Steam Machines, Docker Security, and OpenWRT
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Jonathan
This week we're talking about why CINNAMON is or maybe is not better than your default Linux desktop environment, how flathub and KDE for that matter are trying to monetize. Why you might want to take another look at OpenVPN. What's new with Steam Machines and oh yeah, OpenWRT may have gotten hit. OBS Studio released 31 and a whole lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
Jeff
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Jonathan
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Rob
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Jeff
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Jonathan
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Jeff
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Jonathan
Podcasts.
David
You love from people you trust.
Jonathan
This is TW. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 181, recorded Saturday, December 7th. Run rootless hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky about Linux and open source software. Some hardware stuff. It's time for the Untitled Linux Show. We've got the full crew here today. Maybe not the exact crew that you're used to, but for at least the holiday season it's going to be something like this crew. We've got Rob, we've got David, and we've got Jeff as my co conspirators. Today we shall say, and Rob is going to kick us off. Rob is going to kick us off and he's already warned us before the show started that he's probably going to make some enemies with the story. So we'll let him present it and then we'll decide if you know what exactly we're going to do about it.
Rob
So someone threw out a story this week by Jack Whalen on ZDNet called Five Ways. The new cinnamon desktop is better than your default desktop environment. And after I looked at it, I had to take this on because I'm not so sure about that. Let's, let's dig into it. Let's, let's see what those five great ways. It's better. So the first item on the list is it's speedy. And it goes on to explain that Cinnamon lives in a strange void between full blown desktop environments such as Gnome and kde plasma and lightweight desktop environments such as lxde, lxqt, XFCE and Mate. And it says Cinnamon feels like a full blue full blown desktop environment, but performs like a lightweight ui. So right here I feel like he's saying XFCE and Mate are faster but not full blown desktop environments, which in my experience, I think these guys are every bit as full blown as the rest of them. Really, my takeaway on this one here is he's saying it isn't as fast as some DEs and it isn't as nice as others. We're in the middle. I mean, that's, that's what it says.
Jeff
So.
Rob
Okay, second, second on the list. It's, it looks more modern. And it goes on to say, if you're currently working with an older version of Cinnamon, you'll find version 6.4 to look considerably more modern. So modern. More modern than older versions of Cinnamon. Okay, that's to be expected. Isn't that what updates and moving forward does? I, I personally don't consider the Windows 10 look to be modern, but we.
Jonathan
Would use other adjectives to describe that.
Rob
Yeah, but you know, if you think it looks modern, it isn't. But if you think it does, it's fine, whatever. Cinema, you know. But if you think it looks modern, that's just looks. Don't let that deceive you. There are things underneath, you know, Cinnamon is one of the few DES that barely supports Waylon, only putting it into an experimental feature this year. So I guess it looks modern to Windows 10 S 2016 through whatever era, but looks can be deceiving. Okay, looks more modern. So let's go third on the list, Night Light. So here he goes on to say, before the 6.4 release, Cinnamon did not have a built in nightlife feature to help cut down on eye strain. And you know what, I agree here. This is a great new feature and one that literally pretty much every other mainstream desktop environment already has had for a while.
Jonathan
I was going to say KDE has had this for close to a decade now. I remember using it a long time ago.
Rob
Really. So this article, it's starting to sound like a running joke. It's like look what Apple invented that Android has already had for years. That's what I'm getting out of this article here. All right, fourth, Shading and unshading windows saying that Cinnamon comes with one of my favorite old school Linux features, which is Shading and unshading windows for those not familiar. That's when you can basically there's different ways. Double click in the title bar or sometimes you can put a shade button where it will basically roll up the whole app into just the title bar. So you can have just the title bar on the screen and you can shade it on shade. It's and here again I'm going to admit I always loved this old school Linux feature and it's. It's. But again it's it's one that KDE and GNOME have always had is as long as I remember. I don't know if XFCE or those other lightweight ones that aren't full blown desktop environments has that or not. I haven't used them much for a while, but the big guys have it. And finally on this list is Spices. The Cinnamon desktop also includes. He goes on to say the Cinnamon desktop also includes spices which are add ons to enhance the desktop. There are spices for themes, applets, desklets, actions and extensions, all of which can be installed from the official Cinnamon website. So like themes, extensions, widgets that every other desktop environment has. So, so I don't get it. How do any of these things on this list make Cinnamon desktop environment better than the DE you are currently using? You know what's the differentiator here? Not these, not these five in this list. You know the Cinema Desktop is fine. I often recommend it in forums in the form of Linux Mint in various scenarios. But to say that it's better than all the other desktop environments, is that dumb? I don't know. You know, give Me some actual good reasons, you know, some real differentiators that makes it different, that it would be better. So that's all I have to say. But for those not happy with my commentary on the story, I will point out the link at the end of the show where you can donate a coffee and share your displeasure with my statements.
Jeff
Keith, 512 says Xfce has had shading for a very long time.
Rob
There you go. I figured they did. I just. I haven't used it that much.
Jeff
And I think it's kind of funny that they're throwing shade on Gnome because that's where it came from.
Jonathan
It's one of those desktop environments that got forked at version three because nobody wanted to go to version four. Yes, that's the thing that keeps happening.
David
I thought that happened at version two also.
Jonathan
Well, I did there too.
Rob
Yeah. Mateo is two and then. And then Cinnamon is three.
Jonathan
Yep. Whereas Trinity is KDE three. And I think there's a fork that's KDE two. I don't remember which one.
Rob
Yeah, Trinity. You know, those old forks of KDE don't seem as popular as the old folks forks of Gnome, but Indeed.
Jonathan
Indeed.
Jeff
Yeah. Well, when they went from three to four, that was a major deal in KDE land. But when they did that, they made it easier to upgrade from 4 to 5 and 5 to 6. They kind of had upgradeability in mind going forward. So that's why not as many people have been in pain about the KDE upgrades.
Rob
Right.
Jeff
And I want to say that with Cinnamon, the reason Wayland is a little less supported is because in the GNOME desktop they had said that one of the reasons they actually jumped to four was because it just. The way it was written, it was kind of. They were painted themselves into a corner as far as supporting Wayland. It was. It was a lot harder because it wasn't or set up, it wasn't architected quite right to support it very well.
Rob
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the same story you have with Xord X11 going to Wayland. It's old code. It just gets harder and harder to maintain and update. I mean, they've been doing a great job as far as maintaining this old code for Linux Mint, but it is based on old code. And if you or Cinnamon really, I guess we're talking Cinnamon. But.
Jonathan
Rob, are you going to jump to cosmic Get. Get on the desktop environment that doesn't have any of that legacy x11 stuff in it?
Rob
We'll talk about that later. But I think, yeah, we'll talk about that later.
Jeff
You know, and I would even argue with the, you know, fully bloated or whatever desktops, you know, they don't. The modern kde, modern gnome, they don't take near the resources they used to. And the differentiation between ones like XFCE and KDE are just not as big as they used to be. It's not. They're not lumbering behemoths like they used to be. So, yeah, I would even argue that's.
Rob
Kind of a. I haven't done my own benchmarks. But yeah, from what. What I have heard and seen out there, like KDE is close there with xfc. I think I've even heard people say it. It's lighter way in some ways, but I don't know, I might be fantasizing that now.
Jeff
I've seen some benchmarks where it's at least pretty much around, maybe not quite on par with xfce, but really close. And I don't remember whether it was slightly above or below, but it was. A lot of the bloat came from like version three when it had a lot of extra stuff in there that you had to run.
Rob
Yeah. So being in the middle there is, as far as performance goes, isn't much of a middle ground, I want to say.
Jonathan
Keith512, have you met Rob? This is perfectly in character for Rob to do because. And because we're such great friends, we're going to encourage it.
Rob
It all depends on the use case. If you can tolerate crashing and you don't have anything important or you back up, like, well, you know what everyone should be doing. If it's important, it doesn't matter what de distro OS you have, it should be backed up if it's important. So, you know, if you can handle some downtime from that.
David
What's, what's.
Rob
What's it gonna hurt?
Jonathan
Indeed.
Jeff
And for those on audio only, the comment was from Keith 512. No, no, no. You don't use a desktop environment that's in alpha. Are you mad? Smiley face.
Jonathan
All right, David, we're all mad here. Let's talk about OpenVPN. Let's talk about OpenVPN. It has been a long time since I've used OpenVPN. I switched to Wireguard a while back and have not looked back. OpenVPN is trying to win me back, aren't they?
David
Oh, I don't know about that, but they're at least continuing development. So wireguard is the future and pretty much everybody that knows anything about networking is moving there. But OpenVPN is not dead and there's still development going on. So they've got a new Linux kernel module that has been in review for a while called Data Channel Offload or dco to provide much faster virtual private networking performance. And that's compared to the existing OpenVPN performance, not compared to like Wireguard or anybody else. It's just internal metrics. And so I'm not. I'm saying that because I'm not trying to indicate that OpenVPN is where everybody should go in the future. Now if you're on wireguard, don't switch. It's great stuff. But if you are stuck on OpenVPN for some reason, the DCO kernel module, which allows leveraging data encryption backed by AES NI in kernel space, which avoids context switching overhead, is going through its review process and this week the V12 patches were published and says hopefully there's no major flaws that will require more resending. I'm sure we'll have plenty of time to polish up all bells and whistles, but they're looking like, assuming there's no deal breakers or any issues, that they're going to get it wrapped up in the next couple of weeks ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle, which will be starting early in 2025. So OpenVPN still alive and kicking and there are still people that use it.
