Hey everybody, welcome to Linuxcast, I'm your host Matt. I'm Tyler. And I'm Pete. And I'm Josh. Welcome to the Linuxcast, guys. So we have been streaming for many hours today. So if you haven't caught it already, the four of us along with several others, including DT, the Linux 2, Jesse, Nate, a whole bunch of guys got together, did the Linux 2 Christmas special. It's on my channel, it's on DT's, it's on Josh's, it's on the Linux 2 obviously.  You can go back and watch it. We had loads of fun. So you definitely should go check that out, check the rebroadcast of that. We're not gonna pull it down or anything, it's great. So yeah, so we've been streaming for a while and now we have a podcast to do. So this is the Linuxcast, we talk about Linuxy things. And yes, I know two things before, if you're watching the video, no fancy schmancy graphics, having some technical difficulties all day today, so this is just easier. Second, yes, there's going to be annoying effing green flashes on my webcam.  It can't be fixed without a workaround. I don't wanna do the workaround, so I'm burning the camera and effigy the next time I get a new camera. So that's the plan, it's so bad, I'm so pissed off at it. But anyways, just let you know, you don't have to sit in the chat, you don't have to talk about the green flashes.   Anyways, welcome to Linuxcast, we talk about Linuxy things, but before, and we have a topic for the day, but before we jump into that, we're gonna go around the horn and talk about the things we've been doing in open source this week.  So I have been diving into NixOS a ton and it's been a lot of fun. I did not expect to enjoy NixOS nearly as much as I have. The user experience is not for everyone. It's definitely not a distro that's for everyone, but I found it to be quite enjoyable and it does serve a good purpose. And it is, there is a lot of very fun things that you can do, like right, I wasn't able to stream the Christmas special because last night I decided that it would be a good idea to mess around with a whole bunch of my system. And on top of that run NixOS for the first time from a TempFs because NixOS only requires slash boot and slash Nix to actually get a bootable usable system. So you're able to run pretty much the entire root directory inside your RAM, which is cool. And that's what I was doing, but it caused some issues along the way because it was my first time doing it and I made some mistakes, but that's just an example of some of the cool stuff you can do with it. So I've been having a lot of fun. I have Nix installed on this computer and on the one behind me doing a long-term review of it and my thoughts are this. A lot of times they do things differently just to be different. It's the way it feels a lot of the time. It's like, why did you choose to do it this way? Yeah, it doesn't really feel like you have a technical reason to do that, but that's just my thought. So anyways, yeah, NixOS is whatever. So Steve, what have you been up to this week? I haven't been up to too much because my brother just came in from Dubai for a couple of days, so I've been being with him, but when it comes to Linux and open source, I've been trying to discover more and more apps as much as I can and I've been working again with Docker containers for the third week in a row. Hey, you're welcome, you're welcome. Well, yeah, there's something else. They're just another animal and I discovered more containers and I've been messing with those and finally I've been working on Calamaris because Calamaris finally got a stable 3.3 release after what, two years of alphas. I've been working on that because it now supports QT6. I've been trying to mess with Pipewire, but I'll talk more about that because that's my nightmare story of the week. We're definitely not doing nightmares every week. That'd be just bad for you, right? Matt, can you do your segment? Somebody's knocked on my door. Sure. All right, so let me talk a little bit about what I've been doing. So I've been doing, I've been talking about this a little bit for the last two and a half weeks or so. I've been doing the GNOME challenge. I promised to use GNOME for six months just to see if I can and everything was going fine until this morning, to be honest with you. I used Wayland for the last seven days because I got a new monitor. I got a LG dual-up monitor, which is really cool, but it's 1440p and I needed scalings and scaling doesn't work well in X-Horg at all, especially when you mix and match resolutions. So I bit the bullet, used the Wayland session and used it for seven days. Buggy and a whole bunch of stuff just wasn't working.  I mean, it's like horseshit is what it is. It's really, really bad, especially maybe it's not for every game, but for the games that I play specifically. So City Skylines is not the best optimized game for Linux period, but it works good enough on X-Horg. On Wayland, oh my God, is it bad? Like horrendous. I played a little bit of Madden, could hardly get that to launch in Wayland, works fine on X-Horg. Same things with Sims. I also played several other games, tried to play several other games in Wayland, just couldn't get them to either launch. Some of them did launch and played, but was either laggy or had some stutters. It was really bad. Either I'm doing something wrong. Yeah, I was going to ask you about the stuttering and the flickering. Yeah, it's not a very good experience. So yesterday or the day before I went back to X-Horg and I was having a good time, it works fine. But then this morning when I was setting up for the Christmas special, got discorded up and running, had things going, the camera stopped working. And then I finally got the camera to start working and the audio was going bad. And so nobody could hear any of the desktop audio. And from what I could tell, you guys know how GNOME has those security settings that control whether or not the, they tell you, basically tell you whether or not your camera's on and your microphone's recording. For whatever reason, it saw the microphone just fine, but the webcam wasn't appearing at all. Like there was no icon, nothing like that. So with something going on with there, I'm going to have to do some experimenting. So long story short, I had to quickly get out of GNOME this morning, break my challenge just a little bit and head on over to Hyperland, which guys, I like Hyperland. It has a lot of really cool features. Outside of the whole monitor's not going off thing, I'd probably use Hyperland. But I don't want to be in Hyperland right now because it's giving me a taste of a window manager again. And I have to go back to GNOME if I'm going to finish my challenge. I really don't want to. I like, it's- Just so you know, in Hyperland, I figured out how to make your screens automatically time out and go off. How? Yeah, tell me this. Tell me this magic. So you can use sway idle to initiate it. Sorry, buddy. But you don't have to. Is there another way?  Now you also need to go into your Hyperland config inside of your, if you don't already have it, make it a misc session for like miscellaneous and add mouse move underscore, like it's like mouse move enables DPS. You said that's just true and keyboard press enables dpms true. Yeah, I'm going to tell you, I will try that, but I guarantee it's not going to work because I already used dpms and the sway idle stuff. I've also created a script for it. Didn't work. See, the thing is it's not the mouse that won't wake it up. It just said it wakes up on its own. It will go to sleep and immediately kick right back in. Now the thing is I'm 100%, by the way, this is not Hyperland's problem. It happens on GNOME too. Only reason GNOME has worked for me is because they've gotten hibernation to work.  That works fine. I've learned to live with that.  