 Welcome to the Homelab show and I can't believe it, but this is episode 99. How are you doing, Jay? We've reached level 99, so I'm doing pretty well. Reaching level 99, we still have so much to do, so much to talk about, so much is changing. And this is an interesting one because Linux Safety Net, why you need a secondary distribution, why it's essential. This is going to be a fun topic that I'm going to let Jay take the lead on here in terms of talking about it. But there's some things that are changing in the Linux industry. But then again, they're always changing and I don't even use the distro I started with. So I think this is probably more relevant than I thought it was when Jay first suggested it. Oh, yeah, yeah, there's definitely a lot of relevance, a lot of things happening. I mean, you're right, there's a lot of changes, but there's also more changes coming than I think we normally have at any given time. So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Yeah, as companies get different leadership and different changes that happen, there's kind of the ebb and flow. So having a backup distribution makes a lot of sense. But before we jump into that aspect, we, you know, there's changes that happen even with our sponsor. We used to call them Linode, now we call them Akamai Cloud, but it's the same great service from the same great people. They actually didn't change a lot of the leadership there. They just kind of got bought and got a lot more services. And they've been a sponsor of the show since the beginning, since before their name change. We really like Linode. If you're looking for a place to host your projects, that many of the home of that projects sometimes are better suited for setting up in the clouds, such as hosting websites. And that matter of fact, if you were listening and downloading this podcast, you downloaded it from one of the Akamai Cloud servers where we've got our WordPress instance set up. And you know, maybe one day we'll do that as a topic if there's enough feedback and suggestions on it. But we do host that all with the Akamai Cloud and we thank them for being a sponsor. There's an offer code down below to get you started with it. And let's jump into the day's topic. Oh, I think we'll do feedback first. Yeah, we may as well do feedback first. We need to get more feedback. So I think people need to send us feedback. We like it. You're not bothering us. Trust me, we're not bothering us. We enjoy the emails, feedback at the HomeLab.show. And we had someone write in something rather interesting that we have not covered at all as a topic. And it's because me and Jay are not the most well-researched people on this. But we actually said, you know, we have a lot of photos. And so do most home labbers. And I always believe in being in control of all this. Now, I'll fully raise my hand here in saying that, yes, I've not followed the best open source philosophy on the photos because, yes, many of them are in Google Photos. I do have local copies. I also use Synology Photos. I like Synology Photos, but I do know and completely flame me in the comments on this one. It's not an open source product. It's just something that works really well and lets me maintain local control over it. But there are tools out there such as PhotoPrism. Now, Darktable is an open source tool that we use for editing some of the photos. Darktable is really slick. PhotoPrism looks really slick. I have not dove deep into it, but it's definitely a neat looking tool. And this might be a good topic that we covered a future date that definitely worth digging into. I also admit we do use GIMP for all of the thumbnails. Actually, I use Canva in my regular workflow. So someone says, didn't you say use Canva Tom? Yes, for my other YouTube stuff. But I really feel the homelab show should be edited with GIMP. So there's a GIMP template I set up each time with this. I just feel like that this should be part of what I use. I'm trying to go as open source as possible on the homelab show. Open source really makes things accessible for all of you. And PhotoPrism being a really interesting open source project. I don't know if it's going to be and it probably won't be quite the replacement for the really amazing amount of features you're going to get with a project like Google Photos, because Google has a lot of money to throw at that project and because Google is making money at it. I don't think Google Photos is going to end up in the graveyard. But the there is a graveyard that led us to Google Photos for anyone that remembers Pocasa. Leave a comment down below if you ever used that tool. It was such a great tool. Yeah, Google killed it. So, yeah, whatever. But yeah, OK, Google. Yeah, but yeah, you can't there it is what it is. There's a reason we talk a lot about why we self host things, why we want to maintain autonomy over our systems, why we want to stay in control of all this. And absolutely, this is going to is one of the things that really drives people to HomeLab is to be able to be in control of your destiny and self host things. And also why Jay is going to talk about why you need a secondary distribution to also stay in