Linux Fest in Texas!  ## Metadata - Author: [[Changelog Master Feed]] - Full Title: Linux Fest in Texas! - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/8d011969-943d-4d2d-a03f-206de64c2af5 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Experimentation Fuels Desktop Linux** - Omarchy/Omarchi represents community experimentation in desktop Linux rather than a single definitive solution. - Carl George values experimentation and contributor traction over hype when new projects appear. Transcript: Carl George Have no idea what the right pronunciation is. I'm happy to see it. I haven't tried it myself. Not really interested, but I'm glad that people are taking an interest in trying new things. And, you know, so much stuff in open source in general is just I'm going to try this and see if it sticks, see if it gets traction, see if it gets contributors. You know, some people try stuff. It never never catches on and it just kind of fades or it stays as a single person project for like 30 years. But, yeah, I definitely like seeing experimentation like that and you know what people can come up with. ([Time 0:02:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ba411eca-fa8e-4611-a3ca-543e72fecfd1)) - **Prebuilt Immutable Desktop Images** - Fedora community projects deliver opinionated, pre-configured immutable images for ready-to-run desktops. - Universal Blue and Bazite examples show packaging configured images instead of manual step-by-step installs. Transcript: Carl George There's dozens of them. Lots of people have made things like that. Yeah, I assume there would be, right? Probably the one that's got the most traction, interest, the hot topic right now is a project called Universal Blue. An ex-canonical guy, George Castro, he decided that he wanted to create like a pre-configured Fedora setup using the, pick the term of the week, immutable image mode, atomic, script Whatever. I think Fedora's branding is centered, centering itself around atomic workstations. Some people still like the term immutable, even though not everything's immutable. So it's kind of a weird thing, a little identity crisis on the naming, but you know, engineers love naming things and arguing about names. But, yeah, they're a way to take boot C images where you can boot up an image and you don't apply updates to packages individually. You just boot into a new image and you carry forward like your home directory and any configurations you've set up. They've got a good structure now where they've got like an image template and you build it, put everything in GitHub with GitHub actions to build the images, stores it in GitHub container Registry. And they're doing all kinds of different pre-configured desktops the way they see it, you know, opinionated desktops, kind of a similar thing as the Oma Archie stuff. It's just they're delivering it as ready to go images. ([Time 0:04:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a81d3a17-419a-4d8b-abd8-1cb87af36778)) - **Automate Workstation Setup With Ansible** - Use Ansible to configure and reproduce your workstation setup from a Git repo to a fresh install. - Run a playbook, sign into your Firefox profile, and verify any loose files to finish the migration. Transcript: Jerod Santo I'm sure you have years and years of doing it. Carl George I am an old school sysadmin, so I use Ansible for my workstation. Jerod Santo Oh man, hardcore. What's that? That's hardcore, man. You're just writing your own Ansible stuff. I thought you said what for? Carl George I was like, because it's just what I know. No, hardcore. No, hardcore. Jerod Santo I'll give you what for. It. Carl George No, it works for me. It fits in my brain. I like, I use the GNOME desktop and they have actually an interesting, the backends for all the settings is a thing called Dconf. I've heard it kind of compared to like the Windows registry. Like it's not like a configuration file like most people like on Linux. But it's got an Ansible module that's really well integrated. So I can just, in my Ansible playbook, just set up and say, like, you know, set the clock from, you know, instead of doing 24-hour time, use A and PM. And that's just a single key in a little chunk of YAML that I put in a playbook. And then I run that along with all the other little things that I have set up to go. And so that's how I'll configure my systems. I'll be getting ready to do that here in the next month or so. ([Time 0:06:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a7d3bd8b-3185-44dd-af2e-b2c31f06f309)) - **Configurable Window Managers Attract Tinkerers** - Window managers like Hyperland target tinkerers and expose deep configurability compared with integrated desktop environments. - People seek opinionated ready-to-go configs to avoid building a Hyperland setup from scratch. Transcript: Carl George Yeah i think another aspect of uh the omarchi stuff is that uh i don't think there's a ton of stuff out there yet for hyperland which is the desktop environment or shell thing that it's Using uh it's it's new and a lot of people are, it's very, very configurable, a lot more than like GNOME. I don't know if it'd be more or less than KDE. That's another one that's very configurable. But KDE has been out there a long time. So there's a lot of opinionated KDE setups out there. Hyperland's a lot on the newer side. So I think, you know, there's an appetite. One of the reasons it's getting so much traction is that there's an appetite for, people have heard of