, the amount of hardware out there, the age of hardware, how people use their computers.
And even with all that time, that really helped us to narrow the gap between what we see in the lab. And we have 20 years of hardware to test. But what we see in the lab and what people see in the wild, that's helped us a lot. And there's always more. So I think if I were to ask for something, it would be to communicate with us when there's something. If you've installed Pop! OS and some particular thing doesn't work, we're here to listen and work on things and improve it.
And so, so instead of like, this is garbage, I'm going to put something else on. We're here to, we're here to listen and, and build and, and make the best experience for you.
It's pretty exciting to just be here. It's amazing.
Yeah.
It's massive congratulations to you and the team and Jeremy and everybody that's been working so hard on this. Everybody's tested it, the community around it. Just a huge congratulations, Carl. It's a, it's a, it's a holiday gift for all of us.
At the start of the 11th.
It's a cosmic Christmas.
Ah, there you go. Very good. Thank you, Carl.
I've been waiting to use that one for the longest time.
I can tell.
Look at the door for me.
It's a cosmic Christmas, everybody.
Yes.
¶ He Put TV on the Internet!
Well, as a little something different for the last couple of weeks, I've been like in winter, full winter hibernation mode here, hanging out with my parents and they do the channel flicking and they watch the news in strange amounts of quantity per day. But what I've noticed as a change since I've done this with them years and years ago, is they're constantly like, okay, we want to, I don't know, watch the, I'm so Canadian, watch the hockey game.
And then they're They're like, oh yeah, that's on channel 675. And then my mother's like, oh, I want to watch my cooking show. They're just bouncing constantly from like streaming or, oh no, it's on this app. No, no, you actually need to, you know, you can only watch that on the computer or your phone or whatever. And they're constantly moving around between all these different apps and stuff. And it's, I don't even sign up to any streaming services.
They've got like four or something, plus all these other, like they have cable too. And like, but they can't get everything that they want with cable because it needs packages. You can't just sign up for like just the channel they want to watch. You got to get, it's exhausting. And I'm just like watching from a distance. And Chris, you watch a ton of TV. You got to have a solution to this, right? Please bring a modern solution to these problems.
I mean, I do watch a fair amount every night. I watch a little, you know, with dinner and then usually a couple hours maybe after that. So it's, well, an hour. So it's a big part and you're right.
You also end up doing some, you know, TV for work.
Yeah, yeah. And it's for capturing clips and whatnot. There's a lot of that. And I think I did a little audit and I think it's six streaming services. Some of it's because I have Prime and I pay for the Apple crap for my family because they all have the iPhone. So you get like the Apple TV with that. So some of it's like you got it anyways. But if you count all of them, it's.
How many logins do you have at the end of the day.
Right?
How many apps can you use on your TV?
It's bad. And then you have the different apps you have to pop between. And, you know, the promise was is that we could save money and just have the content we wanted. And it is so bad that I can understand why people just want to go to pirating. But you don't have to go that route. It turns out you can do it legally for free using some really great apps. And I've heard of IPTV for years. You've probably heard of it out there or at least familiar with the term.
I mean, you could really just describe it as HLS video over the Internet. That's really IPTV. What surprised me is just how rich and deep the content is out there and how much money I'm throwing away by not just taking advantage of what's out there for free. And I think the missing piece for me was I didn't have a clear way to take all of these disparate RTMP HLS streams that are all over the Internet.
That the industry is using behind the scenes to just send content between each other over the open frickin Internet. I didn't have a way to like bring all of that together and then just sit there and watch it on my TV. You know, that last 20% just made it unapproachable. And so I was doing stupid things like paying for YouTube TV so I could watch the local news during the winter because we have crazy flooding happening here in the Pacific Northwest.
So I always end up, YouTube TV is almost $100 a month now. It's outrageous. So I came across an app called Dispatcher. Dispatch R. And it is a open source powerhouse for managing IPTV streams and all of the program data, the EPG data. And it gives you a brilliant interface that then produces a playlist that lots of different applications can ingest and make it super simple to have a curated playlist of IPTV channels.
And this dispatcher app will also proxy some of the streaming to make sure you're optimizing bandwidth and reduce the overall connections that the client might natively make to the RTMP stream. And it does so effectively that I can watch four channels simultaneously over my LTE connection. Is about 4.5 megabits when I'm doing this. And yet I can watch four streams simultaneously with this thing. Obviously, it has a lot of different backend, like F of MPEG things going on and whatnot.
But the other thing that I really like about it is it has a video on demand DVR functionality. So kind of turning the page back a bit, sort of like YouTube TV offers. So I can record the local news. And then it integrates with SponsorBlock after the fact and other tools. And it can process the video after the fact. and remove the commercials, which is really nice. And it's got a nice, smooth web UI that's very intuitive. I figured it out in
just a couple of minutes. And then it can output the signal that you ingest in HD Home Run format, M3U, XML TV. So you can pull like the TV guide and the video feed into Jellyfin or Plex or other applications that we'll talk about.
