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0:00before we dive in. This episode was recorded a little while ago, so some of the news may be slightly behind, but from here on we'll be right up to date. Welcome to FOSSNerds. This is the very first episode if you didn't listen to the trailer, then this will be the first time you hear our dulce tones. We're three nerds, all on different journeys that get together every couple of weeks to chat about the next
0:28open source, self-hosting and even little bit about Google Free Android. Coming up in this episode, as Linux really cracked 10% in North America, can Immich finally kick Google photos to the curb, why Jellyfin's, the developer has stepped away and will even offer a few recommendations of apps we think you should try.
0:54But first, the team, a panel of exceptionally intelligent people. Also, they keep telling me. And then there's me. I'm Charlie and I've been using open source now for about two decades. That most people, it all began with Linux. And at first I was dual booting with Windows, but for the last 12 years, I've been Linux only. I also love homelabbing. My homelabbing is very simple. Mine's just a little mini PC.
1:23and N100, 16 gigs of RAM and two terabytes of NVMe. And on my phone, I love to use open source as well. Android all the way, but I'm never happy with Google spying on me. So I use GrapheneOS on my phone and on my tablet. I use Lineage OS, both are excellent. I like to keep things brief. So now over to Majid. So my name is Majid.
1:50I am a doctor and the first question that normally comes is your doctor and your on the tech podcast what's all that about in that voice obviously that's how people think i've been a geek since the eighties in my first amstrad CPC 464 and then i was an amiga man in the nineties and then i discovered heavy metal and girls and say that technology for about 10 years and then got back into Linux Android in
2:18the 2010s and it has become a way of life that's overregging a little bit but it's a pretty it's a large part of my life. Technology, Linux, different gadgets, etc. And now somehow I've become a podcaster as well. There are some people apparently out there who do want to know what a random doctor using to technology from the Midlands wants to talk about. So I'm here.
2:47I'm on a couple of other podcasts. I have my own atypical doctor podcast shameless plug. That's me. Okay, great. Thanks. I know what to bill who is for once in the minority as an American. Oh, wow. Would you look at that? Yeah, Eric help. So like like, Majid, I am a bit of a
3:16At least with with Majid it's smart people stuff, you know With me I am really in my line of work. I am I guess you could say regional and over-the-road truck driver Which means I think you called a lorry in the the UK? Sorry driver. Yeah, yeah, the full 18 wheelers what I drive and
3:45Somebody that's into the things I'm into is really kind of rare. I say that, but we got a guy named Dale that kind of moonlights on the other shows and then he does Distrohopper to digest with Majid, my journey kind of started back in 2002, which is when I decided to go back to school to get
4:10My degrees that I'm making no use of right now whatsoever And I went to big we got a big box store in the United States called Best Buy and in those days you could actually walk in there and buy software for a computer and they were selling SUSE Linux that was back before it was open SUSE and SUSE Enterprise Linux. It was just SUSE and it came in a green box and it had
4:40like four DVDs or it had four DVDs, a book and like six or seven CD-ROMs. And you could basically have everything you needed on those discs. Because you know, we're talking a time before, uh, high-speed internet and all that. So getting software from the internet was just a lot harder. And that was my first kind of foray into Linux, but
5:08Didn't really use it all that well until about six, seven years later. And then it was just kind of a slow process to get rid of, get rid of windows. And then I, and then I really got caught up in the, uh, the whole thoughts, free open source software concept, you know, and the ethos of it all kind of made sense to me. And it kind of felt like something decent to get behind.
5:37So if I'm looking for a tool to use and there's a tool that's easy to use, but it's proprietary, then there's a tool that I can get that's open source, but it requires me to do a little bit of learning. Well, that's fine. I'll do the learning so that I can. Righteously sit on my laurels and look down with the steps.
6:02on the lesser beings below me that use the proprietary nonsense. But yeah, that's been me. That's about all I can. - Okay, so we're going to do different sections on this show. So we're going to do, first of all, each of us are going to talk or offer a question about something that's in the news at the moment. And then each of us will have a chance to share our opinions.