control of your destiny. Because if the distro starts making choices that you go, you know, I don't like what they're doing. I don't like the way the leadership is pushing these features. And it goes against my design philosophy. And in the open source world, we can just fork it or choose another distro that's been forked from previously. There's the variety is what makes it such and first daunting to get into open source, but also fun and exciting because you can change what you do. That's exactly right. I think we should probably mention the fact that we're going to be out for a little bit. Yes, I know I'm going to try to get a guest to co-host. I don't know if that'll happen yet, but I'll be on vacation for a bit. And I think you'll be out of town. So we'll miss at least one week, possibly two. We'll have to see how many depending on a co-host, but we'll be back. Yeah, we'll be back if you are aware. Yeah, just so you're aware. If you don't see, we didn't stop at 99. We just it's a coincidence. Tom is going to be at MSP GeekCon, other stuff I've talked about on my Vlog Thursday live show. Jay's got a vacation coming up. So we're going to be on a plane when we normally record. So it's not going to we're just going to skip a couple if we have to. We'll see if we can bring a guest in and get things lined up for you. Yeah, we'll let you know. But let us know feedback at the HomeLab.show. All right, I've said that enough. Let's go ahead and get started talking about today's topic. Yeah, let's do it. So I feel like this whole thing has a lot of backstory. And I've been talking about a secondary distribution for a while. But I feel like recent events just kind of bring this more more to light and kind of elaborates more on why I feel that way. And in case of point, I've been using Linux for a long time. I've seen distributions come and go. I remember using a distribution at one point called Lycoris that I'm sure nobody remembers. I mean, there's all these different things. And I remember that distribution, let you play solitaire while it was installing, which is ingenious. But that's cool. Yeah, instead of watching the progress bar, you just play solitaire. But it was a great distribution, you know, came and went. And then I started with Red Hat and Dabbled. And, you know, I've seen I've seen a lot of things come and go. And nowadays, I would say we see probably fewer distributions go because we have the staples and most people stay with that. But, you know, everyone, I think, thought CentOS was a stable choice. And when IBM bought Red Hat, even I thought, well, CentOS is going to see some changes, but it didn't, not for a while. You know, it was years later, the dust settled. And well, I was right in the end. But what I was wrong about is I thought it would happen sooner. I think a lot of people felt that way. I don't think that was unique to me at all. But what that caused, and this is enterprise, I'll bring it back to HomeLab in a second. You know, how many IT teams out there had to have a all hands meeting because this distribution that they were told is going to be supported for a certain amount of time. They just decided they didn't want to support it anymore and go a different direction. Now, I'm not going to disparage CentOS Stream or anything. I feel like some people love it. And, you know, some people are OK with that direction. But the thing is, anybody who was not OK with it, they had some choices to make all of a sudden. And those choices are easier to make if you have a secondary distribution. And let's define that real quick. I think it's probably obvious, but just to make sure, I think almost everyone has their go-to distro. Some people have a different distro on their server than the desktop, or maybe someone's all in on both. But what would happen if your distribution doesn't exist tomorrow? Now, that's very unlikely. Again, these staples have been here for a long time. But then again, CentOS changing, we would have thought that was unlikely too. So what would you do? Would you rebuild everything quickly or would you already have a secondary distribution that you've been testing that you could just fall back on if your primary distribution was to go away? But what if it doesn't go away? What if it stays around forever, but it changes and goes the direction you don't want or don't want to follow along with? That'd be a reason to pull out that secondary distro. Sometimes it's just fun to dabble with another distribution, even if you don't have a reason. But enterprise, that's going to hit companies harder when it comes to migrating. I mean, just imagine migrating 1,000 servers. That's not easy to do. And finding out you have to do that all of a sudden, that's a very stressful time. But in the Home Lab, we kind of roll with this. We have fun with it. We don't have a bunch of users that are going to come after us if we mess things up. But at the same time, we don't want to do unnecessary work either. So having a secondary distribution where you could just test your Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Configs, whatever it is you have, maybe run some containers on it just to make sure you can run the