Linux Fest in Texas! (Friends)

25:39They're really designed to be like one cohesive unit and work together. So really you use a distribution that has GNOME either pre-installed or you can, even in Arch, you can install the GNOME, I think they call them groups in GNOME or in Arch Also, you install the GNOME group and you get all of the like design components of GNOME that work together. And you don't really have to even understand that. OK, well, Mudder's handling this part and GNOME Shell's handling this part. It's all just you install GNOME and this collection of pieces work together versus something like Hyperland or any of the other various like window windowing environments or window managers.

26:16You do have to kind of understand, OK, well, I got all this working. Oh, but I don't have a file manager. How do I read my files? and now I got to install that or this part's working or that part's not working. GNOME is definitely designed to be a lot closer to the it's ready to go, works out of the box for the most part, but at a cost of you don't have as much choice with it in configuration. So, yeah, it's kind of like buying an entire set of Lego where it's like this is what you get. It's all packaged. It has all the things for you to build this particular thing. I'm talking about GNOME now.

26:43So as a Fedora maintainer, I'm not saying you are one, but are you one? Are you a Fedora maintainer? Okay. So as a Fedora maintainer. And does Fedora ship GNOME by default? Is that the default environment in Fedora? So the yes for what we call Fedora Workstation, there are certain deliverables that are called additions, I think is the right term. And kind of the flagship addition for a long time was Fedora Workstation, which defaults to GNOME. more recently, I think about a year, year and a half ago. We have, let me back up a little, besides the main Fedora Workstation Edition, there's also Fedora Server Edition, which obviously for servers, not meant to have like a graphical environment on it.

27:27But there's also Fedora Spins that would have things like KDE Plasma, XFCE, and other desktop environments. A lot of people would use those. Farther back, it was decided that KDE Plasma was popular enough and important enough to be what we call a release blocking deliverable, meaning that if something's broken in the KDE Plasma spin, Fedora could delay the release to get that working before pushing out a new version. A release blocking spin wasn't really that different than an addition. So basically they said, we need to promote this from a spin to an addition and give KDE a little bit more love and feature better on the front page.

28:06So now for desktops, Fedora has two additions. There's the workstation, which is GNOME, and then Plasma Desktop, I think, is the name they went with. A lot of people, you know, engineers and naming things, you know, there's lots of talk of like, well, we should have, you know, Plasma Workstation and GNOME Workstation and have it more, you know, right in the name. And then other people said, no, Workstation is GNOME. And then lots of different opinions and fighting about that. But eventually what they landed on was, you know, we still have Fedora Workstation. That is GNOME. If you want to call it a default, sure, but also the Plasma desktop is also featured as a leading variant on the front page, one of the choices you can download, and that has KDE Plasma in it.

28:47Gotcha. All right, so my last question, and I'm going to make sure Adam's with us and has further thoughts, because I'm still getting clarifying questions. So as a GNOME or as a Fedora maintainer then, with regards to GNOME, do you have to care at all about Wayland, X11, those kind of things? Or you just make sure GNOME is packaged and installed and configured by default and they're black boxed to you? It's mostly a black box to me, but that's also because I'm not a maintainer of the GNOME packages or any of the Wayland packages. Well, by you I mean the Royal U, the group of maintainers that maintain that part.

29:20Yeah. And that's part of the difference, right, is that we have the collection of Fedora maintainers, but then you're, you know, you work on the specific things that are interesting to you, the packages you care about. I mentioned my sysadmin background, so I have a lot of like server oriented and like Python library stuff that I'll interact with. A few desktop apps, but I don't maintain any desktop environments. For the Royal Way, though, you're correct that generally the Fedora makes sure that GNOME is packaged and working. That's a lot of the GNOME developers from Upstream also work in Fedora and package it there, make sure it's all working correctly.

29:54And then everyone else can just kind of maintain applications and libraries and whatever else that or even GNOME extensions that integrate with that base desktop. And they'll just adjust to whatever changes. That is one thing that people can criticize, fairly criticize GNOME for is that the extensions API isn't, there's not really an API for it. There's a lot of GNOME extensions and they're well known for basically breaking with every GNOME version or every other GNOME version, which can be pretty painful. And then you have some GNOME developers that will just go out of their way and say that extensions are a niche thing, which is weird because every distribution that ships GNOME has at least like one or two extensions pre-installed.

30:35They're not niche at all. Maybe some of the smaller ones are, but that is one of the things in Gnome that nobody's really figured out how to do yet is to have like a stable extensions API where you can have an extension that works well for an extended period of time. Because Gnome releases a new major version every six months, which does line up pretty well with Fedora's release schedule, which is the same, a new major every six months. So every new major version of Fedora has the next major version of GNOME. But it can be painful for those extension developers whenever the thing's changing out from under them.