6:33then we might have a little chat about it. So each one of us brought a different news article or news subject to talk about. And then afterwards we'll go on to what the Americans I think call the meat and potatoes of the show. And that's where we'll discuss a particular subject. And this week it's all about open source offices. So we'll have a little chat about that. And then we'll offer some recommended
7:01Apps and then the show is closed. So let's start with the news. I'll start with the news with my question to you all. What do you think about Linux passing the 10% mark in North America? I believe it's now reached 10.65% by StatCounter. Okay. So a very
7:26Clever Mann once said lies, lies and damn statistics. And this story would kind of fit that. Well, I saw this first time around and I was like, "Ooh yeah, 10%, I mean, and then I'll have a wait a minute." We were up from three and a half to four to five, and how we just suddenly jump to 10. And this is I think what a lot of other people thought as well.
7:57And it's all about how you collect your data, isn't it? When you, I think it was, was it StatCounter? That was the original article who said, you know, 10%, but actually when you drill into it, that includes bots and servers and AI. And so it may well be that it's being over
8:22represented. Having said that, even if you take that into account, it's still going to be six, seven percent actual native users. And if you look at other services which do this kind of thing like Cloudflare, that's kind of where they're talking about 67 percent. And I think to myself, that's still one hell of a win. I mean, if you think about it, that means that in the last five years, it's doubled.
8:51I mean, that's something, isn't it? Yeah, there's the old saying 70% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Yeah, just like that one. So yeah, first off, whenever they start talking about these things, it's like you got to take it with a grain of salt. You really, really do. But then you got to ask yourself, okay, so why would it be going up at all?
9:20better yet, why do, why is it important that it goes up? Because I'm one of those strange people that are a little bit concerned about widespread adoption of this thing that has managed to survive as long as it has with the meager number of people that use it. Because eventually, and this is true, eventually, it's going to get to a
9:46critical mass to if we're if we're believing the rate of progression that we're seeing here, it's going to get to a critical mass where in order for it to, you know, get over the hump, it's going to have to get turned into the thing that we wanted to get away from in the first place, you know. Can I make a comment here that there are three separate things
10:14in what you've said. And they're not mutually exclusive. So the first thing is, why has it gone up? I think actually it's pretty obvious why it's gone up. It's Microsoft on Windows 11. The disaster that is that platform, all the AI stuff that is shoved in there, the co-pilot branding, the ads in the start menu.
10:45And then the hardware issues around you need to have a certain age of device, otherwise, it's TPM and security, et cetera, et cetera. So you're going to have a lot of people who maybe use their computer for more quite modest needs, being told that the perfectly functional computer they've got running Windows 10, you can't upgrade to Windows 11. They need to go out and
11:12spend £500, £600 on a brand new laptop that in this economy, who's got £500, they can just drop down. So that's the why. The second aspect is, is it actually going to happen, like the way you're saying that critical mass and stuff like that? And I don't think it is, actually. And the reason for that is, there is another operating system out there which has tried to do that.
11:41in a sense and that's apples mac OS and as far as I can see it's never gone above 15% 16, 17% you know considering how much mind share apple devices have and how everybody copies or apes their design language and stuff like that and yeah it is still not the preeminent
12:07preeminent operating system, I don't think Linux necessarily is going to get to that critical mass. Then the question after that obviously is yes, and the more existential one, is it actually something that we want to happen? And whilst in the past, I was very much a, I still am, I'm a Linux evangelist, I'm not going to lie about that. It has become a little bit more qualified recently when I look at, when I look at Android as a good example,
12:36Android and the mobile phone operating system space, when it started off, it was exciting. Those different versions, every update brought something more and more and more. And now it's iterative to the extreme. Features are getting pulled rather than added. It's becoming more difficult for developers, with, for example, sideloading issues and things like that.
13:05So actually, I might actually find myself agreeing with you for once, Bill. Actually, we do need to temper our promotion. But at the same time, I don't actually think we're going to get there. I don't think we're going to get to the stage where the normies, your grandma or your aunt
13:30with the one dodgy eye is going to be figuring out which destroy or compiling package builds from the AUR. It's just not going to happen. Unless, and there is one big caveat to this, unless people start selling it, unless you can go into a shop, a brick and mortar, a Best Buy, or in this country, Curry's PC world, and you can buy a Dell or a Asus or whatever laptop pre-installed with a Linux distribution on it.
