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Untitled Linux Show 191: Linux, Like Sausage...
01:45:00
Linus Puts His Foot Down, Mozilla Diversifies, and Meta Torrents
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- [00:01]
Jonathan Bennett
Hey, folks, this week we're talking again about Rust and the Colonel, but this time Linus has put his foot down. Then we've got news about Asahi, news about one of those other OS manufacturers wrestling with an encryption law. Gen 2 meta taken to court for torrenting. All kinds of crazy stuff. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 191, recorded Saturday, February 22nd. Linux like sausage. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time for Linux geeking out about open source, free software, Linux desktop, some other things. We're going to talk about some of those other OSes today and some other things going on sort of around the world. We're going to branch out just a little bit beyond Linux, but some important stuff and some fascinating stuff. It is not just me, of course. We've got Mr. Rob Campbell and Mr. Jeff Massey. Welcome to both of you.
- [01:03]
Rob Campbell
Yo, yo.
- [01:05]
Jonathan Bennett
And we're going to let Rob go first. He's got a story about something we've been talking about for a long time. There's more drama. What's the latest on the kernel? Trying to get rusty.
- [01:19]
Rob Campbell
So the saga continues with more news about Rust in the Linux kernel. And I think this is going to be the last week I do it. Unless there's something just huge. I'm getting tired of it. But as I said last week, I would feel better about Rust in Linux policy that we discussed if it came from the top, you know, from the Linux guys themselves. And you know, they must be listening. Maybe they're listeners of the show. Hey, Linus and Greg. But you know, they must be listening because this week it comes from the top, as both Linus Torvald and Greg Cage, Greg Cora Hartman, both had things to say. So I'm going to start back it up with a little bit with Christopher Holloway. So he's a kernel maintainer involved with the DMA layer in the kernel, and he's been one of the people who's been critical of Rust in the Linux kernel. He's worried about the kernel becoming unmaintainable due to Rust bindings just creeping up all over the place and then having to be continually updating to keep up with this Rust change and that to be changed and just endless keeping up with us. So that's, that's his concern. And you know, we've, we've discussed our thoughts on the validity of that. But regardless of his objections Hellwig says that Linus told him privately that he would override maintainers vetoes on Rust code within the Colonel. So a couple days later Linus made his views public and he clarified upon Hellwig statement what he actually said and, and saying, you know, maintainers can either choose to take an active role with Rust bindings for areas of the kernel they oversee and become involved or have a hands off approach where it's more complementary to their code. But kernel maintainers can't object to new Rust code as, you know, effectively as a user of, of their C code, you know, meaning if it's not something they're actually maintaining involved in, they can't object to Rust code going into some other part of the kernel. So before this point Linus was quiet on the matter, hoping to see, you know, hoping he'd see something constructive come out of the discussions that were going on. But he got involved when, when he says, things appear to be moving backwards. So Linus's main objection, you know, to, to a recent veto Helwig attempted was the fact that the pull request that Hellwig objected to did not touch any part of his DMA code. So in effect here, Hellwig was merely objecting as a user of that code rather than a maintainer of the, that actual part of the code. And that's, that seems to be what he really had, a problem. You know, you got nothing to do with it, just keep out essentially so let you know. And that's, that's what I'm gonna say about that piece of it. But Linus's number two in charge, Greg Cage, also had something to say about the whole Rust in the kernel debate. So in general Greg shares his reasoning. He believes gradually moving to the Linux kernel to Rust is a good thing. Greg says, quote, the majority of bugs, quantity, not quality or severity we have are due to the stupid little corner cases in C that are totally gone in Rust. Things like simple overwrites of memory. Not that Rust can catch all of these by far. Air paths, cleanups, forgetting to check error values and use use after free mistakes, end of quote. But he points out that, that there are more than 30 million lines of C code in the Linux kernel that aren't going anywhere any year soon. But that isn't a reason to stop new code and new drivers from being written in Rust. He talks about other benefits, you know, to, to the API that'll improve that and providing more time to work on real bugs while you're not trying to find and fix these edge cases, these little C Bugs. But he also admits Rust isn't a silver bullet to solve all of their problems. But to be clear, Greg isn't a Rust developer and you know, he had to, he had this to say about that quote. Yes, the Rust bindings look like magic to me in places. Someone with very little Rust experience, someone and he has very little Rust experience. But I'm willing to learn and work with the developers who have stepped up to help out here to not want to learn and change based on new evidence. Parentheses see my point about reading kernel bugs we have so into that quote there, you know, so, so with this new update here, you know, the leaders of Linux kernel have spoken and they're in favor of Rust. And you know, I really only had time to touch on the key highlights of what these two wrote this week. But if you check out the show notes, you can find links to these which you'll find links to the full Linux kernel mailing list, letters, emails, I guess that they wrote or however we phrase that what they wrote on it. It's a good, it's. It's a good page or so letter that, you know, I don't have time to break down every detail. I got the highlights for you but they're, they're interesting letters to read and to hear what their, their take is on it and it's good to see that they have a view on it. You know, personally, I guess I was almost kind of leaning to. Yeah, it seems like a pain to maintain and I'm maybe concerned that it will cause problems in the future. But then again, I'm not a Rust developer. I barely know much C, I've done some C, so maybe I'm not the one to ask. I don't know what it really takes to put those two together like this, but the Linux gods have spoken.
- [07:57]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes, yes they have. And honestly I understand, right, why maintainers are so concerned about Rust in the kernel, particularly when they don't speak Rust and when there's sometimes a pain. But I think Torvalds has hit the nail on the head here, right? This is sort of a bigger open source and free software argument to make that you don't get to control what people do with your code and the people that don't like Rust don't get to keep users of their APIs out of other directories in the kernel. And that just seems pretty straightforward. So I'm not sure why we needed Torvalds to come in and say this, but. Well, no, I know, but like from a certain point of view we should not have needed him to come in and make this statement. It should have been self evident.
- [08:47]
Jeff Massey
The big thing for me was that I didn't realize that it didn't touch any of the C code. I thought that it was kind of intermingled a lot more and that they would have to maintain it. There was a lot more intermixing versus okay, I have this section of code. I'm complaining about your pull, but it doesn't affect me. I'm not.
- [09:10]
Rob Campbell
So you're thinking like a single file of C programming with some C here and some Rust here and some C here again.
- [09:17]
Jeff Massey
Well, or maybe different object files. And it was have to get knitted together or the maintainer was going to have to know Rust to be able to do it. And it's like, no, here's the section I maintain.
- [09:30]
Jonathan Bennett
Here's part of it, here's part of what's going on. The kernel has internal APIs. And so those are the way that the different parts of the kernel talk to each other. And with someone that is in charge of one of those APIs, they work together, they will make a change to it. And so let's just say that they make a change to the DMA side of it that will break other code. And so the way the kernel has historically worked is when you send one of these patches in that's going to change API, you also include in there the fixes to all of the places that use that API, or you at least work with the people that do it. And so one of the things that really was bothering these maintainers, particularly in the internal kernel APIs, is if the Rust code is going to use their API, what do they do when they need to make a change to the API? What do they do when they need to change the way something works in the kernel? And they've got this code that's written in Rust that depends upon their stuff. How do these C developers that are the maintainers then go out and fix this when they don't know Rust, when Rust is not their preferred language, it's not the language they speak at all, perhaps. And so there's this legitimate question of in having Rust bindings for my code, is that going to tie my hands to not be able to make changes? And like that's a pretty legitimate concern to have that has been answered. And the answer is no, that will not tie your hands. It's going to be on. The burden is going to be on whoever is maintaining the Rust binding. And you know, that's like hopefully that's you that's helping with that. But even if it's not, that's okay. And so that's sort of the answer that they've come to. Yeah, it's, it's. We're kind of watching the sausage get made. It's not surprising that there is disagreement and contention and exactly how all of this is going to get worked out. Hopefully, hopefully we don't have anybody else throwing their hands up and leaving the kernel in disgust. That that would be ideal. But you know, it might happen.
- [11:36]
Jeff Massey
Well, I mean, like you said, we're seeing how the sausage is made. It's a little messy, but Linux like sausage is pretty darn good.
- [11:43]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes, yes. And it's always been messy inside the Linux kernel mailing list. Let's be real, let's be honest, it's.
- [11:53]
Jeff Massey
A lot calmer than it used to be.
- [11:55]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes. I would say that every large software project mailing list is going to have moments of messy sausage making. We'll say, right, like this is, this is, this is pretty typical. When you have a big decision to make, you're trying to change something. This is pretty typical.
- [12:14]
Jeff Massey
Well, and when you're dealing with people putting a lot of code into the kernel, you're dealing with a pretty high level programmer. So I mean this is not just a script kitty or something. You're, and you're going to have egos, you're going to have people that are maybe not as socially adept as others. You know, it sometimes comes with the territory and you know, there's, there's a little grinding of gear sometimes.
- [12:41]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep. And it's like any other communication over text is hard. Right. So like email, Email just has sort of this built into it problem. You don't get, you don't have face to face conversation with email. You don't get the body cues, you don't get even the tone of the way someone is saying something.
- [13:02]
Rob Campbell
Emojis are important.
- [13:04]
Jonathan Bennett
In some cases they literally can be. Yes. And I don't think they use much emoji in the Linux kernel mailing list. Maybe that's what they need to do. Maybe that's the solution to all this problem, use more emojis. But anyway, so I'm just saying these guys know that all the people that work in the Linux kernel, they realize that. And so they, it's kind of like they've adapted to the point to where, yeah, they may get fired up over something, but generally if they're going to last in the kernel for very long, they'll calm down and they'll can explain themselves over text and they'll figure out a way to move forwards. Right. Like it again, it's as normal. All right, yes.
- [13:45]
Jeff Massey
No, I was just saying. Definitely. I was just agreeing with you.