31:10For sure. All right, Adam, are you with us? Are you tracking? I'm tracking. I'm just overwhelmed, I would say. Like, it's not that hard to follow necessarily. I think for me in particular, I would love to use, like, I love Linux server. Linux servers of all types. and I would love to try and use Linux as a desktop, but because I'm a creative and we do video and audio, there's always something that stops me. I can build machines. I love that stuff. But man, all these distros, all these configs, all this, it's just so hard to map your mind around. It's no wonder why we haven't experienced the year of the Linux desktop, because it's all the sand is always shifting underneath you i feel as someone who knows the land well or at least to some degree you're a couple classes ahead as jared said that's probably underselling carl i don't want to undersell you carl sure sure i'm just reusing your words but in elementary school he's in college okay that's a lot of classes okay that's not a few you're being generous there where if i for creatives who want to build their own pc and they don't want to use windows omg please stop don't make me use windows i've tried it it wasn't the worst ever it wasn't that bad but is this your first time publicly saying this i know you told it to me last week privately but you know do you want to come you want to make a stance here because you were pretty you know i got a lot of windows right i'll love it this week and i'll hate it next you know but i'm an experimenter i love to to tinker i love to try and i i think that if you want to go the easiest road possible ever and have your gpu drivers and your igpu drivers and all the drivers ever right there at your fingertips use windows because that's what it does well it is not extremely configurable to my knowledge there's the install installs a ton of stuff on top of it is getting littered with copilot-esque things i don't even know what they're doing with it there's a lot of ways you can remove that stuff but i think windows is a super easy user experience unless you're a developer if you want to ssh into or you want to do things you could do on a unix linux system it's just not as easy and smooth it's not like installing another flavor of an os that's very popular out there and being able to treat it like a thing like that i i had a lot of opposition and i'm also not steeped in it so it could have been you know user error but it was challenging but the real question is is if i'm using linux or i want to use linux and i want to be a creative who does video or audio or podcasts and things like this i don't even know i guess figma is a web app so you can probably figma on linux no problem but where what distro do i choose what windowing server it seems like maybe wayland is probably the route because xorg's got issues Let's just say, where do you go to be a creative and use Linux?

34:16Well, obviously, I'm biased and we'll say you can do all of it on Fedora. Okay. But the real answer is that's just the wrong question to ask. Okay. 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 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.

34:57Not everyone has that quick setup script with OMR 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. 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.

35:39Talk to them, see which ones they like. I know that I have some friends that I won't shout out all the other podcasts out there, but I know that there's some podcasting fans that use NixOS. Yeah, shout them out. My buddy's over at Jupyter Broadcasting. They do a lot of stuff. they are big fans of Nix OS, which is, if you think that, you know, Omar Archie is like really, you know, or Hyperland is really configurable. Nix OS 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 Nix OS.

36:14My friend Michael over with Destination Linux, he uses Fedora for his, 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. 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.

36:47You know, this app on Linux works better for that or is good enough for that. But then there's this other app that helps fill in the gap and just just talk to people, network and find out what can work for you. Because at the end of the day, I don't I don't really benefit or care about switching people to Linux anymore. There was a time in my life when I was like, oh, yeah, everyone should use Linux and I need to convert people. And that's just I know you use whatever works for you. If you're happy on Mac and don't really have interest or curiosity in changing, don't like if you're happy and satisfied on Windows, then keep using it.

37:17It's not my problem. But for me personally, I know that I want to use an operating system that I can contribute to and change and affect. I can't do that with Windows. I can't do that with Mac. I can do that with Fedora, which is why I use it. That's true. That's good points there. Well, I would say, hey, if you're listening to this on YouTube, wherever you're listening to that, drop a comment if you're on YouTube. If you're out there not on YouTube and listening on the audio podcast, we're on X. You can email us, editors at changelog.com. I would love to hear from creators, creatives, whatever you want to call yourself, anyone doing this kind of stuff, because I just haven't gotten that far into it.

37:54And I feel like the next layer of experimentation for me truly is building a creator PC that does not run Windows. Let's just say. So that would be my next major fun project. I'd film it. I'd talk about it. I would love that. Like I love building machines and I have no desire to build one more because I would have to put Windows on it. And I just don't want to do that. It wasn't that bad, though. It really wasn't that bad. It sounds like you're pretty curious. So, you know, honestly, if I could just give one credit to Windows is that they've got so many applications. and I think once you're past a few things and you're using, let's just say like Notion or you're in Slack or you're in Zulip or something like that, at that point, the operating system sort of just goes away and it doesn't feel like you're somewhere wrong.

