 Welcome to the Home Lab Show, Episode 33. I want to say 32 for some reason. I think I got the thumbnail, right? Yeah. Well, 32 is multiple of eight, so it's habit, say 32, right? Yeah. Double-checking things here. It is officially Episode 33. We're going to talk about some package management and app management specifically, the confusion that can be around app image, flat pack and like all things in Linux, there's more than one way to do it. There's a lot of opinions about which way is the right way and we'd at least want to break them down so you can have the information you need to decide which way is the best way for you. If you want to use like these app images and flat packs or you just want to use the standard repositories or extra repositories that you may add to get things running and maybe we'll get a little nostalgic about the dependency hell that used to be Linux. It's still not gone but compared to the way it was 20 years ago, boy, life has gotten much better. Before we dive into this episode though, we want to thank a sponsor and that is Linode. They've been a sponsor since the beginning, we've been really happy with their service and if you've listened to this on a podcast, wherever podcast app you're using, it was downloaded from our website, hosted directly on Linode. A lot of the projects we talk about on here, we've demoed and used Linode 4. They've been a great supporter of the show. We just want to thank them and if you want to become a Linode user as well, we have an offer code in our down below and on our website, wherever you go, you can find this offer code to get you started, get you some hours, get you some time, get started with Linode, start some of these demos, do some of these projects we've been talking about, build your VPN server and someone else's cloud that you want to connect to to obscure yourself or many other projects that we've talked about through 33 episodes so far on this show. So I want to thank Linode for his sponsor and then let's get started talking about, yep, well actually I mentioned something right away. This came up because Jay solved my flat pack problems. Jay's been diving more deep into it so he's much more an alzrobot on me. I like flat pack, I use flat pack, I broke flat pack. Jay helped and so Jay let's start, I'll let you start leading with this of how all this works, all this magic. Yep, so I feel like we should probably start at the beginning or closer to the beginning kind of work our way through and this is probably something that we should have covered in detail earlier. I think we talked about everything that we're talking about today in very minor detail throughout the series. If we haven't had a dedicated episode, we like to have a dedicated episode to refer people back to in the future. So that's what this is all about. We're gonna talk about Linux app or package management in particular, kind of talk through the problems and some best practices, the different types of things like that. So really quick, I think a lot of people already know what I'm about to say, but we got to start somewhere, right? So package management in Linux is kind of like a, it's almost like the App Store mentality before we even had like the App Store buzzword before the first iPhone. Dependency management nowadays is much better, but in the past it was kind of annoying because you'd have to download, in the case of Red had an RPM package for, I don't know, let's just say Apache or whatever and then you need some dependencies so you have to have all those downloaded and you have to search for them. And I vaguely remember going on some websites and finding RPMs and all these things and putting them in the right folder and then getting them installed. And it was just tedious and annoying. It really didn't work out very well, but Debian had the right idea because you just apt install something and then all the dependencies come along for the ride. So it's a little bit easier. And let me start with Debian is the fact that going from an RPM based system for management, being able to apt get install was like, what is this magic? It goes and grabs all the different dependencies I needed to get this project going. And I was like, this is a game changer. And that's what actually made me move 20 years ago from Red Hat over to using Debian. Right. And no, the thing is about this that I think we take it for granted nowadays because Android is Linux. I mean, yeah, they go a different direction with it and there's some debate there that I won't get into. But, you know, we take it for granted. We go on our phone, go to the Google Play Store, whatever it is on your platform, tap on the app that you want and it just downloads and you don't really care about dependencies. Everything's all in one and everything just magically works. But with Linux in the, excuse me, specifically Debian it was like, you could just download something from a repository and it just takes care of everything which is kind of like back then the closest thing we actually had to an app store that I remember. Some Palm Pilots and things like that had, you know kind of like app store, but it really wasn't the same thing. I started with Red Hat as I think a lot of people have when I took the college class that got me started in this rabbit hole, that's what we used. And, you know, dependency hell was hard but I still stuck with Red Hat, you know going forward after that class for at least a few years and I don't know if a lot of people knew this but they actually ported app to Red Hat at one point. Yeah, it was called app for RPM and it was killed off eventually because they, you know, kind of solved this themselves. They had Yum install and things like that. But, you know, we take these things for granted but the idea was you have a, you know a Linux server workstation, whatever it is and you just go through a software repository pulls down whatever it is that you need and you don't even have to open a website. So back then it was very, very popular or very common if you were to, I don't know, go on a Windows machine go on Google, oh, I want to, you know, download Firefox so you type in Firefox