Untitled Linux Show 195: The Blathering Continues

Summary

Untitled Linux Show 195: The Blathering Continues

Released on March 23, 2025, the 195th episode of the Untitled Linux Show, hosted by Jonathan Bennett alongside regular co-hosts Rob, Ken, and Jeff, delves deep into the latest developments in the Linux and open-source ecosystem. This episode covers significant software releases, hardware advancements, and insightful discussions on enhancing user experiences.

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1. Major Software Releases

GIMP 3.0: A Long-Awaited Update

The episode kicks off with an in-depth discussion on the release of GIMP 3.0, a highly anticipated update that has been in the works for over a decade. Jonathan Bennett shares his excitement about the refined interface and improved functionalities:

“Highlights of this new release include a much refined Interface written in GTK3, a little behind since we have GTK4, but we'll get there... It looks pretty good to me.”
— Jonathan Bennett [02:40]

Key features of GIMP 3.0 include:

• GTK3 Interface: Transitioning to GTK3 provides a modernized look and better compatibility with contemporary desktop environments.
• Enhanced File Exchange: Improved support for BC7DS and PSD files, facilitating smoother interoperability with other applications.
• Non-Destructive Editing: Introduces non-destructive editing for commonly used filters, a game-changer for graphic designers.

Despite some mixed reviews from users on platforms like OMG Ubuntu, Bennett remains optimistic about the updates, emphasizing the visual improvements and functionality enhancements.

Blender 4.4: Expanding Capabilities

Jeff and Marius Nestor delve into Blender 4.4, highlighting its extensive new features:

“The highlight of Blender 4.4 is the rewritten CPU compositor, which brings significant performance improvements...”
— Marius Nestor [10:07]

Notable enhancements in Blender 4.4 include:

• Vulkan Integration: The first release to utilize Vulkan for displaying rendered results in Cycles, ensuring better performance.
• Ray Tracing Improvements: Enhanced support for Vulkan ray tracing, offering more realistic graphics rendering.
• Performance Boosts: Over 700 bugs fixed, with improved caching and reduced memory usage in complex node setups.

Bennett and Jeff commend the Blender team for their relentless efforts in refining the software, making it a robust tool for both amateurs and professionals in 3D modeling and animation.

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2. Hardware and System Updates

Raspberry Pi Image Generator

The hosts explore the new Raspberry Pi Image Generator, a tool designed to simplify the creation of custom Raspberry Pi OS images. This utility is particularly beneficial for:

• Custom Deployments: Streamlining the setup process for multiple Raspberry Pi devices with tailored configurations.
• Commercial Use: Facilitating large-scale deployments in industrial environments by allowing easy customization and updates.

“It's based around some YAML config files and if you follow the link, they've got a whole flowchart on all the stuff it does...”
— Jonathan Bennett [16:15]

Fedora 42 Beta and Fedora 43 Roadmap

Jonathan provides insights into Fedora 42 Beta, highlighting the inclusion of the KDE Spin as an official Fedora Workstation alongside GNOME. Additionally, he discusses Fedora’s commitment to reproducible builds in Fedora 43:

“Starting with 43, the actual contents of a package will be completely byte-for-byte reproducible by design...”
— Jonathan Bennett [46:00]

Key points include:

• Dual Workstation Editions: GNOME and KDE are now both official, expanding Fedora’s appeal to a broader user base.
• Reproducible Builds: Enhancing security by ensuring that package contents remain consistent and untampered across builds.

AMD Ryzen 9 X3D Processors

Jeff provides an analytical overview of AMD’s new Ryzen 9 X3D processors, backed by benchmarks from Phoronix:

“Unless you snag a fantastic deal on the 9900X3D, I would skip it... It might shine in specific niche scenarios...”
— Jeff [28:24]

He evaluates the performance benefits versus cost, recommending the Ryzen 9 9800X3D for gamers and the 9950X3D for those needing enhanced productivity alongside gaming.

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3. Desktop Environment Enhancements

GNOME 48: Bengaluru Release

The discussion shifts to GNOME 48, codenamed Bengaluru, introducing several performance and usability improvements:

“GNOME 48 also brings improvements to Wayland's color management protocol support, enhanced HDR dynamic range support...”
— Jeff [73:57]

Highlights include:

• Dynamic Triple Buffering: Boosts performance on low-end GPUs, enhancing responsiveness.
• Color Management Enhancements: Improved support for HDR and better color accuracy.
• Well-being Tools: Features to monitor screen time and encourage regular breaks.
• Notification Upgrades: On-screen desktop notifications for hardware events, like headphone connections.
• Enhanced File Manager: Nautilus now supports easier bookmark management and faster directory loading.

These updates aim to streamline the user experience, making GNOME 48 a substantial upgrade for Fedora 42 users.

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4. Community and Open Source Projects

Asahi Linux Faces Challenges

The hosts express concern over recent developments in the Asahi Linux project, particularly the pausing of work on Apple GPU drivers by the developer known as Asahi Liena:

“For personal reasons, I no longer feel safe working on Linux GPU drivers...”
— Michael Larabel [58:15]

This setback impacts the progress of Linux on Apple Silicon, sparking discussions on the sustainability of open-source projects and the importance of community support.

Calibre 8.0.1 Update

Marius Nestor and Lawrence Abrams highlight the latest update to Calibre, an essential tool for ebook management:

“Calibre 8.0.1 fixes a failure to start on systems where the user had previously installed the Kobo Touch 2 extended plugin...”
— Marius Nestor [41:19]

Key improvements:

• Enhanced Kobo Support: Native editing and conversion of kepub files for Kobo devices.
• Firmware Updates: Support for the latest Tolino device firmware.
• User Interface Enhancements: Improved thumbnail loading and directory performance.

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5. Security and System Improvements

Linux 6.15 Kernel Security Fix

Jonathan discusses a critical security fix in the Linux 6.15 kernel related to the Slab allocator tool:

“This whole randomization function was essentially one big nope. It was always returning the same seed...”
— Jonathan Bennett [67:01]

The patch addresses a vulnerability where predictable randomization could be exploited by attackers, thereby enhancing the overall security posture of Linux systems.

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6. Command Line Tips and Tools

Using ifne in Scripts

Rob introduces ifne, a handy command-line utility for executing commands based on input presence:

“If the standard input into ifne is not empty, it's going to run the command that you have after it.”
— Rob [84:54]

Example Usage:

• Check for Non-Empty Input:

  cat file.txt | ifne echo "Not Empty"
  

• Check for Empty Input:

  cat file.txt | ifne -n echo "Empty"
  

Managing Pipewire Metadata

Marius Nestor presents pipewire-metadata, a tool for managing Pipewire configurations:

“Monitor, set, and delete metadata on pipewire objects... It allows you to configure sample rates and buffer sizes directly from the command line.”
— Marius Nestor [88:30]

This tool is invaluable for users seeking granular control over their audio and video configurations within the Pipewire ecosystem.

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7. Personal Stories and Use Cases

Enhancing Old Games with GameScope

Jonathan shares his experience using GameScope to scale an old Windows adventure game running via Wine:

“In Lutris, you just enable GameScope, set your output resolution, and it scales the game window appropriately...”
— Jonathan Bennett [84:54]

He navigates challenges with splash screens and multiple executables, ultimately finding workarounds to achieve a seamless gaming experience on modern hardware.

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8. Community Engagement and Support

Donations and Support

Rob acknowledges donations from listeners, expressing gratitude and encouraging continued support through platforms like Buy Me a Coffee:

“Thank you to Aunt Pruitt... You can donate a cup of coffee to me at RobertPCampbell.com...”
— Rob [106:12]

The hosts emphasize the importance of community contributions in sustaining their efforts and delivering quality content.

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Conclusion

The episode of Untitled Linux Show 195 is a treasure trove of information for Linux enthusiasts, covering pivotal software releases, hardware advancements, and practical tips for enhancing user experiences. The hosts offer a blend of technical insights and personal anecdotes, making the content both informative and relatable. Whether you're a graphic designer looking to explore GIMP 3.0, a gamer assessing the latest AMD processors, or a developer navigating Pipewire configurations, this episode delivers valuable takeaways.

