Welcome to mintCast

The Podcast by the Linux Mint Community for All Users of Linux

This is Episode 497

Recorded on Sunday, November 8, 2026.

Yes I voted, I’m Joe; I voted too, and I’m happy, I’m Bill; riding the Blue Tsunami and overdosing on Schadenfreude, I’m Majid; …. Charles ; Anyone can be a developer nowadays, I’m Jim

(Insert Intro)

• First up in the news
  Mint Monthly News – October 2026
• In security and privacy
  Brave sells its search index to A.I.
• In Check this Out
  Majid manages Nothing
• Wanderings
  Jim becomes a developer
• In Vibrations from the Ether
  pylang gives feedback about file systems

Show Segments

Please remember if you want to follow along with our discussions, the full show notes for this episode are linked in the show’s description.

• The News (15 min.)

• Mint Monthly News – October 2026
  From Clem in the Linux Mint Blog (via londoner)
  A lot to unpack in this one, including the new apps.
  Sleep Modes – Hibernation now available
  Nemo – Preview Pane added
  Superlight – A new application whose purpose is to monitor the state of the system.
  Velocitty – A new terminal application.
  Unfold – A small archive manager.

• Ubuntu Core Desktop ‘accelerating’ development ahead of 27.04 – Majid

• Linux 7.4 Features Steam Frame VR Headset, More AMD Zen 6 Enablement & Initial Apple M4 / A18 Pro Bring-Up – Majid

• Security and Privacy (5 min.)

  • Brave Sells Its Search Index To AI, And Your Website Is Probably In It Joe

• Wanderings (25 min.)

