664: Back to Root

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes.

And my name is Brentley.

Hello, gentlemen. Good to see you. And hello, everyone here at LinuxFest Northwest 2026.

Woo!

Hello there. In the beautiful Bellingham, Washington, in the very corner of the majestic Pacific Northwest at the Bellingham Technical College. And it is LinuxFest Northwest 2026. And this is a very special year. We'll get more into that in just a little bit. We also are going to set the ground rules for the BSD Challenge, which actually kicks off next week.

Uh-oh.

The show don't slow down. The show don't slow down.

You brought your flash drives, right?

We should get going, right? And then, of course, as always, we'll round it out with some boos, some great picks, and a lot more. We don't have a mumble room with us, but we do have producer Jeff. Hey, PJ.

Hello.

And we have Tech Dev with us. Hello, Tech Dev.

Hey there, guys.

Nice to have you both. And we are going to do day one right now, and then we'll be doing day two a little bit later in the show. Before we get to all of that, I want to say good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking. Go to defined.net slash unplugged and check out Managed Nebula. It's a decentralized VPN built on the open source Nebula platform that we love. And when I'm building a network, I really do try to think long term now.

What?

Yeah, real scale. And get started. You can use it yourself. 100 hosts, totally free, no credit card required. Just go to define.net slash unplugged. Go deeper. Check it out. You can self-host the entire infrastructure yourself. You can build it totally private the way you actually need it. It's simple enough for your home lab. It's strong enough for a global team. And it's built for people who want to own the entire stack. Try it free,

It wouldn't be a challenge without some convoluted rules that we probably argue about now and later when we do the adjudicating, but we've got to start now to be, you know, try.

We want you to be able to follow along. Yes, sir.

Excuse me, is one of the rules don't launch a BSD challenge at a Linux event?

So we're going to give you the rules. The challenge will actually start next episode, 665. And then it will conclude in episode 600 and 666. So you have a little bit of time. You get to follow along. So it's not a Linux versus BSD challenge. It's really can Linux users become functional on BSD challenge. Fresh BSD install is the idea. Four levels you can climb. You get to pick your own BSD, free BSD, open BSD, net BSD, ghost BSD, brand BSD, whatever it be.

Hey, where's Dragonfly?

Sure, Dragonfly BSD. Just didn't.

Is there a BTSD version?

It didn't rhyme, and I came up with a little rhyme, and I liked it, so I went with it. So we have, like I say, four levels, like Wes over there say. Four levels. Level one, you can get up to seven points. If you can get it booted, a fresh BSD installed somewhere, connect to the internet.

That's going to be easy, though, right?

Install a package, read a man page, you get points. We'll put all of this up at linuxunplugged.com slash BSD. So you can go there and get all the rules. So there's level two, which is you become a daily driver. Can you just do normal desktop stuff for human beings on this thing? Can you get a graphical desktop running a web browser? You know, don't run as root, which is awesome. And can you get audio working? Even just test sounds.

Oh, yeah. Is that a thing?

Oh, why are you making that face?

It's a thing.

I don't know if Brent knows how much is different. I mean, there's a lot that's the same or similar.

Yeah.

Or spelt differently, I hear.

But there's whole sort of areas where the concept is the same, but the implementation has a totally different history.

Have you ever seen pictures of a Russian knockoff of a Russian computer in the 80s or a Russian car?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of like that.

I mean, they might suggest that's what Linux is.

Nope. Level three, if you can get to be a level three user, so you earn somewhere between 15 and 20 points. Again, all this will be on the website. You are now technically in the power user power band.

Well, that was easy.

Well, maybe. Can you stop and start certain services? Can you edit the config so it does something right at start, at boot the way you want it? Could you write a little shell script that runs on BSD? Can you edit a config? You know, those guys, can you do it?

Have you effectively kicked your systemd habit?

Yeah, again, all the things that you can do to earn points will be on the website.

There's no systemd?

And then level four, bonus round. If you can get over 21 points, you are truly, truly a BSD master. And this includes things like getting certain services inside a jail. So not just going with a pre-built jail.

I don't even know what you're saying anymore.

Yeah, I know. And some of the BSDs don't have jails, so you're going to have to figure that one out.

They're more prisons?

Also, there's other things like, you know, we could maybe, if it doesn't have jails, we could say if you could still get a service running that you can access from the network, then that would be allowable too, I think.

Yeah, you know, maybe you're building it out in your home lab or providing mesh network services. There's a lot of stuff you can do.

All right, so TechDev has a qualifying question. Go ahead.

Yeah, do we get extra points for users who can get this going in California?

Yeah, I feel like that's true, yeah.

That's a good answer.

There should be maybe a handicap for California. I could, yeah.

Or list the number of sort of compliance or regulatory hurdles you overcame to get this working, and we'll give you points.

Boost in to plead your case, and the board will consider it. So, you know, if you want, we'll give it special consideration.