38:50There's some things I really liked about Windows, but it was mostly UX things and that's because I had taken so much of the bad stuff away that is by default. Chris Titus' script, I forget what it's called, but it's really awesome for helping you fine tune, install, configure, and deconfigure windows to be more enjoyable. If it wasn't for that, windows would have sucked bad for me. I think you bring up a good point with the apps. I mentioned in the past trying to convert people to Linux and huge waste of time, but what I would run into is I would say, what do you do on a computer? And they're like, oh, I get on Facebook and check my email.

39:30And I'm like, what else do you do? That's it. You know, maybe I'll, you know, look at some photos. And I'm like, OK, well, if you're just in a browser and don't have any specific application needs other than like a photo viewer, like, yeah, here's XYZ Linux distribution. Try this out for a while. And then they would always do it. And then they would say they would call me up like a month later or whatever and say, hey, I bought this camera at Walmart and it comes with an application and it doesn't install. And I'm like, what's the camera? And I'll look it up. Yep, that's a Windows only app. And inevitably, something would happen like that.

40:03Nowadays, I think that would be a less common thing just because of the move to web apps over like native applications. So the problem's gotten better, but still it's a problem where I wouldn't recommend, you know, I wouldn't necessarily recommend Linux to friends and family unless they actually want to get involved and learn it. Like you're asking questions and want to know if I have a family member that wants to know and learn, then sure, I'll help them get started and whatever. But I'm not going to try and convince anyone that's perfectly happy using Windows or Mac or anything else that they need to change to anything.

40:33Especially because you become the de facto tech support, don't you? I mean, once you've done that. Yes. I have gotten to the point in my life where family call me asking Windows questions. They're like, you work with computers, right? And I'm like, the last time I used Windows was Windows Vista. Sorry, can't help you. The best Windows there was. The best. That's the best Windows. Pretty accurate. One more thing on this note. And I think the thing that bugs me is like when you use, even when you build your own PC, you're under these issues with, you know, is the, you know, going back to the camera kind of thing, like is there software for it on the platform?

41:05Corsair, pretty popular brand, have a really cool power supply for your PC, a really good liquid cooler for the CPU. And they both have, I'm not sure what they call IQ. it's more of a system iq is like this information system you can get from the psu like how much power is it using what's the constant power draw and the application is pretty much a windows app right it's not for mac because you can't really use mac unless you're doing i guess hackintosh stuff which is not something i do so you're pretty much relegated to a windows application to leverage iq which is diagnostics and information so if you're building a system on Linux, the API for it is not published.

41:54And yeah, you could probably reverse engineer one and have fun with that. But by and large, if you're using Corsair as a power supply or a water cooler, you're not getting the IQ goodies in Linux, to my knowledge, you know? So it's kind of a bummer. You're building a PC. You're probably building a Linux PC because that's kind of to some degree more popular these days. but yet you don't have access to APIs or a CLI for this stuff. And it's just a shame. Yeah, you'll see sometimes third-party projects that will 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 here, you know, Corsair IQ is a Windows-only app.

42:39Here's 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 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 % of the Steam library just works on Linux now without any problems. There's still some games that don't, but people can game all day long with Steam on Linux.

43:20And 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 district you want on here. We've got Lenovo offering pre-installed Ubuntu and Fedora laptops now.

43:54So I think the more of those we get, the better this application problem will get long term. But it's certainly been a long time coming getting to the point we're at now, and we're still not in a great place with it. So it's probably going to be a lot longer trek up this hill getting it more popular. yeah in my case i'm using the iq as more of a diagnostic thing i'm not trying to view the window and check out the power draw i'm trying to capture that in prometheus just monitor across the server so in this case it's a power supply on a server the gpu is on the server you know the cpu is obviously the cpu of the server and i want to look at those things i want to understand how the cpu is performing you know which cores are active things like that how cool it is those are things you can get from the actual cpu but uh in terms of its cooling you know there's things you can tell about like what is the constant temperature of the water in the aio and whether or not that pump is about to go away you know there's things you can do just to ensure durability of your server and that iq system or the the diagnostics in there is sort of stuck and you know i'm i'm thinking about not making it stuck but i gotta make some software and i don't want to do that.

45:03I'd rather them just do it, make it easy, but that's not how it works. If you don't care about the graphical part, I imagine there's probably something on Linux that could reach into that data. Usually those, those types of things, they're not like, it's not like special secret data where you have to have the one special proprietary app to access it. It's usually just normal, you know, industry standard stuff exposed via the hardware. And then there's other, I mean, servers do this anyways, that don't have any graphical environments at all. So there's usually a standard that you can plug into and find some kind of app.

45:33It might just be a matter of finding the right term to Google for, you know, I think this space used to be known as monitoring. Now it's observability is the hot term, you know, kind of like kind of like a lot of sys admins went from sys admin to DevOps to SRE. Observability is now the new lingo. So maybe look into some of that observability and then the exact thing you're trying to monitor, right? like water cooling loop temperature. Maybe that one's too specific. It might not be out there, but there's probably something you can find, some kind of open hardware sensor. There was an IQ kind of Linux.