Jonathan
Yeah, yeah. Um, it's. It's certainly like it was. It was boys revolutionary at the time.
Jeff
Right.
Jonathan
Like it was the solution for the longest time. Um, and. And then wireguard just came and put it in the kernel and makes. It's just. It's actually, in some ways it can be a little more difficult to set up wireguard like the first couple times you do it, but once you understand the. Once you understand the process, you've done it a couple times, it's even easy.
Rob
So all you have to do is go back to one of the very early demo episodes that Jonathan did on here and he'll show you how to set it up.
Jonathan
Yeah, yeah, it'd be fun to get back and try to do those again. That's been a long time and I've had a lot of things come up that happened since then, but it would be fun to get back to those now.
Jeff
Just to clarify for the uninitiated, which I'm kind of one of them. So vpn, this is not a service that's going to allow you to pop out anywhere unless you set up a server somewhere. Correct. This is simply the protocol and Not.
Jonathan
Correct.
Jeff
Although there are one of those services, you see.
Jonathan
Right, right. There are services. Some of those services will give you OpenVPN config files and so you can then run through that service with OpenVPN. Some of them are starting to give you WireGuard config files now. And so you can run through their service, you know, their endpoints essentially with OpenVPN or WireGuard. But generally when we talk about OpenVPN, we're talking about the host it yourself sort of solution.
Jeff
Yeah, the actual protocol itself, not the.
Jonathan
Yes. The technology, not where somebody's selling it. Yes. Yeah. All right. Yeah, Cool to see that. So. Oh, Jeff, Jeff, let's talk about Open WRT.
Jeff
Yeah, we've got kind of a couple.
Jonathan
Speaking of OpenVPN, speaking of OpenVPN, one of the places you might want to run that is on your OpenWRT router.
Jeff
Yes.
Rob
You're going to hurt Jonathan's feelings with this one.
Jonathan
No, I have thicker skin than that.
Jeff
His wife might be a little upset with me. There's a little nugget in here.
Jonathan
I may have the nugget on the way already.
Jeff
I'm going to still count that as a win. Open WRT has a security issue. And before I go into that, I'll give a little background for those in the audience who don't know of Open wrt. So, in a nutshell, it's a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices, routers being what most people install on it or use it to, you know, that where they install it. Both for higher security than manufacturer software, either because the manufacturer sometimes are slow to fix patches, you know, to patch things, or because you have older hardware which isn't supported anymore and it's not getting updates now. Also because some people really want to run open source on their, you know, security software and you can do that with your hardware so you know exactly what's in there. And for those a little higher programming skills can actually fix things themselves and add patches and whatnot. Now, this side note, which is a little nugget in here, is I have a little. Jonathan should buy a bit of hardware which sounds like he's already got coming. But if OpenWRT sounds good to you and you want to play without doing anything to your existing router, you can get an OpenWRT one, which is a banana PI, which has two networking ports, a 1 gigabit and one 2.5 gigabit. And it comes with dual a dual band Wi Fi 6 fully assembled with a case you can find it for US$89. That was out of Alibaba I believe. So I was I was going to say I want to see when Jonathan's going to get one and review it for us, but we'll have to see what when it arrives for him. But getting back to the security issue, they the Open WRT had an issue reported to them about their attended SIS upgrade server or ASU instances that could have led to compromised firmware images being served. Open WRT Group said that they believe no official images were affected or any custom Images from the 21.10.0 release candidate 2 were affected. They do say that because of how the server automatically cleans the logs, the build logs after seven days, they were only able to verify the last week. So while they think nothing was affected, they do encourage people to upgrade to the same version and just just be just to be really, really really sure nothing was affected. The following is a quote from the Open WRT explaining about the security issue. So from OpenWRT they said due to the combination of the command injection in the OpenWRT image builder image and the truncated SHA256 hash included in the build request hash, an attacker can pollute the legitimate image by providing a package list that causes the hash collision. The issue consists of two main components. 1. Command line injection in image Builder during image builds, user supplied package names are incorporated into make commands without proper sanitation. This allows malicious user to inject users to inject arbitrary commands into the build process, resulting in the production of malicious firmware images signed with the legitimate build key. Second, we have the truncated SHA256 hash collisions. This the request hashing mechanism truncates SHA256 hashes to only 12 characters, which this significantly reduces entropy, making it feasible for an attacker to generate collisions. By exploiting this, a previously built malicious image can be served in place of a legitimate one, allowing the attacker to poison the artifact cache and deliver compromised images to unsuspect unsuspecting users. Combine these vulnerabilities enable an attacker to serve compromised firmware images through the ASU service, affecting the integrity of the delivered builds. So an attacker can compromise the build artifact delivered from the sys upgrade open wrt. Org, allowing the malicious firmware image to be installed to the open WRT installation that uses the intended firmware upgrade firmware selector, Open wrt. Org or CLI upgrades. Now the fixes they put into place though now this is back to me the fixes they put into place are basically sanitizing the input and using full length SHA256 without truncating them. Take a look at the show notes where you can find more details and links to the security advisory and the mailing list disclosures of the problem. You know, as I've been known to say in the past, system in the closet or router down the hall, make sure to patch, update, update and upgrade them all.
Jonathan
Yeah. So there's a couple of things we want to make sure and make clear about this. These are, these are problems that they found in the open WRT like build and upgrade system. But as far as anybody can tell, there's no evidence that they were actually abused. So everything's probably fine. But it's one of those deals where they only keep logs for like the last seven days. And so there is a small window of time where if someone out there knew about this combination of problems and went ahead and did something nasty with it, the logs have been deleted and so they wouldn't know for sure. So that's why they are telling like it's sort of an out of an abundance of caution. They are telling everybody about this, but these are just, they're, they're vulnerabilities in their build system that have been fixed and you almost certainly have nothing to worry about. They, they did have a statement that if you had the, like the automatic upgrade turned on then you should do an in place upgrade to the latest version just to make sure that you've got a trusted version installed now. Yeah, but I think honestly this seems to me like a well handled announcement that there could have been a problem and they wanted to let everybody know that.
Jeff
Oh, I think so. I think it was very responsible of them and you know, it kind of funny.
Jonathan
Go ahead, Dave.
David
I was going to say being responsible though can create confusion unintentionally. So clarifying that is important.
Jonathan
Yes, yes.
Jeff
Yeah.
Jonathan
And that's why, that's why I wanted to go ahead and mention that I'm trying to find the, where they recommended to do an in place upgrade because that was. And I'm not seeing it now. I had that earlier and I don't see it now. Oh well, that is what they suggest because they announced.
Jeff
Well, I was gonna say I think it's in the show note in the article linked in the show notes or their official release announcement.
Jonathan
Okay. It's in the top of the article here. They were only able to verify build logs for the past seven days because of automatic cleanup. So users are encouraged to carry out in place upgrades to the same version to eliminate any possibility of being affected. Yeah. So if in the last couple of weeks you did an open WRT install, just do an in place upgrade. Shouldn't change anything. All of your configs should stay, should come over and that way you just make sure that you don't have anything weird going on on your system.
Jeff
Yes. And so you are get an open WRT one coming?
Jonathan
Yes, yes I do. It's in the mail. And actually the reason that I have it is because over on Meshtastic we've got a guy that is trying to. OK, so the OpenWRT one has a microbus header in it and that is SPI and some GPIO. And of course every time somebody says SPI now the Meshtastic community is like, oh, that's us, that's our thing. We can put a radio on that. And so there is. Now there's work going on to make a. Or actually I think, I think it exists. I think somebody already makes a Lora radio that goes on Microbus. And so now you know, there's, there's a user right now that is working to get all the, all of the different applications, the libraries and such into the open WRT build system to be able to build meshtastic over there and put it right on the router and so that'll be cool. So I, yeah, I ordered one to be able to help with that and test it out.
David
I saw a meshtastic article or news or something came across my feedback where there was somebody that is working or maybe it's the same project working on bridging like wifi and meshtastic and several different protocols all into one interface.
Jonathan
Yeah, there are several things where people are trying to do that sort of thing with Lora trying to bridge Lora and wifi, which you have to remember is that data rates on Lora are extremely slow. Like I think the default is like 300 bits per second. It's something like that, like original dial up modem speeds, not the, not the fancy 56k modem speeds like the original dial up modem speeds. So for sending text messages around, it's fine. For even sending emails around, you know, it's fine. But TCP over Lora is just not, not something. It's not a winning idea.
Rob
So buffering.
Jonathan
Yeah.
Jeff
You could change things if you wanted though because they give you the open WRT one gives you all the schematics. You could change a lot of stuff in there if you Want to kind of give you the recipe and say, here you go.
Jonathan
Yeah, well, and then they also give you things like that microbus, which is a 10 or 16, something like that pin header on top. And companies make little pieces of hardware you just plunk down on top of there and give yourself whether it's, you know, another WiFi, more storage, some kind of sensor, all kinds of stuff.
Rob
But if you put like 10 Lora radios and bond them together so.
Jonathan
You.
David
Get from 300 to 3K, best case scenario.
Rob
Okay, 100.
Jeff
Yeah.
Jonathan
Yeah.
Rob
Well, it looks like Jonathan's really thinking hard about this one.
David
But while we wait for our fearless host to come back, another thing that I wanted to mention, if you've seen it, D link was in the news in the last couple of weeks because they basically abandoned some of their old VPN routers and said, hey, there's known remote code exploitation. If you have it, replace it. And that's something where OpenWRT could now, due to hardware limitations, you probably should replace it anyway. But if you need to keep that hardware for some reason, you could actually, oh my, you could actually use OpenWRT to keep that hardware rolling.