That's on GNOME, Hyperland, and it doesn't matter if it's X or Wayland. They both do it. And see, I thought that it was the external hard drive because external hard drives do that from time to time. Look that. What I ended up doing was I ended up unhooking every single USB thing that was connected to my computer, except for the mouse and keyboard. It still did it. So it wasn't the thing. And that leaves, because it's almost 100% positive a hardware problem because it spans distributions, spans window managers, spans display servers and compositors, all of it. So there is something going on in that motherboard settings that's stopping this from working, almost 100% positive that it's something in the motherboard. And the thing is... Are you using HDMI or DisplayPort? I'm using both. Using both. So is it a DisplayPort to HDMI? No, I have... Are you talking about like there's a DisplayPort cable to DisplayPort? He's talking about HDMI to HDMI. Dedicated DisplayPort, dedicated HDMI both. So the LG Dual-Up has two one's an HDMI, one's a DisplayPort. Both of those are plugged in directly to an HDMI and a DisplayPort. The 32-inch in front of me has a DisplayPort. That one's also connected into a DisplayPort. Now, previously, when I was still having the problem, and I had just the 27-inch monitor, that was a VGA, which was connected to a dongle that went into an HDMI. But that's gone. And so that was... If that was the problem, I'd have fixed it because I no longer use it, but it still happens. It's the same issue. Like I said, somebody mentioned something in one of the...  This is like the one problem on Linux that I just can't solve. And so I've mentioned it all over the place. Somebody in one of the comments on one of my videos has told me that there's some setting, I don't remember what it was, in a lot of BIOS mechanisms that cause this issue. And the thing is, is that I am scared shitless of BIOS.   And I have to have this computer. It has got to work. Like I have laptops and stuff and I can use those for a little while, but it would drive me bonkers with a small screen. And I have to have the screen real estate to drive me nuts. So anyways, the long story... You're kind of like me. You're kind of like me. I had the phobia of BIOS for like at least six or seven years before I entered the BIOS and played around with it. And at the time, the first time I messed with BIOS, I entered the password, a random password and I couldn't figure it out. And the only way to reset it is take it back to the factory. I mean, I'm a little bit better now because I've been in there and I've, because when I first built this computer, the fan curves are all over the floor. I mean, they were really bad. I mean, they were running full blasts and it was cool. And they were not running at all when it was hot.  So I had to get in there and fix all that stuff. And I have no clue what was going on there.   But I don't see the thing is my solution is either to figure out the BIOS thing if I can figure out that. So that's the first step. If I can't, if that's not the issue, then I'm at a loss. So it's either, you know, replace the motherboard and figure out what the hell's going cause this is an important thing for me. I like my computer stays on. I've talked about this before as a file server. It backs up all the computers around the house, you know, overnight and it just stays on. But I don't want the monitors on cause I sleep in this room.  So Josh, what have you been up to this week in open source? I have been attempting to, to stick around on a, on a distro and because, you know, I need some stability in my life for a little bit. And because these next, these next few months, I'm going to be extremely busy and I won't have time to be like tinkering with the distros. Cause, you know, I'm, I'm actually going, I'm actually trying to commit to like trying to record videos and be able to post them as well as, you know, keep up with the distro hacking.  So my, my very first solution is, I've actually distro hop like 17 times in the, in the last couple of weeks because, you know, I'm trying to get something that's not going to break on me, right? Right? Right? So my first experience was with NixOS and just like, yeah, we're, we're going to try this with Nix because, you know, if you break Nix, you can just roll back and, you know, all the things that they advertise. So, I'm sitting there with Nix and then I remember, remember, oh yeah, I got to be productive. Cause, you know, I, I have a stakeholder in the job title. So I got to pull up to the software for work that I got to use too. I, I'm not going to list the name for it or anything like that. But it's binary compatible with Linux, but it fully, but it's hard to code it to expect a Linux file system hierarchy standard thing. And I couldn't figure out Nix alien for the life of me. So this, this software just would not work because it has to be installed into slash opt and then expect, and then expect path out of slash bin. So we, so could it get that to work? So I left NixOS and then after that, it's like, okay, so what's another distra that like advertises that you can just roll back on? Open Suso, right? Open Suso makes perfect sense with the, like, the ButterFS integrations and everything. And even then, like this software is prepackaged as an RPM too. So I, so that kind of the best of all the world, right? So I installed Open Suso and I run the pseudo zipper DUP because, you know, we installed the tumbleweed because, you know, we need that newer kernel because Intel Arc and immediately bricks itself. And I hit a corruption. I hit a, I think this was when they were dealing with like their mirror issues because I was able to pull in the updates but apparently the ButterFS progs package was corrupted or something like that because it completely zeroed my entire disk. Like, well, that Open Suso installed in it last very long. Yeah. So then it's like, okay. Two days was really bad with the marriage and stuff because there was a lot of corrupted packages and stuff. Yeah, it was bad. Yeah. So after that, it's like, okay, well, if Open Suso is going to immediately brick itself and I can see that there's people talking about issues with Open Suso, let's try a different distra. So I installed Ubuntu 2310. And I just like, okay.  It's working perfectly fine. All way. It's running EXT4.  I just, I just hit that corruption bug on EXT4. We're completely blew itself up again. Of course, I didn't find this out until the next day. So it's like, why did I want to like reinstalling? I installed, I started with Ubuntu. That broke itself. So then I installed Zubuntu for like the XFCE. It's like XFCE totally isn't going to kill itself or anything like that. Immediately broke, immediately bricked itself. And then just like, okay, Ubuntu proper. I don't like Ubuntu's Nome Session, but if it's what's going to work, we're going to go with it. So I installed that, bricks itself again, all because of that, all because of that EXT4 corruption bug. Okay, so the EXT4 corruption bug, I just downloaded a video that I'm going to watch later about that. Well, then Steve, just for you, I installed zero Linux, right? And as you guys might know, I have a famous history with stability on Arch Linux where I Pac-Man and Pac-Man just gives me a 404 on a mirror that I can ping. You're like, what in the world is going on? Pac-Man, why? This was your chance. This was your chance for me to stay on Arch Linux or like an ArchBase system for longer than a week. And immediately, what the issue is that Pac-Man can see that I have an internet connection, but it can't index DNS. But I can open up a Firefox web browser and I can ping through DNS. So I don't know why Pac-Man doesn't work. Do you use a different DNS servers somewhere along the line or give you a replace your DNS? I changed DNS servers. I pulled in