- [13:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Okay, so let's move on to something else that's actually rather related and that is Asahi, which is one of these Rust projects that has been trying to push code up into the Rust kernel. And we talked last week about the leader. I always think of Martin, that's his name. I always think of Markan because that's his screen name, it's his handle. But Martin, he's moving on. He's left both the Linux kernel and the Asahi project. And there is a new blog post from Asahi that is. Is laying forward what they are going to do next. And it sort of involves a change in governance in a way. So Asahi previously had a single sort of benevolent dictator, we could say. And they are moving to more of a panel of experts kind of a model. And the current list of leads is Alyssa Rosenwig, Chaos Princess, David Kalvaka, Neil Gampa, James Caligaros, Jan Grunya and Sven Peter. Which you've got three kernel devs, a graphics dev, two Fedora devs and an audio dev in that list. And you may think that's weird to see Fedora devs, but remember that Asahi is now based on Fedora. Fedora is their sort of flow flagship. So it's not all that unexpected to see it get a little bit closer to Fedora with this. But anyway, I just, I found it very interesting to see that they are. The people that are still in the project want to continue on. They're pushing forwards. Even in this blog post they've got a list of things that they're still working on and should have working in the. In the next release. The DisplayPort alt modes that you can run a monitor just over USB C. They are working on the internal microphone support, some of the things like that, working on the Vulkan driver still. So, you know, some, some good things from Asahi. They're having to obviously make. Make modifications to the way the project works, but it appears as though there are enough people still involved in it that still care about it that it's going to continue on. And so those of you out there with, with Mac machines based on the M processor, take heart, things will continue to happen and it looks like code will continue to go upstream into the kernel as well. So that is that neither of you guys have Mac machines, so you don't Care.
- [16:33]
Jeff Massey
No experience.
- [16:35]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I really wish that there were a way and obviously there's not because the iPad and the iPhone are so locked down with a bootloader. I would love to be able to run Asahi on something like an iPad because their new iPads are based on the M processors. But I, I've asked a couple, actually I've asked a couple of people involved in the Asahi project about that and they've each told me that it. The bootloaders are locked down. It's just not possible.
- [17:00]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. You know, I didn't realize that the Asahi was now based on Fedora. I thought they still had their Arch and that the Fedora there was now a Fedora spin.
- [17:11]
Jonathan Bennett
I think I'm pretty sure Fedora is the. Is the flagship now.
- [17:14]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I'm trying to find. Find that and that's what I believe I am seeing on the, on their abonas page in the FAQ section. So I learned that new today. That is something new I learned about.
- [17:31]
Jonathan Bennett
You relearned it. I know we covered it back in the day.
- [17:33]
Rob Campbell
No, no, I. We covered, we covered that Fedora Asahi was going to be a flagship. I just didn't know it was going to replace. I don't think we ever clearly said that it was actually replacing theirs.
- [17:48]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, let's be honest, Fedora is a better choice than Arch. For, for people coming from the Mac OSI particularly, Fedora is a better choice than Arch.
- [17:58]
Rob Campbell
You know, Void Linux also has an Asahi Mix or whatever they call theirs.
- [18:04]
Jonathan Bennett
Whatever they call theirs, yes. I guess if you really want to go use Void. And so that's the other thing. Right. Like there's nothing stopping Ubuntu and, you know, Leap and Tumbleweed and all of these guys from having an Asahi spin. Right. Especially now that things are landing upstream in the kernel. In some cases it's just going to work and it's going to be pretty easy to get it going, you know, and some of those have images and there are ways to get it running. We're just talking about like the sort of flagship, the preferred Asahi experience, and that happens to be on Fedora right now. It may change to something else in the future. Who knows? All right, Jeff, what's up with kde?
- [18:50]
Jeff Massey
Well, Nate Graham in his weekly blog provides numerous updates on what's happening with the plasma desktop. And we know that version 6.3 is out and depending on your distribution, version 6.3.1 is also available. Both versions are receiving a lot of attention and fixes and the team is currently working on version 6.3.2 and fixes are already underway regarding what will be included in Plasma 6.4. So we take a look at the fixes in version 6.3.1. One significant issue was that it resolved involved. It was that was resolved involved. Kwin built with LTO on GCC15 which could result in a black screen on login when using an ICC profile. The code was restructured to avoid this issue. Now I should say ICC stands for International Color Consortium, which is a profile that allows users to define their colors, adjusting them if necessary for their display display device, thus enabling color accuracy tuning Another fix address is a plasma crash that occurred when attempting to access the Properties dialog for a file in the recently or frequently used file list in the Kickoff Application launcher. Additionally, a regression that caused the volume change on screen display to fail when adjusting the volume with the integrated volume buttons of a Bluetooth headset was resolved. There's other fixes as well, but in the interest of time let's move to version 6.3.2. So in version 6.3.2, a regression that caused desktop icons to become inappropriately deselected if you dragged a selection box around several icons and released the mouse button over one of them was then fixed. In a two for one fix. They addressed a bug where the desktop and panels would go missing when applying new global theme and using the option to replace the existing layout. This also fixed an issue that caused deleted widgets to not be removed from the desktop applet source config file. So always love those two for one fixes. Moving on to Plasma 6.4.0, an issue was fixed when switching users using Krunner would cause a desktop to start working erratically and eventually crash. Additionally, there was a change to Kwin's render loop initialization code, which now uses a more precise timer to reduce frame drops. Now overall, when reviewing the list of bugs, there's one very high priority plasma bug that remains the same as last week, and it is worth noting that this is actually an X11 bug, not a Wayland bug. There are currently 3015 minute Plasma bugs, up from 27 last week, but overall 129 bugs were fixed over the last week. So overall, although the overall bug tracker might not show significant change, nearly 130 bugs being fixed demonstrates the substantial work being done to fine tune the plasma code. For full details and a comprehensive list of all the bugs that were fixed, please refer to the link in the show notes and there was a lot I skipped over. I kind of just picked some Cherry pick some highlights. You know, I must say I'm genuinely excited for the future of KDE and you know, even bigger with the Cosmic Desktop, you know, on the horizon, you know, stable release. I mean, I know there's some alphas out, but you know, it's coming on. I believe the interface for Linux is set up to be a fantastic future. You know, happy times ahead.
- [22:28]
Jonathan Bennett
We've had, we've had some neat stuff honestly on the Linux desktop for a long time now with the advances in eye candy and it's just some things that you've been able to do on Linux for forever with multiple workspaces. There have been neat things that have landed on Linux that have not come to other desktop either have not at all come to other desktops or very slowly the other big two have stolen our ideas and rolled them out.
- [22:59]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, a lot of the big things come to the other desktops way, one way or another. Either they adopt them 10 years later or some third party makes something that kind of replicates it. Because analytics comes up with a lot of great things on the. Well, in general.
- [23:16]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, I mean, it's because the code's open source, right? It's so easy, somebody can just go, hey, wouldn't it be cool? And the next thing you know, they're hands deep into the code, working on it, make it work, make it happen. Hey, it was cool. Send a patch in and then everybody can enjoy it. I mean, you have an idea, you have your Windows machine, you go, hey, wouldn't it be cool if it did this? How are you going to make it do that? I don't know, I can't get to the source to do anything with it.
- [23:43]
Rob Campbell
Well, if you're one of those people, go ahead.
- [23:47]
Jeff Massey
And even if you're a developer for say Windows, oh, I think this would be cool to do. You now have 20 levels of management to put it through and project design reviews and then probably case studies. And how is this going to affect every, you know, it, it's, it's a glacial movement because you know, this might break something too and.
- [24:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, yeah, so Linux is more experimental. Linux desktop, some desktops in particular are more experimental. They're, they're more open to experimentation. And so they go, they get to move faster and do cool things.
- [24:21]
Rob Campbell
If you are one of those people who likes to dig into the code, as Jonathan said it, there is a company we're going to talk about soon that may have a job for you.
- [24:31]
Jonathan Bennett
Why don't you go ahead, why don't you take it and tell us about it.
- [24:34]
Rob Campbell
I will. I just did the Since Ken's not here, I had to do the segue for him. So gaming on Linux has gotten quite good in the past few years. This week I've even seen a few posts. They were on Reddit, people talking about how the infamous YouTuber PewDiePie is now using Linux and. And apparently he's rather impressed with its gaming capabilities. So are you one of those developers who likes to dig into the code? Are you looking to make gaming on Linux Even better for PewDiePie and the rest of it? Well, Codeweavers is looking to hire multiple Windows Wine developers as well as their crossover products being Vals, Proton Downstream for, for Steam Play and related Wine based tech. And oh yeah, someone who really needs to be better is, you know, Linus from Linus Tech Tips, because we saw how that went in the past. But anyway, back to the story. So who is Codeweavers? We've mentioned them. You know, I'm, but I'm sure a lot of people forget who they are or maybe just saying the name brought it up. But for you, for and for users of the Valve Steam Deck or Desktop Steam gaming on Linux, you're likely familiar with their work as they, as they are contracted by Valve for helping with Proton to power Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. And that's you know, a huge part of what's made gaming so accessible on Linux these days. And then along with, you know, other commercial agreements that they have with organizations for running Windows software On Linux and macOS too, I guess I, who cares? So if you are an expert, if you're experienced with working on open source projects and plus you have a strong C language skill, you know, maybe you're one of those kernel developers who doesn't want Rust, but, but you're a C developer, you can come over here excellent debugging abilities and a desire or and desired Windows, well, they desire Windows 32 programming experience. So I guess a little bit of Windows is going to help you there too for Linux. But this might be a job for you. The job posting is up on their site. You know, go apply. But for the rest of us, you know, not looking for a job or you know, we're not C developers, this is still good news, especially for gamers. This is a sign that code weavers, you know, and probably Valve, they probably have some role in this. Maybe they're contracting more, maybe they're asking for more, but either way they are. Codeweavers specifically at least is investing and putting more into this, you know, even more work into their code. And you know, we're likely to see the results in the future with games. Way more games working other applications. You know, one, one complaint I hear is, you know, Office doesn't work on Windows or Adobe. Who knows? I, I'm just throwing things out there. Maybe they'll get those things working in the future. I don't know, maybe everything will work in the future with, with your help.