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Notable Quotes:

• “We've got something really interesting that is that the KDE Spin is not a spin anymore. It is as official as the GNOME workstation.”
  — Jonathan Bennett [46:00]

• “GNOME 48 also brings improvements to Wayland's color management protocol support, enhanced HDR dynamic range support...”
  — Jeff [73:57]

• “Unless you snag a fantastic deal on the 9900X3D, I would skip it...”
  — Jeff [28:24]

• “This whole randomization function was essentially one big nope. It was always returning the same seed.”
  — Jonathan Bennett [67:01]

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For a comprehensive dive into each topic, including installation guides, benchmark results, and more detailed discussions, listeners are encouraged to refer to the show notes linked on the TWiT platform.

Transcript

[Jonathan Bennett]

This week it's finally here. Yes, we're talking about GIMP 3, but there's also Blender 4.4, the Raspberry PI image generator, Fedora 42 goes beta. We talk about the other big AMD Ryzen release and Gnome 48.

[Jeff]

Lots more.

[Jonathan Bennett]

You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned listeners.

[Rob]

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[Jonathan Bennett]

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[Saurav Rudra]

Podcasts you love from people you Trust.

[Jonathan Bennett]

This is TWiT. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 195 recorded Saturday, March 22nd. The blathering continues. Hey folks, it is Saturday and it's time for some Linux goodness and geekery. It is the Untitled Linux Show. And of course, it's not just me here to talk about what's going on in the news. We've got sort of our regular crew. Rob, Ken and Jeff are here. And boy, it seems like there's a lot going on this week. And there's a few things going on this week that we've been waiting for for a Very long time. And Rob is sort of going to lead out in that because there's something that we have been waiting for. For. Has it been a decade? Has it been a decade? Rob?

[Michael Larabel]

Yeah, we'll get to that.

[Jonathan Bennett]

It's been really close. It's been a very long time. Yes.

[Michael Larabel]

But yeah, it's here. It's finally here. The release we have all been waiting for. Is it Grand Theft Auto 6? No. Half Life 3? Nope. Maybe it's the Cosmic Desktop. Okay, again, Sally? No. Looks like, looks like I'm gonna be waiting a little longer for those things. But this week, released just this week, after a decade, give or take, of waiting, the release candidates have all been tried and played around with for quite some time now. Okay, without further ado, release this week is GIMP 3.0. So, I mean, how long have we been waiting? Saurav Rudra at I. It's Foss says GIMP 3.0 was announced 10 years ago in 2015. Now, if you look at Joy Sneddon at OMG Ubuntu, he says GIMP 3.0 is a result of seven years of development. So I guess they did nothing for three years there. I don't know. But Michael Larable at Pharonic says he has been writing about GIMP 3.0 for some 13 years. So I had to do a little digging myself to see what's going on. How long have we been waiting? So what I. What I found a little bit of my research. Obviously this was all in my head at one point, and, you know, long time's gone by, but GIMP 2.0 was released in 2004. And you know, for me, once any major version of anything is released, I'm kind of already waiting for the next one. So I'd have to say we've been waiting for over 20 years for GIMP 3.0. I mean, once 2.0 is out, you kind of know 3.0 is coming somewhere. But looking at the GIMP website itself, it was announced 10 years ago in 2015 light like Rudrav said. But they didn't start working on it until after GIMP 2.10, which was released in 2018. And I can only guess that Michael Larabel must have been speculating on the Future of GIMP 3.0 long before it's ever announced, which must bring it to his 13 years. And I don't know what happened about the other seven years before that. But anyway, I guess the real question is, how long have you been waiting for GIMP 3.0 20 years for me so highlights of this new release include a much refined Interface written in GTK3, a little behind since we have GTK4, but we'll get there and it allows use of the mouse scroll wheel to flip through different dockable dialogs tabs along with a new slash screen and logo as splash screen not slash as well as improvements to the legacy icon theme to look great on high DPI screens and I think it looks pretty good. Let me just switch something over here for those watching. I have played with it a little bit but I think it looks pretty good. But if you read a lot of the comments especially on OMG Ubuntu you would kind of think the new UI is rather horrible. There's a lot of people complaining on there but I don't know. I assume it's just a bunch of Adobe Fanboys or something. I don't know. I think it looks pretty nice. Not like this 1990s interface like some people refer to but decide for yourself. I like it. I think it looks pretty good. Other features though if you don't care about the ui, just has to work right who cares if it looks old, which it doesn't but anyway you can exchange files with more applications including BC7DS files as well as better PSD which is Photoshop's native file, better PSD better export and many other new formats. You can set your paint tool to expand layers automatically as needed. Pro quality text got easier. That's their words because you can style your text, apply outline, shadows, bevels and more and you and you could still edit your text, change font and size and even tweak the style settings. Organizing your layers has become much easier with the ability to select multiple items at once, move them or transform them all together. Color management has improved again as as their long term project to make GIMP an advanced image editor for all usages. That's what they say they updated to the GTK3 for for modern desktop usage which you know we're on GTA 4 but and oh big one for Linux users. Big one big one for that. We're fans of native Whelen with high DPI support which I mentioned above that the DPI support but on Linux you kind of you really want Wayland for that so and it has native support so boom. And maybe one of the biggest improvements I saved this for last. It was the first on their list. I saved it for last because it's really something that a graphical editor working with layers really wants and that's non destructive editing for most commonly used filters. And I know we brought that up before, but you probably don't pay attention to every word I say. And you probably forgot I mentioned this in one of the release candidates several years ago, but and you know there's a lot more in there too. This is really just the highlights and I'm looking forward to doing some graphic working it in GIMP again myself. I don't do as much as I used to, but looks pretty good to me.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, you know I've been. I've been running GIMP 3 for a while now because some distros like Fedora just said basically I forget this, we're just going to go ahead and ship it. We're going to ship it now.

[Jeff]

Yeah, and I'm going off memory here, but if my memory serves me correct, even though they're on GTK3 now, the conversion from 2 to 3 kind of paved the way to make future conversions a lot easier.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, that was definitely the idea.

[Marius Nestor]

From some of the articles I read, it sounds like some of them were going on the possibility that the GTK ME3 may be forked instead of going to GTK4 so that they stay with it.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Interesting. That's a very interesting thought. We'll see if that happens. Well, there was another big software release. Do we want to talk about Blender? It's not exactly as monumental as the 3.0 of GIMP, but there's something new there, isn't there?

[Marius Nestor]

There's always something new with Blender, both of them.

[Michael Larabel]

Apparently there's not always something new with gimp, but there is this week.

[Marius Nestor]

But this week Marius nestor and Theodore McKenzie wrote about the much anticipated major update to the popular Jack of all trades 3D software Jonathan mentioned. I'm talking about Blender in this case version 4.4. It brings a wealth of new features and improvements across its animation, modeling, sculpting, rendering geometry nodes, and other tool sets. According to Marius, it introduces support for integer sockets in the compositor, a much more accurate fast Gaussian mode of the blur node, a revamped glare node for greater control and a better user experience, and support for rendering videos using the H265 or HEVC codec. Now, according to Theodore, the Highlight of Blender 4.4 is the rewritten CPU compositor, which brings significant performance improvements in certain node configurations, better caching of static resources like images, and reduced memory usage in node setups with many pixel nodes making the compositor generally faster. This version is the first release to use Vulkan for displaying the rendered result of cycles. The Blender foundation says that the process has been re implemented using a new threading model, which results in the same performance compared to when OpenGL was used. They also state the Blender developers double down on quality instability, fixing over 700 reported issues, revisiting old bug reports, and addressing unreported problems during their group effort, which they referred to as the winner of quality. Since I've only touched on some of the improvements, I recommend reading Marius and Theodore's articles or watching the @CGCookies Jonathan Lampel's 21 minute video presentation. I've got links to all three in the show notes.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Very cool.

[Marius Nestor]

Speaking of which, Rob, I'm surprised you didn't provide a link to Brody Roberson's video on gimp.

[Michael Larabel]

I'm sure that would be good, but I had not watched it yet, so it was not a reference for my material.

[Jonathan Bennett]

This is the kind of thing he likes to cover though. Yeah, that would be a good reference to go look at.

[Marius Nestor]

I'll go ahead and put it in the discord so that anybody in the discord can watch it later.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Blender is one of those things that is on my punch list of it would be good to take a few days and sit go through some of the YouTube like there's plenty of information out there about how to use it, but I just, I've never sat down and taken the time to go through it and okay, so this is how it works. Oh, that's what that button does. These are the tools that I want. Right. And I figure two days and I can get to the point of being at least comfortable enough with the interface to go and do something. You can open it Pretty much. Yeah. You can open it and actually know where the tools are to be able to use them.