a whole new mirrorless and everything. The only way I can get Pac-Man to work is if I boot a live image, CH and not even CH root would work. What I would have to do is I would have to use a Pac-Man command from the Arch install media and then tell Pac-Man to install things through a remote root directory. Yeah, well, it's like I say, one of these days, Josh is just gonna pull down the entire AUR stored on a server someplace and point Pac-Man at the server in his closet. I honestly think that's what I'm gonna have to do with one of these days. But, so, you know, like, okay. What's, there's only one distro left and I'm willing to try this week. And that is Debian, but I don't wanna be running Debian testing because Debian testing doesn't do security updates. So it's like, do I wanna live like the Sid lifestyle? I'm like, no, I'm curious. So I checked like Debian backports page because I know that sometimes they backport newer kernels into the stable branch and I'm like, oh, kernel 6.5 and backports because I was this close, this close to pulling the ArcGPU out of my system. But thankfully, Debian's got the 6.5 kernel in there. So I'm still rocking an ArcGPU and I'm on Debian now. Even though, you know, I've had to completely recompile Firefox because somebody packaged it wrong. Might as well use a flat pack. Cause I didn't think about it. Makes sense. Now I actually really don't like the flat pack version of Firefox because I do make a use of a couple extensions that interact with external programs and flat pack just doesn't communicate properly.  We've got Darth Vader sitting here telling me to go back to Gen 2. Well, I did attempt Gen 2 as well. XDG desktop portal is still inherently broken and Intel Arc is still a very bad experience on XDG. All right. So that actually worked out really well for your horror story, Josh. All right, so this week's main topic. So originally, I know last week, I promised you guys a game of some sort, but between real life nonsense and just not being able to get around the game thing didn't happen, the little bit of prep work I did on it, just it didn't feel right.  So we're gonna talk about some horror stories, things where you got into a pickle where Linux just did really not treat you right where you had some really problems and you couldn't solve it and either caused you to distro hop or reinstall or whatever. So that's what we're gonna do. And I have a couple of these. I know Josh has quite a few. So we're just gonna go around, just do one at a time. If we have time, we'll go back around again. So Tyler, tell us a time when you've had some problems with Linux that you just made you wanna pull your hair out. Probably the worst one is when Deadside first made the switch over to easy anti-cheat. Cause that one got me really upset cause I thought my entire install had just like got corrupted or something. Cause you know, it started kicking me out all of a sudden from playing the game. And I was like, what in the heck man? Come on, what's happening? And then after I did a reinstall and then loaded the game and it still did it, I did a Google search and oh yeah, they've enabled easy anti-cheat. So you're gonna have to have a Windows install to be able to play it. That one I was pretty upset. Now that one's not Linux's fault or anything but at the same time like at first I thought it was. I was like, oh God, what's happened?  Well, I mean, I had to go over and use Windows to be able to play a game. That is horrifying. Exactly, come on now. Work on the Linux. It's like 2023, come on. All right, Steve, your horror story. My horror story, like I alluded to earlier is related to pipe wire. I know I don't wanna drag a story too long but everybody knows the horror stories with pipe wire as of late. I'm not saying in general, I'm just saying as of late because I'm still pulling my hair out, whatever I got left of my hair. I got enough of it to pull right now. Tomorrow is another day. But the reason for which I'm pulling my hair out was I was recording a meeting with someone related to potential work and it was a three hour call. And the audio was showing everywhere. Okay, I enabled echo cancellation and I used our boy Tyler's config because he says, he kept saying, it's working. The magic, and I couldn't hear Buddy here barking when he kept saying, this dog is going crazy. And I was like, what is he talking about? I can't hear a thing. I'm like, that echo cancellation module is working magic. So why not enable it on my end? So I did enable it and everything and the audio graph was working and everything. I was like, yay, I'm recording the whole session with a potential boss. And then when I listened back to the video, there was no audio, absolutely no audio. So, and I thought something happened in Pipewire, like it usually happens where it turns your microphone into the output for whatever reason. So I checked that. I tried to play back a YouTube video in the browser. I wasn't getting any audio out of the video in the browser. I was like, what the heck is going on? I go to Pawful Control, it has all the correct things and I saw the graphs working and there was audio. And then I realized that the audio was coming from the speaker output, which wasn't selected. It wasn't coming out of the echo cancel sync, which should have been coming out from because that's the source I said to come out from. And then in the recording, I saw that echo source was selected, but no bars were moving. The bars that were moving were the ones under the microphone. M01, whatever it's called, the USB microphone. So I was like, what the heck is going on? As soon as I switched back to the regular outputs, I heard audio and I was able to record in audacity or ocean audio, the thing I used. So everything was okay again. As soon as I select echo cancel, everything disappeared. I'm still pulling my hair out of this one because I needed the recording because I needed to listen back to all the requirements or all I was required to do for the job. So I was getting no audio. So, and I've had this issue for the past year and a half. That's why I removed that part from my tool because it wasn't working for me. So I was like, if people really want it, they can follow the easy guide that I linked to in my forum because if I gave them my configuration and which might break their system, I might be blamed for it.  So I removed it from my script. So I'm still, it's a nightmare because I now have an interview that I need without the audio. That's scary. Imagine doing that in something more important. Audio's gotta work and audio never works. It just never works. There's always some problem with it. Say that again. All right, Josh. I don't know why it works for some people. It doesn't work for other people. It doesn't, no rhyme or reason. Josh, your first one. So let's turn off the lights here, guys. Let's turn off the lights. Let's do this. Okay, so the year was 2010. Well, it was actually 2012. It was March of 2012. I'm sitting here on my Ubuntu machine and I'm looking up the documentation on how to upgrade to the next LTS release because this was back when I was wee a little lad. Just didn't even know what Linux was. I just knew that I had Ubuntu. I didn't know it was Linux because Linux was never mentioned on an Ubuntu box. It was always just Ubuntu.  