14:01And that's not going to happen anytime soon. I think also the gaming has been a huge contribution to it. I think that's now because especially now with all this latest news that both Sony and Microsoft Xbox are not going to be having hard drives in them. So basically you've got to use drives. Yes, drives. They'll have hard drives. Sorry, did I say hard drives? Excuse me. Yes, yes, it is drives.
14:29So yeah, of course the Laptop Hard Drive. So they'll, you know, for downloading, but they still don't, it's, there'll be no solid media, which was always the benefit of using those consoles. But now, of course, Valve is coming on leaps and bounds. And most of the, the best games are available on Valve. So why would you bother,
14:55Using one of these consoles. So this is forcing it forwards, but for me, whether 5% or 10% of the people use the links, I really have no interest. I don't care how many people use this long, it just keeps. It's it's really keep open. Exactly. And I I want people to use it for the right reason to, you know, because.
15:22It's not a product, is it? It's a project. It's something that people... It's a philosophy. I mean, I don't wanna sound or really other. I don't wanna sound so arrogant or up myself, but there is. Because people, like, you have this conversation with people, and so a lot of people will say, "Yeah, but then why don't you just do this?" And he goes, "It's not just about, yes, it is better or more efficient or more gets the most out of your hardware." There is a philosophical point of,
15:52I want to run what I want on my machine. I want the source code to be transparent. I mean, an account and somebody be accountable. And it is an exciting thing. When you see a project, say, for example, I'm going to get to it probably later, Jellyfin, right? When you see that and you think to yourself, man, that is such an amazing project and how well it works and how seamless it is.
16:19And it's entirely open source and it's made by volunteers. I mean, surely that has to kind of warm the cockles of your heart. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. But the thing also about open source and one of the great things is that it won't disappear. Because if somebody comes along and says, okay, I want to, I want to make money out of this. I'm going to take this, this product and I'm going to charge for it. That's fine. But because of the,
16:46the licenses within open source. Somebody can just say, okay, you do that. Like they did with Redis, they'll just fork it and it'll continue on. So you're never going to lose it. Or the person who's doing it doesn't want to do it anymore. As we've seen, we're going to hear with it, we'll talk about Jellyfin, but that it'll still keep going because there will always be people to come in. Even if they close down, they delete things. Somebody's always got a backup of it and it can continue on in some form.
17:17So you're never going to lose that app. Right. Well, that's okay. Let's move on to the next question. Okay. So I'll go. So can you use a self-hosted photo and video management solution to replace Google photos? So I'm talking about Immich. So Immich 3.1 has been released.
17:44And it is a pretty much drop in replacement for Google Photos. You take photos. They all get synced using this. It's got a lot of, you know, it's self-hosted. It's got a lot of workflow filtering options. It's got improvements to web uploads. You know, it's even got a machine learning thing going. So you can search for car and see cars and whatever in your photos.
18:11As I said, it's completely self-hosted. You can run it through, I think they prefer, they're preferred is to use Docker compose. So I'll tell you what I think. What do you two think first? Well, for me, I mean, I'm not a great photographer. So I have, I've installed it a couple of times, but I've always found it to be a little bit clunky, not because of the
18:39The way it's set up and once you've got it going it's just that set up that I find to be difficult. You want to import all your pictures, you have to drop it into a certain file, then you have to go along into the Docker Compose and enter the folder where it's going to be and then that gives you the name that you enter into the file and I found that to be a little bit difficult. Maybe it's only my my ignorance that created it and well
19:06Until they've actually got a more smooth operation, I think it where it can just literally import everything out of Google photographs. I don't think it's going to be as successful as we would hope it to be. But it does seem to be in theory, the one that can actually literally replace it. I mean, I know myself, I did, if you are taking any photographs off Google Photos, if you use the takeout, it can be.