And this dispatcher is a total unlock for this incredible world of content that's available in every country in every language and there's probably a thousand channels that you would find interesting and like myself after you've gone through them you'll probably end up with a hundred that you stick with a hundred different channels of free content some of its 2k resolution some of its 1080p resolution it's really something impressive but there's just
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Now, Wes, a couple of weeks ago, when you convinced me to watch baseball with you, you were doing something similar to this, just like finding random, I think, IPTV streams. So how would this have helped your situation back then? What do you need to, you know, instead of doing it manually, how is this bringing it all together?
I was doing a lot of it manually at that point. I had found a site that if I was just like casting a tab, probably would have been the easiest way to do it in a simple setup.
And if i didn't want to like remix with the my own audio stream in there uh as well but, they were really set up for that model i noticed after chris kind of tuned me into this dispatcher which i've only tried a little bit we'll get into that i've found the local hockey game on there i wasn't even looking for that but you know just like browsing through and checking out kind of like checking out some of the stuff we'll get into so it made me think oh right this is like such a better
way you know like i don't need to be spinning up i mean obviously i did it in i was just having fun but i don't need to be spinning up obs and like inspecting the browser console to try to like makeshift uh a proper you know hls m3u m3u8 stream setup or.
Just like going lazy and like chrome casting some tab to your tv which works but like your laptop has to be on your phone and sometimes you lose control.
It's great in a pinch and it's terrible if you're going to start watching every game.
Yeah or if you're watching even like a movie really.
Yes yeah suddenly it falls asleep yeah and then you never get back to where it was the seeking somehow you realize doesn't work and yeah um so i set up dispatcher uh they've got a docker image uh works totally fine in podman too uh so it's really easy to just like start dabbling but. And I did find some initial data sources to play with. But I realized there were some terms and some structure that I didn't quite understand.
Because there's the individual streams, which are mostly HLS, HTTP streams, shipping little fragments of MP4 files to you, essentially, or MPEG-TS files. But then those get collected in these M3U files, which also have a bunch of metadata in there. Sometimes they have like headers for the connection that you're going to fetch. So you can pull that into dispatcher. And then that shows like a whole bunch of all the possible channels that are in there.
But then you have to create from that, like those show up, I guess, as streams. And then inside dispatcher, you have to create your own channels. And then totally separately, there's this notion of EPG, which is like the electronic program guide. And that has its own XML format. And then I guess Dispatcher now has the ability to sort of auto match those.
But in theory, either it auto matches or you're responsible for like connecting the stream, the actual like video stream with extra metadata about how the TV guide stuff works. So can you give me the lay of the land here? Because I was I got it to work, but I don't think I did it right.
So, yeah, you kind of have it. So you pull in the various streams and in my dispatcher, I have 71 pages of streams and there's 50 streams a page. So I have everything really that I thought was semi-interesting. But I only have 50 channels that I'm actually actively using right now. And so what I do is I go through the available streams and I curate them. And what's great is you can preview them to make sure they're working in here. And then I assign them a channel. And this is nice because...
And is that one stream per channel?
I think you can do it multiple ways, but I am doing one. So, you know, Channel 4 is the Channel 4 news. And so that way it sort of maps to what people are familiar with already. And so you create from all your available streams, you create the channels you want. And then you can find... And so let's talk about this because this is an interesting bit. is you can find lists of TV streams from different countries, different languages, different topics.
There's a search engine, which we'll link in the show notes. There's a GitHub awesome IPTV that just has lists by region or topic. So maybe you're really into gardening. You can find all the gardening IPTV streams and then you pull them in. Now, I think it is worth noting that some places, you know, do have laws around this kind of thing. Like many mech notes that in the Netherlands, if you're caught using a legal IPTV provider, an illegal one, you can get your ISP disconnected.
Now, I don't know what makes it illegal. Um, cause they're just open, they're just open HLS streams, but I'm sure some of them like are in violation of like a local license or something. Um, but you can find these streams either through the awesome list or the search engine. And so maybe you're a Star Trek fan. You can literally go to the IPTV link search and put in Star Trek and we'll show you all of the streams.
If you're familiar with Pluto TV, a lot of the Pluto TV content is actually just an open HLS stream.
Now they still have the ads in there, but I mean, you're going to get that either way.
Yeah, you're not skipping the ads unless you record it because this does have some DVR functionality.
And we should probably note, too, there's a lot of stuff because of the way this is put out there. A lot of it's geoblocked. So you may run into that.
Yeah, the community tends to label them. You know, there's a community out there curating them and does tend to label them. And then I'll also link to streamtest.in. And you can throw the URL in there and it will test to make sure it's a valid URL, test to see if it's geoblocked, and it'll give you all of the details, like what resolution it is, what bit rate it is. And so you could pass it through that before you throw it into dispatcher.
It's also the kind of stuff you know just like reflecting on we touched on piracy and just you know open culture and media and content like i noticed i was able to pull in turner classic movies yeah that was one that i know that my dad occasionally liked watching he'd find stuff from his childhood on there that he never got to see or whatever and it happened to work out that in the cable package they moved that one up to a tier that like he wasn't going to pay for anymore they're
not you know no one this is not funding active development it's not like it's just all old stuff, Why not just have it show up for free on the TV?
And it's to me, it's the 2025 version of cutting the cord. You know, I remember when I lived a little bit further south and I put up an over the air antenna for the first time and I started getting HD content for free over the air. It felt like I had hacked the system. I couldn't believe I could watch all this stuff for free and it was in higher bit rate than I was getting over my copper cable.