- [28:09]
Jonathan Bennett
There you go.
- [28:10]
Jeff Massey
I should say Code Weavers is one of the companies I actually spend money with. And because it's basically supporting Wine development which supports Proton and all that, I don't really have a huge use for it, but I'm just kind of supporting them through having a license and they do package things so they have automatic installers and whatnot. So if you say I want to run this specific program, a lot of times they will have kind of predefined scripts that will kind of automatically load things and set up some of the Wine tricks that you need and things like that to make it easier to run some of that software.
- [28:51]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, they have the Crossover version of Wine, right? Yeah, yeah. So and Crossover is basically, it's a paid version of Wine. And my, I haven't used it in years. I, maybe I should, maybe maybe not. But my understanding is it, it will, you know, like regular wine. You can maybe run some really old versions of Office. From what I've read, you can run some pretty new versions of Office with the, the Crossover plugin.
- [29:22]
Jonathan Bennett
And I think, you know, part of the, part of the, the package there is being able to have somebody to call to get support, right? That's, that's going to be part of what they offer. And so for somebody like a business, that probably makes a whole lot of sense for individual tinkerers like us, maybe less so we're sort of allergic to calling for help.
- [29:38]
Rob Campbell
But you know, last I looked that Crossover plugin wasn't too expensive, but honestly, it's been a while.
- [29:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep.
- [29:45]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, it's, it was, I want to say it was like 30 something, 35 a year or something like that because it was, it was a little more. But then if you keep renewing then it's, it's cheaper and I just had the lowest level of license and I just thought, well, I'm just support a company that's supporting Linux.
- [30:04]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah. And Valve now is supporting them. And so, you know, you can, you can support Crossover by I'm sure, buying games for Valve and playing them on Linux. Right.
- [30:14]
Rob Campbell
So if you want to work for a company that's supported by Valve and Jeff crossover.
- [30:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Indeed. That'd be fun. It would be fun if one of our listeners got in there and was able to tell us about it.
- [30:26]
Rob Campbell
If you get a job there, let us know.
- [30:28]
Jonathan Bennett
Let us know. Even if it's privately, we would like to hear about it. All right, let's see. Up next. Oh, yeah, that other os. I warned everybody we were going to talk about this, the other os. So I got a couple of interesting fun stories that we're going to talk about. And when I say fun, I mean that sarcastically in this case. So the United Kingdom, UK has passed a law. In fact, it was a. Excuse me, I think it was an order, not a law, telling Apple that the UK government wanted access to the end to end encrypted icloud backups. So we can talk about getting access to a device, your cell phone. Most cell phones these days are quite well encrypted and the various manufacturers have been very resistant to putting any backdoors in that encryption for obvious reasons. Right. As soon as you try to put a backdoor in encryption, well, it will be abused either by governments or by criminals who figure out a way to abuse it. There is no way to actually do backdoor encryption without completely the encryption. It's just the reality of the situation. It's like the reality of the math. It's kind of like physics. There's no arguing with it. So the UK has come out privately about a month ago and said, we want to be able to get into iPhones. Well, you can't get into iPhones directly. There's this kind of workaround, this sort of loophole that's been around for a long time. That is you can't get into the iPhone itself, but the iPhone will automatically back up all of its data to icloud. And historically that has not been end to end encrypted inside of icloud, it's been encrypted. But Apple has the encryption key. And so there was always sort of this backdoor where they could say, we can't get access to this person's telephone, but we want access to this person's icloud backup. And you know, it was because Apple had the ability to do that. They were required by law to do so. So Apple rolled out a solution for that and they called it the Advanced Data Protection adp. And that is end to end encryption for icloud backups. It uses the same password that your phone uses. And then when it Uploads it, it encrypts it with that first. And so then when a government would come to Apple and say, hey, give us this person's icloud backup, they could either say, you know, either say we don't have it at all or fine, here are the encrypted bits. This is probably what actually happens. Here are the encrypted bits and everything we know about it. Good luck figuring out their password. Right? That's likely what actually happens. The UK has passed this order that says that is no longer acceptable. Apple, you are now required to put a backdoor of some sort into ADP, the advanced data protection feature of iCloud. And this, this has been sort of in the news if you pay attention to like the privacy security news. It's been in the news for about a week now. And various people had various ideas about what should happen. You know, some would, some said that, well, Apple will just do what they're told to do. Apple has actually been reasonably good at trying to protect, protect their, their, their consumers privacy. Like there are things that I do not like about Apple, but they've actually been really good about this. They, they have consistently refused to put any backdoors in their products and they let people know about the things that happen. And so they were kind of at, at an impasse here. And at least, at least one, one cryptographer that I've read, I forget his name now, he suggested that what really should happen is the United States should pass a law and says basically pass a law that says it is illegal for US companies to add encryption backdoors or at least add encryption backdoors at the behest of foreign companies. And I think that's an interesting idea. I don't know that it exactly gets them out of the jam, but it does give them some backstopping to refuse to do it. Regardless, that law has not happened. And so Apple has made the choice to just not provide ADP this advanced privacy the end to end encryption in the uk. And so rather than add a backdoor in a way that, you know, could expose everyone, they have just, they've just made the decision that okay, fine, we're not going to do the end to end encryption. We're not going to offer that to our customers in the uk which is really unfortunate that like they can't do that. I like encryption. I think it is a thing that we should all be doing if we can for various reasons. But being put between a rock and a hard place here, I think Apple probably did the right thing about the only other option that they would have had would be to pull out of the UK entirely which would then have essentially the same effect. So it's a, it's a difficult, it's a difficult topic for them. It's a difficult topic to try to figure out exactly what the right answer is politically and across the world. But I wanted to let everybody know that this is what's going on. I'm going to link off to the Ars Technical article, which is pretty good. I will try to find a link to the other coverage that I, that I came across and read as well. But yeah, if, if you're in the UK and you have an Apple phone, you just lost the ability to have end to end encrypted icloud backups and for that I'm sorry. It wasn't our fault this time.
- [36:19]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, you know, write your parliament people, I guess.
- [36:24]
Jonathan Bennett
Does that even work in the uk? We usually, we usually don't stick our noses into other countries politics.
- [36:31]
Rob Campbell
But does that even work here? Unless you have enough money anyway?
- [36:38]
Jonathan Bennett
Apparently if enough people do it all at the same time you can get your congress critters attention. But having lots of money seems to help anyway.
- [36:50]
Rob Campbell
Sorry Congress listeners.
- [36:53]
Jeff Massey
I think a lot of bad things happen under the premise of good intentions.
- [36:59]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, yep.
- [37:00]
Rob Campbell
Oh, and, and Kira says that it was an order based on a law that was passed a few years ago.
- [37:07]
Jonathan Bennett
There you go. Yeah, I, I knew, I knew there was a law in there but it wasn't a new law that was passed and I think it was a secret order for the first month or two and then somebody like we've got to let the world know about this. Then it got confirmed.
- [37:19]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, yeah, I don't know, I, I think they probably did about the best thing I could think of other than just pulling out all together. I mean that might be a wake up call too but.
- [37:33]
Jonathan Bennett
But it would, that wouldn't help consumers anymore. You still wouldn't have access to it.
- [37:37]
Rob Campbell
Right, right. But I mean maybe they'd back down, maybe they wouldn't. I don't know.
- [37:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, we'll see.
- [37:48]
Rob Campbell
You know, if all they could get is, you know, cheap little knockoffs. You know, if Google and Apple both said okay, we'll back out, all you get is, well I'm not going to name any names because I'm talking about cheap knockoffs. We don't know their names.
- [38:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Appleu Aploo phones. Apple phones, yeah, yeah. That's the sort of thing you get. It's unfortunate. Yeah, I don't want to get any more into the politics. I would, I would like to see, I would like to see the United States look at this and see about trying to make it harder to do for other countries.
- [38:29]
Rob Campbell
Right?
- [38:30]
Jonathan Bennett
So like this is the sort of thing that everybody should be able to look at and agree on. We do not want other countries to dictate to U.S. companies that they are required to backdoor the encryption of US Made products. How is it that not everyone that looks at this immediately comes to that conclusion? I don't understand, like left, right. This seems to be an issue that if you understand what's going on, regardless of which side of the aisle you're on, I, it's, it really seems to me that there should be a big crossover between the, you know, the, the kind of the, the left side is, is very much privacy and independence for individuals like to have your data privacy online. And the right has kind of this US Nationalism and let's protect our company, our companies in this, in the United States. This seems like it's a win for both of those mindsets.
- [39:26]
Rob Campbell
And I agree. But also I, even if the US Made a law, I don't think, you know, Apple doing business in the uk I don't think it, it would, I don't only think it would, only thing it would do, I think is, would mean that Apple can't open the back door, which would mean that they either have to pull out, they have to do what they did already, or the UK has to back down. And those are pretty much kind of the three options anyway.
- [39:53]
Jonathan Bennett
Can you just imagine though, Tariffs, Tariffs for everything from the uk Okay.
- [40:02]
Jeff Massey
I think you said the first thing though is if they understood the problem is so many people doing this kind of stuff, they have no clue how this even works and have no idea of what the unintended consequences. Right.