46:10I'm not sure even sure what they call it, probably a package if you want to call it that, but it was unmaintained. So it was written in C and unmaintained and probably for good reason. I'm not going to see, but whatever.

46:31what'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 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.

47:14What we've observed over time is effectively GitHub Actions, when it comes to like actually debugging a build, is pretty much useless. The job logs in GitHub Actions UI is pretty much where your dreams go to die. Like they're collapsed by default. They have no resource metrics. 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.

47:47Okay, so how does it work? 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. And so for us, this is our take on the first step forward of actually building a real observability solution. around GitHub actions so that developers have real debugging tools to figure out what's going on in their builds.

48:24Okay, friends, you can learn more at depot.dev, get a free trial, test it out, instantly make your builds faster. So cool. Again, depot.dev.

48:39Let's talk about Texas Linux Fest before I put my foot in my mouth on C. So we got at the UT campus. This is what? Is it this month? Like a couple weeks basically? 16 days! Yes. As of Friday, it's like 13 days, okay? So if you're going to go to this, go to 2025.texaslinuxfest.org. I assume you're an organizer because you reached out on LinkedIn. You said, Hey Adam, what do you think about Texas Linux Fest? You didn't come last year. Are you coming this year? I said, well the best case I could do here is pod about it. Maybe I can come at least one day, maybe not two. but let's talk about this awesome fest called Texas Linux Fest.

49:20What is it? So it is an all-volunteer-run community event. We are the backing organization is a nonprofit. We're actually under the same nonprofit umbrella as the Scale Conference out in California. We have some of the same organizers that help out with both, like we use the same registration system. But it's a really fun event. I got going to it, met some good people there. And at one point I made a suggestion. I don't even remember what the suggestion was about, but I made a suggestion about something about how the conference operated. And they said, that's a good idea. You should come and help us with that.

49:57And they hooked me in. And so kind of that's the motto I'll tell people a lot of times when they give me ideas for the conferences. I'll tell them the same thing, like good ideas require volunteer time to implement it. Like, I'm not, you know, I'm not just taking all the good ideas from the good idea fair. You got to come help us do this. And I've looped in a few volunteers to help make things happen that way. Some people, you know, it's kind of like open source, right? Like everyone's got an idea, but very few people are willing to do the work to make it happen. And then that when the person that told me that it resonated with me.

50:30So I've been involved ever since then. I think the first year I got involved was maybe 2017, 2018. So, 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.

51:12We've had a few, you know, somewhere between 400 and 800 in the years before that. So we're hoping to get the attendance back up to pre-pandemic levels this year. And talking to other organizers with other events, I've heard good things that conference attendance overall is trending up across community events. So that's a good sign. It's part of the reason I brought it up to you, Adam, to help talk about it on the show, let more people know about it. Uh, some people haven't ever heard about it and they would be very interested. It seems like every year we have the event, someone will reach out like, you know, a month afterwards and say, I had no idea this existed.

51:48If I had known about it, I would have come. And so we try to get the word out, but, uh, we don't really have a marketing department. So it's all just kind of word of mouth stuff and podcast interviews and talking to other people at other events, uh, just to try and get the word out and let people know. Well, we're happy to help. Is this hell? Is this getting put on at the university? It's not at the – yeah, you mentioned the UT campus. It's not the main campus. It is an ancillary venue called the J.J. Pickle Research Campus. Okay. It's called the Commons Conference Center at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus.

52:18All the – the map is on the conference website that you already mentioned the link to. It's also pretty easy to find in Google Maps. Yeah, it's our first time in this venue. I just noticed on the schedule that you have different venues, and one is the stadium. I was like, is that actually the football stadium? No, no, no. That is the, those are the names of the rooms inside that building. Oh, the stadium room inside of the pickle center. Yes. Okay. That is, I was working, when I was filling that out, I actually wrote in that part of the schedule. And I worried about that, about the name being a little weird.

52:51I was like, dang, they're going to have a set up in this. I'd go to that. I'd go see that. I was hoping people would look at the other, other names. Maybe venue's not the right term for that. Well, I didn't know atrium. So I'm like, okay, there could be an atrium. There could be a stadium. Then Bevo. And I'm like, I have no idea what Bevo is. I'm going to skip that one. These are all just room names in the building. And it's all kind of, you know, OK, stricken from the record. But no, that's a good point. I actually thought about that, that the venue column on the website was a little confusing and I should change it to room instead of venue.

53:18That was something from the website theme that we have. But that should be a pretty easy tweak to change. So what kind of stuff is being discussed? It's a Linux conference, but it's not only Linux. We have we have basically we don't really have tracks for every room. We do kind of keep some of the same topics on theme so they're not conflicting at the same time. 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.