same containers, whatever it is, it's just a good idea. And we're going to talk more about why it's a good idea. But it's generally a good idea just to have that in case you need it someday. And it's not rocket appliance, we'll say, to switch between distros. It's a matter of learning some of the different package managers. One of the things I like when you compare Debbie into Ubuntu is if you already know Ubuntu, you're really easy to go over to Debbie and are really anything that's using the app to package manager. And if you're using it for things such as running Docker, it's even easier because most of the stuff is going to be, if you're using Docker compose, the distro doesn't matter as much at that point because it's not going to change much. Your underlying OS is not going to make a significant difference under that because you only need the minimum components to get Docker up and running it from there. You're just working on the configurations for Docker. I think there's probably some people out there in our audience that just consider Docker the operating system because maybe they just app install Docker, DNF install Docker, and then they don't even care anymore about the distribution that everything is on top of that. I know we were probably going to get a few people writing that in. It's still write it. I mean, still finish it. That's fine. But I know that there's people out there. There's nothing wrong with that. I think we're kind of doing it right if they don't care about the distribution at that level. I think that's doing it right. We want to be resilient. And I also want to mention the Elevate project, which will move you in place from one enterprise Linux distro to another, like Rocky to Alma, Alma to Rocky, Red Hat to CentOS, CentOS to Rocky, whatever combination. It's actually pretty amazing. Obviously, make your backups first. But if you're moving from one enterprise distro to another, you have that tool, which is just brilliant. But then again, it's not very common that someone's going to move to a distribution so similar because if they want to try something else, they probably want something even more different. So let's talk about more about why I'm bringing this up. I feel like there's a big, huge, ginormous change in the Linux community that's starting now. And we really don't know completely where it's going to go. I'm going to make some predictions, but my predictions are just predictions. I don't want anyone to think I have inside knowledge. I do have a little. There are some of these predictions that are based on things I know that I can't say because I was told in confidence. But many of these are just predictions that I think are common sense based on what we're seeing. I think the fact that we're seeing change is probably common sense at this point. I mean, CentOS changing was just the beginning. The dust has settled on that. Now, Red Hat unfortunately has a bunch of layoffs happening. And that's really sad because, you know, I have a lot of friends that work at Red Hat and I've started with Red Hat. So I have very fond memories with, you know, Red Hat as a distribution. I remember a friend of mine, Alex, who I'm sure a lot of you guys will remember from the self-hosted podcast, which is an awesome podcast. He invited me out to lunch there and I got to see the inside of the building. Was it just amazing to experience that, especially considering that's where my career started and to, you know, see the actual building for the distribution I started with was awesome. But, you know, now fast forward, you know, from November till now, they have a bit of a problem. There's layoffs happening and that's very unsettling. But I think it's also evident of a larger change. But I think the overall theme of the change is going to be community distributions becoming much more popular than they were before. So we think of, you know, some people, especially in HomeLab, because I think companies, you know, sad as layoffs are, you know, maybe a company using Red Hat has had layoffs themselves. So they might feel some kind of sympathy and I do too, obviously it's a sad situation. But I think a HomeLabber is going to be more likely to say, well, I'm not going that direction if they're having that much trouble, nothing against the distribution of people, but I don't want to be a part of that. And that's very possible. And some companies out there might just want to go a different direction because of, you know, some distros being in the news and it's just a lot of drama. Now, more specifically, we, you know, Red Hat and the layoffs are just the beginning. We just learned recently that the program manager for Fedora was let go from his position, which is also sad. And I'm not going to say that Fedora is doomed or anything like that, but Fedora is going to see some change as a result of this. I think a lot of people love Fedora and we'll keep it going. I think if Fedora was ever having trouble, there'd be a lot of people raising their hand to help it out. Because again, there's just a lot of passion around the distro, but change is change. And you never really know. Ubuntu was in the news constantly because, you