- [40:15]
Jonathan Bennett
That's absolutely the thing. You have people that are writing these laws and they just, in a lot of cases, they honestly just want to be able to catch criminals. Right. Like, I fully believe that there is some good intentions behind stuff like this, but you just don't understand that this is not like a safe. You can't just say that you have to make two keyholes in the safe. Like encryption doesn't really work that way.
- [40:40]
Rob Campbell
I got a few knockoff phones for you. The Eye phone, the Samsung or the new Kia.
- [40:49]
Jonathan Bennett
The new Kia. That sounds like something you'd find in Fallout.
- [40:56]
Rob Campbell
Thanks, Harold.
- [40:58]
Jonathan Bennett
Nice.
- [40:59]
Rob Campbell
Those are good.
- [40:59]
Jeff Massey
It comes on your wrist and it's kind of got that amber color. To it with the black background, you know, Pit boy.
- [41:07]
Jonathan Bennett
Yup. All right, let's move on and not get ourselves into any more political deep waters. And let's talk about hung GPUs. Jeff, I saw this. I didn't dive deep into it. What's the deal with the hunger GPUs?
- [41:22]
Jeff Massey
Well, we're still pretty early in the 6.14 kernel release, and as the time of this recording, we're only on Release candidate number three. But if we look ahead to the 6.15 kernel, something very helpful, I believe anyway, is coming our way. The feature I'm talking about is a standardized way of informing user space of a hung gpu. You know, stuck glitching, whatever. It's, it's. So if anybody's not sure what a hung GPU is, it's a malfunctioning gpu. I should preface this early on. This is initially set up for AMD and Intel GPUs only, so Nvidia is not supported at this time. But this is a standardized interface. So the article does comment that other non intel AMD Linux GPU drivers and non intel drivers. Basically they're saying Team Green will likely adopt this event interface in the future as well, because it's open and sounds like it's not going to be hard to implement. It started with intel graphics driver engineers for their xe and their I O 915 direct rendering manager and they added a new event to the kernel. Now this event reports unresponsive hardware to user space. Now the AMD GPU drivers are also able to make use of this device event when the hardware becomes unstable or hung, you know, malfunctioning, it then notifies user space. Okay, now what? Well, this would allow for a user then to intervene and take actions to possibly be able to recover from this bad hardware state. It could even trigger recovery scripts to automate recovery of the problem hardware. Now several things can be done to get the hardware working again, such as unbinding and rebinding the kernel driver, unbinding and rebinding the actual hardware driver. You know, it's talking to the hardware. Unbind that and there's things like resetting the bus device after the driver unbind. Now they also leave room for other actions that aren't defined at this time. But if you take a look at the link in the show notes, there's an example of a recovery script given for a rebind. So it's, it's a way to flag and then you can try to kind of re kick your hardware to get things going. Now, in the article in the show notes, there's a link to the actual mailing list patch and it has been submitted to the DRM next queue. So this means that when the 615 merge window opens, probably around the end of March, you know, give or take how many release candidates there are in 614, it will then be pulled into 6.15 at that time. That is assuming there's no major roadblocks or issues with the patch or Linus doesn't take a look at it and go, what are you doing? Barring any of that, it should make it in. Now these are intel developers, so I mean they're old hat at this, so it's most likely going to make it in. But take a look at the link in the show notes in the article for all the details on this. But I think for gamers and people like myself who may run beta or even pre beta software, you know, so you can play games, this might come in handy once in a while.
- [44:57]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, you also find, you also find stuff like I was, I was, I've. I've been in this situation before, right? Like I've hung my GPU multiple times and I am used to finding in my error log something like error, radeon fence, wait, time, doubt. And that's just one of the messages that the kernel will throw when the GPU has hung in some way. You run into this like playing a new video game in Wine for the first time when, when nobody has looked at it yet. And because it's new, it does something unexpected, it triggers some bug in video card firmware or the driver. And you know, any one of these bugs can then cause. So what we're essentially talking about is the firmware on your video card crashes, right? Just like your, your OS in your computer can hit a bug and crash, a program can crash, your kernel can crash, crash. There's code running inside your gpu, that code can crash as well. And sometimes that code crashes because it's just buggy. Sometimes it crashes because your driver is telling it to do something that just doesn't make any sense. All kinds of reasons. And yeah, this is the thing. And you have, in the past you had like, I know this is something that they tried to handle in AMD land. If your video card crashes right now, if you have an amd, your machine will attempt to restart it and get it running again. Now sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn't. But like if you're in the middle of playing a game and everything goes dark and then it comes back up again and maybe even you get a few more frames out of it and then it goes dark again and then it comes back up again. That's your video card trying to reset because it's crashed. And so this sort of thing has been around. What's really neat about this is that they're going to try to make this one, this one protocol, this one API across all of them. I think that would be, that would. It's going to make the desktop designers like the KDE guys and all that. It's going to make their job much easier, going to make them much happier.
- [46:57]
Jeff Massey
Oh yeah, because right now, just so everybody knows, there's no way for the kernel to tell User land and userland is what you and I interact with, that something's gone wrong with the GPU currently in the current, current kernels. So. And this will allow the user land to kind of take a little bit of control on, hey, maybe here's some things we can do to try to, to reset that. And, and you also will run into this. You know, we've got the 5000 series out from Nvidia, you know, pretty new driver there. We're going to have the 9000 series out from AMD here in a couple weeks. They're probably going to have some driver issues in there too because it's all brand new hardware. You're going to run into things that you don't normally see just because they can test a lot of things, but they're not going to run it through the gambit like 20,000 people are.
- [47:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, yep. We Linux users do some crazy off the wall things with our hardware sometimes.
- [48:00]
Rob Campbell
It's true if I, you know, caught your story correctly and it wasn't, you know, just over my head like all your other hardware stories. The one key thing I caught here that I think you said in a roundabout way is that on Linux, Nvidia has fallen behind again. I think you said, right. They don't have this cool new feature.
- [48:22]
Jeff Massey
That is true.
- [48:23]
Rob Campbell
I want to make sure I heard that right.
- [48:26]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. This is cool though. You could see, you know, doing things like detect what is actually using the GPU and automatically killing that process and then trying a GPU reset. Right. So like if it's a particular game, rather than crashing your entire system, you can just kill the game.
- [48:43]
Rob Campbell
Don't crash my game.
- [48:46]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean, if the whole system crashes, your game is also going to crash.
- [48:49]
Rob Campbell
Try something else first.
- [48:51]
Jonathan Bennett
Sure, sure, we'll try something else.
- [48:54]
Rob Campbell
I might be in the middle of something and an animal Gummy, you're not.
- [49:00]
Jeff Massey
That good of a player anyway. Rob. It'll be okay.
- [49:07]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, so it's back up to Rob and he's going to talk about Gen 2. Have you run Gen 2? Have you daily driven Gen 2 yet, Rob?
- [49:16]
Rob Campbell
No.
- [49:17]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, you need to add it to your list then.
- [49:19]
Rob Campbell
Well, you know, for followers of the show who pay attention to remember these things. If you listen, you would know that I have tried to set up Gen 2 in the past and I got to the compile point and. Well, I wouldn't say I gave up, but I just decided I didn't want to go through it at that time.
- [49:43]
Jonathan Bennett
Just need a faster computer.
- [49:45]
Rob Campbell
Well, you know, I didn't even start, I didn't even hit the command to start it. I got there. I don't know. So I still have the virtual machine waiting for me to come back and finish. Well, it looks like if I want to daily drive it, there may be another way. You know, Gentoo may have released a much easier way. I mean, I guess they have released a much easier way for people like me to try out Gen 2 in a virtual machine. And what they have released is a pre made QCOW2 disk image designed to be easily deployed to a VM or a cloud environment. Right now images are offered for the X8664 and the Arch64 platforms. And this, this allows you to quickly, quickly boot into Gen 2 with a Qemu native QCOW2 format. So it's already basically installed for you on a nice little file, the hard drive or it's storage, whatever. And they say it's going to be updated on a weekly basis. So you're going to get updates faster than your Ubuntu with a fully functional Gen 2 installation. And while they also have future plans to support the EFI based risk 5. 64 bit and long are 64 bit bootable images. They're, they're not there yet. They're, they're, they're expected to come and you know, sure, this, you know, this kind of defeats much of the purpose of running Gen 2. You know, kind of building it up from scratch and compiling it, which you know, I wouldn't know about because I didn't get that far. I mean I didn't do that yet, but compiling your own system, you know, building it up, making it yours from scratch how you want it. But it may be a great way for people like me to test it out before going all in, you know, I could put that a VM and give it a good test run and, and find out if I really want to spend the next hours, day, whatever, building it up myself. And you know, their hope is to become more crowd cloud, more cloud friendly and increase their presence, you know, in data centers and cloud and you know, anybody using a VM. So because you don't really hear about Gen 2 in, in these circumstances, months, it's more the person people running on their desktops and, and the hobbyist kind of because it takes some work. It's, it's like cross between Arch and Linux from scratch. I mean it's, it's a little easier than Linux from scratch. Except for Linux from scratch has great directions though. You're really kind of doing all the same thing except once you have it installed, they do have a packing package manager. That's my understanding. I've never ran it, but in a way it's also like Arch. You know, you build it up like Arch but then instead of installing everything with the package manager, you compile it all. So my understanding, hopefully I didn't say that wrong because like I said, I haven't ran it. But I have an easy way to do it soon and I look forward to trying out the QCOW2 image from Gen 2.
- [53:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Yeah, that'll be fun. It is a valid observation that gen 2 is very difficult to use for real deployments. If you have to compile everything from scratch, it's just makes it kind of a no go.
- [53:38]
Jeff Massey
So I might have to try it because my pre alpha 25.04 Kubuntu nightly build. Yeah, it dorked itself along the way, so I have to. And again, nightly build, pre alpha, it's not unexpected, right?
- [53:59]
Jonathan Bennett
It's not that much unexpected.