in the search bar and you click on the first link which could be malware, right? I mean, you don't know, it's just, I mean, you're doing the right thing you're downloading another browser I don't even care what it is you're downloading Firefox, whatever it is you click on it, oh, it says Firefox click install there's all these toolbars all over my screen but on the Linux side of things there was, you know, less risk because you just install it from a repository you don't have to worry about clicking on the wrong thing as long as you didn't install a weird repository or something like that. So the platform at least at that time was more secure for many reasons, that being one. So that's kind of how this started and then as time goes on, as we'll discuss some new technologies have come around that have really changed the landscape. Yeah, it's kind of a refinement because as we had these package managers they solved a massive problem we had of just the untenable nature of how to update some of the packages and the problems like, you know, apt-get update like we talked about just in our last episode of the auto management is actually becomes so much easier to use. And when you had to download things as individual DEB packages or individual RPM packages to load that made it really difficult for some of the auto maintenance side of it. And from where we are today, back then there was less the security focus that there is now. A supply chain style attack would have been so much easier to pull off back then just poisoning the well because it wasn't a well it was a multitude of things kind of scattered everywhere and not a clear concise way to download them. So you would be like, yeah. There's like a horse trough, a really large one that everybody in the area had access to and it's just sitting there out in the open. So yeah, drinking well, that's interesting. Yeah. So, you know, eventually I gravitated towards Ubuntu and I had a fondness for Debian at the time because the package management was just that much better and I really liked it. And, you know, one of the issues that we had with this which, you know, get into why that matters here in a moment, but it's like when you have a non-rolling distribution especially when I was starting when I was coming off of Windows going onto Linux it's like we have a new version of open office, you know, at the time that's what we were using and before LibreOffice was a thing. And, you know, Windows users would just go and download it. Okay, great, it's out. I'm going to click on the button, download the thing and I have LibreOffice. But on Ubuntu, no, you have the same, you know version of LibreOffice forever until you upgrade your entire distribution which to me just didn't make any sense. It was like, yeah, I don't really want to be on the bleeding edge about everything but I would like a newer version of this one app maybe but no, just wait for the next version of the entire operating system which never really made sense to me and doesn't make sense to me now but then you have rolling distributions which are always up to date which are way on the other side way bleeding edge just to a fault. So package management still has some difficulties but some of the things that have come around and this is the first topic I want to get into is PPAs which are, I think they're still specific to Ubuntu. I know there's been some discussion about porting that to Debbie and I don't know if that happened yet or if it's going to but PPAs were a good idea and also not a great idea at the same time. The idea being- You have to solve the need. Yeah, it really is because the whole idea before PPAs which PPAs is kind of like almost like a successor to is the idea of an additional repository which is exactly the same thing as a PPA but there's a little bit of a difference I'll get into but the thing is if you needed this one app to be a newer version than the rest or what the distribution offered you just add the repository maybe from the manufacturer of that software and you could get that on your system. PPAs were kind of like that idea on steroids because they were very like PPAs are smaller traditionally than other repositories and typically contain just one thing for different versions of Ubuntu or whatever and you just add that PPA and you get that piece of software in your system everything's fine but the problem with PPAs is that there's really no way to know the health of the security because if someone is just taking it upon themselves to package something like I don't know sync thing or whatever it is are they keeping up with CVEs? Maybe, maybe not or maybe they were keeping up with CVEs very well security vulnerabilities and everything's been patched perfectly but then they start a family and they have a life they don't have as much time to go back and update the PPA anymore and next thing you know the PPA hasn't been updated for a year and you have a vulnerable package on your system so I've always told everyone use PPAs if you have to but you have to keep an eye on them because if the packages go stale you could be creating more problems than the problem you were solving. Absolutely it's kind of a funky issue too dealing with them because there's been times where they have saving when I really like shutter for screenshots, hand down, favorite tool but I've had to get it through a PPA because for whatever reason the people in Nebuntu says we don't like it that much to have it make it work in Nebuntu in the later versions I was never 100% clear on whatever drama went on behind the scenes. It wasn't updated if I remember correctly like it wasn't being patched or something and it was like kind of a risk at some point ago. We don't really make our screenshot utilities publicly accessible and forward ports to it so I'm not really sure I mean maybe a vulnerability chain could be a question here but I mean let's be honest a screenshot tool isn't the most egregious thing that could be unpatched but they have their policy. Right but overall it's not been too bad to add those in there and at least it was a good stop gap and it was a very well actively maintained project so