  Joe

  • Things started off a little slow in regards to tech wanderings for me but then things got a little crazy. First the 8tb drive that i had connected to the garage pc but had no data on it started dropping and reconnecting. I dont know why. but i got it disconnected after trying to do some e2fsck fixes. But then the computer started randomly shutting down. Looking at dmesg it might have been to do with the graphics card overheating. But even when i shut down tdarr which was using the graphics card i was still having intermittent shut downs. I turned the machine all the way off and let it sit for an hour before turning it back on and it started up and was running stably. I did not turn back on tdarr though and i am still looking for the cause. In my search through logs a lot of errors with plex kept popping up. turns out the repo for plex is gone. at least the one that i was using. but i purged plex and this did not fix the issue. The computer was still crashing. I looked inside my computer and the 120mm fan in the front of the case had stopped working. I put in a short term fix with a usb fan but this did not resolve the problem either. Now the only things to conclude is that there is either something wrong with the graphics card or the power supply is no longer able to power it enough. Either way i need to make a change. Recently a friend from another podcast has sent me a graphics card that i was planning on using on one of the mini racks when i get the parts and start doing some interesting things with local LLM’s. An invidia QUADRO P600. Which is a lower power device that is also low profile. I swapped the two of them around and set everything back up. Including tdarr.
  • I dont know what to say about this. Tdarr is limited to two threads on the graphics card and will simply not use any more for transcoding although it will still do other things at the same time. Im not sure how this will impact plex but that is ok because i couldnt get it to reinstall. Not that i tried very hard but i do have some friends and family that use it as well and i expect that i will be hearing from them sooner or later. Anyways back to tdarr. Wow this graphics cards is fast. After i adjusted all of the settings and changed the flow to use an nvidia card instead of a AMD card it was just burning through the transcoding. I calculated that it was doing 2 videos per minute for quite a while, although later it come down to about 10 minutes for different encodings. But it went through one of the 8tb drives very quick and i started on the last one. Well considering when i am writing this it will probably be done and i will need to set up the automation to handle new additions. How ever with the death of that other 8tb drive i am not going to have enough 8tb drives to set up a raid. good still to get the extra space and maintain it, and i may get another one in the future but for right now until i get another fit of inspiration i am stuck. Unless i want to delete everything and start over i guess. I have had to do that before and recovery isnt that terrible. just tedious.
  • At around the same time i started having some trouble with mini rack but i assume it is because the samba from the garage PC was going up and down and causing issues. So that is something that i can fix without too many issues. I decided to get rid of the interdependence so that the rack is more self contained and not dependent on another system being up and running to operate correctly. First i made a copy of the locations on the garage pc that actually get used and then i made the paths on the device that i was planning on moving it too and copied everything over. then i brought down the services that were using those locations and changed the mount points to the new location. Brang everything back up and verified that everything was working. The drive is a bit more full than i would like again but i am going to go through the data in there and see what can be cleared. But now i dont need to worry about the order that i start all of my machines in and i can bring one of the systems down to fix hardware without the other system stopping working as well.
  • Also in regards to the mini racks. I have been looking for a mini itx motherboard for a while that i could i put the 11gen i5 that i have into but it seems finding an lga 1200 mini itx board is a bit more difficult that getting the 1150 or the 1700 and i have been watching this one mobo that is amazon for between 95 and 140. I was planning on getting it eventually or convincong one of my kids to get it for me for christmas. But i have also been keeping an eye on FB market place. Recently one has come up that was listed for 50 dollars. The asrock z590m itx board. Which is nice since it has a 2.5g ethernet port built in so i wont need to add a card for that. But the listing also showed that only one of the channels for ram was working. Also when i saw it i was not ready to pick up it so i waited. By the time i was ready to go and get it the guy had dropped the price of the board down to 20 dollars. I was figuring that even if only one channel of ram worked i could just grab the 32gb stick that i have in the garage pc and that would be plenty.
  • I got it and took it home. Looking very closely i did not see any blown caps or anything on the board that looked to be a problem. So i grabbed two sticks of ram and an m.2 drive that i had pulled from one of my old dell venue tablets. I only put in the one stick of ram and loaded the operating system without any issues. Although i did have to jump the connections on the board to get it started cause there was no power switch hooked up. Everything loaded correctly except for the wifi module but i am not concerned with that. I then turned it off and tested with two 8gb sticks of ddr4. Sure enough it boot looped. So i pulled the second stick cleaned the connections on the board with some deoxit and put it back in. Booted right up. I am happy with this purchase. I may end up pulling that wifi module out and even though it is vertical mount i could myself putting something else there. A sata adapter maybe or simply a 2230 of some kind. I know there are a couple of ssds that you can get in that form factor. But i think the sata adapter is the best bet. While doing all of this testing i had to turn the pc on and off multiple times. Briding the two contacts was a pain but i found some JST connectors and wire and was able to make a quick contact switch. I thought about soldering a surface mount momentary switch to that but said to heck with it and ripped the switch from the old case where i had gotten the CPU and the cooler. It made things easier for a while. But it was not easily mountable. So i ended up ordering a 12mm momentary switch that also had the power light connections.
  • I will have to redo a part of the 2nd mini rack to make it fit. Like i said before i was planning on putting a low profile graphics card on the thing and potentially use that for some LLM’s but since that gpu is now in the garage pc i will have to consider what to do next. But because i was planning on that i 3d printed a 2u rack mount with 2 pci slots. It came out great but the computer it will be replacing only takes up 1u. Also i printed the Power Supply mount which is 2u and then an adapter so that i could use the 300w sff PS and simply mount it to the back of the rack behind some other components that dont take up much space like the router and patch panel. This will also allow me to build more upward. I am thinking that i might be able to use it instead of both of the other pcs that i have the 2nd mini rack it being 6 core 12 thread. But that does mean i would need to pul the 32gb ram stick from the garage pc and replace it with two 8gb sticks. Wont hurt the garage pc much since i have offloaded most of the back ground tasks to the racks. This means that i will need to connect 12 to 14 laptop hard drives to it. Depending on how many i can working. they are various sizes so i dont know if i i will be able to put a raid project onto that but i will look into it. I did have to print another couple of sets of the hard drive mountings from modplate with that in mind and i think that i may be able to put atleast one of those on the back of the rack as well. But i was not able to get all of that done in time. I did use the m.2 sata from one of my tablets on it but i did not have to reformat while i was testing so i am going to put that back into the tablet and use one of the drives that Bill sent to me instead. This board has two m.2 slots and one of them is pcie but will also take m.2 sata. the other slot though i put in one of my 6 port sata controllers and that is verified as working. So with the ports on the board i am up to 10 sata slots. I have the ae adapter that can provide two more. I did see another ae adapter that i am looking into that can hold 4 ports with an extender but i dont know if i need it yet. i also have the m.s to pcie x1 slot that i could use to put on a 10 port adapter instead if i need to. This also still leaves the x16 slot which i am still hoping to get a low profile graphics card into. At this rate i may need to swap out that PSU with something a little beefier.
  • Back to tdarr. It finished some time last night. I am having it rerun through the ones that errored out to see if it can catch a couple of those but the total savings is 5.5 tb. Which is great. Now i just have to some data shuffling and i should be able to free up one drive. That will give me a total of two 8tb drives that are empty and i will need to work out what to do with them but that will probably be next wanderings.
  • I also have not been using my gaming laptop much and i decided to change how it is configured. I might sell it on eventually but for now i want some of the drives out of it for other things. I had purchased some drives from Bill and they arrived. So i took the laptop apart and pulled the 1tb ssd the firecuda 1tb hdd and the 256gb m.2 nvme and put in one of the drives from bill which was a m.2 sata drive 256gb Still need to reinstall linux but the power usage should be lower. I put the 1tb ssd into the mini tower in the garage as well i will be putting the nvme drive in. The 1tb is holding the vm that i use there and has sped things up a lot. The nvme is going to act as a cache drive for my samba shares and i have not yet done the work that.