- [54:01]
Jeff Massey
So I need to reload to get in a usable state and it's like, oh, maybe I'll try Gen 2.
- [54:06]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. Are you talking bare metal here?
- [54:08]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, yeah.
- [54:09]
Jonathan Bennett
So this, this is a Q cow image. So it's specifically for virtualization, right? I don't know. I don't know what it would take to try to boot a Q cal on bare metal. I'm sure there's a way to do it, but you could.
- [54:20]
Jeff Massey
No, I'm talking just running regular gen 2 and just try it.
- [54:23]
Rob Campbell
You're gonna go through it all. All right, it's a race.
- [54:25]
Jonathan Bennett
Let us know.
- [54:26]
Jeff Massey
No, I'm not racing. I'm.
- [54:29]
Rob Campbell
I mean come on, it's taken me like six months already so.
- [54:33]
Jeff Massey
But, but you've, you've done. You've done Arch, right, Rob? Yeah, yeah. See then I can just go, oh, you didn't compile your, you know, os.
- [54:43]
Rob Campbell
So I is a step above.
- [54:45]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. So then you can just. You got those bragging rights on. Yeah, on the, on the Arch guys.
- [54:51]
Rob Campbell
I've done like Linux from scratch too. But honestly, Linux from scratch has excellent directions.
- [54:59]
Jonathan Bennett
It really does.
- [55:00]
Rob Campbell
Step by step. And that was one thing that made me stop with Gen 2 is they're not. They're good, I think. Not as good, I don't think. And I got to a point I'm like. I kind of wasn't quite sure exactly what I was supposed to do.
- [55:18]
Jeff Massey
And you know, I. Maybe I can try out just. Okay, what is the basic user experience starting from just bare metal, empty drive and go, okay, what, what do I do? Because realistically we know compiling optimized and all that, it doesn't gain that much for most things.
- [55:37]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it really doesn't.
- [55:37]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. Unless you're really running a database or something where it's, you know, compiling, doing heavy crunching, where every second matters, you'll never notice anything. But you know, I can check it off the list.
- [55:53]
Rob Campbell
There's a question. Does Linux from scratch have Mesa 25.0? And the thing is, Linux from scratch, you're compiling it, so you get anything you want, you download it from them.
- [56:08]
Jonathan Bennett
From, from wherever the projects are at.
- [56:12]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, generally you download the MESA source or any other source. As long as you can get the source code, you compile it and if you can do that, you got it there. There's no package or repo to. No package manager or repo to install things. But you know, I think, I think maybe I'll, I'll, I'll do the, I'll take the QCOW2 image and maybe I'll do like a DD over to a drive and that might work.
- [56:43]
Jonathan Bennett
The latest beyond Linux from scratch seems to be Mesa 24-4-1. So I don't know what it would take to try to do 25. Instead, things like MESA tend to be a little more difficult to just jump ahead in versions. It might work, it might not.
- [57:06]
Jeff Massey
You just have to see there's a lot of dependencies that come along with. You say, okay, I want Mesa 25.0. Oh, but then here's 16 other things that have to be upgraded and aligned.
- [57:21]
Jonathan Bennett
That's essentially the whole point of Linux from Scratch was that there was always these sort of interleaved dependencies like you have to. Have to have the kernel, you know, XYZ you've got to have one of these three GCC compilers and you have to have one of these three LIBC versions. And trying to figure out which ones of those went together was, I think for the longest time and probably still to some extent a huge pain to try to figure out. And so that's what Linux from Scratch was. It was a manual for. Here are known compatible versions of everything. And then also here are the, you know, it comes with instructions to actually bootstrap into an environment to be able to build the kernel and enough things to get a running system.
- [58:07]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. So the directions are now for 25.0.
- [58:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Yet, but not yet.
- [58:11]
Rob Campbell
If you're adventurous and you want to do on your own, it's probably. Well, it's got to be possible. Obviously somebody built it.
- [58:18]
Jonathan Bennett
It's possible.
- [58:19]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. It's just. You're going to have to research those dependencies. You're just going to go to hate.
- [58:24]
Rob Campbell
Your life for the next week or month or.
- [58:28]
Jeff Massey
Well, but this is, this is actually, you know. Okay, Rob wants to make his coffee Linux, you know, and he's. He'll tell you where to send the coffee at at the end of the show. But anyway, he wants to make his distribution. This is Linux from scratch is how you do it. This is where you say, oh, I want to have this kind of kernel and this version of Mesa and I'm going to make it whatever. This is what somebody who builds their own Linux distribution basically goes through.
- [58:57]
Rob Campbell
Well, do they. I don't think.
- [58:59]
Jeff Massey
Well, if you're from scratch, not, not.
- [59:04]
Rob Campbell
A derivative basing it off of something else, but a few.
- [59:10]
Jeff Massey
But if you want it unique. There you go.
- [59:15]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, yep. I would recommend, I would recommend a build system and a package manager to go with it. Not just lfs, but you do you. Rob, Coffee. Linux can be whatever you want it to be. All right, we've got. Oh, this one.
- [59:31]
Jeff Massey
Yes.
- [59:31]
Jonathan Bennett
We've got one more story from me and then we've got one more story from Jeff. Oh, this one is fun. This one is so much fun. So Meta, the company previously known as Facebook is sort of in legal trouble because it torrented a whole bunch of books. Ah, the.
- [59:51]
Rob Campbell
That is fun.
- [59:52]
Jonathan Bennett
This is, this is so much fun. This whole story is so much fun. Meta torrented a huge data set of pirated, pirated books for AI training and they got caught and a group of authors are taking them to court and there are multiple claims that are happening in this court case and there are a couple of them that are very, very, very Interesting. All right, so one of the first claims is that these authors are claiming that it is unlawful for Meta Facebook to copy and distribute these written works via AI outputs. And so this, this is getting into a question that I find very, very interesting. Is training an AI on copyrighted works enough of a transformative work that it breaks the chain of copyright from the original works? It's a huge legal question that we all have in our current AI world. And this is one of the court cases that is going to decide it. We've got a group of authors on one side and we've got Facebook meta on the other. So that in and of itself is super interesting because we, we need case law on this, we need the world to sort of come to conclusion of, you know, how much training. At what point is training an AI the same thing as stealing written works? And it's not going to be a black and white answer. There's going to be some point where, you know, if you can get the AI to spit back out the word for word original works, then yes, you have broken copyright law. But if you can't do that, then it's more of, it's more of an open question. Right? And I've seen some people say, well, trying to block an AI from doing it essentially makes it illegal to read a book, because arguably there's not a whole lot of difference between what an AI does when it reads a work and sort of makes that work part of itself and what we humans do when we read a book and we sort of make that book a part of our own psyche. So like that's, that's an interesting thought experiment as well. What makes this one particularly fascinating to us as Linux users is that Meta torrented these pirated books. And so these book authors and publishers are also going after them for the, the unleash the unlawful distribution of copyrighted works through illegal torrenting, which has long been considered established case law. I'm reading from the Arsenic article and Meta's. Meta's response to this. Their, their legal defense is yes, we torrented those things, but we didn't seed the torrents, so it's not actually illegal, which is hilarious to me. So yes, we downloaded it, but we didn't re upload it, so we didn't actually break copyright. It was, you know, whoever packaged up that torrent and uploaded to us, that's who broke copyright. And boy, that's actually really fascinating. Legally, if that were to become case law, that would change the way piracy cases were handled for it to become Suddenly not illegal to download something via torrent, only illegal to seed it to re upload. Boy, that's fascinating. Yeah, very, very, very interesting case going on here that I will be, I will be following.
- [63:31]
Rob Campbell
It's usually been the seeds that or the actual uploading of it that's gotten people in trouble. But as I was thinking about it, not always true. I had a. Somebody I knew one way or another gave their computer to a relative. I think they had some disabilities or something to the relative and maybe it got caught. Maybe they actually torrented him, seated him back up, I don't know. But I know that somehow they found him on the computer and then it got back to them and cost them like $2,000. This was like 15 years ago too, but I guess it could have been. I actually, I bet it was also uploading in that case too. So it shows. Usually the uploading, they get you in trouble.
- [64:28]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes, yes. Well, because if you're uploading, then you are participating in actively distributing. They're not stolen. Right. It's not technically theft, but you're actively participating in breaking that copyright. Yeah, it's an interesting case. It's weird. And there are some weird questions around the idea of torrenting and pirating and all of that as well. Most of those have been kind of settled over the years, but this one is pretty interesting. It's interesting if only because it's such a big, big company with lots of legal team that's making the argument. And unfortunately that makes a huge difference. Right. And that's one of the downsides of the U.S. not just the U.S. legal system, legal system around the world.
- [65:20]
Jeff Massey
Right.
- [65:20]
Jonathan Bennett
This is just one of the problems. I'm not sure there's any solution to it, but to be able to make a novel claim like this and argue it in court, you've got to have the money to be able to pay court fees and lawyer fees. And so you've got to be fairly big to be able to make a claim like this and test it in court. If, if, if I torrented something and they came after me, I could, I, it may be true that, hey, I didn't seed it, but I, I would have no way of fighting that five.
- [65:43]
Rob Campbell
Ten years from now. We'll give you on all an update on this.
- [65:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that's the, that's the other downside. Things move extremely slowly. But yeah, it's just, it's so, it's so fascinating to me and like I said, not directly Linux related, although this could have repercussions for torrenting Even torrenting.
- [66:01]
Rob Campbell
Linux ISOs, Facebook runs on Linux. It's all Linux. They're contributors to Linux. They're big on the. Are they big on the butterfs, I think file system?
- [66:12]
Jonathan Bennett
I think possibly. I know they do a lot for PHP as well.
- [66:17]
Jeff Massey
Butterfs and they're big on the IO ring design.