know, they're, you know, talking about SNAP every other day or practically several times a day. And it's like, we get it, you made SNAP. Okay, that's great. And the people that want to use that, they're fine with that, but some people are not. But at a certain point, it just kind of muddies the water a bit. And we aren't focusing on the Linux community. We're focusing on, you know, what the corporations are doing with it, what Red Hat, IBM, Canonical is doing with it. And we're just trying to use Linux and get away from the drama. I think for that reason, you know, companies will either pull away from a distribution that they're using because they don't want to, you know, go down that path or they want to try something else. I mean, there's all kinds of reasons why. Maybe the industry makes them nervous and they want to be in control of that. And what better than a community distribution that's not controlled by a company? And we think of Debian, anything could change, you know, Debian could become something we don't like at some point, sure, but I think it's the least likely distribution to change that I know of. Sure, I could be wrong, but I could foresee, you know, Debian getting a huge surge of users from Ubuntu that are just tired of the drama and they want their apt package manager without, you know, hearing about Snap every five seconds. So I think that's gonna be more popular. We're gonna see Rocky Linux and Alma Linux and the Enterprise Linux spin-offs that have come around since CentOS become more popular, companies switched to it. I think overall, the theme is gonna be community Linux distributions are going to reign supreme and companies are just gonna start to have a harder time selling a product around that other than support, of course, but we're even seeing that being problematic nowadays. You know, it's funny, it's funny, perfect timing. Someone just commented that Debian changes way too slowly, but this is actually, if you're dealing with things from a business standpoint or a stability standpoint of your project and you want that stability, honestly, my forum server, it runs on Debian because I don't want it massively changing. I like how my forum server works. I care that it serves up reliable forms where people can have discussion. It's actually has over 90,000 unique visitors every 90 days right now. I want that to be very, very stable. I don't want whatever, if there's a new driver, I don't care. That's not really what I need a lot of that for. So that's why it's so important to have some of these OSs that are very stable, very slow changing, and very reliable when you have projects like forums and things like that. I love my desktops different. I don't mind some latest drivers for desktops. That's a discussion me and Jay were slightly having about changes that come at the desktop last night when we were talking about this because we know pop OS is doing cosmic. I'm excited for that, but a cosmic desktop has a different use case than running forums or running a website that I just need up and running. Exactly right. And let's talk about Debian because I feel like that's gonna be, the change in Debian that's coming with this new release has nothing to do with anything that I just said, but it is changing, it's good change, and I wanna call it out. Now, first of all, the issues I have with Debian, I do agree that the software is too antiquated. I agree that you don't need bleeding edge software and you especially don't want bleeding edge software on servers and you can make an argument that you don't want that on workstations either, but that also doesn't mean that things need to be three or four major versions behind in order to be stable. There's just no truth to that at all. I mean, you could literally have a 0.4 release of an app and have a far, you know, or pretty much the same number of bugs, but just, you know, being several versions behind is just not, I just don't agree with that being necessary, but thankfully we have Flatpak now. So that doesn't matter. I mean, if you want the latest version of something, you can just download it through Flatpak and leave the distributions package base alone and keep the stable curated Debian stable base and then just piecemeal any specific application that you want. And one example of this is LibreOffice. LibreOffice 7.4, I forgot the point release at this point that was just put out, I think several days ago and it was said that it's gonna be the last version of that major version of LibreOffice, the last version of the 7.4 series, you know, 7.5.3 is out and they're basically saying, stop using 7.4 and use 7.5. Now, one thing I will say about Debian is that they're doing a major disservice to its community by, you know, locking LibreOffice to 7.4 because what happens is Microsoft makes new versions of Office, they're moving it forward, but now LibreOffice isn't being moved forward and it has to be moved forward to keep up with the change and compatibility of Microsoft Office. As a result, you have a old version of LibreOffice that just doesn't have the compatibility improvements, but again, Flatpak, right? It doesn't matter, just uninstall, you know, apt