  Bill

  Majid

  • It has been a long time since I last did wanderings (July!), I wont go into everything here as I dont think anyone wants to hear 3 hours of my wanderings/failings etc
  • Travelling to India
    • Fedora laptop
    • Wifi issues
    • Software vs Bazaar
    • DeepSeek
  • Travelling to Madrid
    • Note taking issues
      • Android Tablet vs S26 Ultra
  • Pad failure… again!
    • Back to Android Tablets
      • need to have enough grunt
      • Pen has to be top notch
        • hence Galaxy Tab
  • File Sharing between devices
    • Local Send
    • Samba/SMTP
    • Quick Share
    • Honor Share (unbelievably quick! 80MB/s!)
  • Xournal++ my new go to
  • Using AI more
    • LLM Studio
  • UPS for my server
  • Podcasts (getting a bit out of hand!)
    • DD – Omarchy
      • Next up is GooglebookOS
    • FOSS Nerds
    • Blood Brain Barrier
  • Prime Day purchase
    • Sennheisers
    • Smartwatch VeryFit vs AmazeFit vs WearOS
  • Ebay for selling
  • MyPreOpKids
  • TV
    • For all Mankind
    • Lanterns
    • Watchmen (WTF!)
    • Mobland
    • VisionQuest
    • Scrubs
  • Movies
    • Spiderman
    • Oasis documentary
    • Clayface
  • Music
    • Muse new album
    • Celavi
    • Maphra
    • Metal Covers
    • Oasis tickets!
  • Cry More MAGA!