[Marius Nestor]

I know enough to be able to open it. Import STL file that you'd use with a 3D printer, do some tweaks to it, then save it back out as an STL file so I can use it to 3D print.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I can do all of that except the actual making tweaks to the model. The actual thing that you want to do with Blender. That's the part that I don't know anything about.

[Marius Nestor]

That's where those tutorials came in handy.

[Michael Larabel]

Yes. I didn't really think about Blender for that use case.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Oh yeah, a lot of people use it for that.

[Jeff]

Yeah. And it works good because there's a lot of models out There like you can even just take the BMW model and I've done a bunch of playing with it where you can follow along with like YouTube videos and just how to do things and you can take those existing models and tweak it and then re render and see what kind of changes happen when you know what the original is supposed to look like. And so that way you're not starting from ground zero.

[Michael Larabel]

Yeah, I guess without ever having used it. The use case I've always thought of it with which being aware there's plenty of other things like benchmarking, but it is like just graphics for games and cartoons, I guess.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah. So it is more of a 3D modeler. Like its original use case was more about 3D modeling than it was the actual rendering and video editing. But they've added all that stuff to.

[Marius Nestor]

It and now you've got flow the movie.

[Jonathan Bennett]

There's been several movies done in Blender actually over the years. Quite a few of them about once.

[Jeff]

A year or so I think they come out with another one. A project.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, something like that. That they highlight with all the. All the cool stuff you can do in Blender. Yeah, no, it's pretty neat. All the stuff you can do with it. Lots and lots of options there. All right. Speaking of options, there is an announcement from the guys at Raspberry PI where you can have plenty of options in the exact image that you get. So this is the Raspberry, the RPI image gen. It's the Raspberry PI Image Generator. And this is intended to be an end user solution for getting custom file systems that you can burn onto an SD card and boot on a PI, which you can sort of do. Like you can do this by hand and people have done it and don't have problems with it, but that you have a tool to do it now is going to make this a lot easier for a bunch of different use cases. And if you think about it. So there's been projects that I've been involved in and one of the things, as soon as we supported the Raspberry PI, somebody's like, we should make our own distro. And I said, no, no we should not. That is a bad idea. We do not want to make our own distro. And he's like, what I really mean is that we should spin our own version of Raspberry PI os. Like that's a thing we could think about doing with this tool. We now have a much easier way to do that because you get actual Raspberry PI os, it's going to get all of their updates, but you can also do your own stuff on top of it, or you can pull packages out of it if you want to. All kinds of options here. It's based around some YAML config files and if you follow the link, they've got a whole flowchart on all the stuff it does, which is pretty interesting. But you run it through this and at the end of it it just gives you, here's your img, flash it onto your SD card and away you go. You've been able to do some configuration with, for example, the Raspberry PI flasher itself. It'll let you go in and set up a user, change your root password, set up your WI Fi, stuff like that. This is kind of that same thing, but much, much more comprehensive. Lots more changes you can make. And we've talked about this sort of thing for other distros. There's some tools to be able to get your own kind of dedicated tool set, a dedicated toolset to make your own ISOs for like Fedora and Ubuntu and those. And so that brings this to the Raspberry PI. And you know, it's going to be great for if you have multiple Raspberry PIs and you want to have kind of a stripped down image that's just the tools you want in it, or if you want an image that's got, you know, everything turned on, if there's a specific tool set you want, it's going to be great for that. It's also going to be really good, like on the kind of more commercial industrial side, so that people can have their own custom spins and easily push them out to however many thousand Raspberry PIs they have running stuff. So good move, good move from Raspberry PI. I think this is a great tool that's going to help all of us that work with the Raspberry PI. So I'm excited to get my fingers on this and actually play with it. Anybody else have enough Raspberry PIs that this makes sense for them? I know, Ken, you were running one as your main desktop there for a little while.

[Michael Larabel]

Ken's a pie guy.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Ken is a pie guy.

[Rob]

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[Jonathan Bennett]

All right, well let's move on to let's move to the Ryzen 9, the new X3D.

[Marius Nestor]

I'm going to cut.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I think he may be way behind us in audio. I'm not sure. Anyway Jeff, let's talk about the Ryzen 9. I think we'll have Ken disconnect and reconnect to the call and that way we can know that he is right up with us and not running a few seconds behind.

[Marius Nestor]

I'm listening to the wrong audio feed.

[Jonathan Bennett]

There it is. So yes you were running several seconds behind. There are technical issues and there are technical issues of your own making. As Linux geeks we are very familiar.

[Marius Nestor]

With our always making our own technical issues so we can correct them. But I'll probably be touching on a distribute that may have used that.

[Jeff]

Cool.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, look forward to that. Let's go to Jeff and talk about the Ryzen 9, the new X3D chip.

[Jeff]

Yes and side note, I always tell people with Linux my problems are self induced just because of what I do. But on with new hardware and as Jonathan covered last week, amd released the 9950x3D processor and the 9800x3D processor. Well a little before that, but you understand, but quietly alongside those, amd launched the 12 core Ryzen 9 9900X3D processor. Now, Michael from Phoronix conducted extensive benchmarking on this new chip and today we'll dive into the results. And I'm also going to share my editorial thoughts on the entire X3D lineup, what I recommend people buy and what to avoid and why. So just first a quick refresher. The 9900x3D is a 12 core 24 thread processor featuring two CCDs, which means six cores have the extra 3D cache while the other six do not. Now historically I've always been wary of mixed core settings setups like these where you know, some cores have cache, others don't. I also said this on previous intel, you know, historically where you know, you had the performance cores versus the efficiency cores. But you know, I'm changing my tune because you know, Linux scheduling has improved significantly and this is no longer a concern. And in this, in the case of this chip, both Windows and Linux and the entire X3D line tests confirm that the previous headaches like needing to reinstall from scratch or dealing with core parking are basically now resolved. I mean you can do it, but it's, you don't need to. It's not like the 7000 series, they've got the software down. That extra time to mature really helped. Michael's review also includes comparisons with a range of this chips. You know, he's got the 7000 series CPUs, the X3D and the non X3D models are in there. Two intel chips, the Core Ultra 5 245K and the Ultra 9 285K. Now with over 400 benchmarks and results, I won't go through them all here, we'd be here forever. But let's take a look at the geometric mean across the tests. Now if you remember previously I've stated geometric mean helps kind of get rid of it wasn't eliminate flyers but it helps reduce the impact of a flyer bit of data on the overall average. And so you know, the 9900x3D is slightly faster than this, the standard 9900x which lacks the extra cache. That being said, if you're deciding between those two chips, you need to focus on specific benchmarks because certain tests heavily favored the extra cache while others saw the 9900X come out ahead. Overall, the 9900X 3D edges past the Intel 285K, you know, over the geometric mean of those four, over 400 tests or benchmarks. And you know, unsurprisingly, it's faster than the 7000 series of processors. You know, hey, there was a generation generational gain, you know, imagine that. So it definitely. Well, I shouldn't say that because intel stepped backwards, but you know what I mean, AMD went forward. So it's all good. Michael's evaluation summaries make it easy to compare the 9900X against the 9900X 3D. So if you have a specific workload in mind, these summaries will quickly show you which processor performs better for your needs. He has a big vertical chart comparing those two chips, and he's got one with the 9900x3D with the 7900x3D, and he lists all the benchmarks in there. And it's in a nice little format showing whether it was faster or slower than the competing chip. So you can quickly decide what you need. Now for my editorial on the X3D lineup, my honest opinion, unless you snag a fantastic deal on the 9900X3D, I would skip it. Now let me explain this. Consider your workload. Are you a gamer? If so, opt for the 9800x3D. It's eight cores with extra cash will keep you happily gaming for years. If you mix in some productivity tasks. Ask yourself, does saving 15 to 20 minutes on a lengthy compile or a few minutes on a blender render truly matter? Well, if it does, spend the extra $100 and go for the 9950x3D instead. With this processor, the 9950, you get the full eight cores of cache like the 9800x3D and an additional eight cores without cache. So you get kind of the best of both worlds when you combine them. And like I said, it's so much more seamless than it was in the past. The 9900X3D on the other hand, sacrifices two cores of cash for gaming. So now you're gaming like a. Was it a 9600x3D or soon to be released, the six core version and you're losing two cores for productivity. So it's like a middle of the ground chip, but it stumbles, especially at its price point. For context. Context. As of today, the 9950X3D is 69, 699. That's United States dollars. The 9900X3D is 599, so there's a hundred dollars difference. And the standard 9900X, so it's no extra cash, just the 12 cores. It's $409. Now, some of you might point out that I Personally use a 7900X CPU, and you would be correct. However, mine lacks the cash and I snagged it at a steep discount. It fits my middle of the ground productivity needs. Although admittedly, you know, there's better gaming chips that were available even at the time when it came out. It was, it was not setting any records anywhere there. I was looking more at power availability and price. Like I said, I got a pretty screaming deal on it. And it wasn't anything insider. It was just I found a heck of a sale at a major retailer and jumped on it. Now, let me be clear. I don't think the 9900x3D is a bad processor. It might shine in specific niche scenarios, you know, maybe whether it's power efficiency or excelling at certain tasks, because there was a few that the 9900x3D really rocked at, but they were very niche. I mean, you're very specific in what you're doing if you're looking at that, you know. But in terms of value, I believe there are better options, you know, depending on your needs. You know, basically I'm saying spend wisely and choose based on your real workload.