And I'm making excellent use of G-Edit, the world's greatest text editor because Ubuntu didn't ship with Vim still. Actually, I still don't think they ship with Vim. They don't. And I'm editing and modifying the app sources.list and I'm changing to the next release branch. I run my pseudo aptitude update and then I run my pseudo aptitude full-dash upgrade because I'm gonna move from Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 12.04. Now, those of you that don't know this, this was the end of GNOME 2 with the transition to Unity. I didn't have a backup. And they specifically say, don't migrate fresh install. So I had to manually craft my whole system and manually migrate from a GNOME and GTK 2 stack to Unity, which was written with this thing called QT that I'd never heard of before. I'm making use of this library called volva and figuring out how to migrate to that and be able to hopefully reboot and have a graphical session when my computer booted. It took me about two and a half weeks to figure this out. In the meantime, I'm sitting here and at the end of the month, I had pre-finals for my degree coming up because I had to do pre-finals, I had to turn in a thesis, then I had finals. Moral of the story, always have a backup. I think that's gonna be the moral of all of our stories, probably. Well, I didn't learn backups until later. That's another story.  So I was on Fedora. I think it was either earlier this year or last year. I think last year when I was being Fedora fanboy. Fedora had been working out really, really well. Been going along for just a couple months and was proclaiming to all that would hear me that Fedora was the best Linux distro that you could possibly use. It was the most stable distribution ever. I had no problems whatsoever. PipeWire was working for the first time. Just Chef's Kiss, it was awesome, right? And then I went to log into my computer one day and it kept telling me that the password was wrong. And now you guys are gonna remember, I don't use a complicated password on my computer at all. I, for online services, yeah, I have a password manager for that. To get my computer, I don't need a complicated password. So it's just a couple of digits. So I knew I was typing it right. Like, I figured like, for sure. The first time, maybe I mistyped something. I had my key, my fingers on the wrong keys or something. Second time, typed it in and it said, sorry, password failed. I was like, what the hell's going on here? And I checked, make sure I didn't have cap stock on. But the problem is my keyboard at the time did not have an indicator and whether or not the cap stock was on. And I don't remember which display manager, because like some display managers will tell you if the cap stock is on, some of them don't. Don't remember which one I was on, but this one didn't. Apparently the cap stock was on, which is what caused that first issue. The first time I typed in, the reason why the machine didn't take the password was because the cap stock was on.  Okay, so Pam has a 10 minute timeout. If I guess 10 minutes, maybe it's half an hour. Is it 10 minutes, Josh? All right, so 10 minutes by default. So for those of you guys who don't know, Pam is what sits behind the display manager and pseudo and everything that checks your password against the password files, right? So if you don't type your password in correctly so many times, it locks you out of your computer. But you gotta remember those first few times, I was typing in with the key cap stock on so I was typing the password wrong, but I didn't realize it. So, but by the time I did, I kept just kept typing in because it's literally three letters. That's all it is. It's a DT style password, very safe and secure. And so the first few times it was working properly but I was typing in wrong because of the cap stock but I turned the computer off and turned it back on because I tried like 10 times and it doesn't, with Pam it doesn't matter if you turn it off and turn it back on that timeout's still there. I'm a very impatient person. So after about 10, maybe seven or eight minutes of not being able to get into that computer with my password, I was like, screw this. I have Ventoy on a USB key. I'm reinstalling Fedora. Well, actually before I did that I tried to go in and do, I was going to be good actually. I wasn't going to just hop. I actually booted into a live environment and tried to chroot into that machine. The problem is, is that if you don't know what the hell you're doing, SC Linux doesn't like that at all. So I wasn't able to either even chroot because with chroot I was actually getting the exact same problem in the live environment where it kept telling me that the password wasn't right. So, and eventually I did get around the SC Linux but for some reason I was still with it. I had either activated the Pam lock again, which is probably the case because at that point it probably had been longer than 10 minutes. So I probably had activated it again and then so I couldn't get in through the live environment and I ended up having to reboot. The big, the problem ended up being first off I didn't know that Pam lock had had the lock mechanism so I had no clue that it had a timeout. Had no clue about that. At that time it didn't know existed but the thing is that computer, that keyboard at the time, the caps lock was stuck on. So even, and again remember, no indicator whatsoever. There was no light, it was just an RGB keyboard and so there was no indication that that was on. And even normally after a reboot come back on the caps lock would go back to the off state. This time it didn't, it stayed on and I had no clue.    Remember the caps lock was off again now and it went to sign into Arch and it would not sign me in because the password was wrong. I was like, oh my God, I was just close guys. I swear to God to switching to Linux or switching to Windows. And I was like, oh my God, this is so bad. Like this is the end of my YouTube channel.  I might have to switch to WSL if I want to use Linux. It's gonna be horrible. Oh, I was so mad. That was like, that was like a four hour period where I kept trying to figure out what was going on. And it was that caps lock button switching it mostly being stuck on. And then every once it was like it was shorted or something. Like the key, the switch or whatever had a like a short end or something. And it was mostly on. It was always depressing itself, really weird. And what I had to do was actually replace the, I didn't have a hotspot swap keyboards at that time. So it was just replaced the keyboard. I was so frustrated. The good news is I learned about the timeout of Pam now. And I know about that. So just PSA, you type your password in multiple times wrong and then it locks you out. It's not gonna tell you that you're locked out. It doesn't do that. Well, at least the display manager, the display manager doesn't. Yeah, the display manager doesn't. If you're trying from the show, it will tell you. Yeah. Well, yeah, this was the display manager.  Well, I could have tried. I don't really remember. Cause I'm sure somewhere along the line, I was like, well, you know what? Obviously this is a display manager problem.  So I'm sure that somewhere along the line, I went into a TTY and try to do it. I don't remember why it, it seems like it would have told me that you're locked out, but it didn't. Maybe it only tells you that first time. I don't know. It will tell you if you're on a new session. So if you're switching to a TTY, it would tell you that this account is locked. You have this number of minutes left. It, that's what it is supposed to tell you, but that can, that can actually be disabled in the PAM configuration as well. Maybe Fedora has that disabled or something. I don't remember that saying, cause I learned about the PAM lockout like the day afterwards when I, cause I think that was, I think that was like the day I decided I was going to switch to like, I was either going to try Gen two or Redcore or something. I wanted something completely different. Cause obviously the ones I was more familiar with, you know, I just needed something stable. And I was looking for something and I learned that like the day afterwards that that PAM lock was there.  And I learned why it kept locking me out. Like that's, that's my number one. Cause I was so frustrated.  