Jonathan
So the little known fact, when you turn around and to grab a piece of hardware to show it off and your ethernet cable and it comes out of your computer, you go offline.
Jeff
Little known fact.
Jonathan
Anyway, I was going to show off this thing. It is a Lora radio connected to a CH341 USB chip which lets you emulate SPI. And so yes, we are working on a way to be able to plug Lora radios in over USB and run the meshtastic firmware natively. And yes, we are working on being able to put a whole bunch of those on one computer. It's in the works.
Rob
See, this is a good idea, David.
Jonathan
Yeah, yeah. Just not original.
Rob
There are no original ideas.
Jonathan
Yeah, that's sad but true, isn't it?
Rob
I made so many inventions and every time I looked it up, they're already done.
David
Have you, have you seen the recent news about the TCP IP spec found in hieroglyphs? There are no new.
Jonathan
Well, Rob, you could come up with the ideas. Can you monetize them? That's often the trick, yeah.
Rob
Is it my turn already?
Jonathan
It's your turn already, I think.
Rob
All right then.
Jonathan
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Rob
It's better over here ATT customers Switching.
Jonathan
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Rob
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Jeff
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Jonathan
Good sleep should come naturally and with.
Jeff
The new Natural Hybrid mattress it can. A collaboration between Lisa and West Elm, the Natural Hybrid is expertly crafted from natural latex, natural wool and certified safe foams to elevate your sleep sanctuary and support a greener tomorrow. Breathable organic cotton and moisture wicking Joma wool consistently provide cool and comfortable slumber. Every purchase helps fuel Lisa's work with.
Rob
Shelters and those in need.
Jeff
Visit Lisa.com to learn more.
Rob
That's L E E S A.com so we all love Flathub and flat packs. Well maybe not these snap loving Ubuntu fans in this group, but the majority of us Linux users have seen the benefits. But one area that many open source projects struggle with is monetization. And you know, people think Linux free, no money. But monetization is important, you know one way or another for the continuity of any project, unless it's just a small hobby that you don't have to rely on. But you know, if they got, people gotta feed their families and pay the bill somehow. So yeah, I never look down on somebody trying to make money on something as long as they don't do something dumb. So anyway, it appears as though the Gnome foundation in partnership with KDE is looking to add ways to sell and accept donations through flathub. And and they're Bootstrapping flathub LLC to become a self sustaining entity. So in a posting, the GNOME foundation is seeking a contractor to help with program management, financial legal setup and public outreach to Bootstrap flathub llc. The project is being funded by Endless and I'm pretty sure, I believe it's the same Endless organization that, that brings us the Endless os, which I don't think we really talked about much, but there's, there's a Linux distro called Endless, among other things that I didn't realize they, they did but gaming and things like that. So the program manager will focus on these key objectives. They're gonna, they want them to launch payment and donation system for the application and flathub itself, establish operational governance for flathub llc, coordinate financial and legal operations and ensure community engagement and transparency. The project is scheduled for only three months so. And it's part time with a budget of $12,000 and it says not to exceed $55 an hour. So that's like the max cap of what you can earn on it. And they're looking for someone with open source project management, financial operations, community management and legal document review. So if you fit these requirements that are looking for a part time job for a few months, check out our show notes for the full posting details. So you can help make Flathub sustainable. And Jonathan, maybe you could use some extra cash so I could sell you on some more things.
Jonathan
Yeah, I'm perfect for the job. I do not have the time to put another iron in the fire.
Rob
It's part time.
Jonathan
No, I've got about five different part time gigs, thank you very much.
Jeff
How many part times make a whole time?
Jonathan
Not as many as I'm doing. That is the answer there. So this actually reminded me of something like you say, Rob, developers have to be able to feed their families and pay their rent and so we absolutely do not hold it against them to ask for money or to come up with ways to monetize. This reminded me a lot of the KDE story. You know they added the request for donations to KDE 6.2 and it only comes up, I think like once a year. And there's an easy way to just make it go away. All right. They were very careful to not be annoying with that. And there's a, on the 2nd, about a week ago, Nate there at Pointed Stick, he has a blog post about it and he says I think it worked. And they've got, they've got their donations for each month and you know, the highest month before this was like $12,000 and they've already brought in, at this point, they'd already brought in like $30,000 for December. And that was early in the month. Wow. Yeah.
Rob
You know, it went crazy and flat up. It's not. This is not only benefit to Flathub or, or this person looking to make $12,000 in three months, but, you know, if you think about it, for one thing, flat, flat packs are an easy way to package something universally. You know, you can make it work on your system, package it, and it's going to pretty much work anywhere. You know, it's been a way. I've seen various things. Even I've seen Wine, Windows applications packaged using wine that made it seamless to work. And what I'm getting at here is, you know, if developers can sell their programs, this could help potentially draw in more developers. Maybe it'll just, you know, maybe it'll draw in some other developers from Windows who, you know, they're Windows developers and they don't want to go through and port the whole thing. Maybe they'll want to utilize, you know, this service and package it up, you know, with Wine and all that, and sell their Windows application. But being able to provide better support as a universal package.
Jonathan
Yeah, I pulled up the graph because like I said, that was from the beginning of December. We're not even through December yet. And KDE has pulled in $60,000 in donations in December. Wow, that was a win for kde. And there's a couple of other things that's interesting with this. KDE is, I believe, a German nonprofit. And so they're actually not allowed to carry lots of cash in their nonprofit. So we've talked about this in the past where KDE was running at a deficit and some people were a little worried about that. And actually they are required by law to do that because they are not allowed to carry a lot of money from year to year. And so it looks like they're going to have to spend maybe even more money next year to be able to deal with all of those donations. But the cool thing is, and we've seen this, we've looked at the people that they hire, when KDE spends that money, they generally hire, like, actual programmers to do actual work, which is a little refreshing because not everybody does that.
Rob
They're going to have so much extra money. They're going to be helping Gnome out with their financial situation.
Jonathan
Maybe, maybe they'll pull an Elon Musk and KDE will buy Gnome.
Rob
I mean, Microsoft did that with the Apple way back in the day. If it wasn't for Microsoft, Apple would have went under, what, in the 90s? I think maybe the early 2000s, about.
Jonathan
The time the DOJ was really looking hard at Microsoft for antitrust. That's when they did that. Yeah, that's when Microsoft really wanted Apple to be there.
Jeff
That's why Google keeps funding Mozilla Firefox.
Jonathan
Yes.
Rob
And if they want to take this even deeper, the default GNOME looks kind of Mac OS ish, while the default KDE is more Windows ish in its look. Neither. Exactly, but. So we'll keep following this down and Gnome's going to not be in such financial trouble next year.
Jonathan
Fun, fun.
David
Oh, boy.
Rob
They should get some Google money. That's what they need to do.
Jonathan
Yeah, that's what we all need. All right. Speaking of flathub esque things, David wants to critique Docker.
David
Oh, I don't want to critique Docker, but I want to appreciate Linus's critiquing of Docker. Basically, I've linked to an article from Open Source for you where they kind of break down some information that Linus shared, and it's specifically about Docker, which is containerizing applications. So basically it uses technology built into Linux. So the architecture of it is using namespaces and C groups or control groups to isolate processes and make them act like, or feel like they're on their own operating system without actually having a dedicated operating system. So originally you had physical boxes, computers, and they could run multiple applications, but all the applications had access to the entire physical box. And so then you created virtual machines where we built abstraction in there, and we're actually able to build separate operating systems and run them on top of an underlying operating system, maybe a very thin hypervisor or bare metal hypervisor, but you then. And they all were completely isolated. There have been issues where you were able to break out of your virtualization, but it was much harder, much closer to true, truly separate physical hardware. And. But that's relatively heavy. You have to basically, with some caveats, be emulating an entire hardware infrastructure to be able to run the operating system on top of it. So Docker attempts, Doesn't attempt. Docker reduces that heaviness by getting rid of a lot of the extra functionality and using namespaces and control groups to isolate processes in the sub process tree. However, a lot of that functionality is built in for administration, but not for security. And so there have been cases where it's easier to escape Docker's isolation than it is a full virtual machine. And I've been using Docker some. I still personally prefer full virtual machines for processes, but there's pros and cons to both. And really being able to dive into those nuts and bolts and understand how they interact and how that whole process works is important because it's easy to get the shiny new thing. And, hey, containers make everything great. So let's containerize all our workloads and stick them in the cloud, and suddenly you wind up having foreign state actors invade your phone system. To reference a recent headline, they end the article talking about ways of improving containerization and basically making it closer to VM's level of isolation. But today, what I find and what I've implemented in some of the full stack development I've done is where you use Dockers for the scalability, but you encapsulate them into virtual machines. So basically, if there was process overflow Dockers, it's all the same code base. Like, this is just database servers, or it's just your web proxies, or it's just. So that way you use the VM to add protection, and then you run your containers on top of that VM to take advantage of Docker while still having the benefit of the security of the vm. So I'm not going to rehash this whole article because there's a lot of technical stuff in there, but it's very, very cool, and I'm really excited to see somebody with Linus's understanding of technology addressing some of those concerns that have been itching the back of my mind since I've started learning about Docker and using it some.