Lawbreaking points?

All right. Rebel points. Also, I think points will be issued...

Randomly.

...for the craziest place you've installed BSD. I mean, it has to get us going. So you know So the craziest place you've got BST Let us know And here's how we want you to submit, You can send a boost or you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and tell us in there which BSD you used, your score that you got, if you have a weird install place, how you installed it, that kind of thing. And if anything surprised you about it, let us know that too.

When you say location, are we talking about what device or what physical location that you were able to install it on?

Sure, both.

You can plead your case. I have a question.

Yeah.

It's me now.

Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Brad. Go ahead.

Can we get extra points with how many days we ran BSD?

I feel like if you can run it for the whole week, that's definitely some points, right? Or every day you drive it, maybe? What do you think of that?

Yeah, that's fair.

Every day you drive it, what would be fair? A point for every day?

Yeah, okay. We got a max of seven days.

Because I'm not going to daily drive it.

Oh, you say that now. You might love it.

No.

What if, I mean, when you start seeing Brent stacking points, maybe you'll change your mind. That is true.

I hate it. I started early.

I hate it when he's... What?

No.

The reason that there wasn't a van is because he was getting BSD installed. You can't do brake swaps when you're doing BSD swaps.

Well, that's the whole reason. The gas line broke because it was running on BSD.

Ah, yeah. You've got to pick the right field.

All right. So let us know how it goes. Give us your score. If you can get over 21 points, you're truly a beastie whisperer. I'm going to be honest with you. I think I'm going for the survival level, which is somewhere in the 8 to 14 points. So here's how it stacks out. If you get 0 to 7 points, then you have visited BSD as far as the show is concerned. You've done it. You've visited BSD. If you get 8 to 14 points, you have survived BSD. I think that's probably where I'm headed.

Wow.

And if you get beyond 21 points, 21 or beyond, you become a Beastie Whisperer as far as the show is concerned.

I got a personal stretch goal for you.

Yeah.

You know, just think about the hero's journey here if you were able to convert fake NAS.

Oh, my God.

Back to BSD and then import the pool back to BSD ZFS.

Wow.

There's no way I couldn't do that without you guys, though. Well, both from an emotional support level.

Call in friend support.

Oh, come on.

You could do a 50-50, call a friend, you know.

You're going to make me put everything into open code? No.

Oh, is that a rule?

I mean, I don't think it runs on BSD, but you can figure it out. So there is a conceivable possibility where somebody could get up to like 30 points. And if anybody wants to link us an audio file or something like that of their journey, if it's short and tight, we might play it on the show as well. That could be.

A lot of fun. Did you say call the launch?

You could call the launch, but it's probably better to send it to this show.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. Okay, sorry.

We should need a number.

Send it to Brent's voicemail.

We need a number for this show.

Yeah, we do.

Kind of thing, so people can call and give us live reports right in the heat of the moment. This damn thing. That'd be so amazing.

Please send those.

Maybe the next challenge we could get that set up. That could be good.

Email that to alanjude at jupiterbroadcasting.com.

Yeah.

Alright, so it might be day one of LinuxFest Northwest for us, but the reality is LinuxFest Northwest is a week-long, if not two-week-long process. PJ, you got here Wednesday evening.

Yeah.

And then made it over to the farm pretty quick and got right to work.

Oh.

Something always happens we were down a couple of cars and we got an extra crew here we need to get another car working we didn't get that car working and.

You know that Jeff gets kind of handsy if.

He's not helping you with something he gets handsy? he does he's got to jack something up or he gets handsy.

He has for consent.

But you had how many cars to work on?

Well we had three cars to work on we got two out of three two out of three working No, yours was already up and running, thankfully.

Oh, surprising.

Somehow.

Yeah, yeah. But you got here, which is great. You got in yesterday evening.

Yes.

Time's going fast.

It takes a long time when you're on the other side of the continent, it turns out.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

But I got here, and I feel good.

Yeah, yeah, it does feel good. And, you know, I've been thinking about, like, what do we do for LinuxFest this year? Because I've been going for 26 years now, and how do you make that different? We've been covering it in the show for almost a decade. How do you actually make that different? And I was thinking about this, and I realized that it's kind of the theme of LinuxFest, which is back to root. Because it hits different this year for a few reasons, and I want to get into that.

Yes.

Actually, round of applause. How many of you got a hot dog yesterday? Anybody get a hot dog?

Yeah.

All right. Some hot dogs. Some hot dogs. Pizza and Indian food was also available. The hot dogs were free. It went really well. Emma and my wife, Adia, were absolute machines at the barbecue.

I took a photo of the lineup. It lasted, like, for two hours, and it was huge. Lots of lineups. Very efficient and courteous.

Yeah, it was grill crazy.

So shout out to System76 for that.