  Charles

  Jim

  • Nitter Redirect for X: My Firefox extension was approved after three days and is currently available to be installed by anyone using Firefox. By the way, I now see that there were already a few other very similar extensions available, surely made by people who had the same need I did and probably inspired by the same archived extension I used to use that I based this extension on. But in any case, the point of this exercise was as much to see if I could get a browser extension made for free by an LLM as it was to get this functionality in my browser and I proved that. Now with official status the Firefox extension doesn’t unload itself like it did when it was only a temporary add-on. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redirect-for-x/
  • Open Media Vault NAS: I purchased a used Hitachi 3 TB HDD of the same 2012 era as my others for $50 to replace the one that the S.M.A.R.T. drive health feature in OMV said was in Bad condition with a lot of bad sectors and likely to fail soon. I could have used one of my extra 4 TB Hitachi drives but those four HDDs are already installed and/or already in use in two of my other desktops and I didn’t want to cannibalize them from elsewhere. I had to open the tower and disconnect almost all of my fourteen drives to figure out which one was the bad one, and while I was at it I took pictures of which drives were which and recorded all the serial numbers in case I ever had to do this again. So I replaced the one bad drive and now I have twelve that say Good and two that say Warning with just a few bad sectors, which I hope should be okay for the foreseeable future. After that I had to figure out how to set up network shares via Samba on each drive, which took a few steps including enabling the SMB/CIFS service, creating shared folders, and creating a user aside from root or admin to give read/write access to those folders. I watched a ninety second YouTube video with horrible A.I. narration that succinctly showed me how to do all that. Then I started copying my data to the appropriate shared folders on the various drives over my network filling them up with each category of data on a different physical drive plus a backup for each drive. So like Backup 1 on sda and Backup 2 on sdb; and Media 1 on sdd and Media 2 on sde. The biggest hitch that has slowed the copying process down is that OMV doesn’t seem to like directories with hyphens, colons, or parentheses in their names, all of which are fine in Linux Mint. And this is a hassle as I copied over the contents of my movie and TV show folders that I have organized for Plex and Jellyfin, since the standard is to name directories using those characters to identify movies by release year, and separate movie title from subtitles. I’m not sure if this is a Debian vs Ubuntu issue or if OMV being a server uses some least common denominator naming rules. In any case, by simply using two separate physical drives each to hold my precious data, I avoid the complications and compromises of a of a RAID setup. With 42 TB of storage space on this NAS I will still have about 30 TB remaining even after copying over my most important data and archives. I’ll eventually end up with 21 TB or so of total usable space if I manually back my data up two two physical drives each like this. But it also makes it very easy to replace a hard drive if one fails without any risk of a RAID failing to salvage all my data distributed on my other hard drives and trying to magically re-constitute my setup on its own. I can simply copy the data from the remaining good drive to a new hard drive. This will also have the benefit of freeing up space on my Dell media desktop where I had a bunch of my archived data temporarily stored, so I will be able to move my TV shows and movies that I had organized and indexed with Plex and Jellyfin from the 4 TB external hard drive they are on now and put them on one of the internal Hitachi 4 TB HDDs. That means I can move my small 4 TB external HDD to use as a local backup drive attached to my laptop for Timeshift and Foxclone images instead of the ancient external 300 GB HDD I was making due with and which is also out of space.
  • GhostBSD 26.2 Released: Just two days after my griping about my woes getting GhostBSD to boot on the last mintCast, on Tuesday October 27th the GhostBSD team announced the release of a new version of GhostBSD, version 26.2-R15.1p6 still based on FreeBSD 15.1 which included a new installer with some different options including a Custom Configuration which acknowledged the presence of other operating systems notably, full disk encryption in the installer, a smaller ISO, and many fixes across GhostBSD tools. I was finally successfully able to re-install GhostBSD with the FreeBSD UEFI loader only option (instead of REFInd boot manager) on the 240 GB SSD as my main operating system on my 2013 era Celeron. Plus, I am also able to boot the unofficial updated NomadBSD from the 60 GB SSD if I interrupt the boot process by hitting escape and going into the BIOS and the Boot screen to change the order of priority of the boot drives so that the 60 GB SSD is first in the drive order above the one that says GhostBSD OS Bootloader. And of course to leave it the other way to boot GhostBSD with priority as the main OS as I intend to. This is exactly what I wanted and now I have my far left-most workstation dedicated as a BSD work station as planned. I’m also going to take the opportunity to learn more about ZFS since ZFS is compulsory on GhostBSD and there are a couple of extra 4 TB hard drives installed that I can add to the pool.