Jonathan
Yeah. So I will tell you one possible solution, one direction that I have gone on some of my systems, and that is, instead of running Docker, run Pod Ban and run it rootless. Most Docker images will just work under Podman. In fact, they have worked very hard to make that the case. So when I do things like, for example, the place where I'm mainly using it is for running continuous integration runs off of GitHub on local runners, and we've got that running inside of rootless Podman containers. And it's working well now, it won't do Docker in Podman or Podman in Podman. It's possible, but you've got to give it more permissions. And that kind of defeats the purpose of the way I'm trying to set it up. But rootless Podman is one of the directions to go. And the cool thing about that is that you could also do it like you say, inside a virtual machine. And that works too.
David
You can technically run Docker rootless as well. It just tends to bring up more.
Jonathan
Issues than you sort of can, I think. Doesn't the Docker service still have to run as root?
David
I think so, yeah. I think that the Docker service runs with podman.
Jonathan
You can just, you can run the entire thing as a user account, no root required. So it really is, it's a pretty cool alternative. I'm a little disappointed that we didn't ever see the single application kernel thing get picked up by the Linux kernel because that also always struck me as an interesting solution to this where you took your application and you basically compiled your application right into the kernel and then you ran this image that was just your kernel image and that was about it. And there were people that were looking at doing that with like SQL servers and such. And so you would, you would then have, you would end up with this image that was sort of like a Docker image, but it included the kernel. You could just run it in a virtual machine. I thought that was always a cool idea, but that didn't really go anywhere.
David
Basically it's the lightest possible virtual machine for any given application.
Jonathan
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Interestingly, we interviewed over on Floss Weekly back a couple of weeks ago. We interviewed one of the guys working on Elixir and the Nerves project. And that's where you use Elixir is related to Erlang, but it's, it's a little bit more modern take on it and apparently they do something very similar to this where they've got the Linux kernel and then it calls as you know as PID0, it calls the elixir. I forget what they called it, but it's just a little binary that Nerves produces and it does all of the boot ups. You don't even have systemd on that system. All it's doing is it's running your Elixir code. And so that's kind of a similar idea. All that's based on build root too. There are some projects out there to do some interesting things kind of in this same space.
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Rob
I thought I've seen something recently, I don't know if it was part of this same news story at all, but something about running steamos or a Steam Link kind of desktop, a Steam Link, I guess on like a Raspberry PI 5 or something.
Jonathan
Yeah, that's a little different but that is a thing that you can do. People remember if the actual Steam Link software is open sourced or if people just reverse engineered it. But yeah, you can build your own Steam Link and the Raspberry PI has enough hardware to be able to do it, so you could do that too. And so a Steam link, that's just the idea of your desktop is playing the game and then you're streaming it to your desktop, your set top box, streaming it to your computer. And yeah, the Raspberry PI is enough hardware to do that for sure.
Rob
This is a full Steam box. Like the SteamOS without a screen or the Steam Deck without a screen.
Jonathan
Yes. So these are going to be more like Steam decks than just the streaming.
Rob
Yeah, it's surprising. It's surprising it hasn't been done by a third party already.
Jonathan
Well, I mean there have been a couple of third parties that are making like especially the handhelds with the screen.
Rob
Well, the handhelds, yeah, there's a couple.
Jonathan
Of them out there, but I'm surprised.
Rob
Like a set top box.
Jonathan
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Rob
Been sold out there. I think this, I, I think the Steam Link, though. I haven't tried the Steam. I haven't tried using the Steam Link technology for quite a long time. It just didn't work well for me last time. But if it works well, that maybe, maybe be a great way to go as you wouldn't need very high specs, but so I'm surprised somebody hasn't done with. I mean you could use it. Use one of the SteamOS clones if you can't get a hold of SteamOS and what, Chimera? Isn't that one of them? I don't remember.
Jonathan
Yeah, Chimera was one. Yeah. Although I think that was mainly made for the handhelds. Whereas this is going to be potentially a little bit different. Yeah, we'll have to see. It definitely has potential. I'll say.
Jeff
I know in one of his videos, Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tip said that when Valve releases SteamOS he's willing to try Linux again.
Jonathan
Cool. I don't know if SteamOS is the best, the best distro to do as a primary desktop. That's not really what it's made for, but you can make it work. You can definitely make it work.
Jeff
It's what he said he wanted to do.
Rob
Yeah. All right, take it easy on Jeff's buddy.
Jonathan
All right, let's talk about obs. There's a new release. I haven't even gotten this update yet. Jeff, sell me on it. What's in the new release of obs.
Jeff
And we'll talk about getting the update too. So OBS Studio 31 has just been released and literally it's probably 20 hours ago. It's not even a full day yet. But there's some new features which this version brings, such as the Nvidia blur filter and Nvidia background blur. But you do need to run the Nvidia official drivers. There are preview scroll bars and a zoom scale indicator that have been added. V210 format support for AJA device capture, Amazon IVS service integration, Intel Quick Sync Video, also known as QSV AV1 screen content coding and support for first party YouTube chat features. If you're installing from a flat pack there are new improved screensaver blockings so basically the screensaver doesn't come on when you don't want it to so that that works better Now Obs Studio has disabled the built in automatic scene switcher on Wayland. They fixed a crash when importing a collection which was created on Windows. So if you are running a mixed environment you shouldn't have the problems that older versions had. They but they have deprecated Ubuntu 22.04 LTS support so re some other stuff is refactoring the NVENC implementation with various improvements SDK 12.2 features such as split encoding are now supported. Additional features from old SDKs are supported like as a reference target quality VBR which is variable bit rate CQVBR Custom options field has been added to allow settings setting more options that don't really warrant their own UI elements. So it gives you a little more flexibility and enhances what the program can do without having to generate a whole bunch more menu items. There are some downsides that come with the NVENC Update though. Nvidia Kepler 600 and 700 series GPUs are no longer supported and you do need to be running the 550.5 4.14 or newer Nvidia driver. Now starting with this release, the TikTok virtual camera is blocked from loading in OBS Studio due to known issues. The settings file also has been split into two files. There's now an app configuration file and a user configuration file. I counted 26 fixes in the release notes which are linked in the article in the show notes, but I had more have been fixed as some of them, you know I count a single line, but they actually took care of multiple issues, multiple different crashes. So the number of fixes is even greater than just the 26. But just to touch on a few of those, some of the fixes that our audience might be interested in are things such as squashing bugs related to the pipewire plugin, playing HDR files now should be better, and capturing D3D12 games and fixing issues with the MP4 muxer and the and the auto configuration wizard, just to name a few. And you know there's many more that I'm not going to go and cover. So you can, you can take a look at the list for yourself to see what particular bugs might be vexing you and whether they got fixed or not. So just. But just take a look at the article in the Show Notes for full details. It's got everything that's changed. The article in the show notes does say you can get it from Flathub, but when looking at it today, December 7, the old version was still on the site. They hadn't released it yet. It was released less than 1 day ago like I said before. So it should be coming through your channels and Flathub soon, possibly by the time you're listening to this podcast. If you're not watching the the show live. I will say snapcraft had it and I installed it but I'm not using it right now because I couldn't get the virtual camera working and I tried direct streaming to Restream and I wasn't having any luck getting on the channel we're on now. It would, it said it was streaming but it, I couldn't really. It was like streaming only to my own channel. So either. Well, most likely I don't know what I'm doing which is, which is very likely. So when it comes, you know, very likely. So definitely happy streaming on this new version of Observation.
Jonathan
You know, there's a lot of things on my wish list that have not made it yet to obs but each time they do an update and they fix some things, it's kind of, it's kind of nice. It's, it's, it's good to see the project continuing on and cool to see some Linux specific fixes landed in there.
Jeff
So quite a few of the fixes were Linux specific.
David
I am streaming on OBS31 and I am using the Nvidia background filter.
Jeff
Ah now how did you. Are you using the virtual camera?
David
Yes.
Jeff
Huh.
Rob
I use that Windows.
Jeff
We won't talk about that part. Are you actually using Windows?
David
Yes.
Jeff
Oh.
Jonathan
Heretic out.
Jeff
Yeah, whatever.
Rob
All right, so it's gonna be a three man show for the rest of tonight.
Jonathan
Yep, yep, yep, yep. All right Rob, try to, try to, try to bring us back and let's talk about a Linux distro. Let's talk about Cosmic. What's new with Cosmic?
Rob
All right, so I told you we'd be talking about this later because we have been patiently waiting for System 76 Cosmic Desktop to be released as we continue to inch closer and closer. And I tested the pre Alpha way back I want to say is like February of this year. And then when Alpha one came out was released in August I installed, gave that a test run showed you guys on the show. It crashed right on the show. You know, at the time, besides some missing dialogue, some occasional crashing, you know, when running, it was running in a vm, so it was likely due to not having graphics acceleration. That's. That's what they said to us exactly when we talked to him on Floss Weekly, I believe some shortly after I did that episode or we did that episode. So yeah, the system seems it even back then it seemed rather snappy and close to production. Here we are several months later and Alpha 4 has been released and I haven't had a chance to give the new Alpha a test run yet, but see what the pundits are saying about it. Bobby Borisov calls it incredibly fast, which, you know, matched my Alpha 1 experience region and language settings are now available have been added. Default Application settings page is now live for you to set your default browser and other applications and on there the Cosmic Media Player is now by default listed as default music and video player. Of course you could change that to something else if you want More details and information are available in their Cosmic store. The power management settings for displays are now fully implemented, and under Cosmic and battery settings you'll find a new range of options to control when the screen turns off and suspension behaviors for when the system is plugged in or on battery in an area many other Linux desktops struggle in is accessibility, but Cosmic is addressing this early in development with the new accessibility applet, though still in its early stages, it includes a toggle for turning screen reader support on and off. Currently the screen reader works for Cosmic settings, Firefox, Gnome apps, making the desktop more inclusive for visually impaired users, and a big feature for the gamers in the crowd or other graphic heavy applications. The Cosmic Comp compositor now supports variable refresh rate or VRR you may have seen listed for short. This feature allows the display to sync with the contents frame rate, eliminating screen tearing and enhancing the overall visual experience. You can set VRR to always be on or configured to actively automatically or activate automatically for full screen content. Along with these new additions also comes the usual bug fixes to make things even smoother. Unlike Jeff, I didn't go through and count them all, but there was a list of them there. So tell me again, Mr. Whalen, what makes your desktop environment better than this desktop environment? Because with Cosmic we have some actual differentiators that are going to make this a desktop environment to beat, I think.