53:51That's a real hot topic right now. I think we have one room where the morning is two observability talks back to back, so like monitoring type things. so those are some of the the leading ones uh 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 uh one workshop about web assembly um another workshop about wsl using uh the windows subsystem for linux which is like you know a linux sort of thing layer on windows um so yeah lots of topics all around the, you know, at least tangentially related to Linux and or open source in some way.

54:32One 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.

55:03And I'm sure there'll be a lot of comparisons to Linux itself. Who should come to this thing? Like, it seems varied. So it seems varied. Who would come? 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 some of the topics are things that you work with in your day-to-day 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.

55:43That's been open for a while. It was$50 tickets. But now the entry-level ticket is$75, and you can upgrade to a$100 ticket to get the swag pack that includes a T-shirt. But yeah, if it's related to your job at all, if any of the topics on the schedule sound good, I would definitely pitch it to your employer. And if your employer is interested in sponsoring the conference, since this is run by a nonprofit, we don't actually have big budgets for any of this stuff. We are completely reliant on our sponsors helping make the conference happen. This year, my ex-employer, Rackspace, down in San Antonio, is our platinum sponsor.

56:19And they sponsored in years past and they haven't in a while. So it was nice to see them come back around and want to be involved in community events. We've also got Red Hat, my current employer, and Percona and Elastic as our gold sponsors, and a few more silver ones. And we're looking for more sponsors if anyone's interested in helping make the event happen this year and in future years. That'll definitely come in handy. But also, having lots of sponsors also helps us control that ticket price and not have to charge too much so that attendees can come and it's affordable for everyone. one. Yeah.

56:53I'm seeing, uh, speaker slots with sponsored by Red Hat and those examples. How does that, how does that work? I'd imagine it's obviously in the cases I looked at, it was a Red Hat employee, but is it, um, is there like a promotion kind of thing there? Is it simply kind of covering that person's costs to be there to give that talk? And it's, it's not like a, an advertisement. It's more like we enable that person while they may work here to have the freedom to go to this conference and give this talk and share their love and knowledge with the community. How does that work? So more of the latter, what you said, it's going to be more like for my case where I'm an organizer, but I'm not doing one of these sponsored talks.

57:37So I don't have like sponsored by Red Hat on any of this stuff, but I will be helping coordinate some of the stuff at the actual Red Hat booth. The actual sponsors, there's different sponsor levels. That's all listed on the website. Many of the sponsor levels will include what we call a sponsored workshop. And then the sponsors get to split that up however they like. I think the gold level comes with a half day workshop, which will be works out to about three hours. The platinum gets a full day workshop that comes out to a total of six hours. The sponsor can use that time however they want to.

58:12many years ago. Actually, the first time I spoke at Texas Linux Fest, I was still a Rackspace employee. And the way that I spoke was in the sponsored workshop. They had a session that was basically part of their sponsorship and they could fill it however they wanted to. And so among employees, they said, who would like to present at the conference about any topic? And then I got to get on with that and do a little small talk there. And I think that might've been my first public speaking thing. So it's not always that. It's not always just, you know, employers, you know, paying for their employees to have a spot.

58:44Sometimes it might be like sales engineers trying to talk about, you know, how their products are working with an upstream open source thing. We definitely try to have an upstream and community angle on it as much as possible. But because the sponsors are putting up money for this, we like to give them a little bit of a little bit of the audience time as part of the benefit for the sponsors to come in. So any of the talks that are part of a sponsored thing, we disclose that right there in the title is sponsored by whoever. So far Red Hat's the only ones you see there, but that's only because Red Hat's the only one that has given me the titles for any of those sessions so far, waiting to get those back from the other sponsors.

59:22And then once they give those to me, I'll add them up on the website. And you'll see if you, you know, you'll see Percona and Rackspace and Elastic on there in that, in the schedule as well. All those workshops are on the Friday. The Saturday is, there's no sponsored content. The Saturday is all talks from our call for papers, which ended last month, I believe in August. And that's just talks that people have submitted. Nobody is paying for the spot. It's all just submit your ideas. And then we have a committee of reviewers. I participated in that also. We go through and read all of the submissions, rate them.

59:57And then we look through the top ranked ones and then try to come up with sort of tracks. Like I mentioned, we have like a full day of Linux distribution stuff and kernels, and then like a half a day, like an afternoon of like AI and then like an afternoon of observability stuff. So we'll look through all of the submissions and the ones that we liked, we'll put together into themes that make sense for the conference and then have all the community members speak in that. Some of those speakers do happen to have their employers paying their way to come speak. Not all of them. A lot of the speakers are local and don't have any travel at all.