[Michael Larabel]

So you're saying if you're a gamer, extra cash is a good thing?

[Jeff]

Yes.

[Marius Nestor]

Cash or cache?

[Jeff]

Yes, cache. No. The 9950 is not really for gaming. There are some benchmarks that show it's slightly faster, but it's one of those. It's statistically faster, not realistically faster. So if you're only gaming or 80% gaming, you know, okay, I could take a little longer if I'm compiling or doing other productivity stuff. Just save money. Get the eight core, dump it into that. Extra money into more memory, a faster drive, a better gpu, better power supplies. Anything else?

[Marius Nestor]

Better audio gear.

[Jeff]

Exactly. Yeah, anything. You know, if you really want productivity, it's. If you're already into, you know, $600, it's not that much to go. You know what, go 700 and you're gonna have a chip a lot faster than the 9900. That's.

[Marius Nestor]

So I'm staying with my AMD Ryzen 77700 for now.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Oh yeah. That's a, that's still a solid chip.

[Jeff]

Oh yeah. And I'm sticking with my 7900. Now, if you're looking at just the, the 9900X, okay, maybe you're saving some money because you're stepping down from the 9950 and maybe there's some power concerns, but you're not giving up really gaming. You're, you're not the best gaming process or you're just stepping back from a productivity. So you don't have that, that fight between, oh, I'm stepping down from gaming and I'm stepping down from productivity. And that's the. Because, because most games almost exclusively use eight cores or less. There, there's a few exceptions, but eight cores will do you for quite a while. And, and a lot of people game on, you know, six core CPUs.

[Michael Larabel]

What if you're a streamer and gaming is productivity?

[Jonathan Bennett]

That's actually a legitimate question. That's, that was one of the things that I thought of where chips like this and the, you know, the 9950x3D might make sense. If you're gaming and streaming from the same machine at the same time, or if you're a game developer and you need to be able to like have Blender open, working on a model and the game open and running at the.

[Marius Nestor]

Same time and streaming both the obs.

[Jonathan Bennett]

That's why, that's when you need the 9950X3D.

[Jeff]

Yeah, step up to the, yeah, step up to the 9950. Or if the, you know, I, I'm just kind of something off the top of my head, you know, if, if the 9900X3D, if you could get it for maybe 500, 450, something like that, where it's significantly cheaper than the 9950, then I could make an argument. But realistically, the general consensus, and this is across multiple reviewers, across multiple operating system, is that just avoid the chip, the value's not there.

[Jonathan Bennett]

So the question is, is AMD going to drop the price on it or is the 9950 going to become Unobtainium?

[Jeff]

I bet you they dropped the price on it. That's how I got mine. I didn't get mine at launch or anything like that. It was, it was later in the cycle and they weren't selling that great. So I'm like, oh, I could save a couple hundred bucks off of 99.50.

[Marius Nestor]

So wait six months, a year or just before the next one comes out.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Maybe not even that long if they're going to change the price. I could see it happening in two to three months.

[Jeff]

Yeah, but I mean realistically, how many people listening are really serious about productivity? Where really be, be honest with yourself. How many? If you're not making money with productivity or you're not spending many hours every day, you can probably get by with the 9800x3D just fine.

[Marius Nestor]

Better question is how many self employed people use it that would be using it for productivity.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Get to make the choice themselves.

[Jeff]

Yeah, and, and if you're using it for productivity, get the get to 9900x. You're saving a little money. And yeah, your gaming performance isn't great, but it's not bad. I mean it's not like it's not going to play your games. It's just like, okay, you're going to drop a few frames, but, but the other thing to consider is if you're running 4K, well you're probably bottlenecking your GPU and not your CPU. Even, even once you get 2K depending on what your graphics card is, the game you're running it, it means less. And the other thing is, what is the frequency of your monitor? My, my current monitor is 120 hertz, so I'll see. You know, look, I can run 400 or this is 450 and well, anything above 120 is meaningless to me.

[Michael Larabel]

You know, for me productivity means email, some text documents and a web browser. I mean I think a Chromebook does productivity just fine.

[Jeff]

Yeah, I guess I should have said unless you're doing like really heavy calculations, simulations, like in GNU cache.

[Jonathan Bennett]

No, we're talking like a workstation build where you're, where you're doing stuff.

[Marius Nestor]

In other words, everything. Rob does everything through Firefox.

[Jonathan Bennett]

So speaking of Firefox, I'm going to interject here before Rob takes the story and say I claim credit for this. It was me and David on a FLOSS weekly interview with a couple of Firefox devs. And as we were getting ready to end, David, do you have any questions you want to ask? And David's like, please bring PWA back to Firefox. And the two guys were like, oh, I guess we could think about doing that. So Rob, you tell us the story, but I gotta say, we did this.

[Michael Larabel]

Well then you can claim the results. So yeah, I mean, followers of the show may know that one of my biggest criticisms also of Firefox, besides the CEO pay and on the lack of focus on their core product and we.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Don'T have time for the whole list.

[Michael Larabel]

Rob it's their lack of support for PWAs or progressive web apps for those not familiar with with the term. So a pwa, it's essentially a way to make a web page into a desktop app and, and there are apps that do customizations to make themselves specifically work for this purpose. And there's specific inter integrations with the desktop that, that this feature usually allows. So typically, you know, it's kind of like it's like an Electron app where the browser gets hidden away and it just runs the app as a, as a pwa, you know, and it can have all the integrations that like an app has. Well, maybe not all, but a lot of them that a typical website doesn't. So for example teams, Microsoft Teams, that is used to be an Electron app, but they got rid of the Electron app on Windows. They went to, I don't know, C Sharp or something, I have no idea. But the official method to run teams on Linux now is a pwa, which you couldn't really do in Firefox so you had to have a Chromium browser or something if you, if you wanted to do that. So they announced that they are bringing PWA support to Firefox 136 but they plan to do it just a little different from at least how the other browsers are doing it, where other browsers get out of the way and let the PWA act like its own app. Firefox plans to keep the experience more like a website or as product manager David Rubino says, the aim is to offer features that help you get a more app like experience for any website you choose, when you choose, but without users feeling like they're not using Firefox so they really want to keep Firefox front and center. For example, he says web apps and Firefox will not use a minimal browser window, but will continue to show a main toolbar with the address bar, extensions, bookmarks. Though the new tab button will be replaced with a button to open a normal Firefox window. He says web apps are still websites and web browsers. The goal will be to fully maintain access to features that help with the website itself while de emphasizing features that are about managing multiple websites. So I don't know what actually makes this PWA support. It doesn't sound like much or like Joy Sneddon from OMG Ubuntu puts it, Firefox proposed approach reads more like a minimum viable product with minimum minimum of effort than an innovative spin on the concept. So I'm not a fan of their initial approach to progressive web apps. Hopefully they go further, you know, maybe make it an option to actually work like a real progressive web app. But at the very least it's a step in the right direction. More than they had before.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, well, you know, oftentimes with stuff like this, you get kind of that minimum viable product and then if people start using it, then more and more resources get put into it then. So there's a very, very good chance that this will get better as time goes on. Just, it's nice that they've gone in and actually made it happen again.

[Marius Nestor]

I think I actually would enjoy being able to have all the tools that Firefox gives you for going to other websites available while you're in that, treating that one site as a application.