Jonathan
Are you going to go Are you going to run popos and Cosmic once.
Rob
It'S fully out I'm definitely going to give it a shot. I think there's a good chance of it.
Jonathan
Yeah.
Jeff
What. What beats it right now? Or KDE Waylon. It's not Alpha.
Rob
It's true right now.
Jeff
What beats it right now.
Rob
But if, if you take a look at this, this is Alpha software and this. Is this good while in alpha. What. I mean, we're all in for something pretty awesome.
Jeff
No, I think it would be. I think it's pretty good. I know I've had System 76 products before and I, I'm a fan of their, what they produce.
Rob
Yeah. And if you think. Lennox. Mint, sorry, Cinnamon. We're talking about Cinnamon, not Linux Mint. If you think Cinnamon is fast. When I tried this in a VM Alpha, it was probably one of the snappiest desktops I've. I've used. And that was a pretty low specific desktop environment. No graphic acceleration at the time or anything, so.
Jeff
So using Snaps, Is that what I heard? No, I left Rob speechless. That's. That's hard to do.
Rob
Why? Whatever.
Jonathan
All right, let's talk about rust in OpenSSL. David.
David
Okay. Yeah, I don't even know how to follow that, but anyway, I have an article talking about either Rust LS or Rust tls. I'm not sure how it's pronounced, but it is a modern TLS library written in Rust. The headline from Michael Arbel over at Phoronix is Rust LS Multithreaded performance is battering openssl. And that in and of itself isn't that impressive because OpenSSL, being the Swiss army knife of SSL and TLS libraries, is basically able to get beaten by everything. What I find more interesting is in the first paragraph, and that is where it is said that when looking at multithreaded server performance of Russ ls, its performance is typically outperforming boring SSL by a significant margin and downright dominating over OpenSSL. So boringSSL is the TLS package that Google wrote to basically get rid of all of the extra Swiss army enough functionality that you don't typically need in open SSL and focus on just the bare minimum necessary to get as quick as possible in doing your encryption and decryption. So he's got a chart in there where he benchmarked it running on Debian 12 on an Ampere Altra Q80 30 processor. And there is a significant difference up to 80 threads. And then it's just solid performance. And then it starts to drop off after 80 threads some, but it's. It's basically twice as fast as boring SSL in the benchmark and significantly faster than the other two OpenSSLs that it's benchmarked against. So Rust is just out there blowing through more performance metrics. And the interesting thing, which I did not know until Floss Weekly a week ago, is that it was originally written because somebody got irritated at an elevator that kept breaking Rust.
Jonathan
It's great.
Rob
Rust was written because of this irritation?
Jeff
Yes.
Jonathan
Huh.
Rob
And where was that? What do I need to listen to?
David
It was Floss Weekly. It was at Mozilla.
Rob
Oh, yeah.
David
There was a Mozilla developer whose elevator was always out for maintenance. And he was like, we're software developers. Why is this happening? So he went and wrote Rust to fix his elevator.
Rob
His elevator had memory issues. Memory, who knows?
David
But now we have fast tls because of a broken elevator.
Rob
I bet it's not a fast elevator. But anyway, before or after, that's just how elevators are. Unless you're at like a big tall building. They got some fast elevators. The Empire State Building.
Jeff
They can all go fast in one direction.
David
Yeah, well, not if the safety functionality is working correctly.
Rob
Yeah, the elevator break is like an amazing technology that saved elevators. I know. I saw or read or heard something about this. It's like a great technology. I'll leave it at that.
Jonathan
Yep. Yep. Would not have elevators without them. Not really. All right. It is neat to see Rust showing up in more and more places. I've done a little bit of Rust development over the past week because I have been working on the advent of code in Rust and that has been fun. I've got through the first, is it two or three days and then got busy writing actual real world code again and haven't had time to get back to the fun for fun Advent Rust code. But I'll get back to it. We'll get some more of those days cranked out.
Rob
One of those years. I gotta do that too.
Jonathan
It's fun. It's fun. One of the other fun things about it is you can go back and do the previous year's challenges. You don't have to do it in December. Like, you could start now. So, like Rob, I'm sure you could knock out the first day really, really quickly. The second day probably too, it does get a little bit more challenging. So. But if you're in a language you know. Well, it's. It's still not too bad.
Jeff
I've been reading them and I haven't actually been program. Program programming them all, but I was looking at like today, day seven, and just how I would write it, I'm like, I feel confident, I think I could do it. You know, maybe, maybe not the most efficient, but it's right for me still programically, conceptually solvable.
Jonathan
Yeah. One of the real fun things about it is that they're all two part challenges. And so when you're just reading them, you're reading the first part and it'll go back and give you a little bit of an extra challenge for the second half of it. So it's like, oh, well, we discovered the elves discovered this year is all it's about the elves. That's what the theme is now. All the elves discovered. They forgot to tell you about this safety feature. And so the assumptions that you made the last time you solved this problem are no longer true. Here is another rule for you to add to your solution. You know, fun stuff. Fun stuff like that. And one of the things I like about that is it teaches you to write your code that solves your first problem a little bit more flexibly so that hopefully you can reuse some of that code to solve the second half of that problem. Which is fun. But I got to get back into it. I still have to solve the crossword puzzle version, the one where you're looking for all the Xmas inside the crossword puzzle. I'm still contemplating on which direction I want to go with trying to solve that. I think I have something worked out. I just got to actually write some code now.
Jeff
I admire that. That's the way you learn Rust. I mean, that seems like that would really. If you can go through all the days or most of the days, you're going to have a pretty solid grasp on the language.
Jonathan
It is a slow way to do the Advent challenge. There's a lot of Googling in between writing code. It's like, okay, I know how we do this in Python, in PHP, in C and C. So ChatGPT, how do.
Rob
I do this in.
Jonathan
No.
Jeff
The only one I could do it in today would be Python. And even then there would be a lot of Googling for me because it's just been too long since I've written code.
Jonathan
Yeah, I mean, nothing wrong. They support pretty much all of the languages, just about every language you can imagine. There are templates for it out there. So you can do it in Rust, you can do it in Python, you do it in C. I'm sure you can do it in Erlang or Elixir, if you want to go that route. Or goodness, Leo is doing it in Emacs. Literally in the Emacs language. Lisp it is. So whichever you want.
Rob
Php, that's my language. I could easily. Python, probably.
Jonathan
JavaScript would be fun too. I'm sure they have it in JavaScript.
Jeff
If I had any programming chops, I would. I would say, hey, this could be a fun challenge for the group here, but.
Jonathan
Well, I think it's definitely a fun challenge for the group here. It's just. Oh, you mean the four of us?
Jeff
Yeah.
Jonathan
Hey, I think we should do it. We should try to. No, no. No pressure on when we get it done because I know we've all got stuff going on, but it'd be fun to all go through it. I know what language David will work in unless he's feeling real adventurous like me.
David
You know what editor I'll use?
Jonathan
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff
Notepad and C.
Rob
Vb. Net.
Jeff
Yeah.
Jonathan
All right, Jeff, save us from this and let's talk about Nvidia and their latest driver.
Jeff
Yeah. Which maybe can support Jonathan's next hardware purchase. 5090, I think that would be. That would be good for him. But in all seriousness, we now have a new Nvidia driver, the 565.77, which has been released as the first stable version of the 565 series. The 565 beta was originally released, so it's public beta on the 22nd of October this year and they've been working on it since then to get it to this stable point. They now have what they feel is a stable version. So they finally said, okay, it's now out in the wild fully for everybody. Now, what does this version bring? A lot of new features that support Wayland. So re enabling of the GLXXT bufferage OpenGL extension on X Wayland. The aim of this extension is to expose enough information to applications about how the driver manages the setup of front and back buffers associated with a given surface to allow applications to reuse the contents of old frames and minimize how much must be redrawn for the next frame. Basically, it's just being smarter about what it has to draw. If it's already got something in the buffer that it can reuse, it will. There's a new application profile key called GLVID Heap Reuse Ratio to control the amount of memory OpenGL may hold for later reuse, as well as some application profiles for several Wayland compositors using the new key to work around issues with excessive video memory usage. Fixed is a bug that could lead to crashes when a Vulkan application awaits on a VK fence created by importing a DRM synco, it's syncobj. However, you would say that basically this solves some crashes observed with Unreal Engine and other applications on Wayland. Gone is a bug that could cause KDE Plasma 6 to crash when running as a Wayland compositor. This driver also has been added several new per plane per CRTC vendor specific properties Nvidia DRM these properties may be used by Wayland compositors to program the GPU's color pipeline for HDR hardware acceleration. So if you take a look at the link in the show notes for the full list of bug fix and new features added, you know there's some games like Far Cry 5 which if a person had issues with the PAT in the past with a black screen, should be fixed now and performance regressions taken care of for Proton 2.9 VKD3D version 2.9 now that the driver is stable, it's a good time to load it up and see what kind of benefits you're going to get. So I guess I better load it up and get to gaming so I can personally feedback if there's an improvement. You know, maybe play a lot of games, you know, just to be sure.