1:00:32Like for me, I'm just driving up from San Antonio, so it's just like a short two-hour drive for me, basically. We have some people, a lot of people local in Austin. Some people that come down from Dallas or over from Houston. Longer drive for Carl than it is for you, Adam. Oh, yeah. Well, San Antonio's far away, comparative to where I'm at. I'm 40-ish minutes from downtown-ish with traffic. You just never know about traffic, man. It can get you. We're a little further for you this year then, because last year we were at the Palmer Events Center, which is right by Terry Black's Barbecue, kind of just south of downtown, just south of the Ladybug Lake.

1:01:04This year, that JJ Pickle Research Campus is a little bit further north in Austin. Okay. But it's still in Austin, so it's not far. I was thinking downtown UT. Yeah. Is there still barbecue nearby? Always. Yeah. There's one I haven't tried yet called Interstellar that's out a little, I think about 10 or 15 minutes northwest from there. I really want to try that one. The one or two times I've gone out there, the line was really long, which I don't terribly mind. But the group that I was with was like, oh, I don't want to wait an hour or two. And I'm like, oh, but it's like one of the top ranked ones.

1:01:37I got to try it. Adam, do you ever go out to a Seguin to try burnt bean? No, that's Seguin's. I mean, you might just go in the middle of nowhere to go to Seguin, right? It's like that one's like an hour for me. It's like a time warp. They won number one on Texas Monthly this past rankings that they put out. Really? Oh, yeah. That's a prestigious honor right there. One of my favorites. Number one. Ooh, what's it called again? Burnt Bean. Burnt Bean. All right. I'm putting it on my list. On Adam's list. Adam's Texas monthly list. There you go. Yeah, they were number four on the top 50 like four years ago when they did the last list, and they went from number four to number one.

1:02:16Which I was kind of bummed about because I was like, okay, the food's going to still be great. All that means is the line's going to be longer. More people know about it because they want to have number one. Good for them, I guess. They get the business. Give us the Carl George list. Give us the top three Carl George barbecue. You want to do San Antonio and Austin? You want to do just Austin? You want to do just San Antonio? Oh, they're all over. Top three. The one that I like going to, that I end up going to more often than any in Austin probably is Terry Black's. It's not the best barbecue in Austin.

1:02:44It's really good. But the best thing about them is that they are cooking 24-7. They're only open like during normal business hours, but they still have barbecue at like, you know, seven, eight o 'clock at night. Most of these other places, they start cooking, you know, the day before and then they they close when they sell out, which will be at like, you know, noon or one or two. So a lot of times you can't get barbecue. That's early in the day to sell out, man. It's crazy. Yes. So that's that's one of the things I love about Terry Black's is you can still reliably go get barbecue, you know, for dinner.

1:03:15And they're they're basically cooking 24 seven to accomplish that. There may be sometimes late in the evening where they run out of particular things, but it's not too bad. Another one I really like is La Barbecue. They're really good. That's all in Austin. There's another one. What is the name of it? They have a brisket taco that I really love. I'll think of the name of it in a minute. The hat I'm wearing is Snows. They're outside of Austin. They're about halfway between Austin and Houston. and they were they were number one years ago on the list they actually got featured on a uh if you go on to netflix there's a documentary about barbecue and one of the episodes is all about snow's barbecue uh and if you've ever seen it and forgot it was the one where the uh they had the little old lady that's the janitor at the high school is the pit master at the barbecue restaurant really it's a great story fantastic oh my gosh that does make sense too i mean like you know It's good if you're going to buy a hat for it.

1:04:14You know, like it's got to be good. They're only open one day a week, too. So they definitely drive up their own demand. How big is the line? It is in a town called Lexington. Very small. I think the population of the town is like 200 normally. And then on the weekends, the day they're open, it, you know, swells up to however many people are in line, which is well more than 200. Which day of the week is it open? Saturday? Saturdays, yes. Gosh. Get there for 5 a.m. kind of thing? Camp out all night? Yes. Is it Friday, Friday, every Saturday? I think when I've gone out there, it was like, yeah, 5, 530 when I went out there.

1:04:44And I would be, you know, 100th in line or so. Yeah. We should do a barbecue crawl around Tejas someday, Adam. That'd be fun. It would be fun. There's a lot of good barbecue. I mean, endless supply of places to go. I mean, I could name my own list, which would not be exhaustive comparative. Not as good as Carl's list, is that what you're saying? Well, you know, I used to live in Tomball, Texas. As you know, Jerry, you should call it Tomball. Tomball. Not Tomball. i know what you're about to bring up slight difference yeah tehas but see i knew before it was in texas monthly and you can go at any given time there was always barbecue and there was no line and then the moment they hit texas monthly because they have chocolate and barbecue it's a very unique place they're chocolatiers so is it what do they call it choclery or something like that i don't know what they call it but you can go there and get really good all sorts of chocolates and it's uh you got really good carrot my i think my favorite side there is carrot souffle and i've yet to find any any place to carry carrot souffle i've never even heard of that before i know well that's the reason to go there because they have it it's a signature thing and i'll check it out the next time my sister doesn't live far from there so when i go visit her i'm like hey you're in the mood for barbecue let's go um have you been to their birth the tehas burger place the same business but just i was gonna say yeah the tehas burger joint it's literally called tehas burger joint and Tejas is spelt T-A-J-A-S.