I did it conscious of the potential problems of that this is currently active all up to fine and a solution so. Yeah you know the thing about Ubuntu is that if you use a lot of PPAs and I've seen this at first it's okay but then later on you do like apt update to refresh your repository index and you get a bunch of errors about some PPAs that are no longer online and it works and all that but you know sometimes we're complacent and ignoring errors and you could kind of tell the age of an Ubuntu system based on if it's not been maintained based on how many errors you get when you do apt update yeah there's three PPAs here that are offline so that solution you know it was okay but I just kind of feel like there could have been more like something additional to check the safety of it or to auto disable them if they're giving a 404 or something like that but yeah that really wasn't the way forward and you know the thing about the Linux platform is it's always been hard for developers because you know it's hard enough like at least not so much now but you know back when we had like several versions of Windows that are being supported at any one time we kind of still do we have Windows 10 and 11 now but developer would have to make a package for each version of Windows which wasn't all that bad but still that was one thing but then they look at Distro Watch which honestly you shouldn't really look at and you're just starting out because it'll confuse you oh my gosh I got to make a hundred different versions not really like you don't really have to make that many just three, four maybe but they don't know you know they're Windows developers they want to get their product over to Linux and then yeah no that's too much work I don't know if I should target Debbie and Ubuntu Sousa, Fedora I don't know what the heck I'm doing here so yeah y'all crazy I'm just moving on so that was a problem getting software adoption for the long time it still is a problem but there's some solutions we'll talk about very shortly that'll ever created to hopefully try to mitigate this exactly the we get into the image options that you have yeah the universal packages is that's it and you know before I get into that I'll have to mention the problem that are one of the problems that it tries to solve because a lot of people I feel like in the Linux community are oppositional towards universal packages they're like yeah no we don't that's horrible I'm just gonna apt install everything that's fine you know if you can apt install the thing you want then you're probably not the target audience for it so you could just happily do that but you know if it doesn't work for you personally that doesn't mean that there's no problem that it's legitimately solving that just means that you in particular you don't really have a problem that would be solved by it but you know Linux community wide there is a problem here and especially on servers you see an issue where I don't know maybe a new version of Nginek or Apache has a new security suite that it's supporting new features something but your distribution especially enterprise Linux distributions they stick to old versions to a fault and you're kind of left with the choice do I compile from source I mean you can do that but then the package database doesn't have any idea that you've done that so you can install or someone else can install Apache even though you've compiled it from source and now you have two and things get a little weird and then you have libraries that one requires that a newer version of another might require something else so it gets to be kind of a problem here and now that's a problem that not everybody has but then again you never have a problem until you do so I see people out there will say I don't want to use universal packages because it's dumb and I've never had a problem and I'm thinking yeah that's great that you've never had a problem but other people are having problems sometimes and this is a legitimate problem and from a user standpoint I don't necessarily want a rolling distribution to be bleeding edge on everything but if I want the latest LibreOffice because I write books and that's really important because LibreOffice they increase compatibility with Microsoft Office formats to the point where I wonder if some of the people that are complaining about LibreOffice and compatibility are just stuck on an older version and maybe those problems were fixed in a newer one but with universal packages you can pull down a newer app than the one that the distribution itself provides but you can make that choice stay with the distributions version or side load a universal package and get something new if you find that you need it. Absolutely, this is finding things well, Cayden Live is my pain and that's one of the reasons I started enjoying the flat pack of Cayden Live so much it's I couldn't, it was two problems it was different dependencies on FFM peg, okay. Yeah, so apparently I'm still live I didn't know if the stream was frozen so I'll just wait for Tom to come back and then we'll just, I don't know maybe edit out the blank spot. Tom is typing to me right now so technical difficulties, see what he says. Okay, so I'm just gonna go ahead and continue and then hopefully Tom shows back up his internet went out. Comcast is having some kind of problem I saw in the news lately so that could mean I'm next because we have the same provider and we're only about an hour away from each other so let's just hope that doesn't happen. So anyway, we were getting into the conversation about universal apps and right away the thing is you could use them or ignore them. Now some distributions kind of we force that along a little bit but that's another story but it gives you an option if you need the newer version of something you can get it. As Tom was saying he likes to have the newer versions of Kaden Live which is really important because Kaden Live crashes all the time so you really do need the latest version because how else are you gonna get the bug fixes but you're not going to get the latest version and the distribution. You have to wait for the next distribution or