Jonathan
For testing purposes.
Jeff
For testing purposes? Yeah, it's for the, for the community. I'm doing this to fulfill your duties.
Jonathan
As a co host of uls.
Jeff
Yes. I'm willing to sacrifice my free time to do that.
Jonathan
Oh fun. Yeah. I've been spending my time while you were talking about Nvidia. Unfortunately I have been catching up on the HDMI 2.1 problem on AMD cards using their open source driver and nothing new to report. So it's at least one advantage that Nvidia has. You have working HDMI 2.1.
Jeff
Yeah, well, you know I'm really excited to see. I hope Nvidia really come. Well honestly I hope intel comes out swinging with their new GPUs and really puts some competition in the market and I hope AMD really does something as well. Now for this round for amd, they're not going to hit the high end. If you, if you want really high end graphics, you're going to have to go team green. That's all there is. But most people don't have high end. They get in the mid range and lower mid range and you know, if we can get some competition started there, that can pave the way to future innovation and competition and lowering prices.
David
Speaking of competition, I haven't kept up with it personally. So I'm just asking, have any of you seen what Team Blue is doing in the graphics?
Jonathan
I know, I know. They just either announced or released something.
Jeff
Yeah, they've had. They've had unboxing videos, but I don't, I haven't looked for a couple days. I don't think they've actually have any benchmarks out yet. I think the embargo is still on.
Jonathan
Yeah, that's right.
Jeff
Hardware unbox. Looked at the last set of intel video cards and ran through. I think it was 250 games or something like that. And almost all of them played. There was just a few that didn't and there was some that didn't because they was part of the game. Like AMD couldn't play them either. They were. The game itself was pretty buggy.
Jonathan
Yeah.
Jeff
But almost all of them worked and they had. They showed the frame rate almost doubling over the time from when they were first released to today with all the driver improvements.
Rob
That seemed like quite a low bar you're throwing out there.
Jonathan
Yeah, yeah. We benchmarked all these games and most of them played. They weren't crash.
Jeff
Well, they were. They were also looking at. Yeah, well, they were looking at can it sustain 60 frames per second. They were doing 1080p gaming. You know, would they maybe have to turn the settings down or whatever, depending on the game. And then they had somewhat playable. I think if it could sustain at least 30 frames per second, which most games were doing 60. And then there were some that had artifacting and things like that that, you know.
Rob
Did I tell you about this new Alienware computer that I got for gaming? I started the thing up and it ran.
Jonathan
To go catch it. So when we talk about intel and their new GPU, I think it's the Intel Arc B580 is the new one, right?
Jeff
580. 570.
Jonathan
Okay. The 570 and the 580 are both new. Yeah. So we don't have any benchmarks on those. But you mentioned intel and I think we have to pour one out. Right. For CEO Pat Gelzinger was ousted. Retired. I haven't gotten the full story yet on what exactly happened there, but he got.
Jeff
He was fired.
David
Yeah, he was given the option of being fired or retiring and. Yeah, retire.
Jonathan
Yeah.
Jeff
That's why the phrasing of he got retired.
Jonathan
Yep.
Jeff
Oh, you're going to retire now? Yes, basically. Well, you know, the sad thing is they're saying now that they're just gonna. I think the next revision of chips should be about when, when he took over would start coming out because as we've talked about the Silicon pipeline on this show in the past, it takes a while, takes a few years for the stuff to come out. And the board wanted immediate turnaround. He wasn't doing it fast enough. And so they're, they were panicking. They're searching for a new CEO, which, which I bet they've got, They've had a few candidates in mind for a while now, I bet.
Jonathan
Yeah.
Jeff
And so great.
Rob
His great chips are going to come up out now and the new CEO gets all the credit.
Jonathan
That's what happens. That's what happens in lots of realms.
Jeff
But one of the things they said is they really have to have a win with this next set of GPUs because the CPUs are not doing well at all. They, they're losing server market share like crazy because the AMD chips are just stomping them in enterprise, their consumer chips, they're doing really good. AMD is doing really good, eating up their market share. So they have to have a win here. And that's one of the reason they're, you know, like in Folsom, California, there's, they're selling their 150 acre site. Their, they're gonna, they're gonna lease some of it back or most of it back, but they're, they're doing some of that to just generate immediate capital.
Rob
You know, that seems like, that seems like a weird way to go about it. You know, in, in the, in the CPU space. I mean, yeah, sure, there's ARM and Risk, but really in the, in the processor space, there's like one competitor. They just have to beat amd. Whereas like, hey, let's go into this field where there's two major competitors and try to beat them.
Jonathan
Well, no, I think the reason for that is that intel sees the end of the X86.
Jeff
And they want a piece of that AI pie.
Jonathan
That too.
Jeff
So they were trying to jump in on that because GPU and AI processors are very close and, but they know they, they can't just jump in to. And now this is, this is my speculation here. They can't jump right into AI right now. They don't have the, the chops to do it. They don't. I mean this is just their second design right now. So they start with gaming, get their names out there, people start liking them. Well, who's, who's running these enterprise clouds? Geeks. What do geeks do? A lot of them like playing games you know, that's why you get your name out there. Hey, these are pretty good cards. They come out with AI and say, look, we got these AI boards. Why don't you give those a try? And hey, you know, my gaming GPU is pretty good. Let's give it more of a shot.
Rob
And I mean, we got these Linux geeks who really like AMD GPUs, but it doesn't seem to be holding Nvidia back.
Jonathan
It's true.
Jeff
It is, it is true. But you could even argue that AMD kind of shot themselves in the foot a little bit with their pricing. If, if they would have priced them a little more competitively versus the frame rates, you, you could have really had amd. Yeah, cleaning up.
Jonathan
All right, so here's something, here's something crazy to me. The market cap, which market cap refers to essentially the value of a business based on its shares, right? The market cap for intel is US$90 billion. The market cap right now, according to Google for arm holdings, is US$148 billion. That means ARM, the company, is bigger than intel, the company by at least that metric.
Jeff
That is by market cap.
Jonathan
Nuts. To me, that is crazy.
Jeff
Well, the company I work for, so I'll say Micron Technology also has a market cap bigger than Intel. If you would have said even five years ago Micron is going to have a bigger market cap than Intel, I'd be like, you're drunk, get out of here. You're on drugs. There's no way.
Rob
I mean, the arm, that's because of all the mobile devices. I mean, everybody has a cell phone these days and that's dominated by arm.
Jonathan
Yeah, and they're also part of, I think, who is getting a bump from the AI craze. So I could see both ARM and Nvidia suffering when the AI bubble pops. I think they'll probably both be around afterwards, but I think that crazy high valuation will probably drop out from under them.
Rob
Their CEOs might not be their CEOs. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. If there's a good reason. If things drop, they're out.
Jonathan
Yep, yep, yep.
Rob
The life of a CEO. That's why I haven't applied for any yet.
Jeff
Oh, yeah, that's why.
Jonathan
That's the only reason. That's why Rob's not the CEO of one of these big play. He just can't take the stress.
Jeff
Yeah, a lot of long hours. It's rough. No, but funny you say that though, because they've got two interim CEOs and they're both in business marketing and there's some people concerned that they need a technical person back in charge of Intel.
Jonathan
Yep.
Jeff
So there's some article editorials out there.
Jonathan
Saying, oh yeah, no, wasn't Gelsinger sort of a technical type though?
Jeff
Yes.
Jonathan
Yeah. And so the theory being that intel is going to see a resurgence because of the changes Gelsinger made. And then you're going to get one of these marketing types that takes credit for it.
Jeff
Oh yeah, yeah, of course.
David
Well, marketing's always taking credit for tech, for the engineers work.
Jonathan
I mean that's kind of their job. It's kind of their job. But yeah, marketing is fun. Only with marketing do you have the conversation of can we do weird X, Y and Z thing? And the engineering is like, I guess you could do that with this if you really wanted to. And then three weeks later you pull open the four color glossy XYZ feature. Oh, thanks, marketing. Now we got to actually build that feature out the rest of the way.
Jeff
Yeah, it, and, and you know, I've read some editorials kind of saying the same thing of taking a lot of credit from the technical and you know, it doesn't always work out for the best in the long term interests of the company. So we'll see what happens.
Jonathan
Yeah.
Jeff
And the head of AMD and Nvidia, they're both very good at predicting where things are going. And they're.
Jonathan
From what I can tell, the head of AMD and Nvidia, they both have some technical chops. I know Dr. Lisa Su for sure does. And I don't know as much about what's his name over at Nvidia, but I get the impression that he does, he knows what's going on on the technical side of things pretty well.
Jeff
Jensen's.
Jonathan
Yeah. Thank you.
Jeff
Yeah, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's technical as well. And you can still be a marketing person as long as you have the technical chops. As far as, you know, you, you really understand technology. You make sure you listen to your experts. You can kind of grasp it and you're not totally siloed in the business end of it.
Jonathan
Yeah, yeah. Not totally clueless when it comes to what your company is actually doing. Yes. That usually doesn't work well.
Rob
I've known many CEOs that don't seem to know what their company is doing.
Jonathan
And it usually doesn't work well.
Rob
You just need to have good managers running the place.