So we wanted to talk about a couple of things just to kind of warm us up while we're all getting going here. And the first one is actually a local LLM story and the Linux kernel. And how Greg KH, the number two in command of the Linux kernel, has been running his own bot that he calls, I love this name, GKH Clanker T1000.

That's appropriate.

That's the name of his bot.

The label is up front, and you've got to appreciate that.

And he's running it locally on his LAN on an AMD Ryzen system that's in a framework desktop. And he's put a picture of it up on Mastodon.

Like the rest of us, he's got a monitor propped up on some various sort of tech books he probably hasn't read for a decade.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you know he's a real hacker.

Yeah, that's very true.

He doesn't care.

So I thought I'd kick this off. And if anybody has any input or thoughts, raise your hand. But we've been watching, I feel like, the Linux community and the open source community really grapple with a lot of the moral and licensing issues around LLMs. At the same time, what we're also witnessing is... Folks like kernel developers and project leads and people that are shipping software are rapidly also using these tools.

You know, I think at least some of that, I mean, there's a lot of aspects to unpack, but I think some of it is, thankfully, we've seen that Greg and some of the kernel team these days are, I guess, a little more well-resourced than your average open source FOSS developer, right? And so I think some of this is, whether you want to engage or not, there is the rise of other folks using it, whether that's for good or just a lot of bug reports you don't know what to do with or whatever.

Okay, so here's my question to you guys. If anybody wants to answer it, raise your hand. Otherwise, I'm going to make Brent answer it.

Oh, please help me.

Is this the first step to our community kind of coming to a consensus on AI? Will we kind of come to a general consensus of, yes, it's good when you use it in these conditions for these things? Is this how we get there? Anyone have thoughts on that? Do you have thoughts on that?

I think I have some thoughts. I'll warm up till someone wants to approach the mic. Yeah, I think it's reasonable that a lot of us are hesitating. but to have someone like the Colonel team start to do this and in ways that are local, I think feels really nice. And it shows that some of the teams that we look up to, I mean, literally it's on every laptop in this room, are doing, at least using the tools in a responsible way that we can also sign up for.

Maybe that's it. He's kind of demonstrating a responsible way to use the tool.

And like using, you know, some computer manufacturers that do follow some of the ideals that we care about and that, hey, it's possible today. And even if you don't have as big of hardware as that, give it a couple of years. And the work that Linux has done to make AI available to run on these machines is going to allow us all to have AI in a way that kind of fits for us, despite all the challenges that we currently have with how it's made and being used.

PJ is here. What do you think? Does Greg doing these kinds of things, does it set a good example? And my second question would be, is he maybe limiting himself only using the free local stuff?

Oh, that's a good second question. The first one for me is, I think it's just an example of trust. And that's something I took away from Mad Dog's talk about, Mad Dog's talk about sovereignty is you have to trust something at some point, you have to trust someone at some point. And even if I don't trust all AI all the time, if somebody like Greg KH is using a tool, I trust Greg KH.

These turn on developers do the same thing. So what about any of this would apply to you too, if you're only using local stuff today, I mean, this is going to change in a couple of years, but today, maybe it's not finding as many vulnerabilities as you know, an opus or a mythos or whatever it is that you'd pay thousands of dollars for.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's just gonna get better and better. What we've noticed every month, the local stuff is better and better. You know, they're, they're finding better ways to compress everything and fit more into memory. And it's just insane. I've got a very old graphics card, and it's running great. I'm just trying to do more and more with it. And I think we're just going to keep seeing that get better and better.

It only makes me think, right, in open source, we're kind of used to this. So, home labs and self-hosting, right? Like, can we compete with the storage for Google Photos back in? No, but kind of we can now because we have image, right? So, it might take longer because there's a bigger hardware difference than we were facing before.

That's my thinking, is the commercial guys don't stand still, right? So, the Googles and the Apples.

But they also, as part of that, tend to incentivize.

Yeah, that's true.

And I feel like we're getting kind of a Moore's Law set up here with AIs too, right? Like, with the AI software and the AI models, we are accelerating so fast the way we did with CPUs back in the day.

So true.

Yeah, I don't think it's going to be long before we're running extremely capable models. And maybe the models will just get smaller and we'll just choose different models for different tasks. Can't wait.

I like it. I like it. Thank you, PJ. That's an interesting point. And I hope you're right. And I think they are getting faster. Tell us your name and tell us what you think.

Yeah, my name is Sam. So I, up until very recently, taught at-risk youth IT skills and things like that to help them get into the IT field locally where I live.

It's got to be a job.

It's a lot different than smaller projects. Not to, you know, it's just scale. It's huge.

Yeah, and that sometimes necessitates tools like this.

Yeah, for sure.

Well, I think we've seen kind of Greg has his unconventional attitude perhaps, right? Like we've seen some of his great blog posts about like how the kernel treats security, which is very much not the way that a lot of other projects sort of have a security model.

Yeah the fact that something's being audited by Linus Torvalds is enough for me to be like you know that's probably going to be okay.

