Ask Noah Show · Noah J. Chelliah

Ask Noah Show 459

September 16, 2025·54 min·4 clips

Noah Chalaya describes kneeling half-naked in a basement puddle at midnight, defrosting his air conditioner with a heat gun.

1. Ask Noah Show episode 459 covers KDE virtualization tooling, Jonathan Riddle's departure from KDE, local Whisper transcription, and California ISP legislation. 2. Host Noah Chalaya and co-host Steve Ovens present the episode; Steve works as an IT professional at Red Hat and contributed to OpenShift Virtualization testing. 3. The episode opens with Noah recounting a midnight air conditioner repair: he found three inches of ice on the evaporator fins, used a heat gun to defrost them, knelt in the resulting puddle, and fixed it in 40 minutes — but the condensation drain hose is still leaking and now channeled by towels to a floor drain. 4. Noah poses the question of whether building AI data centers in North Dakota, where temperatures reach 40 below zero for months, would reduce cooling costs enough to matter — Steve argues the cooling savings are modest because data center heat is generated internally, not from outside air. 5. Noah introduces Carton, a KDE-native Qt6 virtual machine manager still in development as of August 2025, designed to replace the GTK-based virt-manager and gnome-boxes on KDE desktops. 6. The August 2025 Carton update, according to lead developer Derek Lynn, removes the virt-install dependency by generating libvirt domain XML directly using lib-osinfo, which identifies installation media and fills in UID, MAC addresses, and other configuration fields automatically. 7. Carton also now includes its own SPICE client and viewer built in Qt, handling display rendering, input forwarding, and audio streams without depending on virt-viewer — though performance and scalability still require improvement. 8. Noah explains that libvirt's strength is running identically across Red Hat, Alma, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Arch, meaning the same skill set and tooling scales from a 32GB Intel NUC to a large rack server with ZFS and multiple drive pools. 9. Virt-manager was deprecated roughly five to six years ago in favor of Cockpit, Red Hat's modular web-based management interface, on the basis that modern administrators expect to manage infrastructure from a smartphone rather than a ThinkPad command line. 10. Steve recounts repeatedly solving things with Cockpit in 'click-click magic' that took hours in virt-manager, particularly network bridging, and expresses a wish that Cockpit would expose the underlying commands it executes. 11. Steve describes OpenShift Virtualization, a Red Hat product that runs KVM inside a container, allowing Kubernetes-native tooling like declarative YAML, GitOps injection, and native mount points to manage what are otherwise standard QCOW2 VM images. 12. He gives a concrete example: instead of using Jenkins to push configurations into a golden OS image, OpenShift can pull configuration directly from a Git repository and inject it into the VM at deploy time. 13. Steve clarifies he contributed to OpenShift Virtualization as a tester providing interface feedback, not as an engineer, and emphasizes hundreds of Red Hat employees contributed across the 2024 launch. 14. Jonathan Riddle published a farewell blog post at jriddle.org titled 'Adios Chicos' after 25 years with KDE, covering projects including Kubuntu and KDE Neon. 15. His post documents commercial interest from Nokia (before the iPhone ended that trajectory), the city of Munich's KDE deployment, and Valve standardizing the Steam Deck on KDE Plasma. 16. Riddle describes his departure as stemming from disagreements with Tech Paladin — the company now holding KDE contracts — over business structure, profit priorities, and value alignment, after being unable to convince others to adopt his approach. 17. A Linux Newswire roundup covers FreeType 2.14, curl 8.16, Samba 4.23, Hyperland 0.5.1, MKVToolNix 95, and distro releases Q4OS 6.1 and Puppy Linux Bookworm Pup 10.0.12. 18. QWhisper, a Qt6 desktop application by Q5Sys that wraps OpenAI's Whisper model for real-time local transcription, is presented as an alternative to cloud transcription services; Steve benchmarks GPU-based Whisper at one-third real-time speed (one hour for three hours of audio) vs CPU at one-to-one. 19. California's legislature approved a bill allowing renters to opt out of landlord-imposed bulk ISP billing agreements starting January 1st; tenants can deduct the subscription cost from rent if the landlord fails to allow opt-out, and cannot be evicted for doing so. 20. Listeners most likely to engage are Linux administrators and KDE desktop users interested in virtualization tooling, open-source community politics, and practical local AI applications; those seeking non-technical content or deep technical code walkthroughs will find the episode surface-level on both ends.

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A hot room, a VM stack, and a steady case for keeping control close.

Ask Noah opens in a hot bedroom and basement troubleshooting before moving into KVM, OpenShift, and a case for more declarative VM management.

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A hot bedroom complaint opens into KVM, OpenShift, and VM orchestration.

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