remove LibreOffice and all the packages, install Flatpak and then have LibreOffice on there. I think everyone should do that, do not use the version it comes with, but so I think basically the antiquated software problem just isn't really a problem now. So that's a complaint that I basically will have to shut my mouth about. The other issue that I think has plagued Debian for a long time is it has had the worst hardware support of any distribution on the planet because they don't enable new hardware at all. You could be like Debian 12 could come out, I can guarantee you, you can go to Best Buy right now by the latest computer, it will not work with the hardware because it was frozen six months ago, but then again, they're enabling proprietary drivers and making that like a lot less of a problem now. And I think Debian 12 might be the best jumping on point that Debian has ever seen. Like at this point, people don't have to fight as hard to get their Wi-Fi to work. I was testing it the other day and it's not even out yet. I was able to use Net Install over Wi-Fi. I've never been able to do that before without finding drivers, putting them on a flash drive and telling Debian where to find the drivers is just a pain, but it worked out of the box right from Wi-Fi. So I feel like Debian 12 is going to be the best Debian ever. And it's going to be the best jumping on point even for novices that want to check out Debian, but maybe in the past have had a hard time. They have Flatpak for the new apps and they have built-in support for non-free software, which has been a long time coming. So kudos to Debian for the direction they're going because they're going to get a lot more popular very soon, I guarantee it. Yes, I'm excited to try some of this stuff again. I have a mix, I still have Debian servers, I have some Ubuntu servers and I'm not a fan of the Snap stuff. I see comments flying by about Snap. That's still, I commented when I made my great log video about the challenges of, if you choose a bunch of server install, they've decided that Docker should be installed with Snap, but then that causes a ton of permission problems. They're not insurmountable to fix. It just requires more time to set up and fix and work around those issues. When in reality, there's not issues if you just use Docker not install the Snap. So I don't need more problems. I don't see what problem they're solving either. Well, I think that there is a very legitimate problem with universal apps as a whole because a lot of people say, well, that's not a problem, I never had a problem. So I just want to make sure my point is clear, you never have a problem until you do. And the problem is you're stuck with the libraries on the system. So if you wanted to install a new version of Nginx or a new version of whatever it is, then if the libraries are too old, then you got to figure that out. And then when you get that running, what you've done to make that app run might conflict with another one. So you have to kind of balance that. Containers have largely made that not an issue anymore, but universal apps take that out of the package base. The system packages, the kernel, the libraries, just stay there and are still going to be used. But then you just have another source or applications that doesn't collide with distribution. Now the problem with Snap is that it's very premature. It needs more time. And there's a number of issues with it. And I think that they just rushed into this because they wanted to compete with Flatpak so much. And they saw the traction that Flatpak is getting that they have to fast forward. And next thing you know, you have a Firefox snap package that takes like what, 10, 15 seconds just to launch for the first time. And it took a while for them to fix it. That shouldn't never have went out the door. So what canonical has to understand, reputation is eternal in Linux. If you mess it up, you're never going to be succeed. Snap will never happen. It's not ever going to be the primary one. They could push it, they can create contracts with every company they want. It's not going to beat Flatpak. They need to just adopt Flatpak and just admit that it's not happening. And it's not happening because they're premature. They would have waited a while and made sure all the bugs are ironed out. People might have actually loved it, but I feel like they've ruined it for themselves, unfortunately. Yeah, it's really interesting because it's just, I don't understand why you would want to rush out a product. I get the use for universal apps. There's a lot of things and a lot of problems and that does solve them, but it doesn't mean you start competing with them without a fully ready product. The Linux community has a long memory for things. That is for sure. You would still get people who love to reminisce on what they first started on and it'll have an opinion. Cause I had some really poor opinions of the very first versions of Ubuntu Server is what kept me using Debian. And some of those were like, when I set up Apache servers for companies and set up forums and things like that, some of the defaults that Ubuntu chose were way different than Debian. And I didn't