Yeah there's layers there.

He's not a guy to be shy of when things are bad.

I wonder if we'll be discussing this next LinuxFest, right? Because it seems like this is a seasonal thing that we're working through, and this phase we're at right now is we're sort of digesting this stage of it. And with the development of local and folks like Greg, maybe by a year from now, we'll have sort of settled on kind of a common community agreement on this. Thank you. That's good. Did you want to join us? Yeah, come on up. Tell us your name and what you think.

Hi, everyone. My name is Aaron Wolf.

Hello, Aaron.

I just wanted to share a sort of meta perspective that I think is something I tend to try to keep in mind in all of this space, and that's the topic of induced demand. So people know this from things like traffic engineering. You have the issue of if you just widen the road because there's congestion, then people say, oh, well, now I can drive more, and then there's just more congestion again. And, of course, it's something in the general pattern of,

This guy's used an electron app before.

I don't have to care about compressing this or making it efficient or something because I just got so much hardware. And the end result is you can be worse off than you were to start with. And so there's also this pattern of people just using it just to use it, which is what we're seeing with corporate AIs. So, you know, my other example would be we have LED lighting or something.

Have you used any locally yet?

I haven't, I've sort of known people who did it or I've heard things about it and I'm, yeah, I haven't actually jumped into it already, but I'm, it's the place I'm most open to playing around a little more.

I'm curious if you think that it's a solution to the problem that you mentioned.

Well, I think that if people aren't even trying it, then, you know, I mean, that's where we need things. It's sort of like, if you're going to build, go with my metaphor, if you want to build walkable, bikeable, efficient, you know, places, you have to have people advocating for that. You have to design it so that that's a possibility. And there's a, I'll go with that metaphor again, but I think it really just applies for AI.

I think even beyond locally, though, right? I think open weights come in here because part of what you're describing is, I think, partly an effect of the fact that we're racing at the frontier because it's a new untapped technology that we don't know what the bounds are at this point, I think is fair. So you have folks that are using more and more resources to try to find the edge of what you can even do with this technology.

Yeah, so I guess I'm just summarizing that it's the... the ideals and the people who care about the principles and the systems and the privacy or open source stuff, that can be a driver, but it has to reach that point where there's some reason why other people actually find it annoying or it's shittified enough that they're like, oh, well, I'll go to this other thing because that's better and has to exist for that pattern to happen.

Well, that has happened with Linux. I mean, we're seeing it.

Exactly. Yeah.

Windows 11, but the people who are helping make Linux easier than everything else and more powerful than everything else are also the people that we're talking about who are using some of the local AI to push the frontier of what is acceptable.

I think that framing, that's an example of thinking about the incentives of the system so that when we're thinking about it, we're not just looking at the day-to-day whatever about the tools. We're sort of thinking about what are the structures that are getting people to go one way or another. So I'm just offering that metaphor.

Great.

Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So the other thing that kind of, oh yeah, no tech dev, you got, yeah, jump in. Come on up. Come on down. Hey guys. So how are you?

He's taller.

And what are you thinking about? What are you thinking about?

So talking about AI, you had posed the question about, is this the point that we accept it? And I'd like to reframe the question to... To focus on a different aspect of what the AI is. I think that in population movements, so let's say you're coming to another country, you would end up going to the place that is familiar to you, right? Not necessarily the best that a local might think, because the best is relative.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Is this the time that we start using ai i'm not sure is it the time that we should to keep the community alive and avoid a complete separation of brain drain between the context of people coming in now right versus the context of the the old guard so to speak i i think it needs to be from that perspective where the use of ai on the linux desktop is necessary and the the question i believe it was listener sam who brought up the the question

Well i think it reminds me a lot of what happened just in the first wave right where uh computing first was defined by like mainframes and big things you couldn't really access unless you're sliced up and yeah right right and then you got sort of like micro computing and pcs and desktop but there was this whole world of proprietary operating systems and proprietary products and still interesting and new and you know the new frontier and

The essence it feels like that's right yeah.

I would say uh teaching people how to use the technology has been a challenge since technology has come around, right? Any kind of technology, the hammer, you got to learn how to use that thing. Otherwise, you got busted thumbs.

How many users use reset password as their password?

Yeah, exactly. Right. Or chip down their computers by holding the power button. Anyways, I think AI is an interesting one because a lot of us are thinking about, How do we use it in ways that match our ideals or how do we use it in ways that feel safe for our information, especially that we don't really know how it's scooping things up sometimes, right? If you have one conversation and you might have suggested, I don't know, which town you're in or it has your IP or something like that.

It seems like the risk tolerance is somewhat similar or somewhat comparable to migrating from virtual machines to Docker containers. How we understand the problem is evolving. And eventually we'll get into a world where it's LLMs first the way that it's Docker first now.