    • Windowy layout for Mate: I’d also like to mention that I discovered that there is a interesting layout for the Mate desktop environment that one can select in the settings, not the default one, called Windowy, that adds a vaguely Windows style look. Notably for me, it also has a menu and app launcher that responds to the press and release of the left Super key followed by typing the first letters of an app name to quickly launch an app by pressing enter similar to how Windows, Cinnamon, and some other DEs work. And I’m pleased to report that keyboard combination shortcuts using the same left Super key and another key, which can be customized, also work simultaneously- for example, Super + e to open the default file manager. So that removes my biggest complaint about the Mate desktop environment.
    • Mocka Desktop Environment: Going forward, Eric, GhostBSD’s lead developer is working on a custom DE called Mocka starting with a dock of some kind, and whose elements will be compatible with Mate and eventually replace Mate as the official DE of GhostBSD. I was pleased that he said on the GhostBSD forum that the dock and app launcher would be keyboard friendly and he was interested in feedback from users like myself about the keybindings throughout the desktop environment when the alpha or beta release become available to test. https://mocka-desktop.org/
  • Tozo A1 Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds: Question- Who here owns and uses a smartwatch? Along with the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G Android smartphone that I inherited from my mom that has been serving me well for almost two years now, my Dad also gave me her pair of earbuds that I finally found a use for. Since I started going to a local gym to lift weights again last week I decided that I’d like to be able to listen to podcasts or music instead of the just enduring the bouncy Latin pop music that they exclusively play there. I started looking into Android smart watches, thinking that I needed one to pair with these Bluetooth earbuds if I didn’t want to carry my phone around from station to station, which is a hassle. I don’t want to be like the dude I saw in there with his cell phone strapped to his upper arm and a cord running to headphones. But then I saw the prices, and realized one could easily spend three or four hundred dollars on a new Samsung, Pixel, or other smartwatch. Even the “renewed” older models on Amazon are about $120 or so. When I realized that the earbuds have some simple tap controls to play and stop, raise or lower the volume, and skip forward or back to the next song or podcast in a playlist, along with some other interactive features like accepting or declining incoming calls, I decided to try an experiment. Question- what do you think that the range of Bluetooth earbuds is? Since I leave my gym bag and phone in a locker in the locker room on vibrate anyway- what would happen if I pressed play on a downloaded podcast through Pocketcasts on my phone, left it in playing the locked locker, and then walked into the gym to see how much range I got. According to the Amazon listing on these inexpensive $16 earbuds, the Bluetooth range is only about 12 meters or approximately 36 feet, which would barely be able to reach out of the locker room, never mind reach to the main area of the cavernous space that this gym takes up. So I did just that, I walked out of the locker room into the main area of the gym and kept going all the way to the front door, no less than a hundred feet, and the reception worked the whole way! I did a whole hour plus long workout while listening to FOSSNerds. I couldn’t believe it. I next wanted to try listening to some music, and since I don’t believe in a subscriptions, that rules out a service like Spotify, which doesn’t even allow you to listen to a whole album in track order unless you pay for the premium service, nor does it work with many smartwatches without a premium subscription. I could of course start downloading hundreds of full albums as MP3s and organizing and collecting them and transferring them to local storage on my phone’s internal storage or SD card, but that’s a deep rabbit-hole to go down and potential huge waste of time and storage space. So I figured, since I use YouTube as my main unpaid music streaming service anyway, maybe NewPipe would work for this purpose. Sure enough, despite the warning that it may go away soon when I launch the app, it still works, and I can search for any album and hit Play All to play the album tracks on the Playlist in order without commercials. The tap controls on the earbuds allow me to control play and pause, volume, skip tracks, and all the other features just like Pocketcasts. If I want to have a longer play time without having to go back to the locker room to manually play the next podcast or album, I just have to add tracks to Up Next or turn on autoplay for the next item in a playlist in whatever app I am using, which I would otherwise normally always have turned off. For what it is worth, the light pink earbuds blend in with the Caucasian skin tone of my ears quite well, but I don’t love the matching pink charging case on my desk. However, free is a great price. I’m amazed that this works so well over such a long distance, and I decided that I can live without a Smartwatch for the time being at least.
  • Plex’s new Fire TV app: The user interface is only slightly different, which is no big deal, except that I’m finding that the updated version of the app, which otherwise works great, is a bit frustrating since the 10 second skip backwards by pressing the Rewind button and 30 second skip forward by pressing the Fast Forward button on my remote control seem to sometimes instead scrub backwards or forwards as if you pressed and held the button, which is the alternate behavior of those buttons. It’s a sensitivity issue of how the presses are received. So I’m finding my desire to skip backwards to see something I missed or skip forward past a promo or something are now sending the video scrubbing backwards or forwards like a runaway freight train which I have to intervene to stop and correct instead of skipping back or forwards by a specific increment. First world problem, but I’m annoyed by it.