This feels much like that. Now I'm cutting the streaming services cord, and I'm just going directly to the provider's URLs that they're putting out there already.
And I'll give you – so here's some of my channels. I have every news channel –. That exists and all of their iterations i have uh nine versions of abc news i have all of my local news uh then i have classic tv channels classic drama tv land comedy central a lot of pluto tv streams in here a lot of auto tv channels because i like some of that stuff i mean just have i have everything you could ever want like i even i even have like some some crazy wackadoo streams
because it's kind of fun just to pull in and watch this stuff um and you can have international news you You can have local news. I could have just about every local news stream that I want in here. If I wanted to see what the news is in Denver today and then I want to check Chicago, you could do that if you wanted to. And that's why Dispatcher is really nice because there are thousands of these. And so with this, you can curate it to just like the 50 or 60 that you're actually going to watch.
Then it will provide you an output URL that you put into an IPTV player. And that's the next bit I think we should talk about, is then you ingest this into an IPTV player. And for Android and Apple TV, there's some nice set-top TV box versions that just let you watch it on your TV. And there's some really nice ones for the mobile app as well. I know you looked at a couple.
Yeah, I was looking at a few. I was curious what you used. I was having, it might have been my kind of hasty setup too, because I know like the dispatcher can do proxying now. and when you get the URL, you can decide if you want it to do that or not. I was having more luck not having it do that, but I might have just like...
That doesn't surprise me.
And I might have just like, I don't know if I had everything set, so it might have been trying to inject local host.
Did you have hardware acceleration working too?
I didn't get that far, so I didn't try.
That was, it's not bad, right? You just have to pass the DRI device through, if you're doing it in a container, however you might be doing it.
Sure.
But then proxying for me worked.
Okay, I'll have to try that.
On iOS, I'm using a new app that I just got called Chilio. And Chilio is maybe not my most, like favorite app ever for this job but on the tv on on the apple tv experience they let you do quad boxing or multiple boxes and so when we were having historic flooding here over the last few days in the pacific northwest i brought up four local news stations and i would just switch through which everyone was talking about our area and i could kind of keep an eye on all of them,
and it was an immediate wife approval factor win because it works better than youtube tv I can mix and match any of the channels I want. The quality is better than YouTube TV. And so it was an immediate buy-in from the wife. But then because it's just, at the end of the day, these are just IPTV apps, I can also ingest my ersatz TV feed into this. So now in one TV guide, I have a mix of remote streams and local streams.
So when you want to watch the Simpsons channel, you hit that, and that's polling locally. But for my family, the end user experience is absolutely the same. If they're watching a remote stream or a local stream, it's all now in one TV guide, all with the program.
Wow.
See, okay, I'm curious. I'll have to copy some of this because I was trying TV Mate on my Google TV, which is supposed to be pretty good. But it was giving me errors when it was trying to parse the stuff from dispatch. So I ended up just going the jellyfin route because I already had that installed and set up on the TV. That was working well. I mean, it totally worked. I did kind of have the proxy issues I mentioned, but I wasn't really getting the full program data.
Program guide.
Yeah. So I'm curious.
So I got a 70, 75% solution to that. You could go all the way. But my 70, 75% solution to that is if you go to the awesome IPTV GitHub page, they do have a EPG guide information. And they have two options. So it depends on which route you want to go. You can take advantage of the community built guide, which essentially you drop that in Dispatcher and it matches up a lot of the stream names with EPG data and just auto matches them. And that worked for probably 70, 75%.
Okay, that's pretty good.
Pretty good. Not bad, right? If you are crazy, you could download a little script they have here and then ingest your M3U feed, and it will go out and custom match and provide program data for your specific batch of shows that you're –.
That is neat.
So I'll link to that in the show notes as well.
Other than that, I was kind of impressed. I mean, Jellyfin hooked it right up, and it worked pretty darn well.
I mean, the EPG guide data, it really takes it across the line because now it's a no-compromise solution because you have DVR functionality, you can have multiple streams, you have content from all around the world, it's high quality, and you have program guide information.
Here's a question we got live from Magnolia Mayhem. Does closed captioning work with this?
That's going to depend on the stream, but a lot of them embed that data, but that will depend on the stream. That is sort of a universal disclaimer here, right? Some of these, like the TV Land stream, I think is a 582p stream. There's nothing you can do about that. You're going to watch it 582p. Now they're playing TV shows from the 60s. So for some stuff.
It may not matter.
It's probably fine, right? Whereas like Comedy Central here is a 1080p stream. You know, so they're playing more modern stuff.
Right. So you'll probably need, it'll both need to be embedded in the stream you're receiving and your player will need support to see that in.
And I will be honest with you on Android, IPTV clients are a little more hit and miss. It's a little more hit and miss. There are some really, really good web versions where you can take your URL and throw in a web player and just experiment and test with it. And there is also OpenTV for the Linux desktop, and that's pretty good at ingesting the M3U and the XML guide.
And then when you click on a stream in OpenTV on the Linux desktop, it just opens the stream in MPV or whatever your default might be.
Oh, nice.