make that choice and use a universal package and when it comes to developers the concept around a universal package gives everybody or developers the option to make one package that could be installed on multiple distributions which is giving us things like Slack and a number of other apps that I'm not sure if we had that before or not but there's some commercial apps that are often required in the workplace that we have easy access to because of this so it's definitely a great thing to have and unfortunately there's a bit of controversy when it comes to universal packages and one of the controversies is that they use up a lot more space and they do actually use up a lot more space. I have a whole video about this on the channel but the thing is, do they use a lot of space extra? Not really. In my opinion, you could get a, I think a 250 or is it even a 500 gig SSD or something like that for $20, $20 US dollars? It's, I just don't think like the extra hard drive space is really all that much of a big deal but it depends on personal opinion but at least we have the option of getting the latest package and then developers have the ability to target one universal app type and then have that be installed on multiple systems just makes it easier for them and to solve some problems for us too because we can install a newer version of something and since it includes the libraries in that app then it's not going to conflict with another app on the same system because they could coexist there in different location and all the dependencies are in there too. So that's a benefit there when it comes to universal packages but what kinds of packages are there or universal package types, what kinds are there and why would I choose one over the other? The first thing to keep in mind is if you don't have a use case for a universal package then you don't have to use it. If you don't want a flat pack version of Kaden live then you're fine with the one that came with your distribution, just ignore the flat pack version and just stick with the distro version there's nothing wrong with that. It's all about use case. If you don't have a use case for a universal package no problem, just ignore it. But again, it's an option. Anyway, we have flat packs, we have snap packages and app images and there's some differences between the three. Generally I find that snap packages seem to have more command line apps than flat packs have flat packs seem to cater towards GUI apps. That's not to say that they don't or can't have command line utilities as well. Obviously they can. Flat packs are largely commissioned by Nome. I'm pretty sure that's where that technology originated from and snap packages originated from canonical to makers of Ubuntu. So considering that I just said Ubuntu then obviously there's gonna be some controversy there because that's a controversial company. Now the differences between flat packs and snaps they handle confinement differently. I don't wanna go too deep into that. An app can be more open or more closed depending on the use case. For example, if you install a web browser then it's gonna have to be at least a little bit open because if you wanna download a file from the internet where's it gonna put it, right? Probably in your downloads directory but if the universal package is so confined that it can't access the file system how's it going to put a file you downloaded in the download directory? It can't. So some packages are gonna be more open than others. The developer or maintainer makes that decision. Now one downside of snap packages is probably actually the biggest downside is that there's no repository. There is one canonical repository and that's it. You can't use anything else. You can't say thank you but no thank you canonical. I'm gonna steer this snap utility over to my repository where my stuff is and ignore your store. No, as far as I know there's no way to do that. So it's kind of like a walled garden and that has a lot of people upset rightfully so. I totally get it. We wanna be able to get things from multiple sources and not be forced to use one. So there's a little bit of disdain for snap packages because of that reason. That being said, they are a good solution though. If you could get over the fact that there's that proprietary nature of the store they're perfectly usable and the technology is good. Just depends on personal preference. Flat packs actually have the capability of being pointed at multiple repositories. Most people use flat hub. That's the go-to. That's the tried and true. Almost every tutorial I've ever seen on flat packs have you install that repository but there's nothing stopping you from creating your own repository if you wanted to which is a major benefit when it comes to flat pack. Other than that, they're very similar. They contain all the dependencies that they're built in. You install a flat pack or a snap package. You just run it. It's usually that easy. So just getting caught up with the live stream here. So app images are probably my favorite but also my least favorite at the same time. It's so confusing because there's some very good pros for app images and some egregious cons as well. The biggest con is that it's up to you to update it. So it's basically the same problem as a PPA. If you install a PPA, are you keeping up on it? Are you checking that? Did you get an update recently? Are you checking it for security vulnerabilities? Let's be honest, probably not. Even I don't do a good job with that to be completely honest but the fact of the matter is it's a legit problem that you do have to keep app images updated and since there's no repository for app images, you just download an app image and run it in place. You could drop that app image in your home directory, your downloads directory, bin folder, wherever you want, double click on it, it runs. So it's very portable, which is its major benefit but because it's portable and the system doesn't know where that app image is going to be and there's no standard location for that, how do you update that? How do you scan your system and do the equivalent of an app disk upgrade on app images while