Jonathan
Well, you need to have good CTOs that the CEO actually trusts and will listen to. You need to have technical people around the CEO and the CEO actually be willing to listen. If that is the case, then you can make that work.
Rob
You're talking specifically technical companies. I'm not necessarily. Yeah, well, but I'm not necessarily talking companies that have technology but really, you.
Jeff
Know, you could have a CEO that isn't very smart but if their skill is able is being able to pick the right people to have under them that are brilliant and they listen to them, you'll be successful.
Jonathan
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Jonathan
Right, let's move into some command line tips. Rather than doing business tips all night, let's do some Linux Command line tips and we're gonna let Rob go first. And Rob is talking about Eza Eza.
Rob
Easy A. I've been saying Eza, but you can call it what you want. So this is for you Rust fans out there and for those who want to get rid of the core utils. So this is. So it's Easy A. It is an alternative to the LS command. I'm not saying I use it. I just saw some people fairly recently saying it was a good alternative. So I thought I'd check it out. So it does have a few. Besides just being developed in Rust, it has a few extra features. So for those watching, let's just look. So if I do ls, it looks like that. If I do Eza, it looks about the same. Okay. Now if I do Eza, I know one thing I say is Easy A is not as easy to type as ls. The muscle memory is not there, so you may want to alias it. So one thing let's, let's do. Well, let's do A as as a dash L. You could see there are more colors there than if I just do a LS dash L. So it's a little more different formatted there. Now if I do A Eza space dash L space dash dash icons, you're not going to want to take this all the time. So it's probably something you'd alias if you, if you like a certain format. But if you do that, it puts these little icons next to things, I don't know that they really mean anything, but hey, they're there. Now here's one that is nice for those who like to do the, the change mod CHMOD with the octals, like 755 or whatever. If you do A Eza L octal permissions and what I do, I missed the letter there. See octal on the left there. You can see to the left of where it shows like the rwx rx. It shows the octal. So 07, 55 and 6, 44 and all that. So it shows that another nice one is could be useful dash L. So here you know, the normal LS dash L or as a dash L shows it in a long list. Now let's just say, you know, you have all that wasted space to the right. What do you want that for? Let's do as a space L space space, grid. Let me spell grid, right? You can't see that anyway, it's off the screen. But. So there we go. It. It put it into a. A grid Let me just move this over a little bit so you can actually see that. So there we go. It gridded it out to my screen size. So basically just put into two columns. So. And you got the memory safe goodness of rust and colors and some extra features that aren't in ls. Not saying it's something you want to use, but maybe something you want to explore, maybe you like it and you can alias that and make it your own. So Eza and to go there, the website to find it is EZA Rock. So EZA Ro cks if you're on.
Jonathan
A Fedora system, you can just do a DNF install. If you're on an Ubuntu or Debian system, you gotta go get their special PPA package thing. In fact, it's not even a PPA, it's a.
Jeff
It's just a dev source 24.10 I installed it with just a APT install.
Jonathan
Oh well, it's not available on my Pop OS, so apparently it is new in 2410.
Rob
Or you can also install it with cargo. Yeah, that's the route I went before I realized that it's actually in some repos. I don't think it was in my repo.
Jonathan
There you go. There you go. All right, let's see who's up next. David has a pv.
David
Yes. We talked about PV before and so that's why I said PV Redux, because last time I talked about it I was just talking about. And I think my spacing is okay. We'll see. I was just talking about using it to slow down some output. But PV is Pipe viewer and its main design is to be able to show progress bars. So I just wanted to demonstrate that quite quickly. So if you use pv. Well, first I've got two files, Test and Test two, which are pretty big. So if I PV my Test file into Test 2, you will see that it gives you a little progress bar, tells you it's complete, how fast it transferred, all that kind of interesting stuff. If you are doing a transfer where it doesn't know the size. Like for example, if we do dev urandum into Test 2, instead of giving a progress bar showing completion, it just gives you a progress bar of a bouncing icon back and forth and it's telling you the speed and how much has been transferred so far. So that can be handy. You can use pipes to put it into other commands. So for example, if you are doing a tarot command, you're backing stuff up and you want to be able to monitor your Progress, you can TAR pipe into PV and then take the output into your TAR file or something so that you can see a progress meter. And there's also an argument, I think it's size. It's either S or size. And if you are doing something like maybe a transfer where PV isn't going to know how much data is going to be transferred, but you do, you can give it that, and it will use that to calculate its percentage as it moves that data through the pipe. So, anyway, just a little bit more information about pv.
Jonathan
All right, very cool. Yep, love to see it. So I mentioned that I've been working on that little meshtastic project and I found a little program that is very, very useful. And I'm going to show you. I'm pulling it out of the packaging now. If you hear the crinkling, I'm going to show you a piece of hardware, a programmer. This is for being able to reprogram EEPROMs. And if you look on this, on the back of it, it'll say something like, most of these will say CH341A, and this one says MIN programmer. Not spelled right. Because of course, these little cheap electronics are never spelled right. That's the sign of quality, is when they have misspellings on them. And it has a little CH341A chip on it. And you can use this to reflash an eeprom. I've been using something similar to this in doing some development and I went looking for, all right, what's the application? What programming? I was actually looking for a command line tool to do this and I actually came across IMSProgatory. And that is a programmer for EEPROMS. It's actually a GUI and it works on i2C, microwire and SPI. That's where the IMS comes for. It comes from. And it works with these. It also works with a lot of things that are based on the CH341 chips. And it's just a little GUI programmer for reading and writing data onto EEPROMs. And if that is the pro, again, this is a very niche tool. But if that's a problem you've got, if that's what you need, this is a great tool to do it. It looks like it's from, you know, the early 2000s. It probably is, but it is actually open source. You can get the source of it, you can hack away on it if you want to. And it's available on Fedora and probably a whole bunch of other distros.
Jeff
So for your hobbyist electronics, that's very powerful.
Jonathan
Yes, absolutely. All right, Jeff, when we're done with this thing and we want to just turn it off, you've got a tip for us, right?
Jeff
Yeah. Or not. Turn it off.
Jonathan
Or not. Turn it off.
Jeff
This is a really simple tip from Alessandro Barbero. He talks about how he has a server running Debian, but the problem is the power button on the server is really easy to hit accidentally and it'll shut down the server, which is something he didn't want. So basically he went looking for a solution and found out it was simple. So in the slash etc systemd login D conf c o m c o n f file, did you just add one line? It's capital H, handle, capital P, power, capital K key equals ignore. So that's all. There's no spaces in there. And that way it'll ignore the power button. Or if you just want to reboot your machine, change the word ignore to reboot. So you save the file, restart the systemd service, or you reboot. If you have a server and you don't want to reboot it, to restart the service, use the command systemctl space restart space, system d login d dot service and that will, of course, you'll have to do that as root and that'll just restart that service. So simple fix to change the method of your power button operation.
Jonathan
Yeah, very cool. Good to know. I will have to check that one out on my machines. Could be useful.
David
Yeah. I wish you could do, like a different program or something, because I'd want something that every time you press the power button, it sends into the system log. Sorry, I can't do that, Dave.
Jonathan
Oh, that would be great.
Rob
I mean, like you're saying it could be a shortcut button to anything. That'd be kind of cool. I don't know what I'd use it for, but.
Jeff
Well, I was thinking of Jurassic Park. That guy that just waves his finger goes.
Jonathan
Yes, yes. All right, it has been fun. We have hit the end of our show and I will let each of the guys plug whatever they want to. And then I've got something I'm going to plug here at the end, something pretty cool that happened. But we're going to let the other guys get it first and we're going to let Rob go first.
Rob
All right? So as I say, every week, come and connect with me. And to do that, you go to my website, robertp Campbell.com on there, there are links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Mastodon maybe I'll add Blue sky soon. And as I promised earlier in the show, for those who want to send me a comment and complain about my commentary on. On a Cinnamon desktop environment, right here, this little coffee cup, you just click on that and you click the donate button and. And one coffee. Or if you really are pissed off and hate it, you could do three or five. Whatever, Whatever you want, depends how mad you are. And you can, you can put that on there. And you know what? If you really want, I will share your discontentment with the world on the show and, and let everybody know how much I was wrong.
Jeff
How many coffees to have you agree that it's the best desktop?
Rob
I tell you what, If I get 10 coffees, not even from one person. If I get 10 coffees this week, I will switch my desktop to Linux Mint Cinnamon for a month. A month. And then I will give my two months. Two months. I will give my honest opinion after having used it for two months and my honest review. Maybe I have it all wrong and maybe we'll find out.
Jonathan
Maybe.
David
With a low, low price of 10 coffees.
Jonathan
Yes. All right, Mr. David Ruggles. Anything you wanted to plug?
David
So I actually made reference to it earlier in the show, but if you go back and watch the most recent Floss Weekly, we got to interview a couple of developers out of Mozilla, and it was a fun show where we just barely scratched the surface on about 300 different things. We want to go into deeper later. So. And it was just great. So there's always. There's always interesting information to be had over there. So I would say go over there and check that out. And then eventually I will. Now that I've got obs working all this stuff, I'm going to have a fancy background that I throw up and say, go here and stuff too. Just like Rob. Anyway, that's not today. Not today.
Jonathan
All right, Jeff, I'm.
Jeff
You can find me on Mastodon at. Jeff Underscore Massey. One of these days I'll actually post something. So I keep getting followers, but I don't ever say anything. So one of these days I'll actually post something so I don't feel totally guilty about people following me and not not seeing anything. But. So I'm going to leave with Poetry Corner. Roses are red, violence are blue. Computer errors are common. Root cause is typically. You have a great week, everybody.