That is a really good experience. It's just kind of solid, just everything that, you know, focuses on what it does best. But there is also a different route you could go. There is one other option. You don't have to use Dispatcher at all. First of all, you could just go grab some of these IPTV streams that we're going to link in the show notes, and you could just throw it in VLC.
Make a playlist, whatever.
VLC will read that whole playlist of a thousand different streams, and you can just go through and watch the ones you want, and you don't have to go any further than that. And that can be literally as much effort as you put into this. You copy that URL from the GitHub page, and then you go to VLC, and VLC will paste it from your clipboard for you. It's that easy.
And in the past, you even found some stuff to like filter through those files, right?
I think there's an even easier solution. It's called KPTV Fast. This is another self-hosted free software, and it is a headless version of Dispatcher. No UI. It just has a pre-built set of high-quality IPTV streams, more than I wanted, but the community has gone through, and they've curated, like, all the Pluto TV streams are in here, Plex, so all the free streaming that Plex has, Samsung TVs, Tubi, Distro TV, all of the stuff LG TVs have is in here, STIR.
Yeah, right. It seems like a lot of this ends up coming from, like, the TV providers want to have default stuff to play, and so they've set these up.
And they want them to be decent quality. And they want some stuff that people want to watch. And so what this is, it's a tiny little server that you run that comes with all of these already built in. And then it just spits out an M3U file for you and you plug it into whatever you want. And you've got a curated, high-performance little server that does a lot what Dispatcher does. No DVR, no GUI for curation, but it works with your Plex or your Jellyfins and does a lot of what Dispatcher does.
This looks really nice.
It's nice. And honestly, if you're okay with like a thousand channels, it's got a thousand great channels. So like it's a pretty good starting point. I only wanted a subset. But and it's of course, if you just use Docker, it's a it's it's a you could pretty much just use the default compose. It's pretty straightforward. And so it's really simple. And then you just get this curated list of great TV channels.
Python app MIT license. Cool.
So zero fuss. You spin it up. You point your IPTV player at the URL it gives you.
And what you could probably use Shellyfin's DVR against this thing if you wanted to, right?
You totally could. Yes, absolutely. And I do that with ersatz already. You absolutely could. If you didn't need the DVR or you had the DVR taken care of somewhere else. Yeah. And the one criticism I'll give Dispatcher, which I've really been quite happy at, it's under quite active development. So I'm sure these things will come. But with Dispatcher, it does provide the DVR functionality. And that is nice because you have like server side recording
and all that, which you would with Shellyfin too. But, you know, it's cool. But... The next thing would be to have like a channel that it generates for my on-demand content. So I don't really have a way to watch what I've recorded in the DVR on the TV, as far as I can tell.
You'd have to like feed that back into ersatz and then...
Yes, yeah, exactly. And because it does produce a nice little MKV file for me, especially one without commercials, and that's sitting on the server, and I could point Jellyfin or something at that or ersatz at that. But wouldn't it be really cool if Dispatcher could create a video on-demand channel?
Absolutely.
Yeah. I don't know how it would do that, but I would love that. Um, and so in your case, if you're using Jellyfin and you didn't necessarily want to sit there and spend two hours curating a thousand, you just would say, I'll just take them because you could just favorite the ones you like over time. Most, most TV clients, IPTV clients have a favorite concept.
Then KPTV dash fast is a really simple way to go where you could have this up and going in 10 minutes if you know how to start a Docker compose. And then you could point VLC or Jellyfin at it 30 seconds later and you could watch thousands of high quality content from all over the world. So it's really amazing, and I think the humble pie that I had to eat here was I wrote this category off as –, Basically junk streams, local TV, which there is a lot of that, which is kind of great.
Yeah, right. And you kind of run into like, oh, okay, well, here's like a news program for a country I don't live in in a language I don't understand, which is great, but it's not super useful to me.
Yeah.
Turns out there's so much more.
Well, all my local, I didn't realize, and that's where the IPTV search tool comes in. I didn't realize all of our local news. Because some of these that come with pre-curated lists, maybe they'll have one or two local news channels in there for your area. But all of them are on there if you know how to find them. And so then I went back and just added them manually to Dispatcher and categorized them as local news. And I have a local news section.
And it's fabulous. And if they change it, I'll hunt it down and I'll add it. But so far, I don't think it's been a big problem. A lot of these are vetted and they stay up for a while because they're communicating with their partners, providing, like you said, services to LG or Samsung TVs. So it's a real unlock. And at least here in the States, it's a totally legal way to watch content where you can have your cake and eat it too.
And you don't have to pay a bunch of money. I'm going to save like $100 a month doing this. So I say goodbye to YouTube TV. You know what I'm saying? And I say hello to Dispatcher. Join CrowdHealth.com and use the promo code UNPLUGGED. It's hard to make an informed decision for healthcare in the States, and every year it just gets worse and more expensive, and it's something you just can't help but reflect on during open enrollment season.
And so this is the process I went through years ago, actually just over three years ago. That's when I signed up for CrowdHealth. I have saved an unbelievable $1,300 a month since I signed up for CrowdHealth. I don't have to play the insurance game anymore. I am now part of a community of people that fund each other's medical bills directly. There's no middleman. There's no networks. It's really no nonsense. And don't take my word for it.