you can't? They do make an app image, excuse me, an app image updater that you could download but problem is that, yeah, it's hit or miss. Developers have to add a certain, I forgot what it was, but a certain feature set in their app image for that to work in the first place and it's kind of weird to download an app image and the job of that app image is to update other app images. It's just kind of funny. That being said, what I love about app images is because it just seems like a great idea to just download something and run it. It is a bit of a downside that there's no standard security. You have to kind of scan it yourself and kind of keep an eye on things but being able to just download an app image and just run it is great. One of my favorite things to do with app images is pair it with sync thing because you could have all your app images in one folder and sync that folder to all your computers. And then when you download a new version of an app image on one computer, all your computers have that same version as soon as sync thing syncs it. So I find that's a very powerful combo. Something that you can't do as easily with flat packs and snap packages. So those are the main differences between them. What I've noticed is that it's really hard to choose one of the three technologies and stick with it because sometimes a developer might make a flat pack available but not a snap package or a snap package available and not a flat pack or an app image available. I forgot what your video editor was. One of them actually distributes theirs via app image. So if you install a lot of apps, you'll probably end up in a situation where you'll have at least one of each type of universal app just by the nature of the beast. So it's kind of like we're trying to make a standard but now we have three standards. We have three competing standards when we're trying to standardize that's usually how things go. So let's see what we have in the comments. So someone asked if you can inspect what's running in an app image and the lack of consistency kind of makes that hard. Now, I haven't tested it yet. Linus is my favorite tool for checking for vulnerabilities. I mean, I have tested it. I just haven't tested it against universal packages yet because I don't personally run universal packages on servers as of right now. I have a video coming about Linus. It doesn't cover its ability or inability to scan universal packages. So I don't know if it does or does not but I do have a video coming about it that'll at least give you the rundown on how that works. But at the very least, you have to think about your universal apps in terms of security. So if it's a text editor, for example, and that's all that universal package does and let's just assume that it has no internet capability. It's not a text editor that downloads plug-ins. It's just a text editor. If that's behind, it's not that big of a deal, right? Because it's not like you forward your text editor to the public internet unless there's a vulnerability chain. There's no way that that's going to be a problem. But if it's bit warden, for example, where your passwords are stored, you need to keep an eye on that. And sometimes it can come down to making sure that you have the latest version by checking it manually. And you can also make that easier by subscribing to the mailing list for whatever app you're using that's important because when there's a new version, you'll get some kind of a notification for that. Or you could just subscribe to the RSS feed for their blog and you can just see that anytime they come out with a new version. Okay, I'll just go ahead and download it. So there is a little bit of manual work there. Flatpacks, at least on my end when I have them installed, I just run flatpack update and it updates all of them on my system, which is pretty cool. And then there's also, I wanna say flatpack remove or flatpack uninstall. And then the option dash dash unused every now and then that's the problem that Tom had actually is getting these errors about some flatpacks that were out of date and un-maintained and he ran that command, it cleaned it right up. Flatpacks, even though they contain all the dependencies, they still sometimes need a platform like a GNOME flatpack or something that contains the toolkit in there that it uses. So there's still gonna be some dependencies and some shared dependencies here, not nearly as many, but in Tom's case, he had a flatpack that he updated to a new version and the prerequisite flatpack that it required also updated, but it didn't remove the original one. So there's no security risk necessarily in that case, because it wasn't like an internet library or network library or anything like that. He just ran the dash dash unused option with either, again, either flatpack uninstall or flatpack remove and cleaned it right up, everything was fine. He just had a bunch of warnings on his screen and kind of weird. So every now and then you do have to clean up your flatpacks, whereas snap packages, they just regularly, they just update. Big problem with that though, there's some things that you probably don't want to have automatically updated. And Kaden Live is a good example of that because you do wanna keep that updated because there's bug fixes and it crashes all the time. But sometimes they introduce new bugs in new versions. And if you're like me and trying to get some videos out the door, rendering them and get them uploaded and you have like a finite amount of time to get that done, you don't really have time to wrangle with new bugs when you're trying to get your work done. So if a package is automatically updated, that could work against you if you are wanting a specific version with flatpacks, you could freeze them if you need to, which means they won't update, use that sparingly. But the problem with that, as far as I know, you can't say to flatpack, I want a specific version of this package because this is the one that works the best for me. You could freeze the one that's currently installed, but if you install a brand new Linux install on a brand new laptop, you're gonna get the current version of that