19:36a bit of a mess because you lose a lot of the data, a lot of the metadata within the photo. But if you create a folder and then download all the pictures that way rather than using takeout, then you can keep all the metadata within the location and the camera that was used to take it, etc. So it can be imported that way. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. I lose quality with the photos.
20:04I mean once google has it if you don't have it stored somewhere else you already lost considerable amount of quality because they they compress. The photos and everything to take up less space. So that's something to keep in mind i think you hit on it. I don't necessarily agree that it's clunky but. I am a.
20:30Docker person. I guess you could say, you know, I speak the language and Docker compose and all that. And I understand the concept of binding. Real, real storage to an arbitrary location in the Docker compose. And that's something you kind of, you know, you're right. It's something you kind of have to wrap your head around when you set something like this up.
21:00Normal people can pay for an Immich-based service, which is basically just running on a VPS somewhere, and then there's different tiers of that. That kind of thing is available out there. It's not ran by the Immich people themselves, but there are people that are offering a paid version of the service, and that is what it is.
21:27I set it up, what gosh, about a year ago now, I think is when I set it up. I think it might be longer actually. Yeah. And it's been working flawlessly for me. I've completely, I've not only switched away from the Google Photos, but I've also, I was backing my photos up to Nextcloud and I stopped doing that. That's another project we'll probably talk about at some point.
21:56huge open source cloud solution. But yeah, I've, I imagine I don't have as many photos as you guys might have to back up. I've just never been a huge picture taker or whatnot. So, in my opinion, I think
22:22Again, a couple of actually sub questions to this. First is about the actual service. We're talking about Immich. And there's a bit of a learning curve. It's actually quite useful learning curve. I learned how to use Docker Compose with it and bindings and all this kind of stuff. So it was actually quite a education or experience for me. You'll remember that was around the time I was setting up my own kind of server.
22:50The problems are, well one which might be a me problem, I've soon not found an satisfactory answer to this, is one thing about backing up photos you're taking there and then, it's importing a massive library of thousands of photos that you've got on a hard drive, maybe somewhere, and getting that into Immich. And I found that
23:20difficult, problematic, things, you know, metadata would get mixed up, things like that. Now, as I said, it might be a me problem and I'm not the way that I've done it might be the issue. The third and probably the biggest reason that I would not use it personally at the moment is nothing to do with image in of itself. It's just to do with self hosting in general. You have to know your shit.
23:47And I, if it's one thing I've learned, I don't know my shit when it comes to self-hosting. I've had things fail, I've had redundancy thing, all sorts of problems, I'm not going to bore you with them. To the extent that I worry that if I had all of, all of that stuff entirely under my control, I'm probably going to mess it up.
24:15And that is my worry at the moment. And that's why I've not done it because as I said, I've had drives fail on me. I've had power cuts. I've had batteries that didn't work. All sorts of things. I've been through about three different distros, two different devices, all that sort of stuff. Using it for something like Jellyfin. Yes. Using it for audio bookshelf. Yes. Because.
24:42you know, contrary to popular belief, if I was to lose all my legally obtained videos, I might, I mean, it's to be annoying, but I think I can live. Do you know what I mean? If I lose none of them are legally obtained. If on the other hand, I lost photos of my daughter being born or of my departed father, right?
25:10I, that would hit me badly. I had this once, I've said it before on one of the other things where I'd gone on a holiday, I'd taken lots of photos, it was a memorable holiday, one of the best holidays I'd ever been on. Especially since I'd, at that time, I'd just been recuperating from something and it was first time I'd done Eid in India and it was just an amazing trip. One of those few trips where I went where I thought nothing went wrong.
25:39except on the last day when my brother-in-law said, "Oh, can I have a copy of the photos you've taken?" And I gave him a copy and me problem, I ended up deleting them off my own device. And I only realized it while I was on the flight back home. Now, thankfully, because I'd copied it to him and he was able to use some other way, I got them back. But just that experience made me think, "You know what, I don't want to be in a situation where I will lose a photo."