[Michael Larabel]

Yeah, but really a progressive web app is still just a website, but they try to make it. The other browsers try to make it run more like an application, whereas this, like most progressive web apps, like Teams, for example, Microsoft Teams, you could still use Teams in the web. It's not really much different from the pwa, besides the integration. So I, I don't see, I don't see a whole lot that with this, what they're getting out of it than just going to the web, the website itself anyway.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Well, I think there's some extra APIs that are in that are part of like the PWA spec, the integrations. Yeah, yeah, there's some of those that just aren't going to be available as just another browser tab. So that's, that's the sort of thing that they've gone in, I believe in it and have actually added back.

[Michael Larabel]

I'll have to see how it works.

[Jonathan Bennett]

And yeah, give it a, Give it a test. Go grab the. Go grab Firefox Nightling. Give it a test run on you. Your favorite pwa. I have no idea what, what progressive web app I would even try to use.

[Michael Larabel]

Well, obviously Teams. I keep saying that. Right?

[Jonathan Bennett]

There you go. If you really want to run Microsoft Teams on your Linux desktop, do you really want to do that?

[Marius Nestor]

Lacquer you.

[Jeff]

Well, if you're going to run teams, don't just run the conversation. Get in and go with the scheduler. Get in and run the. All the other stuff you can do in there.

[Michael Larabel]

Video and.

[Marius Nestor]

Are you talking about SharePoint?

[Michael Larabel]

I mean, teams, but that's not much of a feature of it. It's kind of. But anyway. But yeah, it is. It is in the nightly build and but you do have to enable Flag at this time I believe is what I saw.

[Marius Nestor]

But how many of those PWAs are designed to work offline?

[Jonathan Bennett]

It's an interesting question. I'm not sure.

[Jeff]

Yeah, there's many. If it's a website, there's some.

[Michael Larabel]

I believe there's supposed to be PWAs are supposed to. I don't use any. I've never used any PWAs that would be used offline, but I believe they're supposed to kind of have some of that functionality.

[Marius Nestor]

Just wondering because I've had occasion where I was able to continue working on a Google Document on my Chromebook offline and it'd sync back up once I got back hooked online.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, speaking of working on documents, there is an update to Calibre, right Ken?

[Marius Nestor]

Yes there is. In fact, Marius Nestor wrote about the Calibre developer Covid Goyal releasing a major update to this open source free and cross platform ebook manager, viewer, reader and organizer. I do use it for managing and organizing my ebooks. Occasionally I'll use it to view one just to make sure I don't have any DRM in it, but the latest release according to Marius is caliber 8.0, but when I went to look at the what's new it said 8.0.1. Now according to Marius, highlights include much improved Kobo support with the ability to natively edit, view and convert kepub format files and automatic epub to kebub conversion when sending books to Kobo devices, support for new firmware for the latest Tolino devices, and a new option in book details to suppress author search links. This release also supports connecting to a folder like it would with a USB Ms. Based device which may be useful for Chromebook uses. I will definitely find that useful, where USB devices appear as folders rather than the actual devices, and introduces the ability to move multiple selected items in the table of contents. Version 8.0.1 fixes a failure to start on systems where the user had previously installed the Kobo Touch 2 extended plugin and disabled the built in Kobo Touch driver. It addressed multiple bugs including a bug in the E book viewer not closing on the interrupt signal. I recommend reading Marius article for more details about caliber 8.0.1 and following the link to what's new through the Caliber website.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Or if you're dorks like us, you can pronounce it Calibre. We got some hate mail for that.

[Marius Nestor]

I've been trying to say caliber since then.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes, yep, it's a neat project and.

[Marius Nestor]

A neat program and it was started off as a way for Covid to teach himself database management.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Oh, interesting. Fun. All right, so there's some news in Fedora World, Fedora Land, and two things in particular that I wanted to briefly touch on, and that is that the Fedora 42 beta is out. So if you're feeling adventurous and want to go run a beta version of the best distro out there, Fedora 42 beta is available. With Fedora 42, we've got something really interesting that is that the KDE Spin is not a spin anymore. It is as official as the GNOME workstation. So there are now two editions of Fedora Workstation. There's Gnome and KDE. And I believe that landed with 42. And so for those of us that actually use it, it's not going to be a whole lot of change, but there is the possibility that it's going to change some things about the way it's marketed and maybe even the way that funds are distributed for, for the KDE version to be an official version of Fedora. But the beta is out. It' some neat stuff in it, and you can go check that out. And of course, with the beta for 42 coming out, that means that they're already thinking about the new stuff that's going to be in Fedora 43. And there's one thing there in particular that really caught my eye, and that is that they are going to set the expectation that packages are all done with reproducible builds. And so this is the idea that the actual, like the individual, the contents of a package, right? So you know, when we say package, we're talking about the actual RPM file that you use to install all the software from Fedora, they are now going to set the expectation, starting with 43, that the actual, like, collection of debt in that package, you've got a timestamp for when it was built, you've got a signature that's going to contain some random information in it, because cryptography, those things of course, are going to change every time it gets built. The actual files, the contents of it. Other than those things, though, with 43 is going to be completely byte for byte, reproducible by design. Now, it's been suggested that there probably will be some packages that will not do this. I would spend a few minutes trying to figure out why that would be, like, what sort of special thing would a package have in it. And the only thing that I can really think of is if one, for some reason, like went out and got random noise, you know, pulled from dev slash random during the build process. And I still, I'm not sure why a package would need to do that. So I'm not sure why, but they Talked about like 99% of the packages they're hoping to get to be completely reproducible in this way. But the reason that we're trying that Fedora wants to get to this point is that's going to make it a lot easier to verify that a package is good and then do offline verification to make sure that a package wasn't tampered with. So being able to find the places where someone could try to hide malware, that sort of thing. This is one of the directions that security in Linux and Open source overall is moving is to be able to do reproducible builds and looking to do that with Fedora 43. So definitely don't go run Rawhide yet. But Fedora 42, the beta is out and if you're feeling just a little adventurous, it might be worth giving a shot.

[Michael Larabel]

I like adventure.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, I know. And honestly with Fedora right now, I would not be too scared to run the beta. In fact, I'm very tempted to install on the machine behind me. I just did an Upgrade, the latest Fedora 41 and it went ahead and pulled down like KDE 63. So it's, it's almost, that was almost more of an adventurous update than going to the beta would be.

[Michael Larabel]

But I can't switch to any, anything on my main desktop yet. I, I'm, I'm stuck on Mint. Well, I shouldn't say stuck. It's not bad. I am on Mint though. Enjoy a couple more months. It's, it's, it's, it's not bad, but I don't want to give it away yet and, and somebody did donate extra money to for me to go to four months. So I'll go to for that full four months.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Rob's Linux only fans. Coffee only fans.

[Marius Nestor]

And how's your AP AMD GPU working with it?

[Michael Larabel]

I don't want to give away anything, but I don't have great monitors, so I'll just leave it at that.

[Jeff]

Ken was trying to segue.

[Jonathan Bennett]

He was. Ironically, Ken was segueing to the one of us that has the AMD story that doesn't have an AMD video card. It's just not right, Jeff, just yet. Oh, okay. Okay.

[Jeff]

Well, they've turned around quite a bit. Things are better. Yeah. And Nvidia has been falling down a lot. But you know, just following up on a Story from a couple of weeks ago about the Radeon 9070 graphics cards on Linux. You know, we discussed the code was already in the kernel so there was no need for any special git tree poles or advanced code merges or you know, things were just working well. Now we've got the next evolution in the graphics card arena. AMD has officially released their AMD VLK Vulkan driver with rDNA 4 GPU support. That's the 9070 cards. So today we're diving into the RADV, you know, the community driver versus the AMD VLK driver for performance on the 9070 series of cars. I say series because there's a 9070 and a 9070 XT. Now unlike a lot of benchmarks that focuses on production, scientific workload, performance stuff, you know, this is all about the games. It's the ultimate question for gamers what's the best driver to run? And it's with most things it really depends on what your playing for. The majority of tests the drivers were neck and neck trading blows back and forth. However, one area where the AMD VLK driver pulls ahead is Vulcan ray tracing. AMD's official Vulcan API driver demonstrated a significant advantage in Vulcan ray tracing benchmark that was conducted by Michael Larable over at Phronix. That's the link in the show notes. So kind of bottom line, if so if you're not running ray tracing, it doesn't matter much. Either driver re either driver will provide excellent performance. Just look at the games you play and see if one or the other comes out on top. If you're someone who likes to dip their toes or dive head first into ray tracing, then the official AMD driver is your best bet. It delivers an overall better experience for those ray tracing heavy videos. Now I should note too, when it comes to power consumption, since it's the same hardware, only a different driver, the difference was negligible. The RADV drivers showed slightly lower average power usage. It had a little lower idle state. But it falls into the. It wasn't really worth hardly worth noting, I mean just a sliver difference. And so now that We've got our CPUs chosen, we got our new graphics cards in place and we looked at the data, we got a right driver installed. Looks like there's a bright future ahead for gaming on Linux.

