LINUX Unplugged

We take KDE Linux for a spin and push it a little too far. Plus, a friend of the show stops by with a fresh tool: Nebula Commander.
Sponsored By:
Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.

Support LINUX Unplugged
Links:
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
Pasadena Linux Party, Fri, Mar 6, 2026, 6:00 PM
KDE Linux - KDE Community Wiki
Beta (Enthusiast & Stable editions) · KDE Linux · GitLab
Install Software Not Available in Discover - KDE Community
KDE Linux / Kapsule · GitLab
suikan4github/Using-tailscale-client-on-an-Immutable-OS
xuars/kdelinux-tailscale
Nix - KDE Community
Fitting Everything Together — TLDR: Hermetic /usr/ is awesome; let's popularize image-based OSes with modernized security properties built around immutability, SecureBoot, TPM2, adaptability, auto-updating, factory reset, uniformity – built from traditional distribution packages, but deployed via images.
Nebula Commander
DEMO Nebula Commander
Nebula Commander GitHub — Nebula Commander is a self-hosted control plane for nebula overlay networks.
Star Trek Comm Badge for Home Assistant Voice Control
Pick: hcloud-upload-image — Quickly upload any raw disk images into your Hetzner Cloud projects!
Pick: Launcher Studio — Launcher Studio is a GTK4 desktop application for creating and managing .desktop files on Linux.
Launcher Studio on Flathub
Pick: tinyproxy — A light-weight HTTP/HTTPS proxy daemon for POSIX operating systems
Pick: socks-to-http-proxy — An executable to convert SOCKS5 proxy into HTTP proxy

Planet Nix and SCaLE are just days away, and we're getting a head start with two guests, the tech, and the trends shaping open source. Our trip starts here!
Sponsored By:
Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.

Support LINUX Unplugged
Links:
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
Pasadena Linux Party Meetup
stahnma (Michael Stahnke)
Flox, Nix, and Reproducible Software Systems with Michael Stahnke - Software Engineering Daily
Pro OpenSSH (Expert's Voice in Open Source): Stahnke, Michael
Nix and AI, are we there yet? | SCALE
stahnma/mandatoryFun
Post by @kelseyhightower.com — Bluesky — I don't care about LLMs or AI. I care about people. AI is just a tool to me. Tools enable people to help or harm at a scale beyond their natural abilities. I care about how people treat each other using these tools.
distrostru's gatus config
Status Page On Demand | Gatus
MimiClaw — MimiClaw turns a tiny ESP32-S3 board into a personal AI assistant.
hrwtech/openclaw-esp32: OpenClaw on your Arduino ESP32 devices
Pick: WebsocketCAM — Access Android camera via WebSocket client API and run AI / computer vision tasks with ease on live camera stream
Pick: ChrisLAS/openclaw-mcp-bridge — OpenClaw plugin that bridges any MCP HTTP server as native tools. The missing piece between OpenClaw + Ollama and the MCP ecosystem.
Pick: ChrisLAS/freshrss-mcp — A simple MCP server to stand in front of your FreshRSS Server
Pick: wechsel — A Cli Utility to replace home folders with symlinks to project folders
wechsel-extension: A Gnome Extension for Project Switching

We were minutes away from shutting down our Matrix server when the Discord news hit. Now we're not just keeping it, we're doubling down. Can open source seize this moment?
Sponsored By:
Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.

Support LINUX Unplugged
Links:
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
Pasadena Linux Party Meetup
Discord to roll out age verification next month
Hack of age verification firm may have exposed 70,000 Discord users’ ID photos
Discord's Age Verification Has A Weird Link To Palantir's Peter Thiel
NULLFS and OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE Features Merged For Linux 7.0
OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE To Provide A Security and Performance Win For Dealing With Containers
All about initramfs
pivot_root implementation and constraints
TrueNAS Scale
ZimaOS — A Simplified, Focused and Open NAS OS Supports all X86-64 hardware.
Github: ZimaOS
Clan — opinionated NixOS peer-to-peer computer management framework
What is Clan? - Documentation
clan-lol/clan-core: Build your own clan
ConnecTen internet
Case Study: Fortress Outdoor Router
Pick: booklog — B{ook}log is a self-hosted, multi-user book tracking platform for avid readers. Each user maintains a personal library and wishlist, with per-user readings, stats, and timeline.
Pick: whosthere — Local Area Network discovery tool with an interactive Terminal User Interface (TUI) written in Go. Discover, explore, and understand your LAN in an intuitive way. Knock Knock.. who's there? 🚪
Pick: Weylus — Use your tablet as graphic tablet/touch screen on your computer.