The thing I liked about the question and approach you had there too is not only is it a change that matches some of our older styles, but I think it's important to not let the proprietary versions of this define what the technology is or how we think about it. Like, okay, we do need to recognize that maybe the most ways people use it is a chat GPT in a browser tab right now or whatever it is, or co-pilot in their 365 account.

Well said.

So here's the next part of this. This week, Bitwarden, the CLI version of Bitwarden was popped, and people's vaults were exposed. And it got me thinking, as we start accelerating bug discovery, the open source software has always had this meme of more eyes, you know, on the code. Well, guess what? We're getting more eyes all of a sudden.

More AI's.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how we handle that. Anybody in here a Bitwarden user right now?

Oof, that's a lot of hands.

That's a lot of you. Anybody a Bitwarden CLI user? Nobody. Interesting. Are you guys?

No. I mean, I have before. I just don't use it regularly.

Yeah, I don't either. Interesting. Okay, well, here's the details. So it looks like the more recent version was compromised as part of the ongoing checkmarks-related supply chain campaign. Oh, yeah, that one. Yeah. I guess they got into some GitHub actions, part of the CICD pipeline.

Yeah, the attacker injected a backdated commit into the checkmarks ASTVS code extension repo. So part of the start of this. But of course, right, yeah, it's all of this stuff that you've chained with between extensions and then all the stuff that you've thought that was helpful in CI. Come on, it's one more action. What's going to, what problem could it be?

Okay, okay. So I'd say about 70% of you were using Bitwarden-ish. Okay, so same folks. Are any of you considering migrating away from Bitwarden? Anybody in here? All staying. Okay, ish. Okay, ish. Pretty much almost universally people are staying with Bitwarden.

Does that mean that the compromising of software has just become normalized?

Well, I mean, maybe they'd feel different if they used Bitward and CLI.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough.

I probably would have. I probably would have been a little more upset. I was like, ooh, dodge that one. That's fine. Well, next time it won't get me. No, that'll be no problem.

But the emotion I have around that is like, it's just a matter of time for all software I'm using. It's sad.

Well, and there are some interesting discussions now, like, you know, considering different techniques. I think I was just reading an article this weekend around, you know, like maybe we need more delays at various levels, right? Like we do tend to catch these things, but if you go install the latest thing all of the time, especially from, you know, NPM or random repository tags.

Wait, is this guy saying we shouldn't roll? I'm not saying that.

I'm saying some people are saying that.

Are you saying we should go to RHEL?

We should go to RHEL.

Because jeez.

No, but I think it's that thing, right? There's the version where you're like, well, you're so out-to-date. This is clearly irresponsible. But then now is there a new version of like, well, you haven't given the AIs enough time to audit that because this just came out. And who knows? Because our software still works.

All right. If AI means I can't roll anymore, then I am anti-AI. That's it. That sealed it for me right there. It's over. I got to be able to roll my distro.

There's someone really shy over excellent.

Okay all right what's.

With the blushing.

Can I ask you why you wanted to try Linux, So, okay. That's a very common way, actually. So that's very common. How's it going so far? The wife installed it for you. How's it going so far? Going good. Good.

We'd love to hear that.

All right. Good. Good. Okay. So most of you then are long-timers. That's probably why you're listening to our show. That makes sense. We're sorry. So like I was saying before we started recording, 26 years of LinuxFest Northwest.

Whoa.

Crazy. And 26 years ago, even 20 years ago, a lot of us were coming to try to figure out, How to get XYZ to work on Linux or how to get Linux to work on XYZ. Either way, just try to get something working. How do I get this to work? Was really, you could almost have a conversation.

What do I install? Where do I go? I still have Windows on my laptop. Please help me.

Right. Every conversation really. How do I get this to work or how do I make Linux work? That's not really what we talk about anymore at LinuxFest. It's not really what we talk about with Linux or open source anymore. So I kind of wanted to take the temperature and see what people think it's about now. Here we are at LinuxFest Northwest.

2026.

2026. So would anybody like to be brave enough and break the ice and come up and tell us kind of what they think when they think what Linux is about for them? It could be a personal thing. Would you like to do it with your name? Derivation Dingus taking the first step. Good job, sir. Good job. Thank you. Come on down.

Brave.

So what is it about for you? What do you think?

So for me, I guess it's mostly about, I run a lot of services at home, mostly for the wife and I. And it's about making it do exactly what we want in a privacy-forward way without cloud servers and without a tech corporation dictating what's allowed versus what I can make it do sort of a situation.

Are you struggling with? Are there things that are sort of persistent or you're unsure about or, you know.

I guess lately the biggest struggle is just getting completely off the cloud.

Oh, sure.

And things like that. That's been my... journey lately.

Can you describe why that's important for your household?

It's really important for me the most. I don't think the wife would mind too much either way. She just wants it to just work. But as you said, we're in a place now where it does mostly just work.