Go look at CrowdHealth. It's a healthcare alternative for people who make their own decisions at joincrowdhealth.com and use the promo code unplugged. I just couldn't do it anymore, especially as a small business owner. It's like, you know, we have a couple of people in our company and my wife owns her own small business. She's the only person in that company. We were in a really bad position, but now everybody's in a bad position.
CrowdHealth does things differently. We've signed up, and we have saved an unbelievable $1,300 a month in our last three years.
¶ Fountain Frivolity
And we've always felt taken care of. It just works. It's really something special. It's healthcare for under $100. You get access to a team. They help you negotiate the bills. They help find low-cost prescriptions. They help you with the lab and testing tools. and they have a database of high-quality doctors as well. And when something major happens, you pay the first $500 and then the crowd steps in and they fund the rest.
It's really, really nice because you have peace of mind while you're not spending every last dime. So you join the crowd and a group of members, just like you or me, they help pay for each other's unexpected medical events. It's a really great system too and they have a fantastic app to manage all of it, Including beginning, ending, middling the process Whatever you want to call it, right? And managing your account Looking at what you have or haven't spent It's all in there, very transparent.
It's something powerful. And it's not just me that's saving money. CrowdHealth members have saved over $40 million in health care expenses because they just refused to overpay for health care. So this open enrollment season, it's time to take your power back. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for just $99 for your first three months. Can you believe that? Just use the promo code UNPLUGGED when you go to joincrowdhealth.com. That's joincrowdhealth.com and use the promo code UNPLUGGED.
At first, I didn't believe it, but I had to give it a go. I really had no better choice. and now I wouldn't choose any other option. Now I choose to be part of the crowd. CrowdHealth isn't insurance. Opt out. Take your power back. This is how we make a difference. Join CrowdHealth.com and use the promo code unplugged. Unraid.net slash unplugged. Go build your dream server. Unraid 7.2 makes it easier than ever. Unraid really unleashes your hardware. And now Unraid has a responsive web GUI.
It works beautifully across all of your devices. They have even more file system support than you can shake a stick at. But the thing I want to tell you about this week that's really great to see take off is they also introduced the Unraid API. It's officially here. It's open source. It's fully integrated. And it gives you secure, programmable access to system data for building dashboards, automations. External apps, integration with Home Assistant, you know, various whatnots.
And you really are seeing the community build around this. And there is an application under development right now called U-Manager. Now, it's still early days, but what they've been able to create here is so slick. You're just sitting on your phone. You can take a glance at your server. You can see what's going on, memory, disk, resources. You can see your different VMs. And it's just brilliant what can be done with this passionate community.
And that's one of the real secrets. It's not on any box. There's no FAQ that's really going to get to this. The community is one of the secret sauces of Unraid because they've been around for over 20 years now, and they've been delivering for that 20 years and they continue to deliver. So they've built a passionate, loyal following with people that really build on top of this. And 7.2 has just seen a massive uptick as well. I think it's one of the most popular releases.
And it's nice too to see them finally add NTFS support. At first, I didn't think that would be something I'd want, but then of course I thought about those old disks that are sitting in my closet. And honestly, that's one of the brilliant things about Unraid. You can start with the hardware you have in your closet right now.
We talk about some really cool apps today those would run on Unraid that's always just an unlock away for you and when you go to unraid.net slash unplugged you can try out the baller license for free 30 days. It's nice. It supports the show, too, unread.net slash unplugged. And then if you like it, it's totally worth the value because you know they're going to keep building and supporting it. And this becomes a pretty serious part of your setup.
And I think you'll appreciate that it's an OS that grows with your skills. So maybe today you don't care about an API. Maybe in a year you do. Or maybe you just start benefiting from the apps that are being built. It's such a great time to jump on, right, because it's a modern Linux base. Now with that responsive web GUI, fantastic ZFS support, and so much more still coming for Unraid. Check it out. Support the show. Go to unraid.net slash unplugged. That gets you a free 30-day trial.
It's also just a great way to support the show and say, hey, I heard about you over here on the Unplugged program, and I appreciate you sponsoring the Unplugged show. That's unraid.net slash unplugged.
Well we have a little podcasting 2.0 news for you fountain 1.4 is now live they've completely redesigned the fountain wallet made ux improvements to payments across the app and added some pretty highly requested features uh there's nostr wallet connect is now live you can also pay lightning addresses withdraw to strike and choose your own payment methods chris do you have extra details especially on this Nostra Wallet Connect?
Yeah, that's a bigger one than it might sound initially. That means now you can bring your own self-hosted wallet. So one of the great things Foundin has done, obviously, is provided a Lightning infrastructure. Now with Nostra Wallet Connect, you can bring your own self-hosted one. You can choose. It's an open standard. It's pretty nice to see them embrace that. And it's been growing like crazy. They've done a lot of nice refreshments to the UI.
They're redoing, well, I probably shouldn't say, that they're redoing some of the key things you see when you first open the app. I'll just leave it at that. I'll just leave it at that. But congratulations to the Fountain team. Also, performance improvements. And in beta right now is a total rework of how CarPlay operates. Totally better, redone. App doesn't have to be running anything like that. CarPlay is getting a nice, nice workover in the current Fountain betas. That'll be landing too.