26:07Well, even if I was to have Immich, I'll tell you right now, even if I was to use it, I'd still probably back up to Google Photos. See, that's the thing, because to actually get rid of photos on Immich, it's a bit more convoluted than it is to put them on there. And like in my case, putting them on there, now they're on a ZFS mirror that's being scrubbed. So I feel like they're safer.
26:34on one of these machines, then they are even on my phone that I can drop in a river somewhere, you know, or whatnot. Because the act of actually deleting them once they're on the Immich server is actually kind of, I mean, you got to be trying to delete them. But what if you lose what if something happens to your hard drive? You know, you should probably use some redundancy like a ZFS.
27:03mirror or something like that. Well, you can just use a backup if you're starting out now with using your own self-hosting, then it's good to start with one of the programs like ZimaOS, which is excellent. Basically, this has replaced CasaOS now because it comes with the Debian built in. And this one will automatically back up
27:30without a problem, you just set it up and it will back up over your network or you could go with what's with us trying to think of the other ones. I use Sanoid to back up my ZFS volumes. That's made by, what's the guy? On two and a half admins. I know we mean, I remember the name. - Is it Gary? - My brain is, edit this out. (laughs)
28:01I'm trying to think I will let it this bit. What's the name of the other ones? ZimaOS. Oh, my brain. I'm so fuddled with. You're talking about distros that are good for putting Docker on and just. Well, they'd give you the whole thing. All you do is just one click and you've got the... Because Proxmox is good for... No, no. These are all... Is my video stopped or am I still there?
28:29No, you're still here. I got it, because I think I've solved the problem with that. It was stopping before when I put up another... So you've got ZimaOS alternative. I don't think what the hell have it called? We got like TrueNAS OpenMediaVault. BSD. Umbrel, that's what I was thinking of, un-raid.
28:54These are all the ones. Anyway, let's get back into that where we were going when I was going with it. So, oh god, can't find the bloody screen now. So there's other ones like ZimaOS where you can, it's just like basically a one click install for things, Umbrel, OpenMediaVault is quite easy as well. But this makes it much easier in trying to do it. So personally I use Arcane, which I think is a wonderful Docker manager.
29:25really is quite new. Most many people that use Dockge or however you pronounced it D O C K G E which hasn't been updated for a while. So a lot of people moved over to arcane. But all these have good systems of backup to make it easy. No, it's because these projects. I've always been nervous about using one of these
29:51projects that make Docker easier because you've got this fear of them because they're ambitious projects, right? And just like with Jellyfin that we're going to get into in a little bit, they get to a certain state and then the original maintainer just can't go on anymore. And if there's enough people that are mad keen to keep it going, then yet might keep going. But then
30:19it might not you know and now you got all these people that are dependent on this layered on technology to help them with something like Docker what not i don't know i could be just paranoid i suppose. Well i mean the thing about arcane is great because if if it all disappears. You just run it from the the command line as you would do normally where is things like Umbrel and and zimmer west then you're sort of tied in then.
30:47If that stops updating, then you're going to have to find a way of moving off it. But I do recommend Arcane. That is really a nice little program, which is constantly being updated. Just makes everything so easy. Right. So what's the third question over to you, Bill? Well, okay. Some of you may or may not be aware that the lead developer at Jellyfin has decided to
31:15leave the project. Actually, it's more than one person. It looks like Joshua Bonaface, the project leader, reason for leaving burnout and mental. This is according to AI, so take this as you will. Burnout and mental health concerns. There's been a couple others. I won't name them. But what do we think about something like that? A big project, open source.
31:45fantastic piece of software. You would think if somebody actually created something that big, that popular, that they would want to stick around until the bitter end. But yet there seems to be this trend of people getting burned out or whatever it is. But in the case of Jellyfin, that's exactly what happened.
32:13Well, personally, for me, I mean, it's really like once you want to become so large, the weight on your shoulders and the amount of information that and feedback you're getting, the amount of people requesting extra features must be intense. So you're spending a lot of time, you know, just just dealing with it. And especially now with AI that is now creating extra work
32:40You've got to set up a way of processing all the AI because I believe that one, I can't remember the name, one of the original people, he was creating some sort of app which used AI. And he got so much negative pushback that it was just too much room in there. And it was like the, I think sort of straw that broke the camel's back basically. And he left the project.