understand why they would do it because it actually created, like just doing some of the install setups. They didn't have enough, I think it was the number of workers available. Some of the way it would set up the sessions, you'd run out of some nuance they had to the Apache, but why would they take the Debian and just reduce all the settings that you'd have to go copy them and put them all back into the higher settings just to get a functional web server. There was a lot of little things in the beginning that I still hold against them. Now they don't do that anymore. They completely don't, but it's the Linux community. We hold grudges, I'll just say it. Yeah, I think that is very true. I still get comments from time to time. People say, Ubuntu is tracking me, which is not true. You can look at the information that's going upstream yourself and see the JSON file. You'll see that if you agree to send it because it's opt-in, it'll have your manufacturer of your computer, the video card, the network card, or things like that, your hardware. They want to know how it works, and that's what it's for. In the past, they used to have the Amazon search results in the thing, and that was legitimately a big deal. That was a silly decision. And that's why people nowadays will still say that they're being tracked, even though that's not true, because they were at one point. And it's just to your point, grudges are eternal in Linux. That's just how it is. I wish it wasn't the case, but it is what it is, right? It took them a while to take the stink of that off. Exactly. And sometimes it's, someone could feel like snap is the best thing ever, but still not want to be in that drama and the infighting and all this other things that's happening and just want to go a different direction just to get some peace and quiet. Sometimes it's just all about that and not even about the technology. But having a secondary distribution, if you at any point want to switch off of something it's easier, all of my configs, I have three, I'm not saying anyone should do this, but my Ansible supports actually more than that. Papua has Ubuntu, Debbie and an Arch. Papua has been my desktop choice and Ubuntu on the server, but the thing is I maintain all of those so I could go to Arch Linux on the desktop if I all of a sudden didn't like Papua OS one day or Debian on the server if I wanted to go that direction from Ubuntu. I could do that because I test all of my configurations on all of them and it works. It's 100% identical. If I use Ansible against a Debian system or an Ubuntu system, the known desktop will look exactly the same and be indistinguishable from both. But then again, I also have a lot of time to do that, whereas companies on the other hand, they kind of don't. So that's why it's kind of hard to do that. But having that secondary distribution does a few things for you. I mean, not just in your home lab. Imagine if you are testing your company's config management solution on a different distribution and the primary one goes down a path the company doesn't want to follow or just goes away. What do we do? What do we do? And then you just raise your hand and said, I've been testing our stuff on this other distribution the entire time. You're preventing a lot of weekend suffering, like work after hours, weekends, that's required and you've already done some of the work. I mean, that's just pretty cool. I'm not saying to work yourself too hard here, but at the same time, the moral of the story is if you think your distribution is going to be the same tomorrow, I think again. Now, when it comes to Ubuntu, recently they doubled down on no flat pack when it comes to their flavors, like as Ubuntu, Kubuntu and the like, they have to ship snap in that flat pack, which I thought was a silly decision. That's another story for another day, but it's still a change. And honestly, that's just the beginning. There's more changes that I know about that they might have reversed, but I feel will still happen that I unfortunately can't say, if you think that's the end, there's more. There's more coming. I just don't know when, but Ubuntu is going to be in the news again for the reasons that I think, but I can't say more. I'll just stop myself right there. But, and that's the thing. There's a lot of changes here. I mean, Fedora could have trouble on account of their program manager, depending on how they'd sort that out. And if they don't have trouble now, maybe they will later or maybe they never will, but the moral of the story is you really don't know. And it's not, once you've built like an Ansible Playbook that can set something up for you. So we've talked many times on this whole podcast about when you build something, there's building it by hand, and then there's building it via script. So you can be a very repeatable system. First time you may have to build it by hand, make note of all the changes you did, and then go back and start writing an Ansible Playbook so it can then enact all those changes on an automated basis. Now there may be some nuance to the way things are from different distributions, but then you can actually build that nuance into your Ansible. This