Obviously they can't even do this right. I'm leaving. It was the closest I've ever been. It was close. And I mean, I'm glad I figured it out, but goodness gracious, that was, it was really bad. All right. Tyler, do you have another horror story for us? Yeah, yeah. So since we're all around the campfire, look, there was this one time.  I'm saying. Yes, you're going to need it. You need to calm down the anxiety that this will cause you. So there was a once upon a time a man was installing Lennox and he decided that he was going to do something a little bit new. He was going to try Gintu for the first time. And the thing about Gintu that you really do need to know is the handbook does cover everything and you cannot skip around with it. There's no such thing as skimming the handbook and then installing the Gintu successfully the first time. It doesn't really happen. So I decided I was going to go ahead, skim through it, install it. And I did. The only problem is I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't boot. And by the grace of God, I was able to figure it out and I don't even know what it was that was the problem. But eventually I got booted into a working Gintu install.  I set all of my use flags inside of mymake.conf. Now Josh and any other Gintu user can explain to you why that is a horrible idea. Just in general, it's not a good idea. So I had a whole bunch of issues around, like I wouldn't say rendering, but like applications not just looking right or coming up like they were slow to load and stuff. And one of the things I did not know about Gintu at the time was, yeah, you can't do that. You can't do that and expect to be able to easily find out your problem, mainly because some flags you don't want to set for every program. And when it does cause, like, you know, oh good Lord, what's the thing where it's an endless loop of conflicting packages? Oh, a circular dependency? Yes, yeah, circular dependencies. So like, I mean, if you have stuff that causes that, you'll end up continually running into it because of what you're doing globally in themake.conf. So yeah, that time I went from Gintu and I think that's when I finally installed Debian and decided to stick with that. I think I spent like probably a month or two on Debian after that. The first time I got Gintu actually installed, it scared me away from it so bad. I used Debian for like a while just to go the complete opposite route. Now granted, I've come back since then. It's much better than that, but yeah, don't do that. It's a bad time and it will very much upset you. Don't advise it a little bit. All right, Steve, you have another story for us? I guess Josh was right. If you think back far enough, you'll find a horror story. I thought I had only one, but let's go way back to 1994. My first foray in a non-windows. Tyler can't, I'm just saying Tyler can't go back that far. I literally can't, that's before I was born. Well, for the elderly here, who can go way back to 1994 to my first foray to a non-Mac or Windows machine into something called Yonic.  I sit on that thing and I discover something. It cost $24,000? Yeah. Sick. Well, it was because of a previous gig that where he won awards and things, but okay, I discovered for the first time something called command line. And it was a wonderful world that made me feel like a God only to this while typing pseudo commands, pseudo style commands. I forgot what it was called back then. My memory is not that great. So basically to enter directories and it had this shelf looking thing on the left side, on the top left. I think Enlightenment has that style still. I don't remember. But I was messing around with it and I decided, what the hell? Let me run this command that it keeps telling me not to run. You know, like what happened with Linus deck tips on his Linux challenge? It kept telling me, don't run this command. It's not safe to run this command. But I was like, hey, you challenging me? I am to the almighty. I was like, yeah, I am your creator. So I am one of your creators. So you let me through, please. So I did run this command and what this resulted in was a wonderful wall of matrix code style, just lines of code coming through. And then it was the equivalent of pseudo-RMRF root directory. Oh, nice. So what you're saying is you tried to list a directory and then deleted everything? Yeah. Nice. And the problem there was we did not, at the time, the software that was on there that my dad used for his production was, did not provide the disk. So it was provided as installed already on the computer. It was called gig 3D. So we didn't have the disk to reinstall it. We had the system disk. No problem. We could reinstall the system disk. It came on this round thing that used to be called a CD. Yeah. And our CD drive was one of those caddy drives. You put the CD in a box that looked like a floppy, but it had a disk in it. And then you insert the caddy inside the disk drive. We installed the system, but then realized we didn't have the disk for the software that my dad needed to finish the commercial he was working on to make money so we can have food on the table. Nice. And calling the company that was, back then we were in Abu Dhabi in the Emirates and the company that installs that software was in Germany. Oh, good. A short shipping distance away. A short shipping distance away. And we discovered then that they didn't have the software on disk. They didn't supply it on disk because that was a rental type thing because we only were supposed to use that software for that commercial. And then the license would expire after a few months and I mean a year. And that was it. We couldn't use it anyway. I remember hearing about though, like that used to be a common software thing. Like they would give you a license and the license literally expired and then like there wouldn't be a way to buy another license or anything. Like it's just like you got it and you used it and that's it. It was a day before they figured out that subscriptions was something that they actually wanted.  You had to go to comp USA and buy the literal thing. Exactly. And when we requested the software they were like it doesn't exist on disk. You have to ship the whole machine to us to install it for you. And the machine itself weighed like a ton. I feel kind of like spoiled cause like when I go to the store especially when I was younger even then like picking up software on disk or anything like that just wasn't like it was definitely a thing but it wasn't as popular. Like cause most I mean most people would just download it from a web browser. You are so young.  Oh young man.  I envy you young man. I envy you young man. So we used to have this place called comp USA and Circus City was another one and they would have Electronic Express They had aisles and aisles of software that you could buy. Right. And the reason why I keep saying comp USA is because they used to do this thing called mail in rebates. And you get an ad flyer in the mail or in the newspaper. Newspapers are these things made of paper that you get the news in. Anyways you get the flyer in the mail and you'd get a whole bunch of software that you could get for free but you had to go buy it and then you'd send in a copy of your receipt and they'd send you back the money in the form of a check. So at the time you got to remember I was early teenage years we'd just gotten a computer it was a gateway computer came in 19 boxes because gateways had these stores and it was like $4,000 right. Had first computer had Windows 98 on it and we got obsessed with these mail in rebates free software things because we don't especially you know I was still living at home and you know my mom and dad and we're like whatever oh there's a computer and all this stuff right we didn't have the internet at the time right we hadn't even bothered with a phone line to the computer. And the thing is they always had the mail in rebate things for like card making programs and like early day photo shop stuff so you could like make greeting cards and stuff like that.  