You know where I slowly think the significant other buy-off comes if they're not totally on the same page there is just, it is the incentivization over time. As you start to upgrade the stuff and it gets frustrating and it sort of opens up a window of opportunity to be like hey you know if we hosted this ourself it only changes when we say it changes and that is that can be a window of opportunity right there and.

No one can hike the bill on you.

Well maybe your utility right there's that the power bill i.

Will say i did actually get off i was running unstable or rolling uh on even the servers and stuff like that and uh i.

Didn't work so well i had to roll it back I.

Wrote so much stuff now that something breaks on every.

Update. Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, so I waited for this last upgrade to basically to roll it back.

At that point, that was it, huh?

Yeah, so now everything is unstable except for my workstations, basically.

Derivation, would you like some hot dogs? Because Emma is here with a surplus hot dog.

Official System 76 hot dogs.

Anybody who comes up to the microphone gets free hot dogs.

I would have a hot dog.

Yeah, I mean, I'm talking a whole Costco thing of hot dogs. You're going to be eating for a week, sir. Eating for a week.

That way you have more time to work on your servers.

Thank you, Emma. She's supplying the hot dogs.

Wait, Emma, come on over here.

I think she's getting more hot dogs. Do you have to go? Okay, come say hi.

We have a microphone with your name on it.

Yeah, I got something I want to ask you real quick. Also, I like your jacket.

It's pink. I would have never expected you to.

Hi, Emma.

Oh, hi.

Hey, nice to see you.

Thanks.

So I just wanted to tell everybody what a badass you were yesterday.

Oh, thanks.

So it started really back before you even got on the airplane. Because you went to Costco ahead of time with a piece of paper and all that, I imagine. Went around and did full inventory.

Oh, a spec run?

Wow.

Yes. And I even mathed it out. I said, I need 22 packs of hot dogs to make 400 hot dogs.

Oh, my goodness.

So we ended up cooking 300. So there's like 100 left over.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

So yeah. And I think everybody ate. We had leftovers.

So when you land here the next day, you get there in the morning, like 7 a.m. You're up and at them. And as soon as Costco's open, you're in there. You're going right to every spot. You already know where to go. You know what you're getting.

Yep.

And you knew who to get the grill from.

Yes.

So it was a pretty smooth operation.

She's more connected here, and she lives states away than we have.

I know. Seriously.

It's because I have boots on the ground here. I have a Hadiyah as my partner in crime. And then, yeah, it was really funny, though, because there were so many buns in the car.

My car was loaded with hot dog buns.

Yeah, there were so many buns in the car that when she hit the brakes, they all flew forward and we're like getting attacked by hot dog buns. So we're like dodging them in the car. I mean, well, I guess if we get in an accident, we're safe.

Yeah.

Like pillows.

Totally safe.

Yeah.

And then also shout out to Olympia Mike because he brought like a tent and some fire starter and some stuff we could poke at.

Yeah.

Mike was essential.

Yeah. And his Chromebooks used to hold down the tent. The tent was blown away. So we deployed a bunch of Chromebooks. surprisingly heavy that's what all they're good for now yeah when you put like a dozen of those things in a crate it's like 60 pounds it's ridiculous it.

Was the only way to keep the canopy on the ground.

So once again you fed hundreds of people yes well done and.

I thought it was pretty quick.

Yeah, Not two hours-ish, but yeah, that's pretty quick, yeah. So, round of applause. Did a fantastic job. Thank you, Emma.

Stop by our booth.

Yeah, go check out.

System 76.

They got that shiny new Thalia.

Do you want to ask her the Linux question? I mean, she's been in the- Okay.

All right. All right, Emma. You ready for this? This is what we were just asking folks.

Okay.

So, like 26 years ago, when LinuxFest Northwest started, everybody was always talking, how do I make XYZ work on Linux, or how do I make Linux work on this? It's like what everybody talked about. Now, it pretty much always works, for the most part. Things just work. So what do you think people really talk about now at these events? What's the thing? How do I make it work isn't really a topic anymore because it works.

How do I make it work?

What do you think?

Because, like, you know, you've heard all the support calls over the years, etc. Like, it used to be in an era where Wi-Fi or just what laptop do I buy? Or how do I even make a USB to get this installing?

Yeah. I don't know. We don't. It isn't, like, it's all custom, I guess. Everyone wants to make something different.

Yeah, their own thing.

It's how can I make it more different than everybody else is what it feels like.

I guess. Yeah, that sounds about right. How do I do my own specific thing that I'm trying to do and make it look like my own thing?

Emma was telling me at the after party last night that System76 had zero tickets for support recently because everything just works.

It was very weird. I was like, something is broken.

Yeah, it's our support system.

I tested it out. I opened a ticket.

It went through.

That's true.

And I was like, oh, weird.

But that's a sign of the adoption of Linux and how it works on the hardware. Because years ago, System76, one of your challenges was like, how do we make the hardware as smooth as possible? But these days, that's as easy as it's ever been.