Hyperland. They want to try it and they go and they say, okay, well, I don't want to start from scratch because when you saw Hyperland from scratch, it is pretty bare bones. It's just right there. And it's like, okay, write your config to put stuff where you want it. ([Time 0:14:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/faeb5d71-2238-46c9-b71f-83b28ae53f52)) - **Wayland Replaces Xorg To Reduce Technical Debt** - Wayland was designed to replace Xorg to reduce technical debt and security issues from decades-old code. - The shift requires compositors per desktop (like Mutter or Hyperland) to implement the Wayland protocol. Transcript: Carl George For a long time, that was Xorg server or X11 is what a lot of people call it. I think technically the term X11 is the protocol and like the project is X.org. And then the thing people are calling X11 is Xorg server, I think is the actual correct term. These are often used interchangeably though. People will just throw those around and say, I have to use X11. Well, the Xorg developers, the people that worked in that project, they realized that their 20, 30 years of technical debt around that server, that thing to draw everything on the screen Was piling up and it wasn't really working great for them. So they decided one of the developers started a new set, okay, well, if we started this over from scratch, how do we change it? And did a lot of different things, a lot of it around security. Xorg has a long history of security vulnerabilities and things because of the design and the lots of technical debt security problems arising. And then the developers decided, okay, well, if we started over, how can we design this where we wouldn't run into this category of issues? ([Time 0:19:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d5dd0a8b-fbb1-477f-92ac-9e68476f7b1a)) - **Pick What Works, Then Ask The Community** - Try distributions and swap when something doesn't work, but avoid endless distro-hopping for every issue. - Talk to other Linux users at events to discover apps, setups, and real-world solutions before switching. Transcript: Carl George Well, obviously, I'm biased and we'll say you can do all on Fedora. Okay. But the real, real answer is that's just the wrong question to ask. The real, the real question is use what works for you. If you try something and it doesn't work, the thing that people love about Linux is that you can just change it out because, you know, most distributions are free of cost. You can just go and install a new one. Well, the famous, not really meme, but people call it distro hopping. You can just swap out and change one. People overdo that a bit where they run into any problem and instead of trying to solve it, they'll switch to another distribution and then have the same problem after hours of reinstalling And whatever. Not everyone has that quick setup script with OMRCHE or Ansible Playbooks or whatever. And so they'll spend a week in getting a new distribution set up and then run into the exact same problem and realize this isn't anything to do with any particular distribution. This is, say, a bug in GNOME or a bug in KDE or whatever, or a bug in Wayland, or a bug in XORX server from the old stuff. The main thing is, I would say, get out to the events. A little future segue to what we should talk about. ([Time 0:34:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/715e573d-0d33-4f19-9eb2-342bafc2a98e)) - **Use Conferences To Find Practical Solutions** - Attend community events like Texas Linux Fest to learn practical workflows and meet people using Linux for creative work. - Use those connections to learn specific apps, hardware tips, and distributions that fit your needs. Transcript: Carl George A little future segue to what we should talk about. Get out to events. Talk to other Linux people. There's a ton of people doing podcasts on Linux, doing creative work, videos, and streaming and all kinds of that stuff. Talk to them, see which ones they like. Um, I know that, um, I have some friends that, uh, I won't, uh, I won't shout out all the other podcasts out there, but I know that there's some, uh, some pox, podcasting friends I have, Adam Stacoviak They use NixOS. Carl George My buddies over at Jupiter Broadcasting, they do a lot of stuff. They are big fans of NixOS, which is, if you think that, you know, Omar Archie is like really, you know, or Hyperland is really configurable. NixOS is that kind of for your whole OS, just like everything is extremely configurable. I don't know a whole lot about it. I haven't tried it myself, but they are big fans of NixOS. My friend Michael over with Destination Linux, he uses Fedora for all his podcast production stuff. But then there's other people on his show that use other stuff. So I would say get out and talk to these people. I'm sure you've probably met some of these folks before. Never. If you haven't, if you see them at a show together, I'll be happy to introduce you. Just talk to other people, see what tools they're using. Besides distributions, you might find out about other applications. Like you may think, oh, well, here's this Mac app that's really good that I would have a hard time doing without. And they could tell you about, oh yeah, I used to use that and try this. This app on Linux works better for that or is good enough for that. ([Time 0:35:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3f4a8dd1-5cd3-41f5-b00d-86283b3134ee)) - **Hardware Support Is Slowly Improving** - Hardware