[Jonathan Bennett]

You say that we have our graphics cards in place. I just did a search and in the two weeks since we. They've been out like two weeks now. I Think it was two weeks ago. We covered it unavailable. Just you're not getting it for, you know, under $979. If you're lucky, you might be able to find it for that at like a Best Buy. So they are still not good luck in your hands on them.

[Jeff]

I have seen some come through now a little more over msrp, you know, versus the reference cards. They're also restocking. And there was, there was it. They kind of got debunked. But there sounds like there's some data behind it where they said Lisa sue from AMD said they sold was it 20, 20,000 cards in that first initial launch. Then, then they said, well, no, it didn't actually come from amd. It came from another third party that was estimating how many cards because based on how many they've had go through and, but overall consensus that they, they've shipped a lot of cards and there's a lot more coming. So they're, they're, they're expecting stability in the, in the pipeline in about three weeks, maybe four weeks, you know, mid, mid April ish, end of April ish. And I've personally kind of kept an eye on them and I've seen some come through. I mean, you can, if you watch, they're not, you know, I look for the Nvidia Nvidia cards. As far as I can tell, they're all Unobtainium. I never see an opportunity to go, oh, I could buy that one if I wanted amd I could. There's, there's windows in there. We're like, oh, here's one right here. That's. And ones that are priced higher, fifty dollars, maybe a hundred dollars higher. You know, some of the, it's got super big cooler and it's flashy colors and RGB and you know, all the stuff they tack on.

[Michael Larabel]

But did I hear you say there's windows in there?

[Jonathan Bennett]

I wondered about that. I caught that too. I had that thought.

[Jeff]

Well, so you can have little graphic displays. Haven't you seen that? Like even on the aios, you can.

[Marius Nestor]

Have a little display. I think he said windowing.

[Jonathan Bennett]

No. So, yeah, that is definitely interesting. Something to keep our eye on.

[Marius Nestor]

And then I do have one question, Jeff.

[Jeff]

Yeah.

[Marius Nestor]

Should I try to put some money aside to get this for myself for Christmas instead of just continuing with the integrated gpu?

[Jeff]

I would right now, if you said I want to buy a GPU, I would recommend a 9070 XT. I would not get the 9070. I would get the XT, because kind of like we talked with the 9900, the XT has got the step up, has such a major jump in performance for a little bit more money.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, makes sense.

[Marius Nestor]

Then I'd have to upgrade my monitors.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Of course. Of course you would. You would be forced to upgrade your monitors. Yes, definitely.

[Michael Larabel]

You know, I need to upgrade my monitors. Seriously. So Jeff, why don't you do a thing on monitors next week?

[Jonathan Bennett]

Just do a thing, make it happen. Do a thing.

[Jeff]

Do a thing on monitors.

[Michael Larabel]

A story. I don't know why I couldn't think of that word. A story on monitors next week might.

[Jeff]

Be a little outside of the Linux realm.

[Michael Larabel]

Oh, come on. I think people are using monitors, aren't they? They're not all headless.

[Jonathan Bennett]

So this is usually where I would segue by telling the next guy with the story to save us from Rob's blathering about doing things and forgetting how to say Stuart. But Rob has the next story.

[Jeff]

So the blathering continues.

[Jonathan Bennett]

So the blathering continues. Yes. But Rob, what is up with Asahi Linux and that person involved with it, Asahi Lina.

[Michael Larabel]

Yeah. So, I mean, after good news, I hope. Yeah, well, unfortunately not, because after all the rust in the Linux kernel drama leading to things such as Hector Martin stepping down from the Asahi Linux project, it kind of was starting to feel like things were starting to get back to normal. Well, I mean, and aside, you know, they, they, they planned to continue moving forward with the great work they've been doing with Linux on Apple Silicon. But this week Asahi Linux has had more bad news as Asahi Lina is pausing work on the Apple GPU drivers. So Asahi Lina had been working on the Apple GPU drivers for Asahi Linux with the open source DRM kernel driver as well as MESA contributions. She was also contributing to Asahi AgX, Gallium 3D and Honey Crystal Vulcan drivers. And Asagileen had worked closely with Alyssa Rosenswig. So I mean, hopefully, hopefully we could keep her around. And you know, I, I don't think this pause had anything to do with the recent Rust drama, but I don't really know because the details are mostly unknown at this time. You know what she posted? She posted this in Blue sky and this is all she said. She said. So quote here. For personal reasons, I no longer feel safe working on Linux GPU drivers or the Linux graphics ecosystem. I've paused work on Apple GPU drivers indefinitely. I can't share any, any more information at this time, so please don't ask for more details. Thank you. So I mean, we could speculate. I don't know. Is Apple doing something crazy or. Or is it with the Rust drama? I don't know. It's probably best at this time unless somebody knows more than. Than what I've found to just let it be at this time until more information, if more information ever comes out. But it isn't looking that good for ASAI right now. I'm kind of glad I never spent any Money on an M1 M2 for Linux.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I have a bit different take. I always thought it was interesting that we had Asahi Liena but like let's keep this straight. Asahelina was someone's alter ego. This was never a real person. This was a vtuber that was streaming themselves, writing code and code got written. Apparently good code got written. So that's cool.

[Marius Nestor]

Rust based code.

[Jonathan Bennett]

It was Rust based code. Yeah. I always thought it was an interesting kind of social experiment but let's not lose the details that at some level this is not a real person that we're talking about. And I could take some guesses about the person behind the account's real identity. I don't know for sure. I have a hunch it doesn't take like it's not too hard to read the tea leaves and go, well that's interesting timing. Yeah. There's a pretty obvious hunch as to who this was. I will say as far as that goes, it doesn't really matter and it sort of just is what it is. There are enough people that are still excited about Linux on the M based Macs and enough work was done. I have a feeling that that project is going to continue and is going to remain healthy. It is unfortunate to see people leave it, but I don't see this as being the end of the world.

[Michael Larabel]

You know, I. I always knew it was a. That their identity was covered. I just. Because they're. They're a vtuber like you said. I. I never really put it together that it very well is probably possibly an alter ego of maybe somebody we already know. Maybe Hector Martin. Like mashed potato.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes. So that's. That's the obvious guess, right, that that Asahi Lena was the alter ego of Hector Martin. And again, I don't like. I don't care. It's. It's just something fun on YouTube and I don't know for sure that's who it was. It could have been somebody completely different.

[Marius Nestor]

I just hope. Alyssa Rosen. I do apologize for mispronouncing that Rose. Elisa Rosenwig Rosen's Rosen Sweg Swig I hope she doesn't leave also. Otherwise we're going to lose two of the best developers that we're working on. The Apple Linux GPU graphics stack.

[Jonathan Bennett]

If I remember correctly, Rosenswig is actually doing it professionally, like, is part of a company and is getting paid for doing it.

[Marius Nestor]

More power to her then.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Larabel]

You know, the fact that it's an alter ego does make. Make my. My mind crank. Like, if people don't even know who you are, what. What. What is a safety thing? I. I don't know. Maybe there's something legitimately and it's. It's not Hector. I don't know.

[Marius Nestor]

It's.

[Michael Larabel]

It just really makes now. Now that you. I never even put that together that it's somebody's alter ego. I just never did. And now, like, my mind is, like, cranking.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Rob. This is how VTubers work. It's almost always a guy. Not always, but it's almost always a guy running their voice through, like, 27 different vocal plugins to make themselves sound different. And then they wear some sort of rig so that, you know, the camera can trace where they are, and then they jump up and down and they have the animated puppet that jumps up and down for them. That's how the Internet works these days, man.

[Michael Larabel]

I'm out of the loop on Vtubers completely. I'm. I. I don't even watch much YouTube. I go to YouTube if I'm looking for something very specific, it's not my. You know, I, I don't just sit there and watch playlists for hours and hours.

[Marius Nestor]

You mean you don't go straight to Brody's?