flatpack no matter what. You could freeze it going forward, but it's really hard to retroactively pull an older version if there's a regression in a newer version. So there's some difficulty there with snap packages is even worse because they're just gonna up an update on you, whether you want them to or not. So there's definitely some pros and cons with them, but the whole point is you could get applications that you need at the versions you need or a newer version, even if your distribution doesn't support a newer version, giving you the option, or you could just ignore them and use the distros package if you need to do that. Canonical is constantly in the news for what people claim is shoving snap packages down everyone's throat. My personal opinion is that, Canonical is a company. And if you don't want a company decision on a distribution put on you like that, use Debian or use a community project and you wouldn't have to worry about that. So I feel like if you're the type of person that really you don't like that and I totally get why you wouldn't like it, probably Ubuntu isn't a good fit in my opinion because they're gonna keep doing this. It is what it is, it's their distribution, they're a company, they have a different plan than a community does, but taking the politics out of it, these technologies are great. It's giving us something that we really need, not everyone needs it. It may be some people are fine without it, but like me, I write books for example, I want the latest LibreOffice. I want the Microsoft Office compatibility to be the latest. So when I send something to my publisher, I don't have to worry as much about something not opening for them that I save in LibreOffice. So for me, I really like that. So I'm gonna go ahead and look at the comments and see if there's anything there I'd like to address. Now someone did mention that universal packages for desktop apps can start or take a longer time to start, which is one of the things that is a downside. The odd thing about that is it doesn't have to be, that's actually more common with snap packages than flat packs. For me, none of the flat packs I have installed take any time at all to open. They're all like pretty much instant, like just as fast as the distro version. Snap packages can absolutely take some time to open. Now I'm not 100% sure of this, but I'm pretty sure it's because the developer, whoever's creating the snap packages and doing something right, there is a way to work around it. I know Canonical has actually met with companies where their software was taking up like a long time to load and they helped them fix it. So it's fixable. I don't know why most people don't fix it, but it's one of those things where it's a legitimate problem, but it's not widespread. App images, in my opinion, don't take longer to load, flat packs don't as well. Snap packages can, like I mentioned, I think the problem with snap packages is that it was kind of like considered ready for prime time before it actually was, because when they were starting to push it, the themes were different. You could tell it's a snap package because it would look different than every app on your screen. It just wouldn't have the same theme. It just looked kind of weird. And people hated that, and I understand that. It wasn't ready. It wasn't that it was broken. It's just that people really didn't know how to, create them without them being slow to open. The themes were inconsistent. So I kind of feel like some of the negative reputation for snap packages wouldn't really be a thing if they weren't in such a hurry to get it out the door. And although I don't think they admitted this, I think they were just really trying to compete with flat pack. So I think that's why they rushed it, because Nome was trying to solve this problem at the same time. Canonical is trying to solve this problem, and then all of a sudden it's a race. But I think Nome, I'm not mistaken, might have started working on it sooner, but I could be wrong. Either way, we now have three technologies that are, I don't want to say wanting to be the dominant force or anything like that, but everyone makes that assumption that that's the goal, is for one to dominate, but I don't personally think that's true, but I think they can all coexist, but it just depends on your use case. So let's see if there's any some more here to answer. Comcast is horrible in Washington. They're horrible in Michigan too. Yeah, so I'll take a few more questions guys, and then we can go from there. And while I'm waiting for the questions to fill in, I'll just say at the end of the day, use your best judgment. If you don't use snap packages or flat packs or app images just for the sake of using them, you have to have a reason to use them. You have to need a new version or something like that. Just don't use it for the sake of using it. If you need it, you need it, but less is more. Fewer repositories, better. Don't install PPAs unless you have to. Don't install snap packages, flat packs, or any of those other things unless you have to, because it's just another thing for you to maintain and keep your eye on. And that might be more work than the average person is able to do. So if you have that one off app, then you can go ahead and do that. I actually have the flat pack version of almost everything on my systems, but I also have that automated with Ansible too. So it's not really a management overhead in my case. Most people aren't going to have the Ansible config that I do. So honestly, do as I say, not as I do, I guess. And someone brought up HDDVD greater than Blu-ray. I was really hoping that HDDVD would take off, but we all know how that worked out or didn't. And also someone pointed out too that you don't have to use a universal package or something like LibreOffice because they have their own repository. That is true. So I do realize that many of the apps that I mentioned might also have repositories too, so you could avoid the universal packages. But generally speaking, if you're using a repository, you are kind of, in my opinion, bringing additional problems in. There's such a long debate and discussion