I mean, text recognition back then was not good. I mean it's not very good now but it was way, way worse then but that thing was like $400 at the time because it came with a microphone and everything it was absolutely, because I thought I was gonna be the hot shit I was gonna be able to do my high school homework just talking into the machine I was never gonna have to type a paper ever, ever, ever again that dream did not happen because it was so bad. I mean it was like literally I mean you would say this thing it would say it had words completely different and if you tried to do punctuation it typed the punctuation out if it recognized the word whatsoever it was bad. So I have all this software that it bought on desk and stuff it's hilarious and despite the fact that I hate subscription service that today's way better. So just... Yeah, to finish my thing is it was then that I discovered that this software that the operating system that was installed on there because it wasn't original it was custom, completely custom because UNIX and Linux you can custom. It had a butterfess type backup thing where it was called cached backup cached backup for whatever reason it was called cached it had the name cached in it. We discovered that it had the whole software install the company that installed the software had an image like you know when if you remember Norton Ghost image back in the day so it was an image that from which the company it was behind a password we couldn't restore it because it was behind a password that only the company in Germany had access to. So instead of having a disk and whatever shipping the whole machine over to Germany they ship a person a tech support agent from Germany to Abu Dhabi to do a couple of keystrokes Yeah, just for a password. What the heck? So basically they had a recovery partition like some of the Dell's do but in order to get to it they had to have a tech support guy come out. That's funny. He came all the way from Germany and my dad being smart as he is he took advantage he kept the guy over in Abu Dhabi for four months. That's not even possible. Start paying money. He paid for his stay. Like you're not leaving, buddy. You're not leaving because he needed tutoring on how to use that software. So the guy being from the company who created the software he was, OK, as long as you pay me, I'm good. So we ended up having the we had we kept the guy for four months and then my dad but you cannot imagine the type of scolding I got. I see if you're not you're never using the computer again. Nate, thank you for the super. I wasn't allowed to touch a computer ever again. And when we got the Mac, the first thing I did was dismantle. Nate, thank you for the super chat. I will read it, but I'm doing this in a protest. Just wanted to announce that Nagia Day keeps the bugs and Linux away. Nate, you're fired. Josh, you got another story. Long story short. Long story short. The nightmare was that I was sweating cold sweat every second of I was staring at that monitor with with an unbootable system. Yeah. So never mess with with things you don't understand because I have done it on Arch and I mess Arch multiple times. But that's just for me and that no nightmare stories here. At least you don't have to hire somebody to come restart the computer for you. A $24,000 machine, you don't mess with that. All right. Especially if it's not yours. Josh, spend $800 on someone coming out to enter a password. The year was 2014. This is not a, this is not an abutu story. I was in high school. I like this. Yeah. So I was out of college by about two years at this point. I'm sitting here and I'm working a contract position for like this small computer repair shop. And we got this contract to work at a bank and to help them modernize their computers. All their computers were from the late 90s and they somehow managed to keep them running for like 12, 14 years at this point. So we had to migrate all of their systems from these old AT hard drives of which none of these computers had any kind of a network connection to speak of that could actually interface with the modern system because they didn't use TCP IP. So it was tasked to me being the Linux guy to figure out how to mount an AT hard drive of which bear in mind, this is the beginnings of me learning Linux. So I didn't even know how to index. I didn't even know how to index hard disks on Linux yet because you know, why would I have to?  So it was my job to pull the data off this hard drive and put it onto my disk. So I Google, what's the best way to back up a disk on Linux? And I see this command called rsync. And I'm like, okay.  That's a cool flag. That's a cool flag. And then I see a delete dash during flag, which is kind of it. And I see a comment on like, it wasn't stack exchange. I think it was an ask a bunch of thread. We're just like, if you run this command while you're doing a fresh rsync, it's going to process a lot faster too. So I run the dash dash delete and I'm expecting bash completion to exist. But bash completion does not exist on Ubuntu 14.04, not by default. So I run rsync dash dash DEL, which that is actually an alias for delete dash during. And what that does is during the course of a transfer, is going to delete data off of a disk as it transfers. And as I'm sitting here running this task to clone the data off this drive, I'm actually not writing anything to my fancy new disk. And what I'm doing is I'm deleting customer data off of a customer's disk. Because I'm, because I called rsync backwards because I'm used to using DD. No. Yeah. Did you get fired? Safe to say after that day, I was no longer an employee with that, with that contractor. So yes, I did get fired because, because I literally deleted about the $3 million worth of records. That's quite a reputation to put on the resume, man. I'm definitely not getting a reference from those guys. Yeah. Funny enough, funny enough, my manager is now the network administrator for my ISP. So he knows this story and we joke about it. Just the fact that Josh talks to the network manager at his ISP is the most Josh-like sentence ever uttered. Okay, so my last one is, so I have had many problems obviously over the years with audio, but I don't think that I've ever had such problems as I had when for whatever reason, for a period of, I don't know, two weeks, maybe two years ago or so, I could not get my microphone to function as only an input device for whatever reason. And this was when, this was like the, this was just like right after distros decided to start shipping pipe wire as default. It wasn't, it's kind of like whaling is now, it's not, wasn't really ready for the mainstream, especially for people who have like a audio interface and multiple inputs and outputs and stuff like that. It always was, it was early days and it was things messing around. So, and this was distro for whatever reason, at that point in my Linux career, I was very much an Arch guy, right? Was using either Arco or regular vanilla Arch. And I didn't want to switch away from that because the AUR was the most best thing ever. I was never switching away from it. Oh my God, you gotta use the AUR. If you don't use the AUR, what is wrong with you? Oh my God, I use Arch by the way, that was me. So I was an Arch fanboy back in the day.  