And I believe Android Auto is coming up next.
And even if you're not using any of this stuff, I mean, I've noticed just the recent releases are super snappy, clean. It's a good experience.
¶ Boosts
And we do have a few boosts to get to, and The Dude Abides is our baller booster this week with 42,000 stats. It's nice to hear from you, the dude, and thank you for 42,000 sats. He says, live boost. Coming in while we're recording the show and being our baller for the episode as well.
Double double.
Double dubs. Thank you, sir.
Southern fried sasa comes in with a robot ox. If LTT can get the Linus on their show, JB has to have a chance, right? Shoot your shot.
I would rather go to Linus. I'll tell you the truth.
Yeah.
I think that'd be so great. I don't want to make him travel. He travels enough.
We should have met him in Japan.
You know, so Linus did that because he said he was interested in what the YouTube thing is like. So now we just got to get him interested in what the podcast thing is like. And then that opens the door for us, right?
Yeah, no makeup required. It's podcasting.
That's right. No makeup. And also we'll try not to be as awkward. We may still be somewhat awkward, but, you know, not as awkward.
Also, Sassy here notes, still loving the cats. On the video feed, so keep it up, Brent.
What? We do video?
We had... Keep it up, Cosmo.
There's no video. What are you talking about?
Well, Soham sent in 5,996 sats over to Boosts.
Uh this one's for you chris hey chris i recently discovered that the nebula android and ios clients are not open source rather just source available with no license in the github repo this is confirmed to be intentional with no plans to change i wonder what you all feel about that or if you all could ask the uh you know define.net people uh what is the deal absolutely love the crap out of nebula and i'd hate to have this be a sticking point later on.
So that's a great question and uh so i asked the co-founder ryan of nebula just this very thing because i saw this boost coming live this week and uh i got a i got a proper education on one of the threat vectors that, these all vpn providers face is knockoff apps that are actually like you know connecting you to a fake network. And so the main reason they don't license the mobile app. Is essentially be able to enforce the only tool they have, which is a takedown.
So the only tool they have in that situation is to ask the App Store to take it down, and they have to have something like trademark or something they can use there. But I asked him, like, you know, where's the flexibility here? And he said, well, if someone has a use case in mind or a reason for this, we have a process they can contact us, reach out, and then we'll talk to them and potentially issue a free license for them.
So it's more of like, I think they would like to see a community of apps, but also you could imagine the risk and brand damage and all of that if a bogus Nebula app goes in. And this is particularly challenging when you have a name like Nebula, right? It's sort of like trying to enforce the word Jupyter or Linux. It's tricky. It's tricky. So that was the answer I got back. And I, of course, in more back and forth conversation, I didn't realize what an active threat vector that is.
And not just for them, but other mesh network providers as well. It's a constant thing. And then you also have a problem of if somebody creates a really crappy app with your name on it, which can be a constant struggle, too. But if you are interested in participating, get a hold of me, Chris at JupyterBroadcasting.com, and I can put you in touch, and you can make some magic happen.
Also seems like a sort of thing where if you want to use that source for your own local thing, you probably could. Or, I mean, the whole app and protocol, you know, in terms of Nebula, the core stuff is open.
You can view the source, I believe, for the mobile app. Yeah, and all the Nebula stuff, of course. Yes, but it's just the iOS and Android that they're publishing in the app stores. Yeah. Not too uncommon, but yeah, it's a good question. True Grits came in with 7,777 SATs. I really enjoyed the technical talk with Kent. It made me reframe the way I think about Bcash FS.
I liked his comment towards the end about not caring what Facebook and other companies are doing and only caring about writing quality code for individuals. In the past, I thought essentially the opposite. It really was only for the big players, I thought, and highly technical people. The average hobbyist really didn't need to concern themselves. Now, now I want to start playing around with it. Also, may I introduce a slot machine boost? Sure can. I bet you I could. There you go.
Seven seven seven seven seven seven seven all seven love it all right you guys oh you guys all have to remember the all sevens boost is the slot machine boost yeah i i also i mean i was already kind of thinking that way but i i thought it was also interesting to hear kent double down on the i'm not building this for the for the big hyperscalers i'm building this for everybody that's an everyday user it's cool i like that kind of stuff.
Well moon and night comes in with 2,026 sets. Oh, it's a 2026 boost.
Aha! I see what he did there. A little early, but I like it.
Bazite user, checking in.
Ah.
I'm running it as a Steam machine for a console experience on my TV in the living room. Also have a couple of friends that just installed it on their desktop to escape Windows Gaming.
Interesting. Nice. So, Moon, I have a follow-up question. So you say you're using it as a console experience on your TV, are you doing any media watching? Or are you using a separate device for that? And if you are doing media watching via the Bazite install, what are you using and how did you install it? Is it like a flat pack or something? I have questions. Because if I could turn my Steam Deck into a Bazite gaming system that's maybe also a media center?
A high performance media center? I mean, now we're starting, you know, now we're talking about six barrels, two birds kind of a thing here. I'm all about that. So, let me know. Thank you, Moon. I appreciate that. boost.
Well, our dear Odyssey Westra boosted in 2,291 Satoshis.
There he is.
Odyssey says uh love you.