1:06:11That's solid too. I mean, they had, they have smoked burgers there, smoked brisket burgers there. They've got amazing smash burgers there, which is something I've personally have really worked hard the last two years, maybe three years of my life to perfect. I've finally got it down. So if ever you're in my neck of the woods and I have some good beef, I will make you a good smash burger. but it would be Tejas barbecue and near me right here in Dripping Springs, I would say pig pen, which is good for downtown. My other favorite, which is better. Don't tell him is, is the switch. I think the switch, Oh, the switch is good.

1:06:51Yeah. I mean, they've done some real special. They have a really good menu across the board from Turkey to ribs to brisket. I like the specialty stuff. the switch will come out with, like the tomahawk steaks and other stuff. Yes. Like what? Lamb ribs, other specialty items. The other one out near you, Adam, is it's not the best barbecue, but I love it just because I like their sauce, Salt Lick. That was one of the early ones I was going to. Controversial statements. Some people are like, oh, no, all these other ones are better. But it's a great social hangout place, and I do like their barbecue sauce.

1:07:28Not many Texas places do a mustard based sauce. Well, I go for the barbecue and stay for the pecan pie, you know, so. And back when I drank beer, they would have a few good beers there, but I don't drink beer anymore. But there the pecan pie is awesome. I think the cool thing about Salt Lake is that it's if you want to go to OG barbecue, it is the OG Salt Lake. And so this is like a property that was probably somebody's backyard at some point turned barbecue joint. And it's just that's the kind of site. It's a destination. It's a landmark. It's not just a place to go get barbecue. It's a place to go see barbecue.

1:08:04And in particular, if you get a chance to go there, what's cool about it is you get to walk by when you order. You get to walk by where they actually like roast and smoke a lot of the things. And so you can see the years, decades, decades upon decades seasoning, you know, around their pit. It's just really, really insane. It's an open fire pit. uh they'll they'll give you a tour of the place if you ask nice and it's it's an experience for sure that's what i was going to use experience i like it yeah i haven't been out there in a couple of years but i do want to go back and you're right that it's the original one they have another location up further north in austin that is it's good but it's not the same you're not getting the same environment i mean it's it's just not the same as the og location and in fact beautiful area too when we became friends a year or so back uh we had said hey we live close to each other let's meet at salt licks that never happened kind of sad so much shorter drive for you well you know on your way to something called texas linux fest oh there you go it pretty much is on my way it is you'll you'll go 150 to get here i'm sure you'll probably go 150 12 290 no the highway the road or both speedy on 150 on 150 you could go 150 on well i mean maybe if you wanted to you could you might die yeah the uh anything to avoid i-35 yeah yeah i like what i love most about where we live is the back roads like unless you want to you don't have to really not if you're going to downtown you have to take some highways but if if i'm going between here and san antonio except for once i actually get into san antonio i don't have to drive a lot of highways to get there it's a lot of really cool fun adventurous beautiful back roads with just views just beautiful views hill country yeah i love that so texas linux fest second year back officially since the vid is there any particular talk that you're looking forward to one thing i noted actually was that i didn't hear you say home lab and that kind of made me sad it's kind of like all home lab in a way but are there any particular home lab flavored conversations happening.

1:10:16Let me see. I know last year, uh, my friend Alex that works at tail scale gave a talk, but he wasn't able to make it this year. Uh, I know tail scales were popular among home labbers for good reason. One of those guys, one of those NixOS fans, uh, from the JB network, my friend Wes Payne, uh, he's given a talk mesh network sidecars for NixOS services. So if you're getting into NixOS for your home lab setup, um, that is something he mentions tail scale in the mesh network clients in the talk description. So I'm sure he'll delve into that and probably talk about ways that it can fit in home lab type stuff.

1:10:55Let's see. There's an NGINX talk that may be applicable for depending on what you have set up. I don't know how often home labers get into observability type stuff and monitoring. All the time, man. I'm sure some home lab setups are just like, oh, whatever. If it goes down, like, you know, my kids will tell me like the, you know, the Plex ain't working or whatever. And but other people get all into it and want to know, like, you know, real time analytics and other things like that. So definitely the monitoring talks and observability talks will be applicable to this to that. Yeah, that's what I'm doing more.