33:08I think he's going to continue doing it, but not now leading the project. I can imagine, you know, people really work hard on something and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, but then it becomes such a behemoth that you lose control. And I guess you also lose the fun of it as well, because now it's not just a little side project. Now it's thousands and thousands of people are starting to use or using the project.
33:35And hundreds of people doing drive-by commits and things like that every day. I mean, yeah, yeah, I guess you do kind of lose track of things after a while. It's not your, when you get to a point like that, you've got all these people that are contributing. You do kind of lose track of almost everything. And I don't know if people get overwhelmed by that, maybe or I mean, it's a lot of work for someone
34:03To be doing this as a passion project on the side, most contributors to most open source projects aren't paid developers. You're doing it for the love of code yourself. People have lives and let's be aware how much we talk about how great the first network is. We also do have a tendency of not
34:32of talking a lot but not walking a lot. You know, we talk about how we love this and this idea, but when it comes to actually contributing, helping out, doing, you know, testing, all that sort of stuff, then certainly we all kind of, you know, slink away. So I can, and unfortunately, there's something about the internet which makes people feel that they can say things that they would never dream to say to someone or to their face.
35:01And so you know, I can well imagine you got a couple of guys working hard on a significant project, which is definitely an asset to the whole free and open source ecosystem. And then the odd snide remark coming from some backseat person, you know, but oh yeah, we didn't need something. We haven't done that. And it's like after a certain amount of time, you can kind of turn around and go, you know what, I don't need this. I don't need to do this.
35:28This is, you know, I'm not getting paid for it. And if I'm not enjoying it, why am I doing it? That's true. And it does get to people. I mean, you can't blame people. You can't blame them at all. No, that's the number one thing. You're not profiting from it. I don't believe they made any profit. So, you know, according to collective, they brought in 75,160.
35:55with $38,978 dispersed and there's $36,181.90 sitting in their public funding page. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, that's not huge amount. That's not, I mean. Is that salaries though? Is that paying salaries or is that for? That's just what's on Open Collective. So what they're doing with it, I don't know. It's not enough to pay.
36:23for a staff, that's for sure. But that's not... I mean, it'll continue. The beauty of it is that, I think after time, being somebody with what they now call ADHD, you lose interest quite quickly. So you switch people with that. I'm going to cut this out. I shouldn't share these things. This is not of interest to people.
36:50People lose interest in things over time. I can't even imagine doing the same job every day. That would just drive me to boredom. I always have to do something. That's why I worked in tourism. Every day was very different. But imagine doing the same job every day. I guess that's what makes them burn out in the end. Should we move on to the main body now? Let's do it.
37:18So now the next one is that Microsoft's 2021 office is basically not going to get any more updates from October and which would be the office that you would prefer to switch to. So I would I have generally used a LibreOffice mainly because it's often the default option on most Linux
37:49distros. Although recently I've started having a bit of a crush on the free office, which is basically a soft maker office. It just looks a little bit nicer and things like that. That's what I've been studying to use.
38:14How about you three offices and open source so you you're fired right next. Yeah, gosh lasted one episode. Don't worry this side. Don't worry this place has astonishingly low standards. I'll be back. Well, I don't really I suppose I'm if I had to choose I would go LibreOffice but the reasons for that have more to do with the
38:42Fact that it's available everywhere in the default repositories. You don't have to jump through any hoops to get that installed and up and running. It's similar enough. Anybody that goes to college in the United States, they teach you one semester crash course on Microsoft Office. I kept dropping that class as a side note.
39:10LibreOffice is similar enough to where if somebody is trained with MS office, they could probably get on. But I think most of them are kind of laid out in a way that you could at least figure out how to get a document written and whatnot. So for me, it's like, well, what's the easiest one to get? Because I mean, you like this one, this new one that--
39:41Charlie's a fan of Genspark office. You got to go to the website and download a debt to get that, which is not a big deal, but I mean, it's, it's not apt install, LibreOffice, you know, that kind of thing. But I think that made a bit of slight exaggeration though, that Charlie's a fan of this is, this is the new Genspark office, which is the new nothing about it until Charlie's. Yeah. Genspark office.