The news this week highlights shifts in Linux from multiple angles. What's evolving, why it matters, and that moment where the future actually works.
Sponsored By:
Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.

Support LINUX Unplugged
Links:
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
Pasadena Linux Party Meetup
Valve explains why it hasn’t announced release dates for its new hardware, now plans for “first half of the year” — Valve now says all three products will ship “in the first half of the year.”
Latest VirtualBox Code Begins Supporting KVM Backend — Support for KVM or other native OS hypervisors in conjunction with VirtualBox has long been sought and it's finally becoming a reality.
bcachefs-tools v1.36.1 — Interactive TUI for monitoring various filesystem internals, slowpaths and device performance, with duration and frequency tracking for various events. Helpful for diagnosing performance issues.
bcachefs v1.36.1 is out - next release will be erasure coding : r/bcachefs
bcachefs PSA: if you're on 1.33-1.35, upgrade asap — Several people have been hit by this, so - please upgrade asap.
Mattermost — Mattermost is an open source platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle.
Debian's CI Data No Longer Publicly Browseable Due To LLM Scrapers / Bot Traffic
Venice AI - Private AI for Unlimited Creative Freedom
ThinkBox V2 - A Custom 4-Bay SATA/SAS HDD NAS for Your Lenovo M720Q
Code for Climate 2026 — The Mad Botter Earth Day Open Source Challenge — We're doing our Earth Day open-source competition again The Mad Botter INC. Once again featuring System76 hardware and this time with dual tracks for college and non-college students.
Michael Dominick on X - Earth Day Open Source Challenge
Red5d/podcast_mcp — MCP server for accessing Podcasting 2.0 RSS feed episode data. "I've really only tested it with JB feeds!"
Pick: Plexus — Remove the fear of Android app compatibility on de-Googled devices.
Plexus-app: GitHub
Pick: ReinschriftTodo — Reinschrift combines a native GNOME interface with the simplicity of plain text. Your tasks remain a normal Markdown file – easy to back up, versionable via Git, and editable on any device with your favorite editor.
Reinschrift on Flathub

We stress tested open source AI agents this week. What actually held up, and where it falls apart. Plus Brent's $20 Wi-Fi upgrade.
Sponsored By:
Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!

Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.

Support LINUX Unplugged
Links:
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
Agenda - PlanetNix 2026
SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG"
Pasadena Linux Party Meetup
LINUX Unplugged 650: This Old Network — We rebuild a small office network around Linux, with an Unplugged twist and real-world constraints. Things don't go quite as expected...
OpenWrt Wiki - Ad blocking
AdBlock-fast — AdBlock-Fast is a high-performance ad-blocking service for OpenWrt that integrates with Dnsmasq, SmartDNS, and Unbound.
OpenWrt Wiki - Supported Hardware Table
Abe's volition — This is a public, sanitized version of my Abiverse repository for people to use and run their own Abes
OpenClaw — Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use.
Introducing OpenClaw
openclaw on GitHub 🦞
openclaw security Issues
Practical changes could reduce AI energy demand by up to 90% – University College London
moltbook — the front page of the agent internet
SeloraBox - NixOS Edition — SeloraBox is a self-configuring home automation appliance based on NixOS, featuring automated installation, device claiming via QR code, and self-updating configuration management.
nixtcloud: Nextcloud with NixOS in the backend and P2P connectivity enabled — Nixtcloud turns a Raspberry Pi or NanoPi NEO3 into a privacy-first, zero-config personal cloud — powered by NixOS, Nextcloud, and peer-to-peer remote access via Holesail. Built for the self-hosting crowd who want full control without constant babysitting.
Holesail.io - Open Source P2P Reverse Proxy
Pick: ml-sharp-pinokio — One-click 3D Gaussian Splatting generation from a single image.
Pick: Gradia — Gradia helps you get your screenshots ready for sharing, whether quickly with friends or colleagues, or professionally with the entire world.