1:11:29So I want to do a little bit more. I would say metrics tracking, which is observability in a way. I just want to see how it's performing. I guess it is observability. Now I think about it. I'm not I'm not trying to build dashboards and go crazy with it. I'm just trying to monitor what's happening there and just kind of get feedback. More so kind of like the pilot filling the rut. Like, I just want to feel it. I want to feel how it feels. We do have a talk about getting started with Ansible. So home liners that might want to improve the repeatability of their setup, that might be applicable for them.

1:11:59We do have a SteamOS talk on the schedule. That's one that I am really interested in that I'll be bummed if I can't sneak away from organizing duties to go watch live. I was chatting with the presenter and he was asking details about the presentation setup. And a little spoiler, he's trying to figure out if he can, he wants to, it's about SteamOS on the Lenovo Go S hardware. And he was trying to figure out if he'd be able to do his presentation about it from SteamOS on the Lenovo Go. And I was just like, that's a fantastic idea. I would love to help you get that working. Hopefully you can bring any adapters you might need presentation-wise, and I'll try to help you get it set up and going.

1:12:40There's a databases talk. There's a NoSQL talk. Good number of Kubernetes things if you're getting into Kubernetes in your home lab. Yeah, but lots of various things. Nothing that is exactly home lab specific, but home lab is just the environment. It's all the other technology you're using in it anyways. Yeah, sometimes it's like, well, I'm trying to use this in enterprise. and it's like, well, can we talk about it in a home lab? We do have a CI pipeline workshop on Friday. That might be for home labbers that want to do, you know, automate their deploys at home. That might come in handy. Yeah, absolutely.

1:13:15I've been running, is it pronounced Git-T or is it Giddy? I don't know. I've heard both. It's G-I-T-E-A, and I'm just not sure. Is it Git-T or is it G-I-T-T? Just not sure. I've never heard an official ruling on that. Okay. I know sometimes people ask me about CentOS versus CentOS, and I'm like, sure, choose whichever one you want. There's no official pronunciation. Very cool. Well, glad to have you on the pod again. A friend, of course. 2025.linuxfest.org. Tickets are now$75. If you want some swag, it's$100. I might know somebody. Can you give out a coupon? Is it too late for that? You just can't do that.

1:13:55Ooh, a coupon. That would have been a good idea like yesterday to get ready. Maybe a short-lived one, like 10. The first 10 get a bonus kind of thing. I don't know, like 10 bucks off or something, anything. We had a coupon code for people that submitted to the CFP to give them a, basically give them the$50 ticket even late. Like basically let them get the early bird pricing continuously if they submitted a talk and didn't get accepted. 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-time speakers.

1:14:35The 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 presenters help organize. So we're familiar with all the little things that you would need, 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.

1:15:12See 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 move forward and present in spite of being nervous. And it's just part of the thing is, okay, 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 SteamOS on the Lenovo Go S or smart cities built with Kubernetes or whatever it is topic-wise that you have.

1:15:50So coming up with an interesting pitch, send it out there. And then a lot of conferences will, even 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. 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 wait list and tell them like, you know, something may open up and we'll fit you in.

1:16:33And we've already pulled up, I think, four or five talks from the wait list and put them on. But all of the speakers that we put on the wait list, 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. I wish I'd have had the forethought to get a special coupon code just for your listeners.

1:17:07If I did get that later on, is there a good way to push that out to people, maybe in the show notes? We can even, we can easily sprinkle it in there. It's not a problem. Yeah. Okay. Stay tuned, listener, to the outro. That's right. You'll hear that coupon code. I will harass some people today about giving me a coupon code for the Changelog listeners. Maybe a code like Changelog might work. Possibly. We'll see. Sounds pretty complicated. Can we make it easier than that? Easy to remember? Cool. Yeah, we'll look forward to that. Stay tuned to the outro. Right on. Bye, Carl. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Carl.

1:17:43Well, thanks for having me on, guys. Bye, friends. What a fun time talking to Carl again. It's been a bit. I like Carl. He's cool. Love talking about Linux, of course. Big fan of Linux. Are you a daily driver Linux user? Is it the year of the Linux desktop for you? Are you using Omarchi? What are you doing? How steeped in Linux are you? Are you a Mac user wanting to be in Linux? Do you hate Windows, but you're kind of stuck in it? Love to hear from you. We have a community, changelog.com slash community. It's free to join. Zulup is there. It's not Slack, but it's a lot like it. And you should join.

1:18:20Again, changelaw.com slash community. And a big thank you to our friends over at CodeRabbit. Big fan of CodeRabbit. CodeRabbit.ai just announced their Series B, so well-funded for the next phase. And they launched their CLI, which is so cool. A CLI code review tool that is built to run with the agents. So cool. And, of course, our friends over at Depot, Depot.dev. and our friends, our partners, fly.io. They support us. You should support them if you can. And of course, to our Beat Freak in residence, Break Master Cylinder. Love those beats. That's it. The show's done. We'll see you next week.

1:19:14on