is one of those things that Jay has really taken over time and built his Ansible this way. So you put a detection, oh, they stored this here or oh, it's going to need to DNF instead of apt to be able to get this package to make sure these packages are available before I configure them. But once you keep thinking from that standpoint, it's not that hard. Once you have these over time built files on there, and Jay's been working, me and Jay, we're talking about this a lot because he's working on, he's got a series of Ansible videos. He's has more stuff coming out around that topic to keep people in this mindset. Ansible's probably one of the best ways to do it. I do know there's other services out there, but you'll find that Ansible's probably one of the most supported and pretty much universally supported across different distributions to make this a pain-free transition, whatever distribution changes happen can affect you a lot less this way. I'm glad you brought that up because I feel like cross-platform tooling is always the best. Cross-platform all the things whenever you can because anything that requires a specific distribution is lock-in period. I've worked in places where I had to talk people out of using, I'm trying to remember what AWS calls their config management solution. I know somebody in the chat room will know the answer. I haven't worked with AWS in a while, but their config management solution, guess what, works at AWS. So if you are a company that gets a, and this happens, and it's happened to companies I've worked for that are all in AWS, we get a client and they say, I don't wanna be hosted in AWS. And my thought process is why do you care because we're hosting you? So, shush, we're gonna take care of it. The whole point is let us do it. But they'll mandate, and we're not gonna sign the contract unless you don't use AWS. So guess what, now you're using Azure, a Google Cloud or something, even if you didn't before. And the tooling that's in AWS is not gonna work on those other clouds, but of course Ansible will, it works on all three. So an Ubuntu instance or a Debian instance and Azure is gonna be the same thing in AWS other than default usernames. And you just throw your Ansible scripts at it and that's great, your cross-platform. And you can pivot, doesn't mean there's not gonna be any manual changes. There will be, there'll be far fewer and you're just gonna be more resilient as a Linux admin. I think that's where everyone wants to get to. If you're all in on anything at all, anything you're doing it wrong because that is creating a requirement. And if that changes right from underneath your feet, well, what are you gonna do? It's really hard to pivot if you don't use cross-platform tools. And I think that's gonna be at the heart of this because that's what makes having a plan B distribution even possible in the first place. Absolutely. And there's so many changes coming. It's just like one of those things where we don't really know how it's gonna change, but I think it's quite clear that community-based distributions are going to be a lot more popular. And my prediction is Debian 12 is going to be where we're going to see the first taste of that because my prediction is after Debian 12 comes out, there's gonna be news that it's very popular. Not that it wasn't, it's always been popular, but I feel like it's gonna be downloaded a lot. They're gonna see a lot of traffic as soon as Debian 12 comes out, probably more than they've seen before, especially considering so far in my testing, this is the best Debian yet and the best jumping on point for newcomers because a lot of the rough edges are pretty much ironed out in this upcoming release. And I think that alone will also make it a good target for people. My prediction, not that I have any inside information, my prediction is we might see J using a little more Debian as he's speaking so highly of it. I will defer that from this conversation. It may happen. I mean, it'll be interesting to see what happens out of this because I'll be out for a weekish, probably closer to two, but I'll still be on Twitter and all the other things and I'll be testing this out ahead of the final release. I was just curious about it and what's interesting is one of the things that made me curious about this was I wanted to randomly try out the Sway window manager because it's been a while and I thought I'll just install Debian because it's not gonna have so many weird things getting in the way. I could just play around with it and just install it and have a more reference installation of the Sway window manager, which is an alternate version of I3 for Wayland systems basically, but thought it'd be a great time to check it out and I wanted the project. I might make a video on the I3 and Sway thing, but in so doing, I figured I'm gonna install Debian 12. Why install Debian 11 at this point when the new release is around the corner and then next thing I know, I'm diving in and thinking about how it's gonna get reviewed if it stays as stable as it is today because so far I haven't had any issues with it. Not saying everybody should use it in production yet though. I wanna