• Check This Out (5 min.)

  • This app lets you manage Nothing & CMF earbuds on Linux

• Vibrations from the Ether (10 min.)

  • From the Ether: From pylang via private message on Discord: “Hey, i’m in the mintCast Discord, but basically locked so i’m touching base here. You were mentioning your disk drive setup. On the mintCast show. i was going to say (in the mintcast Discord but can’t) that i think your approach to having non-RAID disk pairs is a good idea. when you get more familiar with zfs and btrfs, you might discover some future-proofing features that you might like. With zfs (or even btrfs) you get redundancy (what you have now with the paired-drive setup) plus data integrity, which addresses problems of bit rot and data loss from disk failures. Imagine this scenario: You backup and old drive to a new drive. You look at an old photo on your new drive, but see that it’s corrupted. In this case, even though you’ve done good in backing up data, how do you know if your corrupted, unless you manually verify every file you’ve copied? Most people don’t. Now you have two copies of bad data. Modern file-systems are made to eliminate that headache, telling you that that data is bad prior to copying it over. Been thinking about these problems too. thought i’d let you know about and encourage you to keep going! and welcome to proxmox! it’s great.” I replied: “You raise a good point about data integrity. I think I’ll nonetheless still skip RAID for the time being and just manually set up non-RAID disk pairs with network shares on them that I can back up my files too. I’ll have to consider RAID or maybe trying ZFS down the line. I’m using Open Media Vault for now but not Proxmox. I think that is something else entirely. Here’s a link to the Matrix space for The Linux Syndicate where the hosts and listeners/viewers chat nowadays  We don’t really use Discord any more.  https://matrix.to/#/#linux-syndicate:matrix.org”

General

Thank you for listening to this episode of mintCast!

If you see something that you think we should be talking about, tell us!
Chat with us on Matrix at mintcast.org/matrix or send us email at [email protected]

Next Saturday will be a roundtable episode at 2pm US Central Time (convert to your time zone). Everyone is welcome to join us at mintcast.org/roundtable. Just click the link. No software required. Everyone’s welcome to take part, with a camera or not, or come join us in the Live Chat on YouTube.

The week after will be a News/Wanderings episode at 2 pm US Central Time (convert to your time zone). Come join us in the Live Chat on YouTube.

Listen to other Podcasts of the Linux Syndicate Family

Join Bill, Majid, Eric and Charlie on Linux OTC, Linux Off The Cuff, for an unscripted and unpredictable conversation about all things Linux, open source and more.

Join Dale and Majid on Distrohoppers’ Digest to hear about their experiences and challenges with trying out different Linux distros.

Our Hosts

Joe – jeboylan on Matrix, [email protected], & The Linux Link Podcast, The Linux Lug Cast, Buy him coffee on Ko-fi as Joeeb.

Bill – Bill_H on Matrix, [email protected], wchouser3 on fosstodon.org.

Majid – AtypicalDoctor on Matrix, [email protected], & The Atypical Doctor Podcast.

Jim – GNU2Linux on Matrix, [email protected], & The Linux Shortcut on YouTube

Eric – esa1975 on Matrix, [email protected].

Charles – Mr PDX on Matrix, [email protected]

Acknowledgements

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:

Bill for our audio editing, hosting & maintaining our Nextcloud & web servers.

Londoner for his contributions, from News to Time Syncs.

The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about. Thanks Clem & Team.

(Insert Outro)