But, that's the Arch guys. Sorry to interrupt, I gotta go check on a puppy. I'll be back here in a minute. All right man. So, well this, to go through it, is for whatever reason, it was treating the microphone as both an input and an output. So whenever it collected sound, it was also playing through the speakers. So I could hear my own voice through the speakers, but it wasn't like it was playing through a video or through a relay or whatever. It was actually coming directly through the microphone. And you know, like when you have a soundbar and a TV connected together, and sometimes you have the soundbar volume on and the TV volume on at the same time, there's that little bitty, itsy delay. This was that only, like, times a million. And it would not stop. So it was like an echo chamber in here for like two weeks. And it wasn't, I would refuse to jump from Arch. So I went from Arch-o to Arch. I tried at the point I went to like Endeavor OS and Manjaro, they all had the same problem. I think it was like right when Arch decided that they were going to push pipe wire by default for the first time. And eventually I did decide I wanted to do this. Obviously there's something wrong when the, maybe it was a kernel problem. I still don't know what the problem was because eventually it just stopped when I went to a different disk. Like I think it went to, I don't even know at this point where I went out. Somewhere in non-Arch at that point. And it was just such a frustrating thing. And the thing is that at that point, I was like, I'm very anti-Wailand right now. At that point I was anti-Wailand as well, but I was also anti-pipe wire. And that was my shining example of how pipe wire just wasn't ready and it's never going to be ready.  And why can't we just use false audio? Because false audio works. Yeah, it's old and crusty and unmaintainable, but it's good and it works and whatever. And it was just, it was one of those things that happened to you where it just kind of confirmed your beliefs. And I actually just had this whole Wailand thing that's been going on the last couple of days with my computer. It's kind of confirmed my beliefs about Wailand not being ready. The same thing happened with that pipe wire thing. It was like, obviously pipe wire is broken, it's never going to work. And I need just to go to find a distribution that is going to run pipe wire for literal ever. And actually I think I'm pretty sure I went to Debian because I was for sure, Debian's not going to get pipe wire until 2040. It's going to be fine. Obviously they went to pipe wire much faster than that. But yeah, so I had some issues with audio. I think that, I think if there's one horror story that kind of can permeate amongst everyone who's ever used Linux, it's almost certainly an audio story.  And I'm pretty sure everyone in the chat has at least one story where audio, even if you don't do anything complicated with audio. Like if you're just listening to speakers or whatever, you probably have some kind of story where why didn't this just work? And obviously audio now, like in the last five years is actually way better. Way better than it was 10 years ago. Way better than it was 20 years ago because pulse audio didn't exist.  Let's just do, you want to configure your stuff? Let's open up that configuration file. Shall we? It's going to be awesome. Especially when you don't understand anything you're looking at with pipe wire because with pipe wire, everything is like module this, module that, module this, module that. And it gets to a point where it's so confusing at least for me. So I just copied Tyler. That's why I decided to copy Tyler's config file for pipe wire to try it for echo cancellation. I was like, he sure knows what he's doing. I will copy his config. Well, now I learned that the same config does not work on two sets of hardware, the same. I think that's my problem. It's because my hardware is different. I need to figure out a more general way to, well, I discovered one way is to use Pac-CTL. Pac-CTL turns on apparently echo cancellation better than the config file does. I'll be trying that. All right, let's go ahead and move on to the nuggies of the week. This is our section where we select awesome tools and tips and whatever that we have to share with you. And because I've been forced against my will, we call them nuggies of the week, even though I will always protest this. Tyler, whatever it is you're eating, man. What's your, what's your, what's your nuggie of the week? I'm eating freeze dried sour skittles just so we're clear. And they're delicious. But my nuggie of the week is, if you don't already know, Nick, if you are going to check out Nick's OS, one thing that you should probably check out is home manager. That's it. Home manager is a way of configuring your home directory, the way, same way you would configure Nick's OS. It's the best way to, it's so interesting. Sorry. And I'm just saying it's the best way to ensure that nobody who uses other distros uses your dot files. Yes, yes. Cause I mean, it will literally place files and do stuff like that and install and set up programs for a specific user's home directory. Very cool. But you definitely, definitely don't want to check it out if you're not going to check out Nick's OS at the same time. So if that doesn't interest you, then don't listen to me. Nick's OS for the win. Are you going to get stickers and become a fanboy? He's already a fanboy. He's probably, he's probably got, he's probably got a Fiverr contractor right now working on Nick's OS stickers for us. So let's, not you Tyler, but the rest of us, let's figure out how long do we think Tyler stays on Nick's OS? One week? Two weeks? The most? Over, over under two weeks. One month. One month. Overly ambitious. Let's see, let's see, let's see.  Mm-mm. Okay, okay, okay. Mm. I'm going to say. I mean it could be staying on Nick's OS. I'm going to say that Nick's OS will probably last at most three weeks.  It's usually the reason. Nate's in chat right now thinking, man, how am I going to get those crunches out of the microphone?  It's easy. Just mute it. As long as, as long as Audacity's working. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Hopefully Audacity's still hasn't crashed. All right, Steve, your Nuggy of the Week, please. My Nuggy of the Week is OBS DroidCam plugin. The OBS DroidCam plugin, for the longest time, ever since I started my channel, I've been using the OBS app with its own v4l2lubec-dc-dkms package, which didn't work very well. It worked where it showed my camera in OBS, but I couldn't do anything like virtual cam. I used, because I ship in my tool, in my script, I use, I ship OBS as a flatback. They're only right, they're the only correct way to ship OBS with all the flatback plugins. So all the plugins that are available on FlatHub that nobody can see unless you look for them in the terminal. But one of those plugins was DroidCam OBS camera. I'm like, I've been shipping this this whole time and I thought it was a way to connect the app, the DroidCam app to OBS. I recently discovered that no, this plugin replaces the actual DroidCam app, because this plugin allows you to use virtual camera, your phone as a camera in OBS, and then at the same time use the OBS virtual camera. I'm like, I've had this this whole time and I didn't know. And there's a separate, if you look on the Android or iOS store for a DroidCam, you would find two applications, one called DroidCam OBS and one called just simply DroidCam. The simply DroidCam is the wrong one to use. You have to use the DroidCam OBS, because once you use that, you can use virtual cam without issue, which I'm using right now with you guys. And this whole time I was using the wrong V4L2 loopback package, if it weren't for Zaini here to point that out, because he was like, I don't know, man, it works. You need V4L2 loopback DKMS. I was like, but I have V4L2 loopback dash DC dash DKMS. I'm like, okay, I need to look for that package he's telling me about. And I discovered that, yeah, there's two different packages. So yeah, just whatever you do, if you're going to use your