[Michael Larabel]

You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a comment on that. I know it's gonna be a long show, but. But, you know, Brody was on Floss on the episode I was on, and, And I. And after the fact, it kind of felt a little bad because you asked me, Jonathan, if I'd heard of him, and I said, no, I hadn't. And. And then he kind of did this. And you know what? Afterwards, so one of the sites that I look at, that. That pulls in a whole bunch of Linux news. One of the things is Brody, like, he's on the page that I look at every week. And after that show, I'm like, oh, wait, I know who Brody is.

[Jeff]

So the point of the story is, no matter how big and famous you are, Rob will still put you down in public.

[Marius Nestor]

I feel better. Rob.

[Jonathan Bennett]

All right, well, let's talk about Kali Linux, then. And Ken has this story with the newest Kali Linux release.

[Marius Nestor]

Yes, actually I got the information from Lawrence Abrams and Marius Nestor. They both wrote about the latest release from Offensive Security of their Debian based distribution for ethical hacking and penetration testing. Yes, we're talking about Kali Linux 20.25.1a, and I'll tell you toward the end of the story why it's a 1A. Following tradition, this year's first version has new visual effects including updates to the boot menu login screen and a stunning selection of desktop wallpapers and desktop environments. The KDE desktop is upgraded from Plasma to 5.27 to Plasma 6.2, not 6.3. Jonathan their default desktop environment, which one I've enjoyed for years is Xfce, has also had a minor software bump from 4.18 to 4.20. Lawrence notes the strange version number is because the developers stated they found a last minute bug in 2025.1 which required a fix and rebuild. This led to the release of 2025.1a as the first, I repeat, first release of 2025. According to Marius Kali Linux 2025.18 comes with a new tool called Hoax Shell. You can read about it and other updates in the articles I have linked in the show.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Notes yeah, I was just thinking. I've been fiddling with Kali Linux and Backtrack before it for a very long time. Like probably 20 years now. Yeah, about that, about that. The first Backtrack release was back in March of 2013 and it was not long after that that I became aware of it.

[Michael Larabel]

And the funny thing is, it's still not as long as we waited for Gimp. If you're going back to the 2.0 day.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes, yes, that's great.

[Marius Nestor]

So how long before we do see GIMP 4.0?

[Jonathan Bennett]

It depends. If it's on a linear curve, we got another 20 years. If it's on a logarithmic curve, you're talking about the heat death of the universe first.

[Michael Larabel]

I should still be alive, I hope.

[Jeff]

Well, like I said, if I remember correctly, it should be quicker. So maybe five years, seven years.

[Marius Nestor]

Are they working on GTK5 yet?

[Jonathan Bennett]

Probably. Probably somebody is.

[Marius Nestor]

So when GTK5 gets released, that's when they'll start on it.

[Rob]

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[Jonathan Bennett]

All right, well let's, let's talk for just a minute about a funny little security thing that is getting Fixed in Linux 6.15. And so this is the Slab tool, which is one of the memory allocation tools. And in that pull request there's a randomization thing that happens in the kernel and essentially it puts multiple copies of the caches in memory and will randomly pick one when it goes to use it. And the idea is that if, if an attacker has the ability to overwrite some memory and can put their payload into one of these caches, you don't want to have like a guarantee that you're going to pull the one that has been tampered with. And so it's considered a security hardening thing to randomize this. The way that this randomization works actually is that program execution jumps into this function, and then to get the random value, the function actually looks forward in its own code to the return address, and that return address is what it's going to pull to do the randomization. So it uses that value as its random seed. It was discovered that in at least one case the return address. So that that works if that function is what's called Inlined, which basically means that like it gets replicated in memory multiple times because the functions that use it just sort of. They use it directly, we'll say without going into a lengthy explanation of what inlining means in programming. It uses it directly in the code. It's not jumping this particular use case, though. It was being fully exported as a symbol, which means it only lives one place and it only ever lives in that one place in memory. And so regardless of where it got jumped into, that return was always going to be the same. So this whole randomization function was essentially one big. Nope. It was always returning the same seed. And so it was always jumping to the same place. And you might think, oh, well, sure, this is a theoretical thing. Nobody would ever actually use this. No. So if you go to. I've got the link to the Pharonics article. If you go to the third paragraph and it says the Google engineers discovered. That's a link. This is actually where Google security researchers found a problem in NF tables where they were able to like double freeze some memory. And to be able to exploit that, they had to overcome this bit of security hardening. And while they were researching how to get around the security hardening, they realized that the security hardening wasn't working at all because it only ever hardened in one particular place. That's how it was discovered. So it's a hilarious little bit of security errata for the kernel. Neat to see it get fixed, and a pretty interesting look into how these things can go wrong, particularly when you're doing clever, clever things like let's use the return instruction as our random seed, because surely that's always going to change and it doesn't always change. Fun little bit of stuff here.

[Jeff]

Yeah. The randomizer wasn't.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes, the not so randomizer.

[Marius Nestor]

Yeah, I just use the universe as a randomizer now.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, you got to get the. You got to get the outside of the computer into the inside for that to work, though. All right.

[Jeff]

A lot of ways people do it. It's true.

[Jonathan Bennett]

You know, one of the funny, the craziest that I remember is apparently at some big company. I don't know if it was like sun or IBM, one of the. A large company, they had cameras pointed at lava lamps.

[Jeff]

That was. Oh, I know who you're talking about too. Yeah, yeah. I want to say it's a software company, I think. Yeah, It's a pretty big name, if we see.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I think Leo likes telling this story, if I remember correctly.

[Marius Nestor]

Wasn't Microsoft, was it?

[Jonathan Bennett]

No, I don't think so. That's too out of the box thinking for Microsoft.

[Marius Nestor]

Oh, out of the box.

[Jeff]

Does our discord know?

[Jonathan Bennett]

I bet Google does.

[Michael Larabel]

Was it Cloudflare?

[Jonathan Bennett]

Cloudflare has.

[Jeff]

Could be.

[Michael Larabel]

When I Google searches. Lava Rand in production is assisting to collect this data.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Cloudflare has arranged about 100 lava lamps on one of the walls in the lobby of the Cloudflare headquarters and mounted a camera pointing at the lamps. The camera takes photos of the lamps at regular intervals and sends the image to Cloudflare servers.

[Michael Larabel]

And it's called Lava Rand.

[Jeff]

And Mashed Potato had it.

[Jonathan Bennett]

There you go. That's great. Good job, Mashed Potato on coming up with that when we couldn't. Yes, it is a difficult problem to get the randomness of the universe into the computer because computers are by themselves, by definition, not very random.

[Jeff]

And I know there's one of them that's. I'm drawing a blank today. But it was like one of the disk encryption systems that, like, it took the time how often you were moving your mouse.

[Jonathan Bennett]

TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt used to do that.

[Jeff]

Yes.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, you gotta create. You go to create a new. A new encrypted volume and it would be like, all right, now move the mouse erratically and tap randomly at your keyboard for a while. When you feel like you've done that enough, click this button. It was great.

[Jeff]

And it was like a GNOME feature and it was filling in all sorts of other, like the random noise from various things and Internet protocol packets. And what was the time from the last packet reset? Yeah, just bundle that. Chaos.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah. Well, it's actually quite a problem on particularly embedded devices like routers in particular, really have this problem of when you first turn them on and it's time to get a random seed. How do you get an actual random or even, you know, appreciably random seed to start with? Because by default, especially on those little routers, their random seed is going to be the same every time. Or it might be based on the system time, which is going to be pretty predictable. It's actually a pretty severe problem that folks like Open WRT have had to work through and try to figure out how to fix it. So, yeah, randomness is hard. All right, Jeff, do you want to talk about gnome real quick? Gnome 48. I never can remember with gnome. I'm sure there's an even, odd rule. Is it the even releases that are the good ones and the odd releases that are terrible?

[Michael Larabel]

They're all good.

[Jonathan Bennett]

We're talking about gnome, Rob.

[Marius Nestor]

They're all good, they're all terrible.