That's oh well we love him just some love oh i wonder how it's going over there let us know how it goes i was gonna get cold soon thank you odyssey stay warm over there, chris b's here with 5 000 sets can you guys boost the ally oh a nice catch wes i even stopped looking for that very nice boost the ally you get a little bit of glaze there for that i like that Can you guys recommend an instant messaging platform that is A, open source, B, end-to-end encrypted,
C, web client, ABCDF, I don't know, iOS app that is 13 plus? Oh, supports, I guess, iOS, I don't know.
I think that is right.
My family has been using Element, but it is now marked 17 plus. Ah, yes, so we have parental controls.
Yes.
Thanks for all the help and happy holidays. I don't know about the 13 plus thing.
We'll have to farm this out of the community.
I was kind of thinking Simplex. I don't know about web but they do have a desktop client but I don't know what they're rated in iOS because Apple this is really an Apple thing here, Oh, no, Simplex is 13+. Okay. Simple X could be an option. Also, Brent, NextCloud Talk, NextCloud Chat, right? That could be an option, I suppose, as well. That's 4+.
Yeah, that's a good one if you're okay with hosting your own infrastructure. That wasn't mentioned here, but it's definitely an option.
Yeah, and that's ages 4 and above.
I mean, Chris B's hosting Boost CLI, so, you know.
That's a good point. If you can do Boost CLI, you can probably do Nextcloud.
Yeah, that's probably... I would also recommend, I think, Signal. I'm not sure what they're rated on the Apple's platform there, but it's usually a pretty easy one to get going for people who might not be as technical as our dear Boost CLI person here. But that could be an option.
I would like the audience to chime in on that. Is Signal still the recommendation in 2025, early 2026? or are we concerned about Signal these days? I don't, I've never been a user. I have no dog in that particular hunt, but I read and hear things from people in the security industry that seem to be scoffing a bit at Signal. And I'm just wondering if something's happened. So boost in and tell me.
I would like to know too.
I'm just curious. Yeah, right? Chris B., good luck. And that's a good mission, really. I wish I would have gotten the family on something like Simplex or something. Element would have been good. It's hard to hear about the age rating change. Instead, I got them all hooked on Telegram and iMessages. It's gross.
Why the change in age rating? Anyway, that seems...
Well, because somebody probably posted a new image and Apple found out about it. These are just arbitrary, precocious rules by Apple. And because you can send porn in Matrix, they probably marked it up.
Oh.
And they just didn't do it for the other chat apps because nobody's flagged it.
Great. I see.
Turd Ferguson comes in with 13,333 sats. It was good to hear from Kent, and I'm excited about the future of BcashFS. Do keep us posted. Value for value, go podcasting. Heck yeah.
Yes.
Go podcasting. Thank you, Turd. Appreciate you.
Hybrid sarcasm comes in, oh, with a live burr boost from Podverse. Aw, just some signal to let you know I enjoyed last week's episode.
Thank you. We didn't get a lot of feedback on that. And I can't tell if that's just because people took it in and enjoyed it or if they don't like it when we talk file systems. But, you know, it's a shame because, like, that chat with Kent is sort of like the thing that the Unplugged program can do that no other program can do because we've just been following it closely. We've established a channel with Kent. We ourselves run it. And so it's like we're kind of – it's kind of in our power zone,
you know, if you will. Like when you're revving your engine, that's kind of in our power zone. But this episode –.
I bet people are too busy setting up their new BcashFS file systems.
Maybe. This episode didn't get a lot of, that was, we got two boosts about it. We didn't get a lot of emails or any, I don't know, about it. But I think it's a remarkable thing he's doing. And I was really, I really thought it was something special that we could bring to the community. And if you liked it, we'd love to see it in the boosts. We had 28 folks stream and we stacked 29,955 sats with them. And collectively, when you combine that with our boosters, We stacked a pretty
humble 120,600 sats. I say that just because I'm a little apprehensive. 2026, we don't really have many things locked in for funding. And so to sort of see this dripping off at the end, especially when we kind of did a powerhouse episode, makes me a little concerned. And if you love the episode or you love the show in general, there's a couple of ways to support it. Keep it going. That would, of course, be a member.
That's sort of our foundation. And then the signal really for the individual episodes would be the boost. You can do that with Fountain FM. They're making it easier and better all the time. There's even a few more things coming. I mean, they're going to blow your mind on how easy it is soon to boost. And then there's a bunch of great apps like Podverse is in the middle of a fantastic rebuild right now. Podcastapps.com. You can boost in the individual episodes and support us that
way with hard assets. And that's something the show stacks for its long term run. And then, of course, the members at linuxunplugged.com slash membership. That's our day to day run right there. And that's our foundation. Thank you, everybody who does support the show. We do appreciate it. Go ahead, Brentley. Yeah.
Oh, just a small reminder to our community that this is your official last week to get your boosts in for the boosties. Boosties are happening, what is it, next week, right? Is that what we promised?
On Friday, really. So if you're listening to this when it comes out. Yeah.
So if you'd like to get on the leaderboard or try to kick out someone that you think you deserve a higher spot, this is your last chance.
