Wendell wants to make content, but he fears he is too deep in the weeds to know what people actually want to learn. He is a master at Linux after all!
So leave a comment here. Be detailed, but also try to keep it short and sweet. Leave the deeper questions to the video or live stream itself. (The idea is for Wendell to be able to quickly glance through these questions)
This isn’t a discussion thread, so please don’t answer people’s questions here. If you need really specific help, we suggest you create your own topic like usual. Replying with a ditto is cool, though.
How about a deep(er) analysis of the impact of “proprietary“ Open Source code like systemd and rust on the Linux eco system. Basically exposing the influence of corporate America on FOSS and the dangers that poses to its free/open nature.
How to make immutable distros work for power users. I feel that things like bazzite are fine until you start fiddling, or coloring outside the lines in Wendell-speak. Is it something that he thinks is doable or one should just toss the idea of immutable and go Arch /s
In short: is it feasible to manage immutable distros for a single person/power user?
@zszywany Lennart made some blogs and had some thoughts on the subject of immutable distros, to date I haven’t seen any distro actually ship those ideas and implementation details. Instead, everyone is just suffering from NIH-syndrome like always (looking at you, Fedora). It would be interesting to see someone from the Level1Techs community here doing it! (and/or writing a guide about it)
Selfhosted distros from source are definitely possible.
Not sure if you’re gauging what the community here wants or what would have more general appeal.
To me the gateway drug to many of the more in depth topics covered on this forum is self hosting or homelab stuff, so I would say something in that area would be interesting to hear Wendell ramble about. This is a pretty wide topic that covers system administration, networking, virtualization, hardware etc. and is typically of tangential interest to IT professionals.
How about an easy mode “how to run self-hosted AI” for Linux noobs? I’m tired of getting a Claude time-out message. Maybe my RTX 4070 could perform at AI tasks better than trying to use a broken Google search in 2026?
I’d want to see some sort of ‘A-Z of self hosting‘ series. He’s done this sort of thing in videos before like the forbidden router videos and Proxmox for VMWare refugees, but something official, where he goes from what a good build for whichever service would look like - be it a NAS, router, hypervisor, AI rig - showing how to build it for anyone new to PC building, then going over potential software to use on them, listing the pitfalls, idiosyncrasies, whatever.
Would be great to see how to deal with some shortcomings of the Linux system. For example, how to apply a firmware update to the Intel Arc A series; to my understanding this is only supported by Intel under windows (sic!) and for Linux you have to do some workarounds.
Or what to look for when dealing with ROCM+RDNA+LLMs; currently I am a little disappointed in the state of things and it would help me to have a better overview of what ROCM is capable on RDNA3/4 and more importantly what not. Then I can manage my expectations.
Best practices for firewall settings between docker containers/networks would also be nice.
Abiverse! Someone got inspired before openclaw and made his homelab into ai agent self replicating management system inspired by Bobiverse he was reading at the time, talked about it on Linux unplugged and made a git “Volition (fondly referred to me as the Abiverse) is a self-hosted, multi-agent system designed to run persistent, self-replicating autonomous LLM-based agents (“Abes”) inside isolated Linux containers.” each part of his homelab is its own personality with 4 tiers of memory just the memory part is worth talking about at least.
One thing I’ve done recently is to patch my kernel with the Karka btrfs patches to enable allocation hints, and I’ve used that to put metadata data on fast drives and data on slow drives.
While I don’t need a walk through on doing that myself, applying kernel patches to a custom kernel on Arch (or derivative) or Ubuntu (or derivative) would make for an interesting video, as would using the Karka patches to accelerate spinning rust with btrfs. I think that’s the right level of nerdery for much of the audience that may use Linux but haven’t got a clue about modifying the kernel.
I’d be curious to hear a deep dive into sr-iov and implementing networks with virtual functions. I’ve not taken it beyond creating and allocating VFs, but understanding some of the deeper functions and driver tools one can implement with a VF would be cool - inter-VF routing configuration, queue allocation and offload, etc.
From my standpoint I have an ubuntu 24.04 server which I have 2 x nvme 1 x hdd backed up by 3 synology nas units. all storage and cifs are from the synologys with the HDD as backup and storage of more local files. 1 nvme is os only and the other nvme is for data ad fast access only. the entire system is for my jellyfin setup and other docker stuff, like prometheus/grafana… i have some office tools as well.All this running on tailscale and caddy as the sidecar. I don’t think Wendal can discuss tips tricks and other JF related setups (although one video he dipped in for a bit and it got my mind spinning). YT apparently doesn’t allow these types of videos. But what I like is how to tunnel and black hat stuff… it’s fun. i would like to see some benchmarking with tailscale vs netbird for example…. i also routing through aws as a go around if a Derp server isn’t working properly… I dunno its a can of worms if he wants to go down any of these paths.
I don’t know what the algorithm black magic is like, but with this being hopefully The Year of the Linux Desktop, there could be some more basic information about “You’re used to this program on Windows, here’s what a thing that does the exact same is called on Linux” like I just learned you can find scripts and addons that basically turns GIMP into exactly Adobe Photoshop, but without the burden of being an Adobe product. Or some other kind of deep diving into some functionality from windows that is niche enough that it might be difficult or otherwise challenging to get into.
It has just been my experience trying to convince people it’s OK to switch over that the biggest challenge is “I searched for X and that program doesn’t run on Linux and I need the program that is called exactly that to do what I want”
I get that going with basic information like this might not be very exciting though, especially not for veteran viewers.
Would be curious to hear Wendell’s thoughts on the current status of Linux on cellphones, and if he sees any benefit of pure-ish mainline-ish distros like Mobian postmarketOS Arch etc. vs Android-based things like Lineage/Graphene or Halium-based things like ubuntu touch.
Wine 11, running windows apps under other OS’s, a little on this new approach and the best distro to try it out?
Turbo quant, ai memory optimisation and you (us).
Not long ago, Wendell was talking about the oculink port on mini PC’s and the possibility of pcie fabric interconnection, things were afoot and then … nothing since.