be clear, it's not ready, it's not released, but so far it's pretty impressive actually. I mean, there's somebody using something too soon in production, Ubuntu tried it with Snap. Oh, I mean, there is that. We'll go back for one more dig at them. I mean, come on. At least as a community, we can agree to dislike something. That's something the Linux community can sometimes really agree on. Yeah, I still think it's gonna be weird that Debian 12 is gonna ship with a version of LibreOffice that the developer is telling us not to use. So that'll be a little interesting. But again, Flatpak is just odd, the antiquated software but it does have the latest LTS kernel, 6.1. So, and I'm thinking it'll support our DNA3 graphics cards but I haven't quantified that yet. It looks like the packages are there. I'd have to test that, but that'll be pretty promising. If Debian supports our DNA3 video cards, that'll be great. Cause if they don't, then that's gonna upset a lot of people if they can't use their new AMD or ATI video card. So we'll see how that goes. But so far their Plasma fans are gonna get Plasma 5.27. The last version of Plasma 5 that'll ever be released ahead of six. So Debian users on Plasma are gonna be on the latest version of Plasma with Debian stable for quite a while, which is just one of those things that you couldn't possibly have timed better, I think. One last question I've seen in here will be, what do you think of Alpine Linux? Isn't that the lightweight distro for hosting Docker? Yeah, you could use it for other things too. Primarily it's for that. I think it's fine so far. I feel like Alpine stays out of the news because it's, you know, in a good way. It's just not trying to be everything to everyone. It has its job, it does its job. And if you could build something on top of it, then you probably should because it has a lighter footprint. It's not something that I would install on a server necessarily, although you can, I think a more server oriented distro would be better. But for containers, I mean, that's, you're probably using it right now, even if you don't realize it, because your container image that you downloaded might even be built on it. Yeah, absolutely. All right, I think that's all we have. Yeah, that's a lot. And there's a lot to infer from this because now it's like I'm setting up everyone to think about it. And now, you know, it'll be interesting to see what actually happens as this develops. So I think we'll probably follow up to this at some point. There will definitely be some follow-ups. I will suspect Jay has some videos coming out soon that are gonna be talking about the other distros to make sure you're also subscribed to LearnLinuxTV where that video can be found. And actually, we talked about Ansible several times. Jay has a great series of Ansible. I just wanna throw that out there. He's been doing some killer Linux tutorials that are all grouped together. Definitely go check those out if you wanna expand your knowledge and all those. There's some great stuff in there. But that's all we have for you today. In the meantime, watch Jay's videos and cause it may be a couple of weeks before we get the next one of these out. So there's plenty to do. There's some prerecorded ones that'll still happen. I know this week in particular, I haven't put out a video this week, but I'll put out at least one this week and there's gonna be uploads, but the good stuff is coming in. I should say the better stuff is coming in May. That's when you'll see some newer distro reviews and some other shenanigans that I have up my sleeve. Yep. And my gray log video is out to release that last week. So if you are wanting to get started with the newest version of gray log, I cover that in depth. I went a lot more in depth than the other video because well, I've been using gray log longer. I've got more proficient at it. So I've really covered a lot of things, even wrote some new extractors. I put them all up on GitHub. So you don't even have to watch a video if you just want all the different extracting tools I've wrote. Those are all, anything I create on here, I'm giving them all away for free. So that's something I'm making available to people. I was a big open source advocate for it. And if I'm gonna take the time to produce these, why not give you all the stuff I did? But leave some comments down below as to what your favorite distro is. This is always a fun, informal version of a poll, I guess you could say, for what your favorite distro is. So. We're probably gonna be archer Debbie because I think those are the two that always score the highest. If you look at my view counts, for example, I think it's pretty obvious, but we'll be surprised and I wanna be surprised and often I wanna be wrong because that's how I learned. So let us know what you think. And as the joke goes, it's really easy to figure out who's using arch because they'll tell you. Or they'll be wearing a t-shirt. Or they'll be wearing a shirt. Well, they will make sure you have been made aware. So. All right, well, thanks everyone for joining us. This was a lot of fun. Send feedback to feedback at the homeland.show and I'll see you next time.