40:07Part of Genspark AI which seems to be a rather large company that's had millions invested in his worth around about three billion but i've never heard of it before so they brought out a brand new office suite which is open source it's Apache 2.0 license which is quite surprising really because Apache 2.0 is one of the most open laces literally can do whatever you want and
40:35and the people are protected about from being sued later on for using code. So which is not covered by the licenses of BSD and some of the other progressive ones. But I mean literally you can take this program and remake it in your own fashion if you want to. But I signed up for it and it wants you to come and join the community. When I clicked on that I put my
41:02email address and then it came back as joining Microsoft. So I didn't confirm the email. That was the end of my conversation there. It does use its own credits. You can use it just as it is or you can use pay for their Genspark AI credits and that will give you access to AI in your office suite. But you can also do that in LibreOffice as well as a few projects where you can add your own
41:33Bring your own like Claude or chat. Bring your own AI to it. So we don't want you to use your own. But it's interesting to see how these projects are going now is that they know that it's not a case of they've made it an Apache license, totally open source, but it's from by a multi-
41:59billion dollar company. So would you be interested in using that? I, you know, I'm not bothered by companies, stuff that's made by companies. I'm in fact, it's arguable that you might get more quality out of it that way because they're, they're actually paying people to work on this. I think
42:27I think it's time to put away our hate for AI. At least that's not fair. I don't hate AI. I don't think a lot of Linux people do hate AI. I think what they don't like is the way that it's forced down people's throat. You will use this. You must use this. You have to use this because we've spent billions on it. That's what gets people up the wrong way.
42:54Well, I think people are also a little bothered by the ethical aspects of it and how much energy it consumes and stuff like that. It's environmental impacts. I think as time goes on, some of those things are going to become less and less of an issue. As soon as it's showing up on that. Throughout history, you've got so many occasions like this. When the car came about, people
43:24would say, you know, it's like, if you code something with AI, people say, well, that's not really proper coded. For me, that's like saying, you know, I went on holiday in my car and somebody said, well, no, you didn't really because you should have walked. And then you could have taken in all the views. But you know, I don't have the time to walk everywhere. So I want to use the optimum thing. Yes, we've got the problem with all the energy and the global warming and
43:52and there are a lot of negatives there, but it's going to come. Whatever we do, it's going to come. I mean, and if you actually try coding with it, it is quite a frightening experience, as well as being an amazing thing at the same time. Literally, you just give an explanation to what you want and there it is. Spritening, well, the only thing that's frightening is how much money it takes from you to
44:21Get yourself a Claude Code account. Yes, that's like the new addiction. You know, as they say now, people aren't going to be wanting drugs anymore. They're going to be like saying, look, I want to buy some tokens. You're going to need tokens. I need to get it. It's going to be drug dealing, isn't it? Yeah, it's a good job. It's made up of these.
44:47Yeah. So anyway, so I was just a light touch on that because we're running short of time. So another section now is, have you got anything to recommend people? Any little apps to recommend? So I would like to recommend something which has already been around for a while. And you might say, Majid, I've only just discovered it. And the answer to that is no, I've not just discovered it, but I'm a massive fan. And that is Tailscale. So Tailscale is this kind of virtual
45:16private network, but in a slightly different way where you connect all your devices through a tail net, et cetera, et cetera. It's obviously got its security benefits. The thing that I find the best about it is, and this kind of follows on from the discussion we're having about Jellyfin, I have a library of legally obtained Linux, ISOs and media that I can watch on my home network. How do I do that?
45:42Outside my network now you can I can learn a bit of networking and as Bill will tell you I'm not very good at networking and I found that Tailscale is just a Sim relatively simple way of doing it and I've been able to you know watch anything that I need to that's on my home server Where I'm when I'm somewhere else and I can also use it as a way of transferring files remotely, securely. And it's always free.