Yeah, and we have a stellar QA and engineering team. So I trust their work, because it's showing that.

Yay, Linux.

Yay. Thank you, Emma.

Thank you, Emma.

Thank you for everything. All right. So before we wrap up, I want to just take

And there's a spot to donate over in the expo hall as well.

Yeah, and I just want to do a round of applause for James and for all his contributions, even though it couldn't be here.

Over the years.

Really appreciate him.

Absolutely the best spirit of Linux Fest right there.

That's just it. And a great guy. Local guy, too. So it was really great. And, yeah, he'll be missed.

Yeah. Already is.

Yeah, he already is. He already is. But this has been a great Linux Fest for us. Yesterday was a ton of fun. And I think he would have loved to. I think he would have enjoyed it. And it was another classic one where we had the beautiful weather this year. You know, we always say it's like, yeah, it's sometimes a little crappy. Got to warn you. It could be a little crappy. We got a good one this year.

There's something about a lawn full of Linux nerds having a good time.

Yeah, seeing everybody out there eating, having a picnic, eating cookies and hot dogs.

And getting that vitamin D we don't always get in the Pacific Northwest.

Very much so. Thank you, everybody, for coming. We're going to wrap it up there so we don't make it too long on the recording. But we'll hang out for a little bit after this. But thank you very much. And we hope to see you back here next year, too. Thank you, guys.

Hey, a big shout-out to the LinuxFest staff and our proctor. Making all this work.

Thank you, LinuxFest staff. Thank you.

While we're here back in the studio, we might sound a little different. Do you sound different? You sound clean.

Yeah, it's nice. Oh, hello, boys. Back on the regular microphone.

It was amazing to see everybody at LinuxFest. And, well, of course, it is always a special fest. This was no exception. So a huge thank you to everybody who flew from all over, drove from all over, swam if you swam, but the entire community for coming out and hanging out together with us. And to the bigger community for helping us get those headsets that we use reliably at every single event. Those things are amazing. So thank you for that. We are super grateful.

Oh, my gosh. Has things really improved for us in terms of our mobile kit? Thank you again, everyone.

It's so simple.

Who contributed to that. Still paying dividends on that one. All right, Brentley, kick us off with our baller booster this week.

Well, we are extra grateful this week because we have a baller booster. Spooky satcom. Spooky Satcom came in with a mega space balls boost. One, two, three, four, five, six.

That's amazing. Thank you very much, Spooky. $123,456. That's great.

It's insane. Ventoy has been my go-to in a pinch. With all my .files backed up to a self-hosted Forge.io instance, and my important files running on a self-hosted NextCloud instance, my worries are pretty much low these days.

I like this setup. This is a solid setup. I like this a lot.

Shout out to Carl from System76 for his work on the amendments to Colorado's age attestation bill. That's SB 26-051. Thank you for that dedication.

Indeed. Thank you very much for that baller boost, Spooky Satcom. Nice setup you got there. Really appreciate that. Our next boost comes from Turd Ferguson with 22,222 sats. Sending some value your way for LinuxFest Northwest efforts and expenses. Grill a hot dog for me.

Thank you, Turd.

We did. We appreciate you very much.

Where did it go?

Brent, don't go there.

TR Selby boosts in with 7,490 Satoshis. There and back again. I'm betting on Brent going west-southwest for the Linux Fest northwest.

Well, pretty much.

Yeah.

Just in case you need AAA to boost your battery, you can put this boost towards it. Otherwise, enjoy a cider.

Aww thank you thank you that's nice yes alright we'll find Brent a nice gluten free cider there's plenty to enjoy Gene Bean comes in with 244 nope 200 2,444 sets sorry I'm stealing it Brent, I'm not defending the training methods of AI, but comparing to user grabbing stuff from Stack Exchange or GitHub isn't really fair either. Two wrongs don't make a right. A user violating the license is just as wrong as model training and not giving required attribution.

Well and just there's like i don't know i think part of it too at least from my side was we were trying to lay out the scope of different just the the landscape of things and issues to um, to fight about which can you know can start with what do you even assign to like how should copyright work right like you what layer of the discussion you start on kind of matters for this debate so part of i was just hoping we could lay out all the different ways so that we could be clear about which things

Very, very complex topic with many emotions and many should-bes. It's a difficult one. Ford Humor boosted in a row of sticks, 11,111 satoshis. I'm not sure what all podcast players support flipping between audio and video on the fly, but I'm enjoying catching portions of the stream on video in Fountain when I can tell you're doing a demo. This week, I switched to video to watch the pics, and it was super handy. Here's a big thank you to Drew for including a high-quality video cut as part

There you go.

Aw.

Thank you very much.

That's true.

Now, I have to say we don't have the regular video version for this episode because when we're live, it's much harder to do the video setup. Maybe one year we'll have a stretch goal.