manufacturers gradually improve Linux support, and vendors like Lenovo and Framework are easing adoption. - Native apps remain scarce, but Steam and pre-installed Ubuntu/Fedora laptops help the Linux desktop ecosystem. Transcript: Carl George Yeah, you'll see sometimes third-party projects that'll come up for things like that, where they'll say, you know, I don't know if there's an equivalent for the one you gave, the Corsair IQ. But for example, someone could say, you know, Corsair IQ is a Windows-only app. Here is a, here's an app, a GTK app that is designed for GNOME that does sort of the same thing that works on Linux. But it'll be like just somebody's hobby project that, you know, maybe it works today, maybe it breaks tomorrow. And it's just an as is thing. Getting more manufacturers interested to make, you know, native applications. I mean, we've got the great example of Steam there, and that's been just a huge, huge boon for Linux desktop is having, you know, whatever. I don't know what the percentage is, but say like, you know, 50 to 80 percent of the Steam library just works on Linux now without any problems. There's still some games that don't, but people can, you know, game all day long with Steam on Linux. And as long as they stick to those games that are compatible, that's not a blocker for them anymore. And it's just going to be, you know, it's a slow and steady drumbeat of getting manufacturers on board, getting more hardware manufacturers on board that will ship Linux pre-installed. We're getting better at that. Framework's real popular these days. They don't ship Linux pre-installed, but they have devices where they'll advertise it as bring your own OS, which is kind of code for go install whichever distro you want on here. ([Time 0:42:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b5dce1b8-9bf6-4650-bd3c-a5b23b572a80)) - **Make CI Debuggable With Observability** - Use CI observability tools to debug GitHub Actions instead of relying on collapsed logs in the UI. - Depot's runners surface uncollapsed logs and per-process CPU/memory metrics to speed build debugging. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak What's up, friends? I'm here with Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of Depot. Depot is the only build platform looking to make your builds as fast as possible. But Kyle, this is an issue because GitHub Actions is the number one CI provider out there. But not everyone's a fan. Explain that. Carl George I think when you're thinking about GitHub Actions, it's really quite jarring how you can have such a wildly popular CI provider. And yet it's lacking some of the basic functionality or tools that you need to actually be able to debug your builds or deployments. And so back in June, we essentially took a stab at that problem in particular with Depot's GitHub action runners. Jerod Santo What we've observed over time is effectively GitHub actions when it comes to like actually debugging a build, is pretty much useless. Carl George The job logs in GitHub Actions UI is pretty much where your dreams go to die. Jerod Santo Like they're collapsed by default. They have no resource metrics. Carl George When jobs fail, you're essentially left playing detective, like clicking each little dropdown on each step in your job to figure out like, okay, where did this actually go wrong? And so what we set out to do with our own GitHub Actions observability is essentially we built a real observability solution around GitHub Actions. Adam Stacoviak Okay, so how does it work? Carl George All of the logs by default for a job that runs on a Depot GitHub Action Runner, they're uncollapsed. You can search them, you can detect if there's been out of memory errors, you can see all of the resource contention that was happening on the runner. So you can see your CPU metrics, your memory metrics, not just at the top level runner level, but all the way down to the individual processes running on the machine. ([Time 0:46:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cd1a3574-12bb-4165-89f9-55ef933efa18)) - **From Suggestion To Organizer** - Carl joined Texas Linux Fest after suggesting an improvement and being invited to help implement it. - He became a long-term volunteer organizer and stayed involved since around 2017–2018. Transcript: Carl George Wow. We took a bit of a hiatus for COVID. We had the 2019 event. The 2020 event, we canceled outright just because I was right when COVID was kicking off the pandemic. And then we were trying hard to bring it back in 2022. Didn't really come together. 2023, the same thing. And then last year, 2024, was our first year back after the long break. Like many conferences in the years post pandemic, the attendance was down a little bit. But we had a good number of people come out. It was about 300 people that year. We've had a few, you know, somewhere between four and 800 in the years before that. ([Time 0:50:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e6e2ded4-0fdc-4778-85fe-5ed2cfd7f437)) - **Diverse Tracks Keep Community Events Relevant** - Texas Linux Fest programs varied tracks: Linux, Kubernetes, AI, and observability to serve diverse community interests. - The nonprofit relies on sponsors to keep tickets affordable and enable workshops and community content. Transcript: Carl George So in the main room, we'll have pretty much Linux talks the whole way, a lot of distribution stuff, and then one talk about Linux kernel upgrades. We have another room that I