- [66:25]
Jonathan Bennett
Makes sense. Yep, yep.
- [66:26]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, they were big on butterfs, I think before anybody was really barely using it, if I remember right.
- [66:32]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep. All right, so let's hit our next. Our last story actually, and that is Jeff and he has the story about changes at Mozilla. Oh boy.
- [66:44]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. Mozilla Corporation's president, Mark Sermon announced plans today. Well, not today, I guess Wednesday. But to tackle what are major headwinds facing the company's ability to grow, make money and remain relevant. To quote Mark, he said Mozilla's impact and survival depends on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox, finding new sources of revenue and manifesting our mission in fresh ways. So how are they going to do this? Well, they have a new council composed of executives from each of the different Mozilla organizations. So they have Mozilla Corporation, you know, someone from Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla AI, the not for profit Mozilla foundation and MZLA Technologies, Thunderbird and Mozilla Ventures, which it's Mozilla Ventures, which is its capital venture arm. Now a major note is the absence of Michelle Baker, co founder of Firefox. She is no longer a chair or member of either the Mozilla foundation or the Mozilla Corporation boards. Now she's been a polarizing figure in the past due to Mozilla having layoffs while she was receiving multi million dollar salary payments. We we've covered in previous shows how the drama and contention surrounding her paycheck and direction for the company have really. It was there, there was a lot of people that disagreed with her, her direction and the amount of her paycheck based on the size of the company. And so I'll leave it at that. But she is now completely out of Mozilla. The new council says it will continue to invest in privacy, privacy respecting advertising fund, develop and push open source AI features to remain product relevant and pursue novel new fundraising initiatives. Now they didn't go into what that is. That's just the direction they're heading. The article does mention that while Firefox is named a few times, it's not the central focus even though it brings in the most revenue because of the deal with Google. For those who don't know, Google pays Mozilla a lot of money to have Google as the default search engine on Firefox.
- [69:06]
Jonathan Bennett
And you can distill that statement even more and say that Google pays Mozilla for Chromium to not be the only browser in existence.
- [69:13]
Jeff Massey
I was just going to say that.
- [69:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes.
- [69:15]
Jeff Massey
I was going to read between the lines and say we don't want to be stuck with a monopoly, so we're paying Firefox to be around.
- [69:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes, yes.
- [69:23]
Jeff Massey
The article continues with some editorial comments from the author. Now this is just from the author and just summarize them. He understands that Mozilla is in a difficult position because based on legal cases, the funding Mozilla gets from Google could be in jeopardy. He goes on to say, finding an equitable, sustainable future to maintain its flagship browser and advocate for an open web, it needs to be Mozilla's priority. And he talks about the importance of Mozilla in the Internet browser ecosystem just to keep Chrome from being the dominant juggernaut. And you know it. There has to be an alternative out there. Take a look at the article in the Show Notes, which also has links to LWN's comments section in addition to with where this article is from. The link in the Show Notes is OMG Ubuntu uk. And they have their comment section in there too, where, you know, there's a lot of people with input and I'm sure my co hosts have some opinions on this and I would love to hear them.
- [70:33]
Jonathan Bennett
I do. I'm gonna let Rob go first. I want to look something up. So go, go Rob.
- [70:43]
Rob Campbell
I don't know. I just. I don't know. I'm speechless.
- [70:49]
Jeff Massey
Well, a lot of the comments in both comment sections basically came down to stop focusing on things besides Mozilla, stop making goofy little side projects that nobody wants, nobody cares about. You know, really focus on making the browser really, really good.
- [71:09]
Rob Campbell
I mean, I feel like we have said it all before and I guess I don't know if I want to be too redundant with it, but yeah, obviously she was getting paid too much. They get a lot of money from Google, blah blah, blah. And yeah, obviously Firefox browser is their thing. That's what they should focus, focus on. And I think they should spin out like their, their email client.
- [71:38]
Jonathan Bennett
And so okay, I. The email client is already spun out. Oh yes, you, Rob and everybody else listening need to go listen to floss weekly episode 820. Just about a week ago I interviewed Ryan Sipes, who is the project manager, kind of the lead guy of Thunderbird. And I got the scoop from him on a lot of things. So Thunderbird is under the Mozilla organization, the open source, the nonprofit. It is not a part of the Mozilla corporation, which is an interesting note to make. I was looking to try to figure out this press release that they put out. What does it represent? Is it the corporation or is it the organization? Because those are two different things. I am going to say that I think diversifying is the exact opposite of what they need to do. Mozilla has two core competencies. So if we're talking about the Mozilla open source, like nonprofit organization, right, There are two things that they do that people care about, with a possible third. I'm going to list a third that I think people should care about. But there are two that people really care about and that is Thunderbird and Firefox. Those are the two things that are on Mozilla that anybody cares about.
- [73:03]
Rob Campbell
Those are the only things, those are.
- [73:05]
Jonathan Bennett
The only things that Mozilla does that people care about, none of the rest of it. There is a third thing that Mozilla does that people should care about and that is trying to engage with politicians and teach them about how technology actually works. Right? This is a thing that Mozilla actually does. And so I get to talk to some of these people. Simon Phipps is also in the same space, for example. So when you have something like the UK trying to say, well, we need encryption backdoors, one of the things that the Mozilla organization does is they try to come along and say, let us tell you why this is a really bad idea. And so Mozilla does this sort of in the realm of web technologies, because you, and in this realm, one of the things that you get, you get fun things like standards being adopted that everybody is required to support that have patents tied up in them. And so then you. This is, this is one of the ways that big companies that own patents make money, by the way. So like let's say a video codec. Well, let's make this video codec standard for the web. Let's get politicians to encode this video, to specify that this video codec is a standard for the web. And oh, by the way, Impeg LA owns 72 patents on this. And everybody that runs this video codec has to give us a thousand dollar license. Lots of money gets made this way. And so Mozilla, one of the things Mozilla does is they come along and they will say, this is a really bad idea. Let's not use patent encumbered technologies inside of these standards. Like that's the sort of. It's. That is the third thing that Mozilla does that is worthwhile. Not as many people know about it, but it is something that they do. Other than those three things. I think Mozilla should take the. They should take the Elon Musk approach and drop everything else. Cut their workforce and concentrate on those three things. Stop doing things that will make them show up on places like the Duke Journal. Stop doing things that people roll their eyes at. Stop putting out observations like that. We've got to diversify. Just. There are three things that I want Mozilla to do. I want you to make Thunderbird great. I want you to make Firefox great. And I want you to keep some common sense. Try to teach politicians common sense about the way that open source and the web works. Those are the three things. Anything not related to those needs to go. And if they were to do that, I think they could probably turn a profit and then take inspiration from what Thunderbird has done. And Thunderbird in turn took inspiration from what KDE did. And that is every six months pop up a little notice that says we pretty much exist because people give us money. If you enjoy what we're doing, please give us a little bit of money. Do it in Firefox. Exactly what they've done in Thunderbird. Thunderbird and KDE have had huge success with this. Do it. Do it in Firefox. Do not do ads. I can tell you nothing will tell. Nothing will get people to uninstall Firefox quicker and having ads built into it. Because the people that get totally irritated like that are the people that are running Firefox. It is a betrayal of the existing user base to do something like ads in the product. So don't do that. Don't do any of that dumb stuff. Just let people know this is the amount of money we need. If you can't support us, then we're eventually going to go away. People will come out of the woodworks to support you, but stop doing all the dumb extra stuff.
- [76:40]
Rob Campbell
Okay, I'm going to give a slightly different take.
- [76:43]
Jonathan Bennett
Feel free.
- [76:44]
Rob Campbell
So focus on Firefox. That's. That's your baby. All the things you said great about Firefox. Good. Thunderbird. Spin that off. Go, go give that to LibreOffice or something. I know.
- [76:58]
Jonathan Bennett
Thunderbird is already its own company. It is not part of the corporate structure of Mozilla. It only exists underneath the nonprofit. It is in that Nonprofit umbrella.
- [77:09]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, go give that to LibreOffice. They can donate to them. But I think that should be bundled in with LibreOffice or something. And then for the other, the educational or lobbyist branch or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, spin that off too. I mean it should exist. Fire Mozilla can donate to it and support it, but let it be its own thing. Don't let it drag other things down on their main focus.
- [77:41]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah, that's fair. I think we could probably go one step forward and say that all of this needs to be very clearly delineated. Right. So have the Mozilla overarching nonprofit that helps manage all these things and then split it up into these three different groups.
- [77:57]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, that works too. Is, you know, whatever, whatever it is, you know, don't, don't let the other two detract from, from Firefox. And you know, if, if people care more about the educational piece than they care about Firefox, well then that's where their donations and support will go and Firefox will go away. And not that I perceive that happening, but you know, let's let the support speak for itself. You support this, let it go to that. You support this, let it go to that. I suppose, you know, the foundation can be the one who can support a manager just like the Linux Foundation, I guess, you know, does or. And the, well, all the foundations they have like all kind. They're an umbrella over top of so many things. And maybe there's just some confusion. The fact that it's the Mozilla foundation and Mozilla Firefox and Mazilla Thunderbird, I know maybe that graze it for a lot of us. So we don't really realize that there's maybe more, a little more separation than we think.
- [78:58]
Jeff Massey
But yeah, there's several sub corporations under there. But I mean I could totally see, you know, really what needs to happen. I mean, I know it's different but you know, Thunderbird, they need to make it probably a little more corporate friendly. You know, really just juice it up.
- [79:18]
Jonathan Bennett
And they're working on it. I will, I will also say they are working on that. That is one of the, that is one of the goals that they, that we talked about on the show is being able to do like Office365 integration inside of Thunderbird. And that is, that is coming. In fact it's partially working and they are putting the finishing touching touches on that.
