Linux After Dark

Chris is struggling to decide which distro to install on his new work laptop, and he and Gary want to pick a new distro for the people they support. Plus Joe wonders what moving on from Xfce would look like.                   Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes         See our contact page for w...

The most precious machine in our stack of laptops and PCs, excluding anything we actually use regularly. This is a short episode because Joe is having a summer break.               Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

We revisit the topic of the dire situation with hardware prices, this time with a focus on getting the most out of machines with limited resources.                 Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

We all seem to be moving away from Ubuntu, but there are still quite a few reasons to keep using it.   WG Tunnel PiVPN Charlie’s OggCamp talk about infrastructure as code                 Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to...

How we get back to our home LANs when we are away travelling etc. It mostly involves WireGuard and Tailscale. We also get into blocking ads, mostly with Pi-hole.                 Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

Chris ended up with a managed M4 Macbook Air at work with no sudo or root. So how does a Linux user get on with his first ever Mac? Turns out pretty well, thanks to lots of open source software and a terminal.               Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes         See our contact page for ways to get i...

May wants to make a space heater out of an old computer, and Joe is thinking about buying a new (used) laptop. The heater will be pretty straightforward but finding the right laptop will be much harder.             Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subsc...

We decided to give openSUSE a try. We had a great time. Honest.                 Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

May has actually been using her stack of laptops and learning that “legacy” distros make more sense, the Firefox flatpak performs better than other packages, Linux Mint is a fine distro, Linux has the best calculators, and GNOME’s scaling is really good now.             Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes &...

The end of Windows 10 and the terrible state of Windows 11 are driving more and more people to Linux. How do we help people actually manage the switch and stay with Linux?           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

With the price of RAM and storage through the roof, what are we going to do when it comes to supporting people who come to us for IT advice?               Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

How do you convince people to stop using unethical technology like generative AI?             Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

We follow up on episode 104 from September last year when we promised to tackle some Linux projects including moving to Immich and Jellyfin, learning about Docker Compose and Python, and ditching Synology.         Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe t...

We look back at what we wanted to happen in the Linux and FOSS world in 2025, and talk about what we want to happen in 2026.         Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

We tell stories from some of the tech support nightmares we’ve found ourselves in. This is a short episode because Joe is having a break for the Christmas period.           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

Some of the Linux and open source tech from our past that inspired where we are today.           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

How we’ve all set up our backups including GUI distros vs doing it the hard way, ZFS vs Borg, and why it’s tricky to chose the right offsite location.           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .

Some of our Linux hot takes including the LTS release model being broken, Linux media being out of touch, social media being the root of most evil, and people being too angry and defensive about the software they use.             Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to...

We’ve done various challenges in the past where we’ve bought Linux machines on a seriously low budget, but what if we had an unlimited budget? What would we buy in this hypothetical situation? It turns out we all struggled to come up with anything and are pretty satisfied with the machines we already have.   Note that this episode was recorded before we found out that Framework su...

Florian Beijers joins us again to give us an update on the state of accessibility in Linux and whether things have improved since we last spoke .   Florian’s YouTube Channel Techy Twitch streams Accessible gaming Twitch streams fireborn’s blog posts about accessibility in Linux           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes...

We cover some of your emails, questions, and comments. A challenge suggestion of not using a package manager, donating old hardware, why we don’t use custom ROMs on our phones, whether low end laptops with soldered eMMC storage are worth buying (they aren’t), and tips for using Home Assistant with Apple gear and Jellyfin on Android.   The terrible laptop we mentioned    ...

Summer is officially over. As the nights draw in it’s time to hunker down and work on our technical debt. We all have Linuxy projects that we are planning, so we commit to doing them by Christmas – when we will record a follow-up episode. Docker Compose, Immich, Jellyfin, learning Python, moving away from Synology, Home Assistant, and more.             Sup...

It’s the £20 Linux machine challenge! This time the rules are stricter: no adding storage and RAM. It turns out that if you try really hard, you can buy a really nice Linux computer on a seriously low budget.   Check out part 1 and part 2 of the £50 challenge that we did previously.           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes...

It’s our annual episode where we need to talk about Ubuntu. This time most of us are broadly indifferent about the distro itself, so we end up mostly discussing our concerns about Canonical.           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to...

Gary has been using a Framework 12 laptop for a few weeks and gives us his impressions of it. Are the upgradability and repairability worth the premium price he paid for it?         Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed .