← All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
Untitled Linux Show 184: PoPOS Broke PoPOS
01:51:58
ProxMox, Debian 13, Kernel Stats, & Predictions
Loading summary
Transcript476 lines
- [00:00]
Rob
Hey folks, this week we have our Year in Review show and we talk about the Steam Survey, the Linux Commit kernel review for the year. There's Proxmox news, there's Debian 13 news, there's Xorg News. There's a lot going on, you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. AT T Mobile we'll give you four free 5G phones and four lines for.
- [00:19]
Jeff
Only $25 per line per month with eligible trade ins.
- [00:21]
Rob
And no, it's not a contest, it's every day for a limited time.
- [00:24]
Jeff
Everyone's a winner on America's largest 5G network.
- [00:28]
Rob
Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with auto paid discount using debit or bank account 5 DOL more per line without autopay.
- [00:33]
Jeff
Up to $830 off each phone via.
- [00:35]
Rob
24 monthly bill credits plus taxes, fees.
- [00:36]
Jeff
And $10 device connection charge for well qualified customers.
- [00:38]
Rob
Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and.
- [00:41]
Jeff
Balance on required finance agreement too. Bill credits end if you pay off devices early.
- [00:44]
Ken
CT mobile.com Life can be chaotic if you're running a retail business, don't let disorganized order fulfillment add to the chaos. Use Shipstation instead. With Shipstation you never have to worry about shipping and fulfillment again. Whether you're running a business out of your garage or you have multiple warehouses, shipstation is ideal for every phase of your business's growth. Save time with one login for all your stores and by automating repetitive tasks. Plus you'll save money with the best shipping rates from global carriers. Shipstation's industry leading features help you deliver a better customer experience. They'll get accurate and faster shipments along with automated tracking updates with your branding and with up to 88% off UPS and USPS rates and up to 90% off FedEx rates, ShipStation is the fastest and most affordable way to ship. Calm the chaos. Switch to ShipStation today. Start a free trial at shipstation.com audio that's shipstation.com audio when we feel stuck.
- [01:46]
E
It can be hard to picture what's.
- [01:48]
Ken
Possible in the new year.
- [01:49]
E
But sometimes a small change like refreshing your dinner routine can make a big difference in your day to day. Cookunity makes it easy to reset your.
- [01:57]
Ken
Meal habits with a variety of vibrant, healthy meals crafted by award winning chef.
- [02:02]
E
The chefs you see on TV and in five star kitchens are the chefs.
- [02:06]
Ken
Who craft each small batch meal and.
- [02:08]
E
They'Re delivered directly to your door ready to enjoy.
- [02:12]
Ken
There's no cooking required and it's way.
- [02:14]
E
Healthier and cheaper than other delivery options.
- [02:17]
Ken
Experience the convenience of dishes made from local in season ingredients delivered straight to your door.
- [02:23]
E
It's an effortless way to savor high.
- [02:25]
Ken
Quality chef prepared meals while feeling good.
- [02:27]
E
About what you eat. Take a step toward a fresh start.
- [02:30]
Ken
With CookUnity Chef Crafted Meals designed with you in mind.
- [02:34]
E
Go to cookunity.com podcast or enter code podcast before checkout to get 50% off your first week. That's 50% off your first week at cookunity.com podcast.
- [02:48]
Rob
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 184 recorded Saturday, January 4th. Popos broke pop OS. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to geek out about Linux and open source and all kinds of fun stuff. And it is a brand new year. Welcome to 2025. We all made it. And boy, that means that we get to do some year in review and go back and take a look at our predictions, see how we did. And of course we've got the regular crew here, we've got Rob and Ken and Jeff, and we've got four sets of predictions. And at the end of the day, Happy New Year. Happy New Year to everybody. We're first going to go over some news and then we're going to get into our predictions, what we predicted would happen in 2024. We'll give ourselves grades, talk about how well we did, but first. And we're going to let Rob go first, but he's sort of sneaking one in here because this is something that's going to show up in his list of predictions too. But Rob, what's new with the Steam survey?
- [04:01]
E
Well, I forgot to wear my New Year's outfit and if I wasn't supposed to sneak these into my story and have them relate, then I apologize. Because everything I'm talking about today has to do with predictions one way or another. So if you look back into 2023, okay, that's not last year, it's the year before that. Linux was inching closer to that 2%, peaking right around, I think right around the 1.9% mark, at its highest as I recall. So I predicted in 2024 we would break that elusive 2% mark. Well, we smashed that goal early in 2024. We broke past that 2% mark and then it fell back under right away and well, I didn't bring that back up because I was sad. But then again in November, Linux hit 2.03%. I guess it was adjusted down to 2% after the fact, but it broke 2% again there. But we aren't done yet. December showed a real success story, topping out at an amazing 2.29%. In that survey windows lost some ground losing 0.51%, bringing them down to 96.1%. While our actual close competitor in the area right now, hopefully not for long, we'll leave them in the dust is macOS also. They also gained some ground with gaining a 0.22 increase which brought them up to 1.61%. So with Linux continue to maintain a healthy lead over macOS. And as we pointed out in the past, Valve and their Steam deck have a lot to do with the increase. You know, showing that SteamOS accounts for about 36% of the Linux gamers, but this increase, you know, it still benefits all Linux users as I say every time I bring it up and ultimately even those that aren't gamers will benefit as the market market share grows and other software vendors support the Linux as well. Another interesting stat from the survey is how much Linux users love AMD. With 73.6% of Linux users using an AMD CPU processor, though the numbers are a little weird since Intel CPU is at 29.6% which if you add that up brings the total to 103.2%. I assume there's some weird rounding going on in the background. Maybe, maybe the details have further breakdowns of the CPUs and those numbers got rounded up a little too aggressively. Close enough. Either way you look at it, AMT is quite a bit above intel in the Linux gaming ecosystem for Linux enthusiasts. Some other interesting numbers may be the breakdown of Linux distros themselves on the servant. Most interestingly in the stats is that Arch and Ubuntu based distros are the only things listed in the top 10. Red Hat base like Fedora doesn't even show up likely buried somewhere in the other section at number 10, other section being 27.47%. So when looking at the list on the on top, as stated earlier, SteamOS is 36.47%. Number two is Arch at 9.7%, number three is Flatpak at 5.73% which could be split up anywhere. Maybe that's where the Red hat users are, I don't know. Number four is Ubatu 24.04 at 4.79%. Number five is another Ubuntu based Linux which is Linux Mint 22 at 3.79% and I'll be joining these ranks soon, I promise. Number six, a little surprising is Ubuntu Core 22. I didn't really know that was heavily used out there, but that's at 3.79%. And then number seven, another arch based is Manjaro 2.96%. Number eight, Ubuntu based POP OS 2.71% and then arch based Endeavor OS is at 2.66%. And number ten is the other section I mentioned earlier. And you don't look at this. I was just thinking maybe one reason Fedora isn't in there is just because they change versions so often. Pretty much almost everybody is. Every six, at least a year they have to change because it's not supported anymore. Whereas a lot of these are LTSs, Linux Mint 2224 04, which is still a pretty recent LTS. But a lot of these don't change as much. So if they're breaking them down into versions, that may have just split the, the count up of Fedora. So maybe you're not as bad off as you look Jonathan, with your Fedora. But you know, the surprises to me is Ubuntu Core Endeavor os. You know, I knew these were popular, but I didn't really realize they'd be in the top 10, at least for gaming. And in 2025 I'm already gonna throw my prediction out here. We'll reiterate it later, but it ties into this. I predict Linux on Steam survey, that for sure Linux will hit 2.5%. That's the easy one. But my stars, my shooting for the stars, where I'm gambling on is I think, I think there's a chance they'll get that 3%. You know, just for a moment, one month we'll hit that 3% mark.
- [10:12]
Rob
Could be, could be. Jeff, you've got something linked here that's actually kind of on topic.
- [10:19]
Jeff
Yeah, so in the discord, I linked Linus from Linus Tech Tips and he just released this today where it says I can't keep waiting for Steam OS Linux Gaming Update 2025. So what he does in the video is he takes the Steam OS that you would get on your Steam controller, your gamepad on a Steam Deck. Yeah, or Steam deck, and he loads it onto a PC and they, he, he uses an AMD CPU and gpu. So it works. He said they tried to use Nvidia and it didn't work. But he, he acknowledges that it's, it's not ready for prime Time and there's a lot of drivers and stuff that aren't supported. But yeah, he plays it and basically says, this thing rocks. You know, it works really good with the limitations that it's still the Steam Deck os. So it's, it's geared to that basic interface. You can't, you can drop into the desktop version, but it's still limited right now.
- [11:24]
E
He should have just used something like Chimera. But what's really shocking me about that story is the fact that how was he able to install SteamOS on a computer? I mean, that's a lot of workarounds. From what I recall last time he couldn't even figure out the basics of POP OS without breaking it.
- [11:43]
Jeff
Well, this was something he said. Go ahead, Jonathan.
- [11:47]
Rob
I was going to say, to be fair to him, that was a pop OS problem. Popos broke pop OS. Now they got it fixed within like 24 hours, but that was, that was not a Linus problem near so much as that was a popos problem.
- [12:00]
Jeff
Well, and last time they should have really, they should have stuck to like Ubuntu or Fedora or something pretty mainstream. And they, they kind of chose a little more adventurous path. But on this one.
- [12:13]
E
Hold on, hold on. We just looked at a survey. Fedora is not more mainstream than POPOs in Steam.
- [12:21]
Rob
So you're talking about the Steam survey versus Linux users everywhere.
- [12:25]
E
We're talking about gaming too.
- [12:27]
Jeff
Right, but I'm talking about a distribution that you can just put in and load up. Because in that video I've watched it, he talks about, I can't little, you know, it's little, Little Johnny Consumer is what he names this imaginary person about they can't, you know, I don't want to get in and have to mess with the command line and do all this stuff. And he wanted something you just load up. And I would, I would argue that like an Ubuntu, a Fedora, you know, something like that, you can just load up, you don't ever have to get into the command line.
- [12:59]
E
Well, I agree with Ubuntu, or an elementary OS as far as that goes. Popos, you said ever need to go into the command line either?
- [13:06]
Jeff
Apparently, indeed, but he was at that. But, but he was. Remember, popos was a little rougher when he tried it. That was what, two years ago now? Yeah, I believe so.
- [13:17]
Rob
It's come a long way since then.
- [13:18]
Jeff
Yeah, maybe now you can say that, but at the time it was still a little beta ish.
- [13:25]
Rob
And, and to be fair, Steam OS on desktop is a little beta ish at this point too, isn't it? Wasn't there some fun and how he even got that installed?
- [13:35]
Jeff
Yeah, it, well it, it pretty much installed. What it does is there's an image you can download to re image. Yeah, your Steam deck. And he just loaded that into a PC. But he did, they did make sure the PC had AMD hardware in it so that it would work. Because they talk about, you know, even if you go to the desktop, like there's no printer support, there's no Nvidia support, there's no, you know, there's a lot of stuff missing because it was tailored for the Steam deck. But they keep talking about, they're also talking about how Steam OS is. They're, they're predicting it's going to get released as a, as a general distribution so that everybody can just game.
- [14:16]
E
Yeah, calling that a beta right now is probably a stretch. I mean it's not at the moment not designed to support that software. It's pre alpha for our hardware. I mean.
- [14:26]
Rob
Yeah, but it's interesting though because you know, there's been noises being made about Valve coming out, or not coming out directly, but supporting people making other Steam box, whatever they're going to call it, you know, made for SteamOS hardware and that implies supporting a little bit wider hardware set, you know, for a lot of people ideally supporting Nvidia. So you figure all that's got to.
- [14:53]
Jonathan
Be coming, especially since it's to Valve's advantage financially.
- [14:59]
Jeff
Oh yeah. Well, and they're worried and he talks about it. They were worried about back in the Windows 8 days, about how Windows kept talking about they were going to have like the walled garden kind of like Apple does and lock everybody out. So you couldn't just load any third party software.
- [15:15]
Rob
Yeah, that was going to be the Windows Store and only the Windows Store.
- [15:18]
Jeff
Yeah.
- [15:19]
Jonathan
With Windows apps.
- [15:21]
Jeff
And they haven't really backed. Yeah, they haven't really backed off from what he was saying anyway. I, I think that I thought they had, but it's still there. I mean it's, it's not. They haven't walked away from it. It's kind of on pause a little bit and then, you know, with everything Windows 11 is doing not making people happy and the state of Linux in general is so much easier than it was. There's a lot more distributions you can just load on and go without having to fight and mess with them so much.
- [15:54]
Rob
Yeah, pretty much. These days you only have to get into the command line and fight with stuff if you really want to.
- [15:59]
Jeff
Yeah, and a lot of times I do because I'm running the game.
- [16:02]
Rob
Yeah, exactly. That's the game for us. That's why it's fun.
- [16:07]
Jeff
And that's why people say, well, God, you got to get in there and you're doing all this. Well, yeah. Cause I'm running weird beta software on top of alphas and I'm wedging things in that weren't maybe supposed to go together. So it's a problem of my own design. It's not Canonical's fault in my case.
- [16:26]
Rob
Yeah. And I see people pointing this out in our chat. They talked about it in the Linus Tech tip video that right now the actual Steam OS on an x86 desktop is not the way that you want to go. There are other options that are going to be a lot easier. They were using that for a specific reason and that is that they foresee that becoming an official solution soon. But yeah, right now there are, there are other options that are way better than trying to run Steam OS on your desktop.
- [16:57]
Jonathan
Maybe on that latest arm system that System 76 has got out, you could.
- [17:05]
Rob
If you really wanted to. Sure.
- [17:07]
Jeff
Well, in all fairness, in the video, they do talk about that. This is not meant for mainstream yet. This was kind of an experiment to see how it ran and how much problems they would have. It is not desktop ready for general use, but if you have the right hardware, it does give you this Steam Deck interface and all that. And it works just like the Steam Deck does.
- [17:36]
Rob
Yep.
- [17:37]
Jeff
And a side note, when you talked about AMD being popular, not only is it on the Steam Deck, if you look at a lot of top retailers, Intel CPU sales are not in the top 10. And the last time I looked it through the Amazon, like the first Intel CPU was the 12th gen. The new release was like number 15 or something like that. I mean, it was. They were selling some of their old 12th gen CPUs more than they were selling the current gen.
- [18:14]
Rob
Yeah.
- [18:15]
Jeff
And even one of the fourteen 900ks was above the current gen. So people, you know, gamers usually keep up on hardware a little more in general. Not, you know, not universally true, but little more than grandma checking her email and AMD is just killing it in sales right now.
- [18:37]
Rob
On the CPU side. Yeah, for sure.
- [18:38]
Jeff
On the cpu.
- [18:39]
E
Yeah, yeah. Gamers do keep up with that because I just bought a gaming keyboard for my kid and when I watched a video on it because I couldn't figure out how to turn the thing on, the power button was hidden.
- [18:54]
Jeff
But power button on a keyboard.
- [18:58]
E
It's a wireless oh, but I thought it was funny. The guy said the batteries last for 18 months. I change my computer more often than that.
- [19:10]
Jeff
Yeah.
- [19:12]
Rob
Wow. Wow. I'm still flabbergasted at the idea of a wireless gaming keyboard. Those are just not words that go together.
- [19:20]
E
But anyway, the other funny thing, the other funny thing I got a quick say.
- [19:25]
Jonathan
Is it using a microwave radio?
- [19:28]
E
No. Two keys were on upside down too. It was a renewed device. The app was upside down and the Windows key was upside down.
- [19:36]
Rob
Yeah, if you love your phone but not your carrier, just switch to T Mobile. You can keep your phone, keep your number and we'll help pay it off up to 800 per line. You can also use our savings calculator.
- [19:48]
Jeff
To compare our plans and streaming benefits against Verizon and AT and T. So.
- [19:52]
Rob
Switch and keep your phone, keep your.
- [19:53]
Jeff
Number and keep more of your moolah.
- [19:55]
Rob
@T mobile.com up to four lines via virtual prepaid card allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service ported 90 plus days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemptor required card has no cash.
- [20:06]
Ken
Access and expires in six months Life can be chaotic if you're running a retail business. Don't let disorganized order fulfillment add to the chaos. Use Shipstation instead. With Shipstation, you never have to worry about shipping and fulfillment again. Whether you're running a business out of your garage or you have multiple warehouses, shipstation is ideal for every phase of your business's growth. Save time with one login for all your stores and by automating repetitive tasks. Plus, you'll save money with the best shipping rates from global carriers. Shipstation's industry leading features help you deliver a better customer experience. They'll get accurate and faster shipments along with automated tracking updates with your branding and with up to 88% off UPS and USPS rates and up to 90% off FedEx rates, ShipStation is the fastest and most affordable way to ship. Calm the chaos. Switch to Shipstation today. Start a free trial@shipstation.com audio that's shipstation.com.
- [21:07]
E
Audio when we're stuck in the same routine, it can be tough to imagine new year possibilities. But sometimes a small change like refreshing your dinner routine can make a big difference in your day to day.
- [21:19]
Ken
Cookunity is an easy way to reset your meal habits. Each meal is designed with you in.
- [21:24]
E
Mind with chef crafted dishes that bring.
- [21:26]
Ken
Vibrancy and health to your table.
- [21:29]
E
See what's possible with a simple reset. Go to cookunity.com podcast or enter code podcast before checkout for 50% off your.
- [21:37]
Rob
First week all right, let's talk about Xorg and X11 and Ken, there was kind of a bump in commits for X11 in 2024. Is it coming back? Is there a resurgence? Are we going to move back to.
- [21:54]
Jonathan
X11 is the question you're asking? Is there still some life in Xorg server? Yeah, well Michael Larabel's article about the number of commits in 24 to the Xorg server git tree has me wondering if Xorg is going out with a bang or a whimper. Now Michael was also surprised to see last year had the most commits over the last decade. He doesn't think it is a sign of resurgence since Wayland continues to become the dominant force in the Linux desktop. Now here is what Michael saw. The Xorg server saw 708 commits last year compared to the 200 to 300 commits seen each year going back to 2018 when there were 535 commits. Now Xorg was averaging 400 to 500 commits a year between 2010 and 2020. Why are we seeing this much activity in 2024? Two reasons. First, the X Wayland code within the Xorg server continues to be actively developed to support new Wayland protocols and other fixes or additions. The second reason is open source developer Enrico and I do apologize if I'm mispronouncing this. We get Enrico has largely been working on X.org server fixes and improvements around testing and better CI or MBSD coverage areas for the X.org server. Enrico has nearly single handedly been working on some Xorg server fixes and other minor feature work. With no major vendors like Red Hat or Intel left investing the Xorg server development. Now let's don't forget that there were some security fixes Xorg had last year also. Now according to Michael, there were only 35 authors doing commits last year. If you do want to know how many lines of code were produced in 2024, I recommend reading Michael's article as well as to get some of the other numbers that I didn't touch on.
- [24:13]
Rob
Yeah, interesting stuff. And that is probably the most interesting of all of this is that we are down to 35 authors in Xorg for 2024. In 2023 there were 44 and 22. There were 52 separate authors. So we may be seeing and more lines of code changing but fewer and fewer people working on it.
- [24:36]
E
I want to know how many of those commits were urgent.
- [24:39]
Rob
Security bug Fixes a handful of them, sure.
- [24:44]
Jeff
And that's a bit of a foreshadowing for one of my predictions coming up.
- [24:50]
Rob
I do also find it real fascinating that somebody from the BSD side is working on the continuous integration stuff for Xorg server. I guess there is no, or at least it's not mainstream doing Wayland on BSD. They're still using Xorg and X11, so it makes sense that they're still interested in it.
- [25:08]
Jonathan
Go with another one that I saw mention. I'm trying to think something begin with an ar. I can't think of the name of it now.
- [25:20]
Rob
I don't know. That is. That is definitely interesting to think about. You know what their arcan.
- [25:27]
Jonathan
That's it. Arcane.
- [25:30]
Rob
I. I am not familiar with that.
- [25:33]
E
It was an alternative that some maybe hoped would have been the next de facto after X, but instead it never really had a chance.
- [25:44]
Rob
Yeah, yeah, that one. Let's see, the last, the. The Last commit was December 25th, some of the 23rd. Oh, okay. It's getting, It' getting continuous commits. Probably more commits in arcan than there were in the Xorg server for 2024.
- [26:07]
Jeff
But not a high bar to cross.
- [26:10]
Rob
Yeah, yeah, not a real high bar to cross.
- [26:15]
Jeff
And one of the comments is x11 just works, but it doesn't fully work. I mean from the user standpoint, possibly, but there's a lot of security issues. There's a lot of things that we want to do into the future that X11 just can't do.
- [26:32]
Jonathan
It just works on Legacy's devices connected to a single monitor.
- [26:38]
Rob
Yeah, yeah, that's the case. That's funny.
- [26:45]
Jonathan
That's when you start doing dual or quad monitors HDR.
- [26:52]
Jeff
Securely and don't have those monitors at a different resolution. It doesn't like you can't individually scale or not very well anyway.
- [27:04]
Rob
Yup, yup. All right, do we want to talk about the kernel commits since we're measuring commit numbers?
- [27:14]
Jeff
We do. So Michael Erribill over at Pharonix has been reflecting on the previous year, much like many of us do at the end of one year and the start of the next. He examined the number of kernel commits in 2024 and compared them to previous years. Michael found that last year's commits hit a decade low. However, when you actually, when you look at the actual number of lines added and removed, they're pretty much in line with the previous decade. So while there are fewer actual commits, they're on average larger in size. Now, to give you a sense of scale, last Year's total. Last year's commits totaled 75,314 and between 2021 and 2023 they were averaging about 86,000 to 88,000 commits. And the peak was during 2020 when I think nothing was happening, which had almost 91,000 commits and also saw the most lines of code added to the kernel. Now Michael generated this data from the git stats on the Linux git source tree. So this is straight from where it's going in and out. He also tried to see if timing of the merge window had any effect but from the data he couldn't find any correlation. So even though sometimes when you have the pull request windows changes, it didn't, nothing, nothing was there to show that any timing was effect or any other issue that he could find outside of why there was fewer. But you know, even, even with the lower commit count, the kernel last year saw almost 3.7 million lines of code added and almost 1.5 million lines removed. You know, of course Linus Torvalds was in the top in the commits with almost 2900, but that's mostly from merges. Michael also highlighted some top contributors from organizations like Lenaro, Meta, BCash, FS and Intel. And overall there were 4807 authors contributing to the kernel this year, which is down slightly from previous years by about 50 authors from, from last year for example. So it's, it's not like there's a huge difference. I did take a look in the comments to see if there's anything that people might be saying about this, you know, if there was any insight or anything like that. But it quickly developed into politics and it kind of went nowhere. So personally this is my take. I think it's because a lot of the easy stuff has been done. You know, when you look back at the stories we do, you know, there are many covering very complex scheduling, new network optimizations and performance tweaks that are not trivial and a lot of times they're based in specific hardware. You know, not that there aren't a bunch of small things that gets fixed as well, but I believe a lot of the low hanging fruits already been picked. You know, it's to say I'm going to optimize the scheduler. It's a very high level theory crafting you have to do and then actually write it, prove it out, do it. It's, you know, this is, this is not trivial type things. Not, not that writing a kernel is ever trivial, but I mean I think that, I think the difficulties gone up quite a bit now. I should add that this activity that we had in 2024 is about what it was 10 years ago and it has been for a long time. So. And keep in mind, numbers like these are always variable. So I don't want anyone to think that the Linux kernel's in trouble. You know, it's vibrant and healthy and this is just a bit of interesting data. But that being said, if you ever thought you would like to develop for the kernel, you know, there's plenty of room for you to jump in and try making things better, you know, and happy coding.
- [31:09]
Rob
Yeah, I do know, because the kernel guys talk about it a lot. One of the things that they are very concerned about is bringing along new programmers and sort of training up new developers, but also new maintainers for the kernel systems because they see that as a very much a potential problem, that as the current maintainers get old and age out, they have to retire from it. Is there going to be people there to step in and take care of things?
- [31:36]
Jeff
Well, and I don't remember who it was you or somebody had said, maybe it was Greg Hartman, that if you're putting a few commits into the kernel, you're going to have a job offer.
- [31:53]
Rob
It was five commits. They said the average is five commits. If you land five commits in the kernel, you'll get a job from it on average.
- [32:01]
Jeff
Yes. So if you're in university right now, or you're even in high school and you're like, I want to be something I might want to do, start working on it because, you know, you start contributing at that level, that's a serious job resume right there.
- [32:22]
Rob
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
- [32:24]
Jonathan
And make one of those commits in Rust.
- [32:28]
Rob
Honestly. Yeah, that is a very hot job market right now. If I were starting over again, I would be working even harder to try to learn rust. I did a little bit. I did the first few days of the advent of Code challenge in Rust and then everything else came up and then everybody at my house got sick. I haven't gotten back to it yet, but yeah, that was fun. So learn some rustics.
- [32:52]
Jeff
David Ruggles is in the audience listening. He said we need new grade beards to replace the old gray beards. And I'd say, no, we need the peach fuzz beards to replace the gray beards.
- [33:03]
Rob
I mean, the gray beards are always going to be gray beards. You just, you, you need people to start training to be gray beards when there's still peach fuzz.
- [33:10]
Jeff
Yes.
- [33:11]
E
So none of us here, except for maybe Jonathan Bennett are what I can.
- [33:16]
Jonathan
Say.
- [33:20]
Rob
Yeah, well, that's a start.
- [33:24]
E
None of us are young enough to take the place of Linus and.
- [33:31]
Rob
It'S not a job that I would want. That is way too much cat hurting, way too much cat herding. Yeah. In looking, in looking at that, the numbers for the Colonel, the one thing that does come to mind that does concern me just a little bit is I wonder whether we're seeing the kernel start to fracture is not the word that I want, but if kernel development isn't moving into, in various different places. And we'll talk a little bit about this more when we get to our 2025 predictions, because this is something that I see happening more and more in various places. But we did dismiss some people from kernel development. Now, it happened late in the year, so there wouldn't have been a big part of this. But if the kernel guys keep doing that, and obviously that wasn't necessarily at their own behest, but if more people around the world keep getting kicked out of doing kernel development, then your commits are going to continue to fall. That's just the math of it. And I assume, Jeff, that is part of what people were getting into and arguing about in the comments.
- [34:38]
Jeff
It had to actually do about sanctions with Russia and things like that.
- [34:43]
Rob
That's what I'm talking about.
- [34:44]
Jeff
Yeah, okay.
- [34:44]
Rob
Yeah, yeah, that is pretty much what I'm talking about. And I don't know that that's, that's a big, a big driver of these numbers yet. I do, I do fear for that future, though.
- [34:57]
Jeff
Yeah. And it kind of boiled down to the, the really short version was because the Linux foundation is a US Organization and the US government has put sanctions on certain countries that they have to not allow certain countries to contribute because then that would be kind of breaking the sanction and then they would be in violation of the law.
- [35:28]
Rob
That's a real thing. Right. It's not necessarily that they can't accept contributions, but what the statement that the Linux foundation came out and finally gave was that people from, well, individuals that were hired by companies that were on the sanction list were not allowed to be listed as maintainers, is specifically what the judgment came down to. But it does. It brings to mind this question of are we going to start to see sort of a fracturing in where the kernel is developed and how it's developed. Are we going to see a. Are we going to see a BRICS kernel? Right.
- [36:08]
Jonathan
A European colonel?
- [36:10]
Jeff
Possibly, I would say less likely European and more likely Asia.
- [36:17]
Rob
Well, so that would be part of brics. When you look at the way geopolitics split out right now, you've pretty much got the west and you've got brics and there's a lot of sanctions going back and forth between the two. And so the kernel, a lot of open source projects, but the kernel has sort of been able to avoid wading into that at all. We've not had to do geopolitics in the Linux kernel. And here in the last few months, it's sort of been forced into the kernel that, no, there are sanctions and there are laws and you've got to pay attention to them.
- [36:46]
Jeff
And, and what is brics? Isn't that what Brazil, Russia, India, China?
- [36:51]
Rob
And what's the last one? Afghanistan, maybe? No, S. It would be sick. Oh my goodness.
- [37:04]
Jeff
Is it like Syria, maybe.
- [37:10]
Rob
South Africa?
- [37:13]
E
Oh, yeah, it's not Afghanistan.
- [37:20]
Rob
Yes, I earned a lot of shade with that one. Oh, yeah. Anyway, we'll talk a little bit more about this when we get to predictions, but let's continue rocking through here. And Rob, what's up with Proxmox?
- [37:36]
E
All right, so VMware's ESXi was and still is the king of virtual machines in the data center. The end of 2023, we saw Broadcom purchasing VMware and completely ripping it down beginning in 2024, breaking off from partner channels, ending perpetual licensing, killing its pipeline by ending the free ESXI that students and hobbyists are using to get familiar with and then bring it into the world at work. You know, the path many enthusiasts and those in education, you know, you know, they bring it back to the office. Serving personally serving on a local college computer careers board. I learned that, that this college that I kind of help advise in a big group, it's not like just me, but I've learned that they're no longer even a part of the VMware Academy that they used to be in. And I assume it ain't really get into it, but I assume it's somehow related to this change. Discussions took place as to what others are doing about it in the industry because this board is made up of businesses in the area what kind of IT needs they have. So the discussion came up, you know, what are you guys doing? Are you doing anything with this? Are you replacing it? What are you replacing it with? You know, and I've seen a lot of ads and various things with, with other vendors trying to step up like Scale Computing and Canonical, trying to fill the void being left by VMware. But I think one of the strongest contenders in this space may be Proxmox, one of the closest drop ins that I've seen. As it sits today, I already, you know, I already thought Proxmox was a great drop in replacement and I didn't even realize it was missing anything. It works great in a cluster, but what about managing multiple clusters? Well, that is where the new Proxmox Data Center Manager comes in. Funny thing is, when I first saw this, this posted about Proxmox Data Center Manager, I thought it was a job posting. I clicked in, I thought maybe I could apply for a job there, but it's not. It's a piece of software to manage all your clusters and I tested it out. The first alpha was released and it doesn't add a lot to what's in place today, especially if you only have one cluster as I do. But for managing multiple clusters, this simple alpha may have features you need. Proxmox Datacenter Manager is a single pane of glass that can monitor and manage all your Proxmox clusters. You can already easily migrate VMs from end containers between servers within a cluster, but if you're managing multiple clusters, there's no way to migrate them without Proxmox Data center. Because with Proxmox Data Center Manager you can migrate systems between distinct separate clusters. So monitoring, managing or yeah, monitoring, managing all clusters at once are the key features. And I believe this may be in response to better set of Proxmox as a replacement to VMware's EXI supplying similar functionality to VMware's VCenter, which is kind of a manager for all their ESXi VSpheres. You know, for those watching, I actually have my, my Data Center Manager up 0.1.7 Alpha and you can see things such as, you know, all the remotes could be reached. Virtual nodes are. I have two online two nodes in my cluster. How many virtual machines are running, how many are stopped, how many containers are running, how many are stopped? There's access controls, certificates, administration stuff shell down at the bottom the remotes, PVE's. You could do a lot of the same things you could do when you're actually on Proxmox itself. Start, stop, clone. You can't do everything at it's, it's alpha. But like I said, one thing you can do here that you cannot do is actually migrate a VM from one Proxmox in one cluster over to another connected cluster. The roadmap shows many more management improvements planned to where I believe at some point, Proxmox clusters will be able to be completely managed within this Proxmox Data Center Manager, much like VCenter does for VMware. I'm not sure how to quantify some of my thoughts in this prediction for 2025, but I believe that Proxmox will make large gains into the enterprise Data center in 2025, especially with some of the things I've heard even before this. We may or may not be aware of these gains, but I think what we will see without being in these data centers is major improvements to the Proxmox ecosystem and Data Center Manager with, with a final release by the end of the year. So, so the measurable thing is proxmox Data Center Manager having its first final release. That might be a stretch being only an alpha now, but it gives them a year and, you know, we'll see where it's at. I also wonder if, you know, if the alpha release of Proxmox Data center, you know, starting to develop this has anything to do with possibly new money that's maybe already being injected into, into Proxmox, you know, maybe, you know, they've had a whole year to start thinking about where do you want to go. And you know, I've heard a lot of talk about people going to, to Proxmox and if you're in the enterprise, they have paid support just like vcenter. So it's not like you're completely all on your own. You can pay for the support, you can get their service, you can set that up in your data center. It's really out of, out of the things I know, probably the path I would like to recommend and push going forward and you know, maybe others already are. Maybe people are buying that support and maybe they have some new money. I don't know if there's somewhere to look up if they have that somewhere. But that might be a good sign. New products coming out might be a good sign for Proxmox this year.
- [45:00]
Rob
Yeah, well, I mean, Broadcom has ticked enough people off with their changes to VMware. You figure that there's going to be a couple of different places that pick up customers as a result. So interesting to see.
- [45:14]
E
Broadcom did fine with hardware for years, but once they started getting into software, they just fumble it. What it must have been 2019, 2020, they, they bought Symantec and they did all the same things, killed their channel partners, their partnerships, and, and so many of the same things. And I don't know of anybody that uses that anymore. And VMware's ESXi is probably a lot more deeper rooted in a lot of data centers. So it might be a lot more work for people to get rid of. But you know, once people start, you know, it may be able to take a little more time, but I don't think people are going to want to keep that.
- [45:59]
Rob
Yeah. So it's never a good business model to say it's too annoying to get rid of us. Like that's not what you ever want to rely on as your business model.
- [46:08]
Jonathan
Especially when you got somebody else that says users are definitely free to ignore their subscription notices.
- [46:15]
E
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [46:17]
Jonathan
I noticed that proxmox, a staff member says in their forum notes.
- [46:23]
Rob
Interesting.
- [46:24]
E
Yeah, you don't have to get a license that's, or it's completely free to use if, if you don't, if you want. But you can get support licenses and all.
- [46:33]
Jonathan
But if you want guaranteed support, then I would recommend that subscription.
- [46:38]
E
Yeah. If you're a business with a real data center, you probably.
- [46:42]
Jonathan
And an insurance company that wants proof you've got support.
- [46:45]
Rob
Yeah, yeah.
- [46:47]
E
But at home here with my personal VMs that I dabble in, it's, it's not worth it to me for that price. I wouldn't mind like a smaller tier, like, you know, an enthusiast tier or maybe somewhere just to donate. Even if I don't get that full license and feature, I wouldn't mind donating. But the bottom tier for just individual like me is if I remember, it was probably a little higher than I'd want to pay or even donate, but I don't even, I wouldn't mind, you know, just a donation tier.
- [47:20]
Rob
Yeah, it makes sense. I, I, I donate not much, just a few dollars a month, but a little bit off to like Ardor. It's one of the tools that I use all the time and I wouldn't be able to pay them, you know, $100 a month, but I can, I can give them a few dollars a month and that, you know, with our door that actually unlocks some things for.
- [47:41]
Jonathan
You, but like getting the latest version on any desktop.
- [47:46]
Rob
Yeah, yeah, you can do, do their downloads and all that stuff. So it's, it's definitely a, it's definitely a viable business model to let people do sort of a donation if they want to.
- [47:59]
Jeff
You can even download code weavers here.
- [48:01]
Rob
Yeah, Code weavers, yeah. So, Ken, let's Talk about Debian. Debian 13 is about to be a thing.
- [48:08]
Jonathan
Yes, it is. In fact, Marius nestor ended his 2024 with an article about the first alpha version of the installer for the upcoming Debian GNU Linux 13 Trixie operating system series. It comes with support for the latest Linux 6.12 LTS kernel series and introduces various hardware improvements, starting with Support for the RISC5.64 architecture. The Debian Trixie installer alpha drops support for the RML and the i386 architectures. It also comes with some new recipes targeting small disks and improvements to automatic partitioning, such as to compute the swap size, along with revamped screens for the creation of the root user and the first user. Now, the new default ceratopsian theme was created by Elise Cooper and it has made its debut in the installer and can be seen all over the place, including the wallpaper, the lock and login screens. In fact, the wallpaper you see behind me from it, Elise's artwork won the contest held last fall. Now you can read Marius article for more details of both about the how she got the article, why this version is called Trixie and some of the other features that you may see coming out with it. And I'm going to predict that it'll probably by the middle of this year that we'll see it.
- [49:53]
Rob
Yeah, I am interested in what's coming with Debian. I'm actually really interested that they are dropping ARM L. You wouldn't necessarily think that anything out there uses that, but actually the one where people would use that is raspberry PI. The 32 bit raspberry PIs. That is what sort of what they run because they are actually ARMV6. And so anybody that's got like an original PI Zero if they want to do something with that. The Debian version that you would use for that is ARM L. So you know, it still kicks around a little bit, but it is old hardware and I definitely see why they want to retire it.
- [50:34]
Jonathan
And that's also why you saw it being. One of the reasons why you saw it being dropped is because of the framework that you're using now for creating Debian. I think we covered a story about that last year.
- [50:49]
Rob
Yeah, yeah, I can believe it. I can believe it. Also cool to see that they're bringing RISC5.64 bit as an officially supported arch. That is definitely an interesting future thing that more and more boards are starting to pick up on.
- [51:05]
Jonathan
I look forward to Will you be running Debian on one of your RISC VS this year?
- [51:10]
Rob
I don't know. Maybe. I run. I do run. I mean, I guess I run Debian as a part of the Raspberry PI OS that's built on Debian. That's. That's about the only Debian that I run right now. But I don't know, maybe might be worth giving it a try. I don't usually live on the Debian side of the fence, but I am. I know enough about it to be dangerous.
- [51:32]
E
Debian wasn't in the top 10 of the Steam survey either.
- [51:36]
Rob
Nope.
- [51:37]
Jonathan
But just to give everybody a better view of the wallpaper, I'm going to take myself out of the picture for a minute.
- [51:44]
Rob
There you go.
- [51:45]
Jonathan
And there it is.
- [51:46]
E
Yeah, I like that a lot better.
- [51:48]
Rob
Yeah, it's nice. And oh, that was mean. Okay, well, Jeff, let's talk about plasma.
- [52:00]
Jeff
Yeah, I mean, we can't end and start a new year without talking about KDE plasma. I mean, that's been the big story, you know, for many months now, and a little over a month ago we saw the release of KDE Plasma 6.2.4, and now we have the next release, 6.2.5. Now this is going to be the final Update for the 6.2 desktop series, and because it's the last update in this series, no new features are being added. Version 6.2.5 is strictly a bug fix release. Now some of the fixes include resolving a system settings crash that occurred when plugging in a mouse while viewing the mouse page, which I thought was kind of funny. And they fixed a nasty bug which could cause the lock screen to appear all black when using an X11 session. And additionally, a black screen issue that happened when wiggling the pointer while the screen was about to lock has been addressed, so you shouldn't run into that anymore. There are also improvements for recording specific windows with Spectacle and Obs Studio when using screen scaling. Now version 6.2.5 enhances the display of metadata for the picture of the day wallpapers, improves pasting of images from Plasma notifications into Sandbox apps, and offers better support for apps using Input Capture Portal, allowing you to regain full control of your pointer and keyboard immediately. Another Another issue that has been fixed was the mispositioning of notifications after dragging any widgets on the desktop for the first time. Nate Graham explained this fix by saying, and I quote, this turned out to have been caused by the plasma config file having old crusty system tray widgets left over from prior Plasma customizations which were competing for control over the position of notifications. Now they're cleaned up properly, which also reduces memory usage, removes a ton of cruft in the config file and may resolve other mysterious and random seeming issues with notifications being positioned incorrectly. Now, I won't go over the numerous other fixes in this release, but if you take a look at the article in the Show Notes, they go over it in much more detail and they also have a link to the full changelog if you want to see every single update. You know, basically this update's essentially prepping for the 6.3 release, which is expected on February 11th of this year. If you can wait a little longer from today, or perhaps by the time you hear this, if you download it later, the 6.3 desktop beta should be ready for testing on January 9th. So that's coming up pretty quick. And you know, I'm really excited to see what this next year holds for KDE 6.
- [54:48]
Rob
Yeah, it should be really interesting. That's actually one of my predictions from last year and also for next year, so lots of interesting things coming. I've been enjoying KDE 6. There was just a little bit of growing pains getting into the first version, but those got fixed pretty quick and it's been a great experience since then.
- [55:10]
E
I've seen posts recently from people saying that KDE 6 isn't ready yet.
- [55:16]
Jonathan
Well, I upgraded to Ubuntu Studio 24.10 just so I could get up to KDE 6 as well as PipeWire 1.2.4.
- [55:27]
Jeff
See, I'm on Kubuntu 24.10 and I'm on KDE 6.1 and 2504 I believe is going to have 6.3 something when it, when it gets released here pretty quick. So yeah, yeah, because we've talked, there's little niggles that I've had in six. One. Nothing, nothing groundbreaking, but just some little, little issues. But I have tried 24 oh or 2504, the daily or nightly build, but they haven't upgraded to the latest kernel yet and they're still on 6.1. So it's, it's still kind of a 24.10 extra at this point. They're not even truly calling it 25.04 yet.
- [56:19]
E
Did you say niggles?
- [56:22]
Jeff
Yeah. Have you ever heard that?
- [56:26]
E
He didn't just make that word up?
- [56:28]
Jeff
No, no, it's like a little. So it's little things that aren't right, but they're not horribly catastrophic. They're not major. They're just like little annoyances.
- [56:41]
Rob
They're niddly from the Oxford Dictionary, a trifling complaint, dispute or criticism.
- [56:48]
Jonathan
Not truffle Trifle.
- [56:50]
Jeff
Yeah.
- [56:51]
Rob
Yes indeed.
- [56:52]
Jeff
Rob learned a new word today.
- [56:54]
Rob
Yeah, all right. Yeah. I am interested to see where plasma goes. So let's chat then for a minute about predictions and we had some of these. Mine are listed first, so I will go ahead and talk about mine. So first off, I said that the 2024 release of Ubuntu LTS was going to be sort of a big deal because you finally got things like KDE Neon and everything else using them on the newer kernel. And I don't know that it was a big deal in that a whole lot of people noticed, but it definitely helped things like KDE Neon to be able to be on the newer kernel. So I give myself a partial credit for that.
- [57:40]
E
I take points away being that specifically KDE Neon or the KDE Neon folks have decided to make another distribution based on. Was it arch?
- [57:55]
Rob
Well, yeah, we'll see if anything ever becomes of that, that I. I'm skeptical about that particular thing that they're going to do.
- [58:04]
E
I still think it says something though.
- [58:06]
Jonathan
It says something about it on the Ubuntu lts. I would have said you were spot on.
- [58:15]
Rob
It was a big deal for you.
- [58:17]
Jeff
Well, but keep in mind the whole basis of Neon is they wanted a stable foundation to run the beta and development desktop on. So they don't want to fight, you know, underlying bug. That's originally why it was built off of lts. It's just right now the kernel development was. Well, up until now it was slow, so they were having issues with some of the current later kernel features were needed to run kde. And to me it seems like it would be easier to take that LTS and just run a newer kernel in it rather than just totally jump to a different distribution.
- [58:56]
Rob
Yep.
- [58:57]
Jonathan
In other words, use the hardware enablement.
- [59:01]
Jeff
Yes.
- [59:01]
E
Yeah, but depending on what kind of features they're developing in a kernel isn't necessarily the only limiting factor.
- [59:09]
Rob
Also true, you've got your. Like your. Your Mesa version is going to be.
- [59:13]
E
All the other libraries that you're building against. You know, you're going to build against the current ones rather than what worked last year and rather than what's going to work next month.
- [59:26]
Rob
Yeah. So my second prediction was that fedora with KDE6 was going to basically be the premier Linux desktop and. Well, for me it has been. But I think something else is interesting here to note is that Fedora is looking at, and I think they have approved already, they are going to make a flagship out of KDE for Fedora 43. I think is where they're going to start doing that. So they literally do consider Fedora with KDE to be one of the premier Linux desktop experiences. So I'm going to call that for Fedora.
- [59:59]
E
That definitely is a win. I don't know how you'd measure that for the general. It's very subjective. Unless you wanted to look at the Steam survey. It's not even on there but.
- [60:13]
Rob
Well, that's true. I said the second half of the year would be boring because everything just starts working only.
- [60:21]
Jeff
So I'll give you a C on that one because we saw a lot of scheduler updates, we saw, you know, a lot of optimizations with new hardware.
- [60:33]
Rob
I was a little optimistic about how quickly things were going to get fixed.
- [60:36]
E
Though my boring part was, was December.
- [60:39]
Jonathan
So I think I was closer to it with saying everything was going to be exciting.
- [60:44]
Rob
Yeah. And then the, the last thing which I knocked out of the park was I said there's going to be a PI 500 and there was. I'm a little disappointed by the PI 500 but hopefully we'll get a follow up here before too long.
- [60:58]
E
But you didn't say it was going to be the best ever.
- [61:02]
Rob
Yeah, I did not. All right, Jeff.
- [61:05]
Jeff
Yeah, I didn't do quite as well. I said, I originally said AMD graphics cards are going to take a big leap in performance.
- [61:16]
Rob
They took more volume.
- [61:17]
Jeff
Yeah, they kind of and they killed some of their high end stuff and supposedly some future stuff is coming that's supposed to be pretty powerful but we won't see it next year. So I, I give myself, you know, maybe a C minus on that one or a D. It didn't work out as well. My next prediction was CUDA will have a valid competitor and we'll see a real path to moving off of cuda. I, we do have a valid competitor. I guess it depends how you want to look at it because that Rock M and Hip from AMD and Intel I believe is also getting behind it to try to have an open source compute stack to compete with cuda. It just isn't completed yet. So I mean, I guess I don't know it's valid yet but it is heading that way. So it's coming online. A lot of people are working on it, it's just not there yet.
- [62:22]
Rob
I think part of this is also the Zluda project which that's where you can take CUDA code and run it directly on AMD Stu. So there is, you know, there are definitely people working towards this.
- [62:34]
Jeff
Yeah, just not quite so maybe the.
- [62:37]
Jonathan
Top of the hill.
- [62:39]
Jeff
Yeah, so. So maybe maybe a C on that one. You know, it's maybe a little early. I also said CXL will become a lot bigger and more mainstream. Yeah, that one was kind of a D minus. It's, it's growing, but it's more enterprise and it's not so much mainstream. It's. It's industrial applications, it's growing, but the average everyday user, it's not, not going. I also had more acceptance of Snap packages and at least one distribution besides. You know, one of the Ubuntu's will have Snap.
- [63:19]
E
That's enough.
- [63:21]
Rob
Has that happened? Is any of the other.
- [63:23]
Jeff
I looked it up like Fedora's got it. Fedora supports Snap.
- [63:27]
E
Well, everybody supports Snap. Everybody supports Snap. You can, you could always install Snaps anywhere. That's not new. I ran Snaps on Fedora two years ago when I had Fedora. Oh.
- [63:42]
Jeff
But it looks like now when I was looking it up, it's, it's officially supported because there's a lot of them that are still in kind of developer stages. But.
- [63:55]
Rob
So you, you can run Snaps on them as opposed to. We support running Snaps on them.
- [64:01]
Jonathan
Can you run the Ubuntu core Snap on Fedora?
- [64:05]
Jeff
Well, I have no idea.
- [64:08]
Rob
I don't know. It'd be fun to try.
- [64:09]
E
I don't care what the difference would be.
- [64:11]
Jonathan
I'll try that on my Lenovo ThinkPad since I've just recently installed Fedora 41 on that.
- [64:21]
Rob
I have not seen a whole lot of popular support for Snaps. In fact, just the other day someone was ranting in one of the Discord servers that I'm in, like, what is all of this? How did he put it? He liked Linux 10 years ago, but he doesn't like all the new stuff that's been added to it. That feels all like cruft. And Snap was one of the things.
- [64:41]
Jonathan
He was also complain about systemd.
- [64:45]
Rob
Yes, yes, of course he did. So it is possible, I suppose, that Snap is the new system.
- [64:50]
Jeff
D by God, Post Extended has gone downhill since the VT100 terminals went away. And yeah.
- [65:01]
Jonathan
I will admit Jeff Flatpak seems to be more popular than Snap at the moment.
- [65:09]
Jeff
I, I think that they're going to be competing standards and Flat Pack probably will be a bigger thing. It's just you can't do everything you need with Flat Pack.
- [65:19]
E
Yeah.
- [65:20]
Jeff
And Snap. There are certain things that Snap does that Flat Pack can't. So I don't, I don't know a Snap will ever take over. But I think it'll be out there more just because there's certain when you have to tie real low level tie into low level stuff. Snaps can do that.
- [65:37]
Rob
When you, yeah, I guess the real question there is whether whether flat packs are going to add support for doing things like that. Are they going to go, oh, that is actually a neat feature that Snap has. Let's add it to Flatpak.
- [65:48]
Jeff
Well, I don't, I don't know how much refactoring that would take. I don't know if they're kind of in the painted in a corner kind of thing or if they could add it. I don't, I don't know enough about the containering that to say one way or the other.
- [66:02]
E
Let's, let's, let's ask a vote from the audience on if Jeff got that one or not for Snaps because I don't believe it. Jeff thinks he did. I don't know what the other guys think. Let's have a vote. I'll give you the link later on. Donate a coffee and give your vote or just send a message. You don't have to donate me a coffee. You guys got a message. I love, I would love to hear, love to hear on LinkedIn or Mastodon or whatever. Maybe I'll post something on Mastodon and you guys can just comment and tell me what you think. But I would love to hear if you think he got that one or not.
- [66:40]
Rob
If you love your phone but not your carrier, just switch to T Mobile. You can keep your phone, keep your number and we'll help pay it off up to 800 per line. You can also use our savings calculator.
- [66:50]
Jeff
To compare our plans and streaming benefits against Verizon and AT&T.
- [66:54]
Rob
So switch and keep your phone, keep your number and keep more of your moolah. @t mobile.com up to four lines via virtual prepaid card allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service port in 90 plus days with device and eligible carrier.
- [67:07]
Jeff
And timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months.
- [67:10]
Ken
Life can be chaotic if you're running a retail business. Don't let disorganized order fulfillment add to the chaos. Use Shipstation and instead with Shipstation you never have to worry about shipping and fulfillment again. Whether you're running a business out of your garage or you have multiple warehouses, shipstation is ideal for every phase of your business's growth. Save time with one login for all your stores and by automating repetitive tasks. Plus you'll save money with the best shipping rates from global carriers. Shipstation's industry leading features help you deliver a a better customer experience. They'll get accurate and faster shipments along with automated tracking updates with your branding. And with up to 88% off UPS and USPS rates and up to 90% off FedEx rates, ShipStation is the fastest and most affordable way to ship. Calm the chaos. Switch to ShipStation today. Start a free trial at shipstation.com audio that's shipstation.com audio audio, right.
- [68:11]
Rob
All right, Rob, so let's, let's talk about your predictions then.
- [68:15]
E
I think everyone is at least close, so let's go from the top. As I already mentioned this, one of the predictions I had for 2024 is this year Linux breaks 2% on the Steam survey. And yeah, we nailed that way past. Maybe that was too easy. I don't, I don't know if it was necessarily a sure thing last year, but it was white.
- [68:40]
Jeff
It was, it was a safe, it was a safe one. Come on.
- [68:43]
E
Oh, come on. All right, all right, we'll move on. Oh, go ahead, Ken.
- [68:50]
Jonathan
Yeah, I was just going to say, well, breaking 2% on the Steam survey is one thing, but becoming 4% of the desktop operating systems globally is another. Yeah, it did that too.
- [69:06]
E
Did that too. But that wasn't among my prediction, so I can't claim any awards for that. And remember, you have to donate a coffee for everyone I get. Right. So just. All right, next on the list, installable cosmic beta by the end of 2024. It wasn't a beta, it was alpha. Alpha four. I'd say close. I mean it's installable. Maybe just the terminology of alpha and beta and whatever that distinction. They could have called it whatever they wanted. They could have called it beta. It's subjective on what they called it, but yeah, close. I didn't make it. I didn't get that one.
- [69:53]
Jonathan
Well, we have the finalized cosmic out by the end of this year.
- [69:57]
E
Absolutely. But we're not in the prediction section yet, so just back off.
- [70:07]
Jeff
Stop reading ahead.
- [70:09]
Rob
Yeah.
- [70:10]
E
All right. Yep. The next one ahead is the year of Whelan. Any mainstream distros that haven't announced going full whelen will this year. What do you think?
- [70:22]
Rob
That's pretty much happened.
- [70:23]
E
Yeah, pretty much there. That's maybe not, maybe not an A plus. I mean they all at least have it experimental, if not their main. So close. I give it a B plus.
- [70:41]
Jonathan
Even XFCE got an experimental, experimental version.
- [70:47]
E
XFD Cinnamon.
- [70:50]
Jeff
I'd give You a B? We're not grading on a curve here.
- [70:55]
E
If we're grading on a curve, it'd be an A plus because I'm the only one who in the curve. So they'd all be. All right, next, someone will announce a premium ARM based Linux laptop this year. What do you think, Ken? Did I get that one? Were you talking about 76 Laptop?
- [71:16]
Jonathan
Yeah, Windows 70. 76 I had posted earlier in the discord link to a YouTube review of it. It can even run Windows.
- [71:27]
E
Yeah, so I didn't even catch that before. Before I heard Ken talk about that pre show, I think. I didn't think I got it, but hey, I guess I did. System 76 has a premium ARM based Linux laptop this year.
- [71:44]
Rob
It's not. It's not a laptop.
- [71:46]
E
You said desktop. Okay, well, what about. Hold on. So. So I have. I have some other ones up my sleeve and I, for the life of me, I can't remember what it's called. What is that framework? The framework, they have the ARM module, so I think that's premium. That's arm.
- [72:08]
Jonathan
It's a premium price. It's not quite as quick as the System 76 desktop, though.
- [72:15]
E
Yeah. Is the System 76 the elite.
- [72:21]
Jonathan
Ampere ARM?
- [72:24]
Rob
So I hate to break it to you, but the framework module that you're thinking of is RISC V, not arm?
- [72:31]
Jonathan
No.
- [72:31]
E
They had an ARM too.
- [72:34]
Rob
Not that I see. I see. I see a Reddit thread where people are asking for one. That's all that comes up.
- [72:40]
E
Okay, fine. There are premium.
- [72:45]
Jonathan
I'm trying to help you, Rob.
- [72:47]
E
There are. There are premium ARM laptops available that you can install Linux on, but they're not Linux laptops. Okay, I didn't get it. I call it close, but.
- [72:59]
Jonathan
Oh, you're talking about that Snapdragon that's not going to be developed anymore.
- [73:04]
Rob
Yeah, I don't think we're giving you that one.
- [73:10]
E
No, I didn't. I think I was close. I think it could have happened, but it didn't quite. I think it should have happened. What is wrong with you hardware makers? You got to pick up your slack.
- [73:21]
Jonathan
Well, if you had predicted that Windows would come out with a ARM laptop that would run Linux, great, then you'd have been spot on.
- [73:30]
E
Yeah, I was leaving that one for David Ruggles, but he didn't come on.
- [73:34]
Rob
So, all right. And then what about a Linux phone?
- [73:38]
E
So my last one was a new premium Linux phone announced. I did have a story on a phone that seemed premium and I can't even remember what it was called and I couldn't find it.
- [73:52]
Jonathan
Was it a new pine?
- [73:54]
E
No, no, I had the story, I think. I think.
- [74:00]
Jonathan
Or pure os.
- [74:02]
Rob
No, that's Android Base.
- [74:03]
E
No, there was a. They even did a snippet, a teaser of that one that I did it.
- [74:11]
Jeff
I don't think that was a premium phone, though. I think it was kind of for the low end market. If I'm thinking of the same one.
- [74:21]
E
You're not.
- [74:25]
Jonathan
Or Was it the Libram 5?
- [74:27]
Jeff
No, you blew it, Rob. Just face it.
- [74:32]
Rob
Yeah, I think that's. I think that's a buzz.
- [74:34]
E
I'll bring this back to Mastodon and we'll see if I got that one right or not. I'll. I'll figure it out. But I.
- [74:42]
Rob
You could. If you could find it, feel free to update the show. Notes. It's Ken, you had some. You had some safe ones. At least two of these were pretty safe predictions.
- [74:52]
Jonathan
Yeah. May have fallen a bit short on what would be the LTS version, but I did predict that we would have Linux kernel version 6.11 by the end of October, which we did. And then we did see the end of life for the kernel. 4.19 LTS. And I still think I nailed it with the second half of 2024. It will be exciting as we see even more improvements.
- [75:28]
E
Yeah, December was pretty boring. So you were a month short from the whole second half being exciting.
- [75:35]
Jeff
Yeah, we saw some big boring for me. There was some big AMD improvements that went in and there was some.
- [75:41]
E
So, yeah, I mean, yeah, it was so boring. You haven't even had a story in months, Ken.
- [75:52]
Jonathan
Then you're right. It was boring without me, wasn't it?
- [75:55]
E
It was boring. I was. I missed you guys.
- [76:01]
Rob
Yeah. And then you've got a question here, Ken. What did we not see coming? That was big news. I know one thing that comes to mind. We've talked. We already talked about it for this show and I'm going to talk about it again. But that was the sanctions hitting the colonel that blindsided a lot of people and was huge news.
- [76:19]
Jonathan
I was thinking of the Raspberry PI monitor when you asked that.
- [76:23]
Rob
Oh, yeah, see that. I. I can't. I can't get very excited about the.
- [76:29]
E
Raspberry PI monitor until Jonathan Bennett pointed out all of the negatives and yeah, he knocked it down for me.
- [76:40]
Jeff
Yeah.
- [76:43]
Rob
All right, so, Ken, what's coming in 2025?
- [76:46]
Jonathan
I think we will see the Linux kernel version 5.4. X series reach end of life by December of next year. Or this year actually. And then in December 2025 we'll either. I want to take a leap of faith and say that Linus is probably going to switch to 7.0 and make that the selected LTS kernel. The other options is either 617 or 618 depending on the way the RCS fall.
- [77:24]
Jeff
I. Makes sense. I have a comment there. I bet you it's not 7.0. I bet you he'll have an LTS as like 6.18 or something. And then the new kernel will be 7.0 after the LTS just for no other reason than just oh, an LTS shouldn't be a 7.0. It should be high number.
- [77:48]
E
Is somebody predicting the 7.0 kernel this year?
- [77:53]
Jonathan
I am.
- [77:54]
Rob
I think Ken is.
- [77:54]
Jeff
Ken is.
- [77:55]
Jonathan
I'm gonna.
- [77:55]
E
Well, right. I guess you. You did it right in there. I guess that was kind of bundled in.
- [78:01]
Jonathan
Well, I'm gonna take a stretch and say that we will see 7.0 and very likely it'll be the LTS for. For 2020.
- [78:10]
E
So you gotta. You got a two parter there.
- [78:12]
Jonathan
Yep. And we ended the year talking about open Seuss rebranding. I don't think we're going to see that this year. They will be switching to a new package management tool by the end of this year though. Actually I think we'll see that by the middle of this year.
- [78:34]
Rob
Now not switching away from RPMs, but just using a different. A different tool to manage Zipper.
- [78:40]
Jonathan
It's going to be called. Let's see if I can figure out how to say this.
- [78:44]
E
Or is it the graphical side of it?
- [78:47]
Jonathan
It's. I'm just going to say YQ package.
- [78:56]
E
Well, that's not a prediction. You're reading it.
- [79:03]
Jonathan
From my notes.
- [79:09]
Rob
And then what's up? What do you. What do you foresee with Fedora 42, Ken?
- [79:13]
Jonathan
Oh, that'll probably update to a new upstream release of Python Setup Tools. And I got a feeling Fedora Rawhide is going to see a lot of packages impacted. I'm going to predict at least 142 of them.
- [79:33]
Rob
And what is interesting about the new Python Setup Tools version, Like what's different about it?
- [79:40]
Jonathan
It's gonna be changing the it. I'm trying to remember now. I didn't put that in my notes, but I didn't warn him.
- [79:54]
Rob
I was gonna ask.
- [79:54]
Jonathan
There's the legacy tools actually been deprecated for at least five years.
- [80:02]
Rob
That sounds like it needs to be updated then.
- [80:04]
E
That's a. That's a good bet there I think.
- [80:08]
Rob
Yeah, I have just recently been sort of rediscovering that Packaging Python packages and Go and Rust have this problem as well, is a huge pain because Python, when you go to install these packages, it assumes that you're going to be online and so you can grab all the things. And most distros have sort of a rule that when you build your packages, you do not get to do that connecting to the Internet. And you know, that makes sense in and of itself. But when you're then talking about building packages that are inherently on the Internet, you run into problems sometimes. So that is. That is the main reason why I was asking.
- [80:46]
Jonathan
You mean like corrupt data?
- [80:49]
Rob
No, like building this package is going to pull other packages, but only as build dependencies. And so the way that it's normally built is it assumes it's connected to the Internet to build pull those extra packages. But when you go to build it inside of the build root system, it's not connected to the Internet and therefore can't get those packages. And so sometimes you have to really jump through hoops in your build scripts to make things work.
- [81:16]
Jonathan
And if you were connected to the Internet and you had a bad connection, you could get corrupted data downloaded.
- [81:23]
Rob
Well, there are things that are in place to keep that from happening. The real problem, the real thing that they want to avoid is packages changing depending upon when you build them. So, you know, something upstream changing and a new version getting pulled.
- [81:39]
Jonathan
That could definitely affect things.
- [81:43]
Rob
Yeah, well, it breaks being able to do reproducible builds. It's one of the things they really talk about. I've got some predictions and these are some interesting ones. We talk a lot about HDR and the color management. The Wayland Color Management protocol is finally close to landing, and once that happens, then I predict that you're going to see browsers to begin to support it. And I've been doing a little sniffing around and I actually consider it possible that Firefox is going to land HDR support on Linux before Chrome does. It may be that Firefox is the first browser to support it, but I imagine that by the end of 2025 we're going to be able to just open a browser, go to YouTube and play HDR videos and it'll just work by the end of the year. I think it'll happen.
- [82:31]
Jonathan
Especially if Google sells Chrome off to Firefox for a dollar.
- [82:37]
Rob
That's not a thing that's going to happen. But yeah, interesting future ahead there. I do foresee that projects are going to continue to have problems. We're going to continue to have stories about open source projects and the culture war issues where someone tweets something from the project and a lot of people tweet back or report and say, we really wish you hadn't said that. And then people get banned from the project, that sort of unfortunate thing. And I think we're going to see that some of those forks are going to gain steam and actually begin to threaten the original project. And it's difficult to predict which of those are going to be, you know. So for example, Godot. Godot had one of these instances, a bunch of people got banned and now there's like at least two different forks of Godot. One of them I think is called redo or red dot, however you want to pronounce that. There's going to be at least one project that has a fork that gets formed in 2025 from one of these events and the fork is going to really take off. Maybe it will be that one, I don't know. And depending upon how things go, we may actually see a BRICS kernel. We talked about this earlier. That may be a thing that happens. And I will consider that to be unfortunate because open source and the kernel has avoided to this point having to fiddle about with geopolitics. But I think it's gonna call out.
- [84:11]
E
A few forks that have never gone anywhere that some probably hoped would be the fork of gimp, the fork of Audacity. Yeah, so forks.
- [84:23]
Rob
Yeah, well, lots, lots and lots of forks happen and it's, it's actually pretty rare that a fork, like a non friendly fork happens and takes over as the, the main benefit.
- [84:33]
E
I call those out just because at the time there was some political upheaval and expectation that the main ones are just going to go away and these forks are going to take over. Not like LibreOffice, there's a successful fork.
- [84:48]
Jonathan
If I didn't know better, I'd say you are describing history repeating itself.
- [84:53]
Rob
Well, sure, there are definitely patterns that happen and continue to happen.
- [84:57]
Jeff
Oh yeah?
- [84:58]
Rob
Yep. So anyway, I think that's going to continue to be a problem and I don't know exactly what the solution is going to be, but we'll see that. I do think we will see a PI 500 Pro or a PI 500 XL or a PI 550. I don't know what they're going to call it, but there was a pretty universal panning of the PI 500. Everybody looked at that and went, wow, it could have been so much more.
- [85:22]
Jonathan
Where's the mz.
- [85:23]
Rob
So I think that slot, nvme, I think power over Ethernet would be really cool. And I still want to see mounting inserts on the bottom of it to be able to make more interesting cases out of it. So I am hoping that we get those things off of our wish list for the pro version, whatever we call it the PI 500.
- [85:44]
Jeff
If you have an NVME slot, you can hook up that 64 terabyte SSD.
- [85:50]
Rob
Yeah. And then the last thing that I'm going to predict for 2025 that this is going to take off, this is kind of a callback to my last Floss Weekly episode, is that we are seeing more and more legislation where software is liable for damages caused. And I think that's going to give open source projects a new funding model because we're already seeing it to some extent. Right. Like, so a business will come along to an open source project and say, we need a software bill of materials to be able to keep using your software. And I've said for a long time now that the correct answer to that sort of query is sure, here's our hourly rate. And there are, there are people out there working on it, trying to codify this, kind of give a blueprint for open source projects to be able to do this. And so I think that's going to kind of take off and hopefully will be a positive change.
- [86:37]
Jeff
Yeah, I'd like to see that. But really, you know, and talk about that. Well, I'll say when you talk about that, really, software is like about the only product that you get that, you know, it may work, it may not, it may not. I mean, imagine buying a car if it had a software license attached to it, nobody would touch it.
- [86:57]
E
Isn't that a thing already? Actually, there are. I mean, essentially you can get a car with all the functioning stuff, some of them, and then you could pay extra for the software to unlock the heated seats or.
- [87:12]
Rob
Yeah, no, you don't buy a car. You don't buy a car and it part, you know, part of the paperwork you sign says no warranty expressroom implied.
- [87:20]
E
Right.
- [87:20]
Rob
Like the. No, no government regulation.
- [87:25]
Jeff
No, I mean like the engine falls out and you can't do anything because they're like, oh, sorry, there's no warranty.
- [87:31]
Rob
Yeah.
- [87:32]
E
After a few years.
- [87:35]
Jonathan
Well, the only. What the paperwork does say is when you sign for it is if you fail to keep it updated, you avoid the warranty.
- [87:45]
Rob
Yeah, that's a thing. All right, Rob, you want to give us some predictions?
- [87:51]
E
No. All right. Yeah, no, not my predictions. The Linux on Steam survey. So as I already said earlier, it's definitely going to hit 2.5. That's not even, not even a. I don't know, I can't think of a word, but it's definitely going to hit that. But my big gamble here is I'm going to say they're going to peak out at that. 3%.
- [88:18]
Jonathan
No. 4.
- [88:22]
E
No.
- [88:24]
Rob
At least not 25.
- [88:26]
Jonathan
20, 29.
- [88:29]
E
I don't know. I'll tell you next year. All right. And I'm going to go. This year is going to be the year of the Cosmic Desktop. I don't know, I feel like now, I mean, they got through four alphas in half a year. It seems like maybe it's a stretch to say that they'll have an actual final release. I think they were really hoping for it, so I'm gonna just hope for it too. They're gonna burn through these betas quick and get the. A final release of the Cosmic Desktop. This is the Rust based one. It might be a stretch, but they're hoping for it. I was hoping for it. My next one out of nowhere, a new Steam console, probably from Valve, like the Steam Deck, but maybe it'll be from someone else. I'm just saying there's gonna be a Steam console and then as I said earlier, Proxmox will see major improvements as it tries to replace VMware in the enterprise. And I think the measurable thing we're going to see here is that Proxmox Data Center Manager will have a final release this year. Again, maybe a stretch on how quick they're going to develop through it, but you know, they've only got the first release now, the first beta release I think they called it, and some of the others that I was close on I think are going to come true this year. I think that premium ARM based laptop, Linux laptop will come out this year.
- [90:14]
Jonathan
Premium risk fight before we see the premium ARM base.
- [90:18]
E
That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't. It's, it's not. Yeah, but it's not premium specs. It doesn't run like the ARM does this year or last year now. And I, you know, Waylon, you know, you guys pretty much said I was right there and got it. But you know, any stragglers, they're gonna, they're gonna be finalizing their plans and be all in on it.
- [90:49]
Rob
Yep, yep. I think that's all fair. I think those are all fairly easy and safe predictions, man.
- [90:55]
E
You think there's gotta be a Steam council, huh?
- [90:58]
Rob
I. I don't know that Valve's gonna make it, but yes, I think that is a. That is a thing. Let me put it this way. I've seen news stories about Valve preparing to have a new Steam console.
- [91:08]
Jeff
Yeah, it's. It's pretty out there that stuff is coming.
- [91:12]
Jonathan
If it's not directly from Valve, it's going to be Valve in collaboration with a third party, I bet.
- [91:18]
E
And that 3%.
- [91:19]
Rob
Yeah, I think that's actually what's great.
- [91:20]
E
Percent's a stretch, I think too, but it'll be a 3% bigger jump than we got last year.
- [91:28]
Rob
That's fair.
- [91:29]
Jeff
Yeah, but that hot car comes out. There you go.
- [91:33]
E
That'll be a boost.
- [91:36]
Rob
It's true.
- [91:37]
Jeff
So, as always, there's a little bit of hardware in here too, but AMD graphics cards are going to stumble this year in sales. Sales. You know, the new ones are going to come out. They're just gonna, you know, and. But the work to fight Cuda will continue and keep gaining more traction because AMD and Intel both want in the AI market, which is right in there with the computational stuff. So they're going to keep working on HIP and ROCM and make that happen. I don't think it'll replace Cuda yet. We're way too early in the cycle for that. But I think you're going to start seeing it becomes a very valid alternative to run AMD or Intel for computational workloads. I have another one here that maybe is a little. See, I stretch these. I don't throw the meatballs across the plate here, but it. I'm saying Ubuntu is going to start fighting with Fedora. Not literal fighting, but fighting for the cutting edge and trying new things. Now, I do say not arch, cutting edge, but a step back. So Ubuntu is looking at compiling with like, clang. They're looking at getting rid of, you know, older support, they're adding more newer kernels.
- [93:06]
E
They're.
- [93:07]
Rob
Yeah, I was gonna say they're being more aggressive about pulling newer kernels.
- [93:11]
Jeff
Optimizations. They're looking at doing more compiling with greater optimizations and cutting some of the legacy stuff. So I think, you know, Fedora is known for being that cutting edge, not bleeding edge, like an arch or rolling, you know, hide. Yeah, they're slightly a step back. Well, I think Ubuntu is going to try to be right there with Fedora on a lot of their packaging and kernel versioning and things like that, and just even possibly leading the charge on, you know, the options they're compiling into the distribution.
- [93:50]
Jonathan
You think they're going to be up there with Tumbleweed?
- [93:53]
Jeff
No, they're not going to be up there with the rolling releases. They're that step back. So that's what I mean by not arch cutting edge. They're not Tumbleweed cutting edge. They're not Rawhide cutting edge. They're. They're gonna, they're gonna want a, a little stability. So they're gonna be back slightly, but they're not going to be running, you know, oh, we're running three dot Ancient for our. Whatever, you know, they're, they're gonna kick it into gear and they're trying to really reinvent themselves, I think a little bit. So that's. Yeah, I, I think it's basically, I'm predicting it's going to continue for the new year until by this time next year we're talking about. Yeah, Ubuntu's running the same, same versioning or maybe newer and has just as good options or maybe even better options than Fedora has. Or they're going to be neck and neck because Fedora then says, well, we got to keep up and we're going to follow suit or, you know, so that's what I mean by fighting not, you know, each other to compete.
- [94:55]
E
If that happens, I might have to switch back to them on the desktop. But that might be a little too cutting edge for my servers, though. I might define somewhere else for them to go.
- [95:07]
Jeff
That's where you load up Debian. That's a Red Hat enterprise.
- [95:11]
Rob
That's what Ubuntu LTS is for.
- [95:16]
Jeff
I am also predicting, and we'll have our first major distribution is going to at least propose, not that they'll get it done, dropping X and only letting X be handled by X. Wayland.
- [95:32]
Rob
Jeff, I have a question for you. Do you consider RHEL to be a major distribution? Yeah, because that's what they're doing with RHEL 10 coming out H1 of this year.
- [95:42]
Jeff
Oh, okay. Besides.
- [95:46]
E
Yeah. Hasn't Fedora already proposed that?
- [95:50]
Rob
No, not dropping it all together.
- [95:52]
Jonathan
They did, then they backed off because we covered that last year.
- [95:55]
E
Yeah, I thought so. So they proposed it. They didn't do it.
- [95:59]
Rob
I don't think they proposed not packaging X. They proposed not doing an X version of kde, but that was not a distro wide thing.
- [96:08]
E
I suppose not having it by default is maybe more what they've. What we've been seeing as opposed to not packaging it.
- [96:17]
Jeff
Yeah. At least not Packaging it. I'm talking proposing, not having X in there. They're going to propose out of there.
- [96:26]
E
No X in their repos at all.
- [96:28]
Jeff
Yeah.
- [96:28]
Rob
Yes, that is coming with REL10 and interestingly I suspect that that's going to be a real sea change in how everyone else sees X11 because once RHEL is no longer doing any maintenance work on it, it is essentially going to be unmaintained software. And that for some distros is going to make some big changes with, you know, based on their policies, what they are. They may not even be allowed to package it coming up here pretty soon because X11X will not maintain software. So.
- [97:07]
Jeff
So I guess that was a safer prediction than I thought.
- [97:09]
Rob
Yeah, real safe.
- [97:11]
E
Sounds pretty wild to me.
- [97:12]
Jonathan
But unless the new eco really steps up and starts working 24. 7 on all those commits.
- [97:19]
Jeff
No, it's, it's fundamentally X is fundamentally broken on a lot of stuff going forward. It just can't do it. And I'm predicting hardware releases are going to be boring this year. I now without any insider knowledge, I don't think the new GPUs from Nvidia are going to be that exciting. I think they're going to be expensive and they're not going to be a huge step forward. Yeah, I'm going to say maybe so.
- [97:47]
Jonathan
10%, 20, 26.
- [97:49]
Jeff
Yeah, I think it's going to be. They're going to be expensive. The coming of the new processor. The rest of processor releases are going to be pretty ho hum. I know people are excited for the night or 9950x3d but I believe if the rumors are true, the cache is only on one of the Neumann nodes. So it's. You're going to be back to part of it has cache, part of it doesn't part. You know, I don't, I don't think they're going to be that great.
- [98:19]
E
There was a lot of hardware excitement last year. It's hard to follow it up year after year.
- [98:24]
Jeff
Yeah. So I think this year is going to be, hardware wise is going to be boring.
- [98:30]
Rob
So I got a question, something I'm just thinking of. Once you get to the point to where you can do 4K as I was talking about GPU, you can do 4K and you can do ray tracing and you can do that essentially at let's say 120 frames per second. Is there really particularly a direction to go? What, what is, is there anything next, Is there anything big to push for after that?
- [98:56]
Jonathan
8K?
- [98:58]
Jeff
There is 8k but that's kind of a, a niche that I don't know is ever going to take off.
- [99:06]
Jonathan
Or at least it's good for a decade.
- [99:08]
Jeff
Oh, at least decade or two.
- [99:10]
Rob
Because you have to have a really big display to be able to see the difference between 4k and 8k.
- [99:14]
Jeff
Yeah. When you, when you went from standard, you know, 320 by 200 interlaced and then to regular, even 720p was like, wow, look at that. And you go from 1080p to 4K. It's like, yeah, that's, that's kind of better.
- [99:30]
Rob
You know, I think I can see the difference.
- [99:34]
Jeff
Yeah.
- [99:35]
Rob
Yeah.
- [99:35]
Jeff
But it's not as shocking. And then when you go 4k to 8k, it's like I can't see any difference. Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, maybe in this one corner if you freeze it you can see it better. But I mean unless you're running a monster display, it just really isn't there. Now there's always games that can push it harder, you know, even more ray tracing, they can do it better. I'm thinking, you know, that's where you also start getting some of the AI in those cards to, in your games. So when you're out fighting zombies, maybe the zombies get a little smarter and start reacting better to what you're doing.
- [100:12]
E
And smart zombies.
- [100:14]
Jonathan
I'm having enough trouble winning.
- [100:17]
Rob
Yeah, well, you know, I remember seeing some mods where people were doing things like, you know, they would take Skyrim and they would take the, the NPC responses and they would feed those as prompts into something like ChatGPT and then have an AI service speak it back. And so you would be able to have conversations with NPCs that were way more intriguing than just all the prepackaged stuff. So I could see those sorts of things making their way into games. But do you really need like, is that a huge stretch for what current gen GPUs can do? I don't know that it is.
- [100:58]
Jeff
I, I don't know. I mean I think if you really start tapping into it hard, there's a little more computation there. Of course they can turn up the, like I said, turn up the ray tracing, the graphics there because they're still writing a lot of stuff for, because they know a lot of people aren't running the super high end cards. But yeah, you do kind of come into a point where you're like even say okay, like you said for I'm running 4k at 120hz. Well now what? You know. Oh, but this one can run it at 500. Yeah, but my monitor is only 120. I'm not, you know, so hot off the press.
- [101:40]
E
One last prediction about accident. Since you brought that up, x11 xorg, what's going to be their downfall is this year Elon Musk is going to discover that there is another X out there and he's going to sue them out of existence and tell them to stop using the name X.
- [102:00]
Rob
It's mine.
- [102:06]
Jonathan
Oh, by the way.
- [102:08]
Rob
Yeah, yeah.
- [102:11]
E
He's like, I was here first. Why don't you own the domain name? I own the domain name. It's me.
- [102:17]
Rob
That's hilarious.
- [102:20]
Jonathan
All right, this is X.com, not X.org.
- [102:23]
Rob
There you go. Let's get into some command line tips. Let Rob go first. And what do you have to start the year off?
- [102:32]
E
Rob, my first tip of the year is not a command line. It is maybe not even something to try yet, but something to keep your eye on and something that might be something to use in the future. So GNOME Tweaks has long been the tool to use when tweaking GNOME settings. But with many of those settings being pulled into gnome, you know, we, we may no longer need GNOME tweaks and there's a new kid in town. Perhaps one of the successors called Refine. So Refine is available in flathub and the first release supports cursor themes, icon themes, light style for shell themes, main UI font terminal monospace font under the mouse and touch settings. You could control the middle click to to paste options under the shell compositor options. There's a center new window, attach model window to parent, enable variable refresh rate options to display and enable fractional scaling options in Enable fractional scaling options and display X Wayland native scaling. Under sound configuration there's volume stepping. So it's something maybe you want to try out if you like tweaking your gnome. But time will tell if the future will bring a refinery as maybe the replacement to GNOME Tweaks. As you know, this is their first release. It's in flathub. So, you know, maybe you don't want that on your Ubuntu because that's, you know, snaps. But you know, if you have a flat pack somewhere else, might be something to try out if you want to try tweaking things with it.
- [104:36]
Rob
If you love your phone but not your carrier, just switch to T Mobile. You can keep your phone, keep your number and we'll help pay it off up to $800 per line. You can also use our savings calculator.
- [104:47]
Jeff
To compare our plans and streaming benefits against Verizon and AT&T.
- [104:50]
Rob
So switch and keep your phone, keep your number and keep more of your moolah. @t mobile.com up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service port in 90 plus days with.
- [105:02]
Jeff
Device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required.
- [105:04]
Rob
Card has no cash access and expires.
- [105:06]
Ken
In six months if you're running a retail business, don't let disorganized order fulfillment cause chaos. Use ShipStation instead. From running a business out of your garage to multiple warehouses, shipstation is ideal for every phase of your growth. Save time with one login for all your stores and by automating tasks. Plus, you'll get the best shipping rates from global carriers. Calm the chaos with the shipping software that delivers Start a free trial@shipstation.com audio.
- [105:34]
Rob
That'S shipstation.com audio all right, and that brings us to Ken Muted it is ironic that you're talking about an audio tip and you have your volume muted.
- [105:51]
Jonathan
Too many buttons to press as I'm bringing it up here. But the audio tip I'm going to be talking about is PW Jack and I'm going to be demonstrating trading with some slides here how I used it to run Ardor on a R door on a system that was set up with POTS audio. For those of y'all listening, I've brought up on the in the video screen a screenshot of my terminal showing me running the first of the options that you can use with hard order to get help with it. That's a PW Jack space dash h and that shows this brief help screen which gives all the options you have. You have dash h for help dash R followed by the remote daemon name. If you want to control a remote instance of pipewire dash v to get a verbose debug info when you're running it, Dash 8 or excuse me, Dash S will give you the sample rate. Now the defaults according to the help screen is 48,000 and then you've got a dash P if you need to put in the period in samples. Now the the next screen snapshot I have is showing me getting ready to launch Ardor using PW Jack and I'm going to be doing the dash V so I have the verbus debug info on and I've also at the end of it got the ampersand just a single one so that it will run in the background the Command line says PW-Jack space-V space. And here I give the location of where Ardor, which is/use usr/bin ardor. The next screen shows what happens when I hit enter. First thing you'll notice right after I hit enter is it moves it to the background and gives us the process ID for it. It Then on the next screen it starts giving us some information about the running in Pipe Wire and as you'll see it says I'm running in pipewire version 1.24 and then gives all the information that order spits out on the command line as it's booting up. This is actually two screens full of information. There you go. And. And with the second screen it shows that Ardor is loading bindings and loading the UI configuration. And because I haven't set up any templates yet, it says found nothing along The HomeDead config Ardor 8 templates or the user share Ardor 8 templates. The next screen is showing the session setup part of Ardor where it's opened up and asking me to either start a new session, recent sessions I can choose from, or other sessions. Now in this case I went ahead and chose the session that was named Don Williams especially for you. Side one, it's where I'd previously used Ardor to record side one of the Don Williams album especially for you. I've got it in vinyl. Then on the next screen it shows that it's power come up. I've gone in and opened up the audio MIDI setup and it's showing the jack is already running. So you can see that PW jack's got it running. And. And then on the left half of this it shows the output from PIP PW jack showing that it's got pipe wire jack running. Now this next screenshot for those of y'all lifting is from QT pipe wire graph where it shows that Ardor is running. And it's showing that I've got my US B record player connected to the audio inputs on it as well as a lot of audio connections with between Ardor itself. It's amazing how many connection Ardor does internally y'all. And the next screen that I took a snapshot of of was both of my displays monitors. On the left side is the QP pipeward graph and then on the right side I've got two terminals, one above the other with the that one has the output from pipe wire jacks using the verbose debug information. Right below it is the ALSA mixer showing that I'M using pipewire to control the audio. And then of course, Ardor over to the far right on the other monitor. And the last screen shows the. What happens when I exited Ardor? It just goes to done. It repeats the command that I used and puts me at the DOS prompt, waiting for the next command.
- [111:55]
Rob
Very cool.
- [111:57]
Jonathan
So you can use pipewire or PW Jack when you want to run application that is Jack aware only. Even though you've got your system configured primarily to use the POS audio server under PipeWire.
- [112:18]
Rob
I think some distros do that for you automatically. I'm pretty sure Fedora. I don't have to actually run that and it does it automatically, but that is useful to know what is going on under the hood. So. Very good. Jeff, you've got. Is it. Where did I say I just saw it? Base name.
- [112:35]
Jeff
Base name.
- [112:35]
Rob
I was gonna say basecamp. Like. No, no, no, that's something else. What is base name?
- [112:40]
Jeff
Yeah, basecamp is not a good program, I'll just tell you that. So when I was searching for a command line tip, I stumbled on this one and I decided to check our spreadsheet just to see if it'd been used before. And interestingly, I found that Ken had incorporated incorporated it into some of his scripts, but nobody ever actually discussed it. So this tip is actually quite simple and useful. So the base. The base name command just B, a S, E, N, a M E. And it takes the result of a file or a full file path name. Like you'd have it if you typed in which. Or something like that. What you know what it would come up and it shortens it just to the name. And there's really just a few command line options available for this. So there's a dash A and you use that if you have multiple inputs, you separate them by a space. There's a dash S, which stands for suffix, and it removes the trailing suffix. So if you have a. For. For example, if you have a file named like notes.txt, it would just give you notes and it would remove like the. The dot text portion of the file name. There's a dash Z which separates the output with a null character rather than a new line. And of course you have the dash dash help and dash dash version, which displays help and version. Basically, you know, the base. The base name command just allows easier parsing of file names with paths and especially like in. Basically for scripting, it just makes things simpler.
- [114:25]
Rob
Very cool. All right, I've got one that I will quickly talk about, and that is loginctl and this is a command that you might come up with if you go to look for how do I check if I'm running Xorg like X11 or Wayland on a given machine? And one of the ways to look is there's a one liner that runs login CTL and it's actually a pretty interesting command in and of itself. So if you run just login ctl, it'll give you a list of sessions, a list of graphical sessions on your machine. And so right Now I'm using session 2 and UID of 1000 and my username and it's seat 0 because this is a single seat machine. But then you can then take login CTL and add show session and that session number. So session two in this case and you get lots more information about that particular session. One of the details that are in there is type. And in my case on this POP OS machine, type is still x11. So yeah, a very interesting way to get lots and lots of information about the exact session, the login session that you are in. So we've never covered it. And so there you go, Login ctl.
- [115:45]
Jeff
Very cool.
- [115:46]
Rob
Yeah. All right, we have covered our tips, we've covered our predictions. I'm going to let each of the guys get in the last word if they want to plug whatever they want to. Rob is up first with that.
- [115:59]
E
All right, guys. Happy New Year, everybody.
- [116:02]
Rob
Happy New Year.
- [116:04]
E
And I just have my usual plug come connect with me. And when you connect with me, you can share with me your votes on like whether or not you think Jeff actually got some of those right that he thinks he did and or not. So to do that you go to robertp Campbell.com that's Robert P as in Patrick Campbell as in Campbell. And on that page you can find a link to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my mastodon, which I. Well, between that and LinkedIn is my most active. Not that I'm crazy active or anything. I won't flood your, flood your feed or if you just appreciate what I've done for you, click this little coffee cup here to donate a coffee in five dollar increments.
- [117:06]
Rob
There you go. All right. And Ken, Well, I just wanted to.
- [117:12]
Jonathan
Recommend an article from the latest issue of PC Linux OS magazine. I've got the link in the show notes to it. It's about what's in interest the public domain as of the first of this year. So those of you with a creative bent, you may be able to get some inspiration from all some of that old public domain stuff.
- [117:40]
Rob
Yeah, it's always fun to see what what hits the public domain. I like that a lot. There's a couple of interesting ones this year too.
- [117:46]
Jeff
All right, Jeff, there are don't have much to say, so it's just going to be a poetry corner. Roses are red, lettuces, lettuce is green. Be nice to computers before the rise of machines. Have a great week everybody.
- [118:03]
Rob
Oh that's great. Thank you guys for being here. I sure enjoyed it and appreciate it. If you want to follow my stuff, of course you can find me. Over at Hackaday we've got the Security column goes live on Fridays and Floss weekly as well. Have a super interesting Floss weekend weekly this past week and another one coming up this week. We record those on Tuesday. They go live on Wednesdays so watch for that and check it. You can scan the QR code and learn about how to join the club that is part of Club Twit. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per day and it keeps the network going. It's the way to show that you care. And we sure appreciate the support there as well. We appreciate you guys, everybody being here, everybody watching those who get us live and on the download. And we will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show AT T Mobile. We'll give you four free 5G phones.
- [119:03]
Jeff
And four lines for only $25 per line per month with eligible trade ins.
- [119:06]
Rob
And no, it's not a contest. It's every day for a limited time.
- [119:09]
Jeff
Everyone's a winner on America's largest 5G network.
- [119:13]
Rob
Minimum of 4 lines for 25 per line per month with autopay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without autopay.
- [119:18]
Jeff
Up to $830 off each phone via.
- [119:20]
Rob
24 monthly bill credits plus taxes, fees and $10 device connection charge for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue build credits or credit stop and.
- [119:26]
Jeff
Balance on required finance agreement to bill credits and if you pay off devices.
- [119:29]
Ken
Early, CT mobile.com life can be chaotic. If you're running a retail business, don't let disorganized order fulfillment add to the chaos. Use Shipstation instead. With Shipstation, you never have to worry about shipping and fulfillment again. Whether you're running a business out of your garage or you have multiple warehouses, shipstation is ideal for every phase of your business's growth. Save time with one login for all your stores and by automating repetitive tasks. Plus you'll save money with the best shipping rates from global carriers. Shipstation Shipship's industry leading features help you deliver a better customer experience. They'll get accurate and faster shipments along with automated tracking updates with your branding and with up to 88% off UPS and USPS rates and up to 90% off FedEx rates, ShipStation is the fastest and most affordable way to ship. Calm the chaos. Switch to ShipStation today. Start a free trial at shipstation.com audio that's shipstation.com audio People are driven by.
- [120:31]
Rob
The search for better. But when it comes to hiring, the.
- [120:34]
Jeff
Best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search Match with Indeed.
- [120:41]
Rob
The hiring process can be slow and overwhelming. Simplify hiring with Indeed.
- [120:46]
Jeff
Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors.
- [120:52]
Rob
According to Indeed Data, and a matching.
- [120:54]
Jeff
Engine that helps you find quality candidates fast.
- [120:58]
Rob
Ditch the busywork. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening and messaging.
- [121:03]
Jeff
So you can connect with candidates faster. Join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide.
- [121:09]
Rob
That use Indeed to hire great talent fast.
- [121:12]
Jeff
Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com p o.
- [121:19]
Rob
D k a t z 12 that's indeed.com p o d k A t z 12 terms and conditions apply.