David
That's awesome.
Jonathan
I like that one. I like that one a lot. All right, so as far as me, the things I will plug, of course we've got Hackaday. You can find Floss Weekly there. And if you want more Floss Week weekly in your life I am actually quite excited that we got the old Floss Weekly Twitter account back. There's quite a story to that. Let's just say that someone's two factor authentication device got lost and there was a whole thing about getting back into it after that. But finally we got that back. So that is over@x.com flossweekly if you are still on the xverse and you want to follow it there, you can. If not, I am actually really considering also adding like a blue sky and a Threads account for Floss Weekly. We already have the Mastodon account at the Hackaday Social. We are equal. Equal opportunity Twitter. Let's see, how shall I put this? Equal equal opportunity microblogging services. There you go. That's what it is. All right. We appreciate everybody that has been here, those that got us live, those that get us on the download, and we will be back next week for the Untitled Linux Show. We'll see you ATT customers Switching to T Mobile has never been easier. We'll pay off your existing phone and give you a new one free all on America's largest 5G network.
Rob
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Jeff
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Podcast Summary: Untitled Linux Show 181: Run Rootless
Release Date: December 9, 2024
Host/Author: TWiT
1. Introduction & Overview
In episode 181 of the Untitled Linux Show, host Jonathan and his co-hosts Rob, Jeff, and David delve into a variety of topics central to the Linux and open-source communities. From desktop environment debates to security updates and the latest in software releases, the episode offers a comprehensive look at current trends and developments.
2. Cinnamon vs. Other Desktop Environments
The episode kicks off with a heated discussion led by Rob, who critiques a ZDNet article by Jack Whalen titled "Five Ways the New Cinnamon Desktop is Better Than Your Default Desktop Environment." Rob questions the validity of the claims made about Cinnamon's superiority, especially regarding performance and features that are already standard in other desktop environments.
Rob (02:50): "How do any of these things on this list make Cinnamon desktop environment better than the DE you are currently using?"
Jeff adds to the debate by noting that features like window shading have long been present in environments like Xfce and Mate, challenging the notion that Cinnamon offers unique advantages.
Jeff (08:46): "Keith, 512 says Xfce has had shading for a very long time."
The team concludes that while Cinnamon is a solid choice, the reasons presented for its superiority are not compelling enough to deem it better than other established desktop environments.
3. Flathub & KDE's Monetization Efforts
Rob shifts the conversation to Flathub and KDE's initiatives to monetize the platform. He explains that the GNOME Foundation, in partnership with KDE, is looking to introduce payment and donation systems to make Flathub self-sustaining. This move aims to support open-source projects financially, ensuring their continuity.
Rob (33:14): "Flathub is an easy way to package something universally... this could help potentially draw in more developers."
Jonathan highlights KDE's successful donation campaign, noting a significant increase in contributions following their respectful and non-intrusive solicitation for donations.
Jonathan (36:27): "KDE has pulled in $60,000 in donations in December. Wow, that was a win for KDE."
The discussion underscores the importance of sustainable funding models for open-source projects and the positive reception of KDE's approach to donations.
4. OpenVPN Updates
Jonathan revisits OpenVPN, highlighting its ongoing development despite the rise of WireGuard. David informs listeners about the new Data Channel Offload (DCO) kernel module aimed at enhancing OpenVPN's performance by leveraging AES-NI in kernel space to reduce overhead.
David (13:19): "OpenVPN is trying to win me back... the DCO kernel module is going through its review process."
The team acknowledges that while WireGuard is gaining popularity for its simplicity and speed, OpenVPN remains a viable option for those reliant on its features, thanks to these recent improvements.
5. OpenWRT Security Vulnerability
Jeff brings attention to a reported security issue in OpenWRT's upgrade system, where vulnerabilities could allow attackers to serve compromised firmware images. He details the nature of the vulnerabilities and the steps OpenWRT has taken to mitigate them, including input sanitization and using full-length SHA256 hashes.
Jeff (17:02): "OpenWRT had an issue with their attended SIS upgrade server that could have led to compromised firmware images being served."
Jonathan reassures listeners that there's no evidence of exploitation but emphasizes the importance of updating to the latest version as a precautionary measure.
Jonathan (23:46): "They are encouraging people to upgrade to the same version to eliminate any possibility of being affected."
6. OBS Studio 31 Release
Jeff provides an overview of the latest OBS Studio release, version 31, outlining new features such as Nvidia's blur filters, improved support for Intel Quick Sync Video, and enhanced integration with Amazon IVS. He also mentions several bug fixes aimed at improving stability and performance across different platforms.
Jeff (56:05): "OBS Studio 31 includes the Nvidia blur filter, Intel Quick Sync Video support, and numerous bug fixes."
David shares his experience using the new features, specifically the Nvidia background filter, highlighting the improvements in streaming capabilities.
David (61:03): "I am streaming on OBS31 and I am using the Nvidia background filter."
7. Steam Machines and SteamOS-Powered Hardware
The conversation shifts to the resurgence of Steam Machines, with Jonathan referencing an Ars Technica article about hardware running SteamOS in collaboration with Valve. The hosts speculate on the potential impact of more powerful processors and improved software support, suggesting that this iteration of Steam Machines could overcome past shortcomings.
Jonathan (53:21): "This is going to be the Steam machine idea... software support for running things on SteamOS on Linux using Proton is much better now than it was."
Rob adds that while Steam Decks and similar devices have been popular, a new wave of SteamOS-powered hardware could offer fresh opportunities for gamers and developers alike.
8. Linux Distro Cosmic
Rob reviews the latest updates to System76's Cosmic desktop environment, now in Alpha 4. He highlights features such as enhanced language settings, default application configurations, improved power management, accessibility enhancements, and support for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR). The team praises the desktop's performance and its potential to compete with established environments like KDE and GNOME.
Rob (61:50): "System76 Cosmic Desktop Alpha 4 is incredibly fast... accessibility applet makes the desktop more inclusive."
Jonathan expresses excitement about Cosmic's progress, comparing its smoothness to Cinnamon and contemplating giving it a firsthand experience.
Jonathan (66:10): "It's pretty good... it was one of the snappiest desktops I've used."
9. Docker, Podman, and Containerization Security
David offers a critique of Docker's security features, referencing Linus Torvalds' concerns about container isolation. He explains the vulnerabilities associated with Docker compared to full virtual machines and suggests encapsulating Docker containers within virtual machines for enhanced security.
David (40:28): "Docker reduces heaviness by using namespaces and control groups... but it's easier to escape Docker's isolation than a full VM."
Jonathan recommends using Podman in a rootless configuration as a more secure alternative, noting its compatibility with most Docker images and its ability to operate without root permissions.
Jonathan (45:22): "Run Podman rootless... Most Docker images will just work under Podman."
10. Rust in OpenSSL and TLS Performance
David discusses an article from Phoronix highlighting Rust LS, a modern TLS library written in Rust, outperforming OpenSSL in multithreaded server environments. The hosts touch on the origins of Rust and its growing influence in system-level programming.
David (67:33): "Rust LS multispeed performance is better than OpenSSL... Rust is just out there blowing through more performance metrics."
Jonathan shares his personal experience with Rust, including participating in Advent of Code challenges, and reflects on Rust's potential in enhancing software security and performance.
11. Nvidia Driver Updates
Jeff announces the release of Nvidia's new stable driver version 565.77, detailing its enhancements for Wayland support, bug fixes for Vulkan applications, and improved performance for gaming through better memory management.
Jeff (76:23): "Nvidia driver 565.77 supports Wayland better, fixes crashes with Vulkan applications, and enhances HDR hardware acceleration."
The team discusses the importance of these updates for gaming and Linux users, with David confirming active use of the new features.
David (61:03): "I am streaming on OBS31 and I am using the Nvidia background filter."
12. Command Line Tips: Eza & pv
Rob introduces Eza, a Rust-based alternative to the traditional ls command, highlighting its additional features like color-coded outputs and customizable formats. He demonstrates how to alias Eza for ease of use and showcases its enhanced display options.
Rob (94:26): "Eza is an alternative to the LS command with extra features like color and icons."
David presents a tip on using pv (Pipe Viewer) to monitor data transfer progress in command-line operations, enhancing user experience during file manipulations.
David (99:17): "Use pv to display progress bars during data transfers, useful for long-running pipelines."
Jonathan adds that these command-line tools can significantly improve productivity and user interaction with the Linux environment.
13. Conclusion
As the episode wraps up, the hosts reflect on the diverse range of topics covered, from desktop environments and security updates to the latest software releases and command-line enhancements. They encourage listeners to explore the discussed tools and stay engaged with the Linux community for ongoing developments.
Notable Quotes:
Rob (08:37): "I never look down on somebody trying to make money on something as long as they don't do something dumb."
Jonathan (36:27): "KDE has pulled in $60,000 in donations in December. Wow, that was a win for KDE."
Jeff (56:05): "OBS Studio 31 includes the Nvidia blur filter, Intel Quick Sync Video support, and numerous bug fixes."
David (67:33): "Rust LS multispeed performance is better than OpenSSL... Rust is just out there blowing through more performance metrics."
This episode of the Untitled Linux Show provides valuable insights into the current state of Linux desktops, security frameworks, and the ongoing evolution of open-source projects. Whether you're a developer, system administrator, or enthusiast, the discussions offer actionable information and thoughtful critiques to enhance your Linux experience.