about the security of these things that I don't really want to get into. I favor non-repositories personally. The argument can be absolutely made in the other direction though. I totally understand that. It's just a matter of preference. But repositories, in my opinion, I just would rather see repositories used for system packages like the Linux kernel and your core system packages. So I don't have a rolling system, but just have the apps separate. Have a LTS repository or channel or universal app or something that has the tried and true packages so it's not bleeding edge or it could opt into a more bleeding edge repository if you want to. But no matter what happens, I think distribution packages are absolutely here to stay. I don't think that's ever gonna go anywhere. The use case might change, but I do favor the universal packages for GUI apps when it makes sense. Again, it depends on your use case. Yeah, so there's a number of people that are mentioning some problems with universal apps. And I feel like that the big problem here is reputation because what I don't think some Linux companies understand is that reputation is everything in Linux more than any other platform, bottom line. Look at ButterFS. They called it 1.0 when it still had some bugs and no one has ever let them live that down. ButterFS is like forever scarred their reputation. Even though I think it's fine and if you're managing your system properly you shouldn't ever have a problem but they rushed at 1.0 and then Canonical is pushing snap packages out the door while there's still some big rough edges there. And now the reputation there is bad. GNOME 3.0, the first release of GNOME 3, Nome Shell was missing all the features and just wasn't good. I feel like GNOME is great now but they pushed it out the door and when it wasn't ready and now there's a large number of people that dislike GNOME. So the common thread I'm seeing here is that when you have problems here with these technologies it's often the case that they rushed it out the door and then when you have a reputation you have entire groups that are against snap packages and against this and against that usually it's down to the reputation. Maybe the problems have been fixed now but or maybe not. Either way the reputation will be here for like five more years regardless of what the developers do. So I think that's kind of something that keeps happening. So yeah, I think that was basically everything for this episode that I wanted to discuss. I'm not sure what we're going to do in the next episode just yet. Maybe there's gonna be some follow-up discussion on this, I don't know if Tom wants to do that or not. So maybe we'll do that in the next episode. Maybe we'll switch to a completely different topic but I would like to do a Q&A episode whenever we can. So definitely go to the show's website right in your questions because our ability to create a Q&A episode depends solely on whether or not we have enough questions. Sometimes we'll get like a lot of the same questions so we might get like 10 questions but like six of them are the same one so they don't like counts as one and then we don't have enough for an episode. So if you guys have a bunch of questions please ask send your comments in, your questions especially and maybe that's what we'll do next time or the time after that. So I appreciate you guys. Thank you so much for following this podcast. It's 33 episodes in, technically 34, we started at zero. So I can't believe we have that many episodes into the podcast at this point. So yeah, that's that. So thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it and stay tuned to Tom's channel and my channel. We both have some great content coming maybe even some collaborations in the near future. So we'll be seeing you guys very soon. Thank you. All right guys. So I guess we could consider this like a post show thing. I messaged Tom to close down the stream because technically the episode is over but I guess until he does that I could just hang out with you guys for a while. So yeah, if you could ask some questions if you guys want to about anything at all I think everything Tom might edit the later parts out since technically this isn't the show anymore. So I'm just watching the stream. There's a bit of a delay. So I think there'll be a delay. You guys ask me a question and then when I see it, Home Lab show after dark, I like that. That's fun, real fun. So really cool. Still have 31 people watching after the episode is technically over. Now that's dedication guys, you guys are awesome. All right, so do you guys want to chat about? I am like, I have nothing to do for probably 20 minutes right now. I'm not saying the stream is gonna last 20 minutes. It could die at any point whenever Tom hits the button, but yeah. Yeah, thanks Astro Cat. So community.learnlinux.tv that's the forums for my channel, please sign up. There's an approval process. It might take a couple of days before I get over there and improve your account but please go there and blow it up. Like make it super popular because that'd be really cool. Let's see what else we have here. So Joshua, I have a video. I just recorded about that. I have a feeling that the SSH video that I've done about managing that is going to be, there's two already, but I have a feeling like there's a lot more to talk about in that space. So my mindset is get those two videos out the door. And then once I do that, then I'm sure you guys will let me know what I missed and then we could probably do another episode to iron that out. What fun projects am I working on? Okay, so my project lately is not exciting. It's learning how to say no. I mean, ever since I've been on my own, it's like, I get requests, can you do a video about this? Yep, can you do a video about that? Yeah, can you do this video? Sure, I just say yes, yes, yes, yes. Next thing I know, I have so many video projects going on that I can't even get to the forums lately. That's why I haven't been there that often because I'm just recording and editing so many things. So I guess what I'm going to do is just say no to the unexciting reviews, like I'll review a laptop