I can't believe we're there already. Can you believe it? We're almost at 20. Oh, it's our last episodes. This is wild. Thank you, everybody who does support this episode. Episode 645 is made possible because of you. Of course, check it out at Fountain FM, and we'll have more links at linuxunplugged.com, including links to become a member, to join our Matrix community. It's a value-for-value podcast, and there's several ways to contribute, and that's just a few of them.
¶ Picks
All right, now before we go, we have, well, we really have an embarrassment of picks.
You can't help yourself.
I don't know what's going on anymore. We've completely lost it. It was supposed to be one pick. But it just felt like we should slide this one in with the theme of the episode. This one is Jellyfy Music, a cross-platform, open-source music player for Jellyfin. And it's a nice-looking app. Showcases your artwork and your library. Makes it real easy to just play the music you might have in your Jellyfin library.
Yeah, React Native.
It's.
Available on ios and android lots of ways to install it including published releases and apks so i assume that makes it obtainium friendly.
You got it you got it but yep uh-huh uh-huh and it's really nice if you want high quality local flex and things like that so that is in the show notes then i want to talk about something that's just kind of handy don't hate on it wes, it's docker compose maker now you can self-host this yourself or you can just use their live demo but.
I gotta do i have to use docker compose.
How am i going to generate i know i know well this is for those that use docker compose and so it's two things it's a a curated list of like compose stacks so say you wanted to get a media stack or a jellyfin stack or maybe you wanted to run just one application they have ready to go compose files for you but what they do that's kind of neat And why I actually decided to mention this is they let you define a lot of the things ahead of time, like the config path, the data path,
the UID and the GID it runs with, the network mode and those types of things. So that way, when you actually download the generated compose file. Got a better shot of being ready for your environment.
This looks nice. And I see I can select multiple stuff.
Yes.
Let me make sure I add Postgres in here. Definitely going to want that.
And they have some that are like, okay, I want the self-hosted password stack. And it's three or four things combined, right? Or the home automation or the dad's media stack, I think, is one of them. And then it's several of them combined together. And then you go into the settings, you define your variables, and then it produces a Docker Compose file that's pretty much ready to go. Or at least a good starting point.
Yeah, it also spits out a .env file for you. Cool. Oh, this looks nice.
Yeah, it's nice, especially if you're new to this stuff and you hear us talk about some of these things but you don't really know Docker Compose. This could be a good reference point to get started. So that's DCM, and what's neat about it is you can self-host that generator, or you can use their demo, which is kind of the same thing. I'll have that linked in the show notes. And then, before we get out of here, Bradley found us a AGPL3 productivity management tool that has a special niche focus.
There is a niche focus here's uh here's the description lean time it's a goals focused project management system for non-project managers hey that's me building specifically with people who have adhd autism or dyslexia in mind i thought that was pretty fascinating i've been doing oh let's call it a wee deep dive this week into uh my adhd brain stuffs and uh i did not think there would be a productivity application that
was open source that would be specifically targeted at helping us individuals. Sure enough, there is. And it's been around for quite a while. It seems pretty actively developed. It has 147 contributors, so quite well used and loved, clearly. So I'm thinking of giving LeanTime a go.
But I was curious if If anyone in the community had given this a shot or if, you know, you might have an ADHD brain like a few of your hosts here do, what are the productivity tricks that have really made a huge, massive difference for you? Because I'm looking for something that, I don't know, makes my life easier.
This is gorgeous. I wouldn't think to say that for this type of app, but it's a freaking beautiful app. That's nice this looks really nice nice deep dive brent i'm.
Curious what you'll what you'll manage first.
Yeah yeah we'll see okay so lean time and we have that linked in the show notes like i mentioned it's agpl3.o uh looks like it's a mostly a php app with some javascript as you would expect and of course a few other things in there uh looks like a good project, And then also it says a simple Trello, but a, as feature rich as Jira, a perfect alternative to ClickUp, Monday, or Asana.
I mean, just by definition has to be better than Jira.
There it is. They also have their own website, leantime.io, built with ADHD and neurodivergence in mind. Huh. I'm just impressed with how damn good it looks. That's, to me, that's the unexpected part. You know, usually these task management apps like this are not so great.
So now we've got to get DCM to have a Docker Compose for this.
Right.
But we've got to get it going so we can manage that goal with it.
Oh, yeah, right, because we're never going to get that done until we get lean time going.
Yeah.
Catch 22. And yet, here we sit. All right, well, so you're wondering, what do they talk about?
¶ Outro
Where do I find this? You said they have a bunch of IPTV resources and search engines and stuff. You've got to go get the show notes over at linuxunplugged.com slash 645, or it might just be in your podcast app of choice. Did you even know it? If you wanted to catch the name or rehear something we said, well, we have a couple of things people should know about West Payne.
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Diarization?
Diarization for the apps that support that, so you don't miss a beat. And we are live, so you can catch the whole thing, mistakes and extra bonus content and all. That's over at jblive.tv. We start at 10 a.m. Pacific. That's 1 p.m. Eastern. You can also catch it at jblive.fm if you're on the go. And remember, we have that mumble room that's cooking as we go along. They join us. They get that low-latency Opus feed. And it's a lot of fun to hang out in.
And, of course, you can see Brent's cats. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we're going to see you right back here next Tuesday. Actually, no, Friday for the Home Lab. Woo-hoo-hoo! Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you then.