- [79:36]
Jeff Massey
Nice. And as far as like AI only where it helps browsing be better work on AI. And not as like, I'm going to make a virtual assistant. I'm going to no help it maybe hit multiple search engines, something like that, or whatever.
- [79:53]
Jonathan Bennett
Just.
- [79:54]
Jeff Massey
And it does surprise me because when you read the comments, it's overwhelmingly of make Firefox better, make it the top browser. You know, focus on that. I mean, it's like 95% of the comments say that. And there's a lot of comments saying, you know what? I would donate to it. They said I would. You know, a lot of people said, you know, kind of the Wikipedia style of, hey, you know, if you just give us a couple bucks, you know, it really help. And people donate. And even if they're worried about Google saying, because the court case is saying, oh, we cannot force, you know, you. Because basically it comes. It's coming from kind of an antitrust spin of saying, okay, Google can't pay everybody to make Google the default search engine because that's like antitrust or whatever. Well, you know what? Google's still going to hit that donate button and go, well, here's, here's a few hundred million just to stick around, you know, because it's not illegal to have a monopoly. It is not illegal, but when you are classified as a monopoly, you have an extra large set of rules you then have to play under. I mean, it brings a lot of overhead. And they just as soon say, we don't want that. Hey, Firefox, keep going. And as long as they can keep it a viable alternative, they go, we're not a monopoly. Okay, we have 99% of the market, but we're not a monopoly. Yeah, here's an option you can go to right here that's viable.
- [81:28]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [81:28]
Rob Campbell
So I, I haven't given Thunderbird an honest chance in a long time. I'm looking at it now. It actually looks a lot better than it used to. Than it used to be. I mean, it is maybe very petty, but what just drove me nuts is just kind of the look and feel of it. It just always looks so antiquated, like, just like something made in the early 2000s. Looking at it looks pretty good, but I can't. Is there theming? Because I still don't like the icons in it.
- [81:58]
Jonathan Bennett
I think there is some. I think they're working on more. Try to remember, it's been, it's been a little bit since I had that conversation.
- [82:06]
Jeff Massey
They went through a big, they went through a big revision here about six months ago. They really advanced the code quite a bit. Yeah, because it stagnated for Quite a while. And then they had a big release and now they're back into it. And so.
- [82:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, they, they came to the point where there was only, there was only budget for a few, a handful, very small handful of engineers to work on it. And they, they came to this point where it's like, well, what do we do? Do we spin out and go into LibreOffice? Do we do something else? And they came to the conclusion, they said we're going to ask, we're going to ask people if they want Fire or they want Thunderbird to stick around. And people overwhelmingly said yes. You know, there's a large group of people that love Thunderbird and want it to continue. It's okay. We're going to ask them every six months we're going to do a pop up and ask people to give. And they've been able to hire multiple full time engineers off of that. They've done exceptionally well with it.
- [83:01]
Jeff Massey
Well, and I'm glad to hear there's a corporate take on it too because.
- [83:05]
Jonathan Bennett
This is a problem that they're aware of.
- [83:06]
Jeff Massey
Yes, I have to use Outlook at work. It's, it's all Windows based and Outlook, the new outlook I have tried is like Fisher Price Outlook for, you know. Oh, it's great for somebody that gets.
- [83:25]
Jonathan Bennett
I know what you're talking about. Yes, it is.
- [83:27]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. And I forced it back to classic and I'm still on classic and I'm gonna, I'm gonna die on that hill. But it's, you know, for anything that's serious email, the new version is horrible. It is not, you know, when you're getting, you know, 800 to a thousand emails a week and you got to go through them and you know, really power through stuff. That new one is just, it's made for grandma sending email or.
- [83:58]
Jonathan Bennett
I was, I was with a customer. Yeah, I was with a customer. It's been a couple of months ago and he got updated to the new Outlook and there was something that we needed to do. We needed to do something with one of his actual Outlook files like split, I think we needed to download, create a new offline Outlook file and download email into that so that when his email account went away he wouldn't lose it all. And you couldn't do it. You could not do it in the new Outlook. You could not make a separate file. That's what it was.
- [84:28]
Rob Campbell
Now which new Outlook is that? Is that the paid one or the one that's built into Windows 10? Because they have, everything's called Outlook now.
- [84:34]
Jonathan Bennett
That's part of, that's part of the problem. I'm not sure which it was, but I went searching on the Internet. It's like, how do you do this in new Outlook and found several threads. You just can't. It's not, it's not supported. Not at all.
- [84:45]
Rob Campbell
I think, I think the one that comes built in with Windows 10 has the bigger issue where Jeff is talking about the paid one where they just, yeah. Made it a colorful.
- [85:01]
Jonathan Bennett
So one more thing that I will really quickly touch on a couple of people in the chat mentioned. Well, webmail is so good now. Gmail's webmail is so good. Why would you want Thunderbird? And I would tell you, one of the reasons that you actually want Thunderbird is to have an offline local copy of your emails.
- [85:18]
Rob Campbell
I don't like Gmail webmail either.
- [85:20]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean, I don't care if you like Gmail. I like Gmail webmail. I use it a lot.
- [85:23]
Rob Campbell
I don't like the interface. I don't like their web interface either.
- [85:27]
Jonathan Bennett
And that's totally fine. But like every once in a while you will lose connection to the Internet. I know it's hard to believe, but it does happen.
- [85:35]
Rob Campbell
I like Thunderbird interface better than Gmail webmail.
- [85:40]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I probably do a little bit too.
- [85:43]
Jeff Massey
The online versions too. I see there's curious outlook365 online got much better a while back. It's still terrible. It does not. When you're doing, now I'm talking serious emailing here. I'm talking, you know, huge number attachments. You're forwarding, you're doing, you're creating, I mean, and I'm using a ton of keyboard shortcuts just because you just gotta get through it, you know, you can't, you can't sit around and kind of. Oh, let me.
- [86:11]
Rob Campbell
Sounds like you need a secretary or some AI.
- [86:14]
Jeff Massey
No, I, Why use the AI as well.
- [86:16]
Rob Campbell
And I'll tell you what, Administrative assistant.
- [86:18]
Jeff Massey
Sorry, but I, I, you know, I know we're getting off a little off the rails here, but online office, like Excel and Word, it's missing too much functionality. It's, it's again, it's built for grandma sending something once in a while.
- [86:34]
Rob Campbell
When you're online, Outlook is okay, but Excel's losing, missing a lot of functionality. Yeah, Word is.
- [86:43]
Jonathan Bennett
If I, if I wanted that, I would just go use Google. Google Docs. Right.
- [86:47]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, it's. But again, I'm at work. Yeah. I'm a power user. I'm probably using a lot of functions that most People aren't Windows power user here. Yeah as somebody said in the comments. Roger H. Jeff is an email 1 percenter you know and my probably patch and you know but for home it would be okay. You know I'm not doing anything but at work. No, it is not hold the candle the applications.
- [87:16]
Rob Campbell
So to bring this back to Linux, one thing I'm. I'm looking at Thunderbird here and they seem to be following the new Outlook design with that tab on the side that I kind of dislike. I really hated when my Outlook at work went put that tab running down the left side and that's what Thunderbird did too.
- [87:34]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm sure you can change it.
- [87:36]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, well, yeah, I went through and. Because even when they changed the wanted Outlook I went through and I want compact mode. I want to get rid of the big fluffy headers with the pictures because I got to get more information on that screen and I need to read.
- [87:50]
Rob Campbell
20 emails at a time.
- [87:53]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, you'd be surprised at what you. I mean the.
- [87:58]
Rob Campbell
You need to find that delete button a little quicker.
- [88:01]
Jeff Massey
Oh, I. Oh, I do. I use the cleanup functions. Yeah, I. I do because I literally get like say a thousand emails a week. You have to be able to sort through them and there's ways you. You do it to just speed through it.
- [88:19]
Rob Campbell
You just select, select delete, hope there's nothing in there important. If there was, they'll email again. Yep, I'm gonna give Thunderbird a shot. It does look a lot better. I really want to change those icons because they look colorful. Kind of like something I would have thrown on a website about 15 years ago. But if I can fix that, I think I'm okay with it.
- [88:42]
Jonathan Bennett
I think it has some theming. So give it a, give it a test run. Let us know what you think.
- [88:45]
Jeff Massey
I've been using Gmail for a while and I still like. I'm kind of lukewarm on it. But you know, now's a good time maybe as well I will try Thunderbird and give it a shot again because I used to use it all the time quite a while ago.
- [89:00]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's. It is once again getting, getting to be better and much more usable. All right, let's get this command line tips. We've talked, we've pontificated enough about the news. We've told them as little folks what they need to do. Let's tell the users what they need to do. Rob, what is Q?
- [89:18]
Rob Campbell
I got something really cool for you guys. So Q spelled K E W. It's a It's a terminal audio player. So basically it's, it's, it's winamp free terminal. So if back in the day I would have loved this, you know, 25 years ago I'd set up a computer and the thing would be hooked up to an amp and just some speakers, basically, basically DJ for friends. And, and I just have a playlist going. And I'd have to use this graphical user interface when it's just not necessary because Q will do that for you. All right, for those watching, I'm going to give you a little snippet of Q. And this is in like all, you know, apt, install, Kew. There are a couple of things set up. You have to point it to the directory where your, your music is and which isn't hard. If you run Q, it says can't find directory. Run this to point to your music directory. Not. Not hard. And yeah, so if you run Q, I put a few, I grabbed a few MP3s, slapped them in a folder here to demonstrate. I said, I want you to see all my inappropriate music. So I mean, I guess I just grabbed. Whatever. So if I. So here, for those watching, if you can see that, yeah, you guys can see that. You can see the songs in the directory. There's some F keys. F2 will show the playlist, which I have nothing yet. F3 is going to show the library which was on F4 is going to show the track. So it's Nothing there yet. F5 will show all the keys. So gives you all the shortcut keys, plus minus the. For volume arrow keys for tracks scrolling through the playlist, up and down arrow keys, ida, toggle color delivered from album or from profile. I'm not going to go through all these, but there's a bunch of keys that you can use to navigate through Fast forward backwards. And then. So if I go to the F3 to the library, I'm going to click on a couple of these to click on a couple of these to add to the playlist here. So I'm putting stars by them. Now I'm going to go, well, I'll show you the playlist there. Shows it right there. If I hit F4, I don't have the audio piping in.