phone, iPhone or Android, as a webcam, which I highly recommend because they're 10 times better than any webcam you can buy with exception of the $700 webcams, don't use the DroidCam app, the green one with the Droid in it. Don't use that. Use DroidCam OBS with the DroidCam OBS plugin if you're good to go. Cool. All right, Josh, your thingy of the week. My thingy of the week is actually really cool. It's called a COPPWR. I don't know what that stands for, but it is a graphical tool for managing PipeWire directly. It sort of looks like a standard patch bay, and but it's not a patch bay, it's a diagnostic program. So Matt, I know that you had some fun with PipeWire earlier. This tool probably could have actually helped you if you took the time to learn it because I'm still trying to learn it myself, but it is a graphical tool designed for that will display the, that will communicate with the PipeWire server itself, be able to show you the sample rates that's actively going, all the processes that are using PipeWire, how much work PipeWire is doing in the background, and it will show you where all the sound channels are connecting to, where they're going, their volume levels, and it's super in-depth, and it's super cool. I just don't know enough about it to be able to properly explain it, sorry. But it looks really cool. It's a lot like one of those old Jack utilities that would be able to like spin up and run the Jack server for you, and be able to run like those really verbose ones, not like Karla, but like the ones that people were using before Karla. But I've been messing around with it here for probably the past couple of days, you know, just looking, just using it for like indexing like my wire plumber configuration. To complement your tool, there's something called QPW Graph. Yeah, this can do everything QPW Graph can do, plus more. Okay, you can also save your profile and connect different outputs, different inputs. Yeah, you can not only save the patch bay layout, but you can save all the audio sample rates too that you would adjust. Yeah, but can you connect an audio from one app to another app as well? Yes. Because since now sharing Windows on Wayland is possible, but if you wanna share a video from a browser, for example, and get the audio from that browser to Discord, I use QPW Graph usually to connect one, the audio from the browser to Discord, reroute it. Yeah, it can do that. And on like beta versions of PipeWire, it can actually take the video stream too and be able to pipe the video stream into a sound output and only output just the sound from the video and be able to output from that sound output to a video playback device and you'll be able to get the video plus the sound. It'll like do, it can direct all that traffic and everything appropriately. All right, my thinking of the week and I'm gonna go against the false ideals here, but I've been playing Halo on the Steam Deck. And if you have, I think it's like 40 bucks and you're like an old school Halo player from like the back in the day, the Halo Master Chief Collection is on sale a lot actually, so you might even be able to get it for less than 40 bucks and it plays fantastically on the Steam Deck and on Linux, just regularly. So if you don't have the Steam Deck you can just play it on your desktop. It is a, obviously if you've played Halo before you know what it is, it's a very, very good game. It did later in the series, kind of jump the shark a little bit and it found itself in another one and then it jumped the shark again. It's been around for a long time the early ones that the Master Chief Collection comes with are just spectacular and they play so damn well on Linux. Not on Wayland, but they've played, although it's weird, they play well on Steam Deck which uses Wayland, so I don't understand what I'm doing wrong on my desktop. Game scope magic. Yeah, Steam Valve's got something, some kind of wizardry going on there, but on the regular Linux, as long as you use XORP for me it was working fantastically well. Add the Master Chief Collection to your wish list on Steam and like I said it's on sale a lot. So you might be able to get like half price sometimes. Even then right now it's $40, which for the amount of content that you're getting for that 40 bucks. It has five Halo's, it has ODST and Reach and three other ones, I can't remember what they are, but yeah, you get five games and for 40 bucks it's a good buy, but I think I paid $29.99 for it like a couple of weeks ago. It's a really good deal and like I said, if you like Halo, it's definitely worth buying. So anyway, so that is it for the Linux cast now. Bye Josh. I don't know where Josh went, but he managed to make it all the way to the end. Definitely should have been on Gentoo, maybe that wouldn't have happened. Anyways, so that's the end of the Linux cast before we jump out of the show and say goodbye for the last time this year, we should jump into the contact information. You can get in contact with us in many ways. The first way is to head on over to the website thelinxcast.org, there you'll find previous episodes and blog posts. Also you'll find a link to all of our stuff at thelinxcast.org slash contact. You can follow Steve, he's on Macedonia, thefalsedon.org slash zero links, zero with an X, not a Z. He's also coming back in 2024 with some YouTube content. So you can follow his YouTube channel, link will be linxcast.org slash contact, all that stuff is there. Tyler does make videos and stuff like that on YouTube as well. He's at youtube.com slash zanyo g. Josh who has disappeared for some reason. I'm assuming his computer crashed or the power went out or pipe wire. He texted me. Oh, he said he hit a kernel panic. Nice. Oh well for WNB and stable. No. That's awesome. And anyways, you can find all of his stuff at 10leaj.com slash contact. Again, you can find all of this stuff at thelinxcast.org slash contact, all of the stuff is there, including links to the Discord server, my Discord server, Tyler's Discord server, Steve's Discord server, I think Josh's Discord server is linked there. You can support me on patreon.patreon.com slash linxcast. You can also head on over to the merch shop which is shop.thelinxcast.org. There you'll find t-shirts and mugs and hats and all sorts of stuff. Also limited time. I hate Nuggets t-shirt which is excellently designed if I do say so myself. All that stuff goes directly to help the channel. So I really do appreciate everyone who has gone over there and checked that out. Shop.thelinxcast.org. I'm not quite as bad as Linus pimping the store but I'm getting there. I aspire to his greatness. Look, you're doing a good job. It's tasteful. Yeah, I don't, I just mentioned it once per episode or twice or maybe three times. Maybe five times. Every other breath. Shop.thelinxcast.org. It's great. Anyways, thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and YouTube, you guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel would just not be anywhere near where it is right now. And I'd be showing you the end screen credits if I wasn't on hyperland and my monitors weren't in the right order. But anyways, thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and YouTube you guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel is not anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are awesome. And thank you for watching. This was the last episode of the year. We'll be back the first week of January. We record this live every Saturday but we won't be back until the first Saturday of January, I believe. First or second Saturday. I think it's the first Saturday of January. It's like January 6th or something like that. Make sure you subscribe YouTube.com slash Linuxcast. We'll see you all then. Hope you have a happy wonderful holiday, all that stuff. And we'll see you next time.