When we have a video crew.

It'd be nice to actually be able to make clips of Linux Fest and these events we go to and release them individually too. But that is a stretch goal for the future. And we do love Drew. Thank you very much, Forward Humor. Appreciate you. Appreciate everybody who boosted it, including those of you who boosted below the 2,000 set cutoff.

I think I want to pull one up here.

Let's do it.

There's a 1,000 set here from AmazingQ. Long-time listener, circa 2018 first-time booster, though. You asked about Pixie booted servers. For three years now, I'm running my NAS diskless, which sounds strange to NASers that generally need disks. This is what I mean. There is no disk or partition used for an OS. It is based on Alpine Linux via Netboot. The state is stored in a tar file, which is generated by the command LBU. This tar file is stored on a web server.

That's a slick setup. So he's basically the NAS OS is loading over the network.

Isn't that cool? So then, like machine agnostic almost.

We have talked about that for our studio machines once in a while. That's true. Don't even run with local OSes, just have them always netboot. That's an interesting idea. I'd love to know how it works and practice it if anybody else out there is doing it. Also, shout out to everybody who streams stats. 21 of you stream stats. How about that? Right there on the money. 21.

That is cool.

I know, right?

Bunch of streaming nerds out there.

And, of course, thank you to everybody. If you did not hear your boost read this episode, we cut off a little early when we were prepping for Linux Fest. So you may not have gotten in because we collected before Sunday morning. But don't worry. We'll catch it next episode. So thank you, everybody, who did boost those collectively. We stacked 196,240 Satoshis. We really do appreciate it. And if you would like to participate, you can get Fountain FM. It makes it very easy to boost.

Is that what your hair does sometimes?

It does do an Updo every now and then, especially in the mornings. But then I was looking through it, and I don't recall actually talking about this. It's an uptime monitoring CLI tool, but it's not just for your local host uptime.

No, and that's maybe where it sets itself apart, is we have looked at a lot of sort of cool networking TUIs, and this one's more directed outward. So think something like Uptime Kuma, but less something you've set up as like a server daemon and more something you might run, you know, more temporary.

As a TUI.

Yeah. But it does have a Toml configuration format, all kinds of easy ways, Nix, NixOS, Windows, Docker, Linux, macOS. So lots of ways to run it. It's a Go app, MIT licensed, and it's a TUI. And so you can kind of do real-time monitoring, multi-target, multi-region. It's got AWS support, lambdas. It's got metric exports for Prometheus, so you can get Grafana dashboards going, alerts.

Thank you, Wes. You know, when you put something out there, sometimes the internet provides. And this week, the internet provided me with Bake, I think is actually how you say it. You turn any web page into a desktop app with one command, P-A-K-E, but it's a Hawaiian word. It's lightweight. It is 90% rust.

Wow.

And they have some pre-made ones ready to go. They say it will be nearly 20 times smaller than what an Electron version would produce. 20 times smaller.

That's what got you right there, huh?

Yeah, it's using Rustari, which is a much faster traditional JS framework with lower memory usage. You use one command to get it going. No super complex configuration required. Support shortcuts, immersive windows, drag and drop, style customizations, built-in ad removal. I don't know if I mentioned, but it's an MIT license.

This is for Brent, right? Because he won't pin his tabs, but maybe he could make apps out of what we would consider pin tabs.

Now you're talking.

I like that. I wish he would just pin his damn tabs, but that would also work.

I won't pin my tabs.

You have so many windows now. Instead of tabs, he would just have so many windows.

And that'll force him to get a proper window manager that can handle it.

I am an entropy enthusiast.

So we will have links to those in the show notes over at linuxunplugged.com slash 660fer, which is where you can get all of that. Again, thank you, everybody who came to out to LinuxFest Northwest, made it a special 2026.

Shout out to the organizers and all the folks putting it on.

Wes, before we get out of here, is there any extra nerdy details people should know about the show that only people that have listened this long would really actually even care about?

Yeah, well, since XML is really painful to read, we sort of hide these things in our RSS feed. But there are magic text files you can get. Yeah, that's right. Chapters, JSON chapters, yeah.

JSON?

JSON.

Oh, that's useful.

Oh, super useful.

What about like, I don't know, maybe transcripts?

Yeah, if you want to track exactly what Brent says in every episode, check out the VTT file. It's got labels there.

It says Brent.

What? It's diaririrized?

That's right. Diarirized, yeah.

Wow.

Just for you.

You should probably see a doctor about that. And if you look really, really closely, you'll find an MP4 file in there, too. Although this week, it's not actually our faces.

But it's still good.

And every now and then, you might also see what's called a live item entry, because we are live on Sundays, which we call a Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. So why not make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday? Join us at jblive.tv or jblive.fm. And, of course, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar is where you get it in your local time zone. We have bots, the early versions of bots. Before we call them bots, before we call them algorithms, we got them over there and they convert it to