or something like that. But if it's not something that I think you guys care about, maybe I'll ask you guys if you care about it. But I gotta stop saying yes to everything so I can lighten my workload a little bit. Other than that, it's been video projects. That's really what I've been doing, getting caught up on those. I have a bunch of UB keys. I wanna do an updated video on that. So I plan on doing that as soon as I can. I wanna do an updated Next Cloud video. I have at least two SSH videos that are recorded. One is about SSH config file. The other is about multiple SSH keys for multiple servers, which will help, I'm sure. I recorded a video about Proxmox backup server. That's pending editing now. So you guys will have that one. There's another CrowdSec video that I recorded that's being edited. A review for two of the recent Tuxedo laptops and one video is done. That's recorded and being edited. I filmed the video on Raspad, the final version of that. I'm editing that video as well. So I have that one to do plus about three or four episodes of Linux Essentials that are, it's already recorded. I just gotta get these things edited. So I have all those things coming. So I have like, I think 200 gigs of footage left to go through right now. So that's a lot. So that's what I mean. I just do everything. And then all of a sudden, why am I so busy? Oh, right. Yeah, not my finest moment. Let's see. I'm gonna get caught up here on the chat. Oh, thank you for helping out AstroCat in the forums. I'm glad you're doing that for me, approving people because yeah, it's just been so hard. I think quantity or quality over quantity is gonna be the thing. Like I probably can't do a new video every single day. I could do several a week for sure, but lately some weeks that there's been a video every day. I don't think I can keep that up, but eventually I'll be able to be more active there too. Basic file server recommendation. Try open media vault. I like that one a lot. It's pretty easy to install. You can install it on a Raspberry Pi and a desktop, a server, whatever it is. You could just install it on a server that's Debian. You could just run the script. So I would probably start with open media vault as that one. What else do we have here? Any suggestions for a tablet style interface for a home assistant? No, but that's something I'm looking into. It's on my list. I don't know when I'll get to it, but pretty soon because I have the Raspad, which might be a good fit for that. I did a review on it because some of these things that I review, like they don't ask for them back. So they didn't ask for the Raspad back. So I'll probably turn that into a well-mounted home assistant thing. And I have a project downloaded like, excuse me, bookmark that's supposed to do exactly that. I just don't remember the name. But as soon as I'm done with my video projects, I don't know where that's going to fall. It could be with my current workload like two months until I do it. But it is on the list though, because here at home I actually want touch pads or touchscreen controls in each room to manage everything. So I will definitely be attacking that problem for sure. Any more Raspberry Pi videos? No, not at this time. But I am getting the new Raspberry Pi Zero in, but I don't know if that's really going to make a video because there's a drop in replacement. I'm just going to put it in my handheld Retro Pi. I'll have some other ones. So there will be more Raspberry Pi videos for sure. I am thinking about doing a video on PopOS on the Raspberry Pi I've had many people ask. The only reason why I haven't done it yet is because every time I record, that's the last time I'm editing so things don't get out the door. So it's like I really, really want to, but then I'm delaying other videos by doing that because I've agreed to too many videos. So I'm really hopeful that I'll be able to install the PopOS distribution on the Raspberry Pi 400. I think that would be a very fun video for sure. Have I been doing anything more with my Raspberry Pi cluster? Unfortunately not. I do want to do a Kubernetes series like I did with the Proxmox series, but I don't even have it written yet. I haven't had any time to go back to it yet. So I imagine when I start working on that, then I'll just do more videos about the Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster. At the same time, I'm writing the series whenever I get around to it. I don't have an ETA on that yet. I also thought about doing a series on Debian. I'm kind of just trying to figure out where to go next here. And there's like a bunch of different tutorial series I want to do, and it's a matter of picking my favorite, but I want to do them all. So there again is my problem. I want to do everything, but I don't have time to do everything. Do I use any voice assistance with my homelab? I did. Mycroft, that's the thing that's behind me. I think you guys can see it in the background. It does do that, but I haven't had time to work on that. I broke something. I don't know what I did wrong. I used to have it to the point where it could like play music and stuff. Like it sucked up to a really loud speaker system. And I'm definitely going to do that for sure. I just haven't had the chance to really go back in, figure out what I broke, get it updated. And once I do that, then maybe it'll make a video. I guess we'll see. Cool. So yeah, I have some really good thoughts here. And let's see if I missed anything. I'm sure I did. Bear with me. So the stream is going to close down any second now. Tom is ready on that end. I'm going to try to do a live stream on my own channel. I don't know when, maybe today, maybe next week. Not sure yet. Probably not today, but definitely on my list of things to do. So anyway, thank you guys so much. I think I've stolen enough of Tom's live stream. So I'll catch you guys later on my own channel. Again, if you're part of Tom's audience and you're not familiar with me, it's learnlinux.tv. If you go to that website, it's got a link to the YouTube channel there, forums, everything I do. You can go there, check it out, and that'll be that. So thank you very much.