Logbot (Nov 28 2025 at 19:35): Logbot (Nov 28 2025 at 19:35):Our old friend Lars Wikman returns to the show to discuss Linux distro hopping, Elixir, Nerves, embedded systems, home automation with Home Assistant, karate, and more. :link: https://changelog.am/119
| Ch | Start | Title | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 00:00 | Let's talk! | 00:37 |
| 02 | 00:37 | Sponsor: Tiger Data | 01:38 |
| 03 | 02:15 | Karate & Friends | 04:04 |
| 04 | 06:19 | Why Karate | 03:54 |
| 05 | 10:12 | 35 | 00:55 |
| 06 | 11:07 | Karate Kid | 05:35 |
| 07 | 16:42 | Switching teams | 00:55 |
| 08 | 17:38 | Sponsor: Augment Code | 01:38 |
| 09 | 19:16 | Not Arch btw | 04:16 |
| 10 | 23:32 | Arch kills SV | 01:27 |
| 11 | 24:59 | The 4 DIMM problem | 02:25 |
| 12 | 27:23 | Fedora 43 | 01:23 |
| 13 | 28:46 | KDE things | 00:46 |
| 14 | 29:33 | Queueing a stop | 03:33 |
| 15 | 33:06 | Adobe alternatives | 05:21 |
| 16 | 38:27 | Mac-like Linux | 01:11 |
| 17 | 39:38 | Blender | 01:36 |
| 18 | 41:14 | Linux on the rise | 01:52 |
| 19 | 43:06 | Distro "hopping" | 03:36 |
| 20 | 46:42 | Ricing | 03:00 |
| 21 | 49:41 | Indie Mac software | 04:26 |
| 22 | 54:07 | Sponsor: Depot | 02:43 |
| 23 | 56:50 | Sponsor: Framer | 01:51 |
| 24 | 58:41 | Not a power user | 01:38 |
| 25 | 1:00:19 | Jerod wears a shirt | 00:39 |
| 26 | 1:00:58 | Lars on Nerves | 10:16 |
| 27 | 1:11:13 | ZimaBoard | 03:57 |
| 28 | 1:15:10 | Greenhouse sensor | 00:57 |
| 29 | 1:16:07 | Home Assistant | 01:41 |
| 30 | 1:17:48 | Why Raspberry Pi | 02:08 |
| 31 | 1:19:56 | Tinker time | 04:08 |
| 32 | 1:24:04 | Older Pis | 00:24 |
| 33 | 1:24:28 | Jerod's Pi use case | 01:21 |
| 34 | 1:25:48 | Observability | 04:02 |
| 35 | 1:29:50 | Adam's Plex idea | 02:47 |
| 36 | 1:32:37 | n8n | 02:01 |
| 37 | 1:34:38 | Muddy license waters | 01:55 |
| 38 | 1:36:33 | Stand-ups | 01:20 |
| 39 | 1:37:52 | Getting started | 05:33 |
| 40 | 1:43:26 | Freedom to play | 03:28 |
| 41 | 1:46:54 | Lars URLs | 01:48 |
| 42 | 1:48:42 | Bye, friends | 00:16 |
| 43 | 1:48:57 | Next week on the pod | 01:27 |
Nabeel S (Dec 02 2025 at 17:23):Nerves sounds cool, but I think a Raspberry Pi is overkill if all you need to do is control a relay or read a simple sensor. Especially if you're going to use HomeAssistant anyways, I think ESP Home and an ESP8266 is a great option. No programming necessary, the pins are configured with a bit of yaml.
Andrew O'Brien (Dec 08 2025 at 16:04):Wondering if Adam's tried Bluefin now that he's settling into Fedora. I'm mostly a Debian person, but I tried Bluefin (based on Fedora Core) after a Ship It episode about it. I've stuck with it and haven't felt like I've had to fiddle too much.
The entire distro is built like a Docker (well, Podman) container. It's an immutable distro. I've never had a problem with updates because I don't customize at that level so it just A/B installs periodically. All of my dev work is in containers (distrobox) or VMs. CLI tools are managed through Homebrew and desktop apps through Flatpack.
The only downside I've found is that it doesn't play nice with other OS's in other partitions on the same drive. But that's not huge for me because I have another drive in the machine.
AJ Kerrigan (Dec 08 2025 at 18:20):That discussion did seem ripe for a Bluefin mention :thumbs_up: . I did appreciate that Regolith came up though! I've tried (and failed repeatedly) to get that working on Bluefin via Distrobox, and have been using Gnome's Tiling Shell extension in the meantime. The tiling situation is my only notable lingering papercut with Bluefin.
To be clear that isn't a Bluefin problem, it's just that I got Regolith so locked into my brain/hands that switching to a machine without it feels really clunky.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Dec 08 2025 at 22:25):my primary setup is COSMIC on Bluefin, with tiling enabled
not too tricky to add COSMIC to Bluefin with rpm-ostree and i haven't had any layer/merge conflicts when the base Bluefin layer is updated, so far at least
AJ Kerrigan (Dec 15 2025 at 06:44):I've started using COSMIC with tiling a bit, and it's definitely an improvement - good call :thumbs_up: . It has a couple things that I have a hard time living without, which seemed somewhere between tedious and impossible in GNOME even with a tiling extension: stacking layouts and simple keyboard shortcuts to move focus directionally (rather than alt-tabbing). There are some other things I think I lost, but could just be a learning curve thing. As a wise man said in another thread, Linux is a rabbit hole :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
Last updated: Feb 17 2026 at 17:33 UTC