46:13I don't think there's a limit on the number of devices. It's worked on. I think you can do a hundred. Before you start going to pay plans. I just think it's just brilliant. I really do. I think it's brilliant. I would recommend it. I am not being sponsored by them, but if they want to come and sponsor me and give me a huge amount of money, I have no problem with that whatsoever. I use it as well.
46:40Setting up the SSL is a bit tricky. You know, well not tricky, but it's not one click. I was using CloudFlare tunnels, but then I... That is a little bit tricky because then if you're going to use a tunnel at home, it's got to go outside of your network and come all the way in. So yeah, I also use Tailscale now, and it is quite
47:06an amazing thing, just wish I could use my own domain, instead of that rather long name you have to put in. Bill, have you ever had to recommend? Well, no, I was going to say you could do a C-name with one of your domains that would resolve the domain that you put into the big long domain. You could try that through whatever service you're doing your DNS.
47:36So for people that want to dip their toes into running servers, running Docker containers and whatnot, I'm going to recommend starting with something like Proxmox or OpenMediaVault where you've got kind of a
48:04Sort of graphical I say sort of graphical because it's You still kind of have to learn some things, but you've got a graphical representation in front of you of The services that you've got running and you've got buttons you can click to do most of the maintenance work that You would need to do you have other projects out there but called
48:31Is it TrueNAS scale? Is that still a thing or is it TrueNAS? Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, stuff like that. Just get yourself started. Learn how these things work. I'm going to second, uh, Majid's opinion about something like Tailscale because if you're, for example, Jellyfin, if your only goal is to set up a Jellyfin and make it work for you when you're outside of your network, then that is
49:01perfectly good method to take. I don't do it because I have to make things available to thousands of people. So I have to go to the old-fashioned static IP and reverse proxy route for everything. But yeah, for anybody that's just making something available to themselves, something like Tailscale is a great idea.
49:27Good way to get your feet wet too because learning servers is learning computers all over again. It really really is. Oh yes, saying that the truth. It is because now you need to learn networking and how SSL works because sometimes it's not enough just to have a certificate that gets to the server sometimes
49:54Like when I was building NextCloud with bare metal or from bare metal, for example, it needed its own internal SSL running just for like the services to talk to each other. You had to have SSL running from the very beginning. So you had to learn how to make self or what is it open SSL. You got to learn how to make the self-sign certificates, things like that.
50:24That's not an issue with the all in one Docker container. We'll talk about that at some point. I'm sure. But learning this stuff is important because it's if you don't have a SSL up and running and you put something on the internet, it's well, next cloud, for example, just won't work without it. It just it refuses to work.
50:50You put a website out there without SSL, then people automatically think you're a scammer or something like that. There's hardly any sites left that are not encrypted one way or the other. But yeah, check out one of those distributions. Get started with Docker. Learn. There's lots of content on YouTube about how to get containers up and running and keeping an eye on them, how to keep them updated.
51:21up to date, stuff like that, you know, but like I said, it's learning computers all over again. So it's be ready to fall down a bottomless pit. That's for sure. But yeah, that's what I got. Well, my recommendation is a new terminal app created by FOSS Charlie. So this is called the
51:47Fetch Terminal and it's... let's just say it's... it was created with the assistance of a man with a French name. Or shall I say an AI with a French name. And it's... It's... Yeah, you mean "pitched" my... which. Which is "scratched and itch". My problem with terminals is that they weren't
52:17You always have to keep typing it in or keep going up and down trying to find something you've typed in before. So I wanted something with snippets. So literally one click. So I created in my vibe coding skills, my own little terminal. So now I just put in all the snippets that I use regularly. There's protected snippets by
52:43by a code and there you can put your password. So now if you just, you can click you either hold the the shifting click and then it will just print the line or you just click on the the the snippet and it will enter it if it needs a password you can click on the password and it will enter it for you automatically and away you go. It's even got it will give suggestions and you hit tab and it will take that suggestion that appears there as well.
53:11So it's got lots of extra functionality. You can go to fetchterminal.org. Thanks for listening everybody. That's the end of the show. Until the next time, I'm Charlie. I'm Bill and I'm Majid.