think the whole afternoon is all Kubernetes stuff. Another one where the whole afternoon is AI stuff. That's a real hot topic right now. I think we have one room where the morning is, it's two observability talks back to back. So like monitoring type things. So those are some of the leading ones. We have some stuff that's more developer oriented. We have a workshop on the Friday of the event. It's a Friday, Saturday thing. One workshop about WebAssembly. Another workshop about WSL using the Windows subsystem for Linux, which is like, you know, a Linux sort of thing, layer on Windows. So yeah, lots of topics all around the, you know, at least tangentially related to Linux and or open source in some way. One interesting talk we had on the schedule this year was about Darwin, which is the, as I understand it, kind of the underlying operating system for Mac. So I'm pretty interested in, I don't know if I'll be able to actually watch any of the talks live, but we're hoping to get the talks recorded this year and be able to go back and watch that. Cause I'm curious, you know, the title is the design and implementation of the Darwin operating system. And that's interesting to me that one, that someone would propose that at a Linux open source conference, and two, I want to know what he has to talk about about it. I'm sure there'll be a lot of comparisons to Linux itself. Who should come to this thing? Adam Stacoviak It seems varied, so it seems varied. Who would come? Carl George Anyone interested in Linux and open source. Like I said, I mentioned that there's a lot of AI talks this year. So I know that's a hot topic. People that want to learn more about that. We've got people working specifically in observability. So if this is some of the topics are things that you work with in your day-to job, it's certainly applicable. Maybe you can get your employer to pay for the ticket. The tickets are pretty reasonable. The entry-level tickets, we actually just ended the early bird pricing. Unfortunately, that's been open for a while. ([Time 0:53:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/692843f2-c5d1-4e4b-8570-c3ef7299af79)) - **Submit Talks To Get Free Or Discounted Access** - Submit a talk to community events even if it's your first talk; organizers support new speakers and often grant free or discounted tickets. - Use CFP acceptance or waitlist offers to secure attendance and reduce cost barriers. Transcript: Carl George So I would definitely encourage people to do that next year. Submit a talk, even if it's your first talk. This is, I would say, a really good event for first speakers. Well, the organizers, we've got several first time speakers on the schedule. We try to be supportive, help people get started. A lot of regular conference speakers help organize. So we're familiar with all the little things that you would need, you know, things we wish someone told us when we were getting started. So if you've never presented at a conference before, the community events like this, whether you're in Austin or can travel to Austin or you have another community event in your neck Of the woods, like LinuxFest Northwest or Southeast LinuxFest, those other conferences, if you've got something near you that advertises itself as a smaller community event, submit A talk. See if you can get it accepted. The hardest part a lot of times isn't the presentation itself. That's one that I tell people, they're like, oh, do you get nervous when you present? I'm like, yeah, every time still. But the thing is, you just figure out how to just, you know, move forward and present in spite of being nervous. And it's just part of the part of the thing is, OK, I've got my talk jitters now. The harder part is coming up with a good idea that will look good in that call for papers where the reviewers look at it and say, yeah, our audience does want to hear about Steam OS on the Lenovo Go S or smart cities built with Kubernetes or whatever it is topic-wise that you have. So coming up with an interesting pitch, send it out there. And then a lot of conferences will, even if they don't accept, if they accept your talk as a speaker, you can pretty much guarantee you're getting a free pass for that. As a speaker, you're part of the content. A lot of conferences, including us, will also give free passes to speaker alternates. And that is where we accept so many talks right off the bat. And then a certain percentage of those will drop off just scheduling conflicts or they don't show up at all or whatever. Uh, hopefully it's a small percentage. It's not too bad, but we have to plan for it. So we right off the bat, you know, the next, whatever, 20 or 30 talks that we would have accepted, we put on the waitlist and tell them like, you know, something may open up and we'll fit You in. And we've already pulled up, I think four or five talks from the waitlist and put them on. But all of the speakers that we put on the waitlist, we gave them free passes as well, mainly to encourage them to be there present in case we have a day of cancellation. I want to be able to tap one of them on the shoulder and say, you got that talk ready, right? And you're already here because you got a free ticket. But anyone that we rejected in the CFP, we gave the $50 price ticket, the early word pricing permanently so they can get in, still get in. So I definitely encourage people to do that. ([Time 1:14:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/970912c1-caca-4195-9e74-39be5dbf94b3))