- [92:16]
Jonathan Bennett
But I thought you said you weren't going to show any of the inappropriate ones.
- [92:26]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I guess it does say it has the explicit, explicit lyrics, doesn't it? But you can't hear it because I do not have the audio piped over. But you get a nice little. Well, a nice. You Get a text based album cover, which I assume that's what the album looks like.
- [92:45]
Jeff Massey
I don't know, it looks like an. It looks like an adult game from like 1985.
- [92:51]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, exactly.
- [92:55]
Rob Campbell
It's just a bunch of colors and then you have the. What is that called? The sound at the bottom there. There's a name for that with all the bars going.
- [93:10]
Jeff Massey
Equalizer.
- [93:11]
Rob Campbell
Equalizer. There we go.
- [93:13]
Jonathan Bennett
It's more. It's more like a visualizer, honestly.
- [93:15]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. Because I can't adjust it or anything. But anyway, you could be listening and you can just have a simple little audio player and you know, whatever. DJ for your friends or, or go professional, whatever. You might want something fancier than this, but a nice Q. Little music player.
- [93:38]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. Spectrum analyzer in the bottom.
- [93:41]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, there you go.
- [93:41]
Rob Campbell
There you go.
- [93:42]
Jonathan Bennett
That's neat. Now the unfortunate thing is on my systems it's not available to install via the package manager. I don't know why popos does not have it, but it does not. And it's not packaged on Fedora, so.
- [93:52]
Rob Campbell
But that's. They had a DNF in there.
- [93:55]
Jonathan Bennett
They have a DNF to get all of the things that you need to be able to build it. Well, it's fine. I know how to compile software on Ubuntu.
- [94:06]
Rob Campbell
It installed it all.
- [94:10]
Jonathan Bennett
So a win for Ubuntu, I guess. No, that's actually pretty neat. I have wanted something like that a few times in the past, so we'll definitely add that to my little toolbox of tools.
- [94:22]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I've found times when I wish I had that and I had to go with other workarounds.
- [94:28]
Jeff Massey
Yep, yep.
- [94:30]
Jonathan Bennett
So, Jeff, I found a command line tip and I got really excited about it because it was really cool and I had never seen anything that quite did this before. And I found it and I went to paste it into the command line tips and I discovered that you found the same command line tip and you beat me to get in there. So we're going to let Jeff talk about Kill Port and then I will talk about something else.
- [94:52]
Jeff Massey
Okay. For my command line tip, I have two links in the show notes. The first one is to the Linux TLDR website that goes over the command line tip which is Kill port K I L L P or P O R T. The second link is to the GitHub page for killport. Now kill port is basically like how it sounds. It's a command line tool that lets a person kill a process based on the port it's using. So just. I Know, there's a lot of people, you know, Ken's probably listening, going, I can do that. I don't need. I don't need a program. But you know, manually doing it is a little more cumbersome. You know, you'd have to find your open port, look for the responsible process behind the port, find the process pid and then stop that process process. This tool just simplifies things. The article in the show notes goes on. It talks about how to install it, which is available. It's available for Linux, Windows and Mac os, goes over the installation methods for Windows or for Linux. And then it goes into the usage of kill port. And it's pretty easy. I mean, the easiest way to use it is simply sudo kill port space 80, which would kill whatever process you have on port 80. Now, you can do more than one. You can. In the example they have, they set up something so it's listing on Port 80 and 88. Well, if you want to kill both of them, you do sudo space kill port space 80 space 88. So you can just list the ports you want to kill. Now there is a V flag that you can use which will allow you to see the verbose mode. So it gives you a lot more information that it's just showing that, yep, it definitely killed what you said you wanted to kill. And there's also a dash S flag if you want to kill the process using the, the sig up, sig kill or sigterm signal. So if, if you want to use those, you can. The command is really pretty basic and you can take a look at the article linked in the show notes for more information. But that's pretty much everything. So it just simplifies something that you manually could do.
- [97:01]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that is neat. That is. And it's a Rust program, so it looks like generally you'll install it with Brew or. Excuse me, you can install it with Brew. That is one of the options. But Cargo is what I was trying to spit out there.
- [97:15]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I guess we got Mac User here.
- [97:18]
Jeff Massey
And there's also.
- [97:19]
Jonathan Bennett
There's also Linux.
- [97:20]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, you can, but most people running Brew are probably on Mac maybe.
- [97:30]
Jonathan Bennett
What was that, Jeff?
- [97:31]
Jeff Massey
Oh, and there's also a script method. So if you don't have Homebrew or Cargo, they do have a script you can get with Curl.
- [97:42]
Jonathan Bennett
Okay, cool. All right, I'm going to plug. Actually, it's not exactly a terminal. I mean, you run it from the terminal, but then you use your web browser to interact with is stable diffusion Web UI and this is, it's actually a Python program. But the thing that's interesting about it to me, this is a. It uses stable diffusion to do AI generation of images and it works on AMD cards with Pytorch and the ROCM backend. And what's really interesting to me is it's a pretty good test. It actually works with the Fedora ROCM packaged packages. Packaged packages, sure. So I've got a link off to the actual GitHub page and then also to a YouTube video that I found extremely helpful talking about how to actually get this thing installed on a Fedora machine. And so, you know, all of the normal AI image generation things apply here. So you know, you can go get your models off a hugging face and all of that. But also don't be dumb with AI, especially because when you're running these locally, they don't have all of the safety things built into them that they will running them off of a website. And so don't be dumb with the things that you make your AI generate for you and that you then send to people. Just don't be dumb. Don't, don't, don't break any laws. Don't be dumb. I do not claim any responsibility for people doing dumb things with this. But it is cool that it works and that it can work on local machines and that it can work with AMD video cards. The world is not all Cuda anymore. And that is. That is the main thing I find neat about this.
- [99:28]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, don't be dumb and download torrent books and train it with your AI.
- [99:34]
Jonathan Bennett
Don't. Don't train your AI on torrented books. Yes, that is the lesson that Facebook engineers learned or maybe didn't learn. I don't know, just the cost of doing business. Right. Okay, well, I think we've gotten through everything. I will let each of the guys plug whatever they want to plug. We'll let Rob start. I have a feeling that he's going to try to plug Coffee Linux.
- [99:57]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I just got the same old plug that I do every time because I'm boring. I'm not as fun as Jeff with the cool poems. Here's my poem. No, never mind. I can't think of anything. Come and connect with me online. If you go to Robert P. Campbell.com you'll find my webpage. All kinds of cool things about me. Well, maybe not that much. There's some things there. But the key thing I'm trying to point out here is near the top in the gray little box you'll find a little button links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my blue sky, which I am trying to be more act. All right. I'm maybe the most active here these days. Mastodon, which I'm second active, I think. And Coffee Linux. No, this is where you can donate coffees to little old me and let me know that I'm still appreciated. Or Yesterday was my birthday. So if you want to send me a birthday coffee, can send that too.
- [101:14]
Jonathan Bennett
How many coffees do we have to buy you to get you to roll your own Linux? To make Coffee Linux a reality?
- [101:22]
Rob Campbell
20,000.
- [101:27]
Jeff Massey
All I know. All I know is one of those coffees was earmarked for me, so Rob owes me.
- [101:32]
Rob Campbell
I'm headed out your way in the. The summer, so.
- [101:36]
Jeff Massey
Oh, nice, nice. I'm gonna. I'm gonna convert it to beer though, or coffee. Beer.
- [101:41]
Jonathan Bennett
There you go. All right, Jeff, anything you want to plug?
- [101:48]
Jeff Massey
Not really. You know, I'm not very active on social media, but I do have Poetry Corner, so this one's for you, Rob. Hickory Dickory Dock. Don't watch Netflix on the clock. We can see what you're doing. Bandwidth you're ruining and soon that website will block. Have a great week, everybody.
- [102:12]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, fun, fun, fun. Alrighty. Thank you guys for being here. I sure appreciate it. You can find my stuff on most of it on Hackaday these days, including the. The. Including Floss Weekly. You can find the Untitled Linux show here at TWiT. You can find Floss Weekly over at Hackaday. And we have had a string of really cool interviews. Unfortunately, I've been doing them by myself because my guys have just not been responding. We've got Rob lined up to come for next week, so we're making progress there. But we've had a couple of really interesting ones. The this past week we interviewed Gregory Kurtzer and one of the community managers at Rocky Linux to kind of be the bookend to our Alma Linux episode from several months back. And then we did also the week before that, talk to Ryan Sipes from Thunderbird. And that was a really cool conversation. And we did indeed tell him, please don't add AI Clippy to Thunderbird. And he was in agreement with that. So I think we're safe there. But that is a lot of fun. You can also find my security column goes live there every Friday morning at Hackaday. We have a lot of fun doing that too. And then of course here at TWIT with the Untitled Linux Show. We appreciate those watching, those that got us live and on the download. Don't forget to check out Club Twit if you haven't yet. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month and you can support the network that you know and love. Keep us on the air. We sure appreciate it. And yeah, thanks for watching. We will see you next time week on the Untitled Linux Show.
- [103:39]
Rob Campbell
Hey buddy, are you a geek?
- [103:42]
D
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- [104:53]
Rob Campbell
It.