[Jeff]

So we show a lot of love to KDE on this show and, you know, for good reason. KDE is going through some big evolutionary changes right now, but today let's shine the spotlight on another desktop environment that deserves attention. On Wednesday, Gnome 48, codename Bengaluru, made its debut as the latest version of the GNOME desktop. So we'll just dive into some of the highlights of the features of this release, which there's like we always say, you know, there's a ton more in here. We're just, we're just skimming, skimming the tie points here. First up we have dynamic Triple buffering, a feature that's designed to boost performance on low end GPUs like Intel Integrated graphics or even Raspberry PI devices. You know the real low end stuff. Gnome 48 also brings improvements to Wayland's color management protocol support, enhanced HDR dynamic range support, and a new well being feature. This well being tool tracks your screen time and sends you friendly reminders to take a break, stretch or go outside and touch some grass. But there's more GNOME now features on screen desktop notifications for when you connect headphones. It has a new display control system that lets you view and modify action Active monitor configuration, and for that, for the monitor configurations, changes can be made through the command line arguments as well, so you don't have to use your your GUI to change your monitor configurations. And by default new windows, you know, something that you don't have previously configured will now open centered on your screen. The Nautilus File Manager has also been upgraded. It now supports removing bookmarks directly from the path bar and you can load a thumbnail and you can load thumbnail information separately from other file information. In addition, you'll see improvements in directory loading performance and grid selections. Now for Team Green, which we haven't talked too much on this show, but for Nvidia GPU users, GNOME 48 offers better support when an Nvidia card is your primary gpu. It does this by it improves DMA buffer support for headless sessions and optimizes frame rates for monitors connected to secondary GPUs in copy mode. In Wayland only setups X Wayland is no longer required thanks to updates in the GNOME Display Manager, so previously you had to run X Wayland even if you were not running any X programs. Some app specific upgrades include no music, which now supports high DPI album covers so you can see the high resolution on those better. And the Remote Desktop app receives support for zero copy rendering via Vulcan and vaapi. Even the GNOME text editor has been updated. Its search bar now appears at the bottom of the text area. You know, that's not all of it. Like I said, we're hitting the high points. Gnome 48 comes with countless other updates, bug, fixes, changes. So if you're interested in the full list, check out the linked article in the Show Notes, where you'll also find a link in there to the official release notes. So every single item that you can, you can dig into and find out what's changed. It is worth mentioning that Gnome 48 will be the default desktop environment for Fedora 42. On the Gnome side, they also run KDE, just so you're aware, and Ubuntu 25.04 for those using a rolling release distribution, you can expect to see it arriving very soon. Until then, happy computing.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Very cool.

[Michael Larabel]

So it sounds like our Wayland only future is getting really close. GNOME doesn't need X wayland and GIMP 3.0 is native Wayland now. So it's. It's a lot closer than.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Oh yeah, I think last week we talked about how KDE is moving their X11 support down to, you know. No, no new features being added and in the next version, I think in seven, they're gonna finally yank it.

[Michael Larabel]

So yeah, a little behind get home.

[Marius Nestor]

But they're splitting it. So you got a X11 version and a Wayland version, aren't they?

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes, but that is only, that is only going to be maintained through like the next release, the next major release and then after that it's just not even the split version is going to be there, it's just going to go away.

[Jeff]

So it's kind of one of those. If you were going to running something really, really old, it's oh, I got to have this. It requires X. You're just going to have to run some older version of KDE and probably just stick on an older distribution.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Xeyes works though, through X Wayland. You can run xeyes under Wayland. That's just it. Pretty much everything works at this point.

[Michael Larabel]

Yeah, but we're getting rid of X Wayland soon.

[Jonathan Bennett]

No, we're not getting rid of X Wayland.

[Michael Larabel]

GNOME doesn't need it anymore. GIMP doesn't need it.

[Jeff]

Well, it doesn't need it if you're running only Wayland application.

[Michael Larabel]

Exactly, that's my point. You just.

[Marius Nestor]

So if you application still requires x11 and you want to run GIMP or GNOME or KDE, you're going to need to have the X server running.

[Michael Larabel]

It's the same thing we tell people who say, but I need that Windows app. You don't need that Windows app if it doesn't run on Linux. Just don't use that app. So now we're getting a little more into the future here. If it doesn't run on Wayland, you don't need that app. Get with the times.

[Marius Nestor]

So we need to start listing the Wayland alternatives.

[Jonathan Bennett]

There you go.

[Jeff]

Well, most things should be anything really supported should be converting to Wayland and there is going to be a time where X Wayland is probably going to not support certain things or they're going to wind up changing the API in Wayland and might break something or I mean it's going to be probably a few years away but at some point X is going to be so old that they're like no, we're not supporting this anymore.

[Marius Nestor]

There's too many security risks with it now.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Well yeah, actually running an X11.

[Michael Larabel]

Yes, yeah, which usually is on X Wayland too. I mean lots of times, not always, but a lot of times they have the same CVs.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Uh, sort of. The, the big advantage though is that X Wayland doesn't run as root, whereas your X11 server usually does. Um, no, I, I imagine X Wayland is going to stick around for another probably 20 years.

[Marius Nestor]

Right.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Because open source things sure are gonna go to Wayland. But what about your closed source applications? What about your games compiled for Linux? Those are never gonna get recompiled as Wayland options. Just kind of stuck with those on running on.

[Michael Larabel]

Is it going to be a thing that's there by default or something? Like if you need it you can get Xwayland too.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I imagine it's going to be installed by default for a long time to come.

[Jeff]

We'll see. A lot of those old games will be like, yeah, just get the Windows version and run it through Wine and it supports Wayland.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes, that is unfortunately the case. As we have noted here many times before, the, the Windows API has sort of become the long term support API for Linux.

[Michael Larabel]

I'm going to predict by 2030. Write this down. Before 2030. Before 2030, write this down. Distributions will be released without X Wayland and it's just going to have to be like a dependency. If you install something that needs it.

[Jonathan Bennett]

It'S going to be, they're going to be released without it installed by default.

[Michael Larabel]

By default, yeah, that's probably available.

[Jeff]

That's well, kind of like the 32 bit support for a lot of stuff where you're like, oh, if you're going to run this, you got to load your 32 bit libraries and pull them.

[Marius Nestor]

In, download them and install them.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep.

[Jeff]

Well, and that'll, that'll be the signal of when they can stop including it. Because they just monitor the downloads and go, gosh, hey, we had 10 downloads this year. It's probably not worth the support or the packaging or listeners.

[Rob]

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[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep. All right, well, let's get into some command line tips and just tips in general. I know not all of them are command line tips. Mine is not. This week we're going to let Rob start us off with if not empty. If ne.

[Michael Larabel]

That's what it is. If not empty. So if any, if any, however you want to say it, ifne if ne. So this is. I am continuing my more utils series with ifne or if not empty ifne. So for those watching, I set up a couple files. I did a file text and a file 2.txt, and on the screen I already catted them both. As you can see, cat file. Txt is an empty file. There's nothing there. If you cat file2.txt I have. This is text from file 2. Have a nice day. So to get on with it. So most pretty much you're gonna, you're gonna pipe things into ifni. And what it's gonna do is if the standard input into ifni is is not empty, it's going to run the command that you have after it. And most likely this is going to be used for like scripting and stuff. But there's also a dash n which does the opposite. So first, so I'm going to show you here, I'm going to pipe cat file txt, which is an empty file. I'm going to pipe that to ifni and if it's not empty, it's going to echo not empty. So that's command I ran afterwards. So I'm going to do that. Nothing spit out because it is empty. Now I'm going to do the same thing with file two and it's going to say not empty. Now it's not that. What's even more useful really, I think is the dash n feature. So I'm going to do the same thing but in reverse. I'm going to cat the empty file, which is file. Txt, pipe that to ifni, do a dash n. And so that means what it's going to do here, it's going to cat that file and but if it's empty, it's going to run the command which I have say empty. So I'm going to do that and hey, it's going to return it's empty. Okay, so let's do this on the file 2. So cat file 2, which has text in it. So it's going to cat that. But if it's empty, it's just got to return empty. And this is, this one is probably one of the more useful because it's going to cat it or it's going to say not empty. So here. So when I did the empty file, it just returned empty. When I did the file that had texted it, it just showed me the cat of that file. So it's kind of a quick way right there where you could do a do this. But if it's empty you know, kind of spit out this error file is empty or whatever you want, so. Or your standard and whatever the standard input is. And that is basically that. That is what you do with ifni if not empty or if empty, if you do the dash n tag.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I prefer to say that if not not empty.

[Michael Larabel]

Yeah, I mean that's so if full, they almost just need a second command. You could just alias another one if not empty and then iffy.

[Jonathan Bennett]

That's great. All right, Ken, what is up with pipeware metadata?

[Marius Nestor]

Well, that's going to be interesting was for me and fun to play with. But this week, as Jonathan mentioned, I'm introducing another command for managing your pipewire configuration, PW metadata. It allows you to monitor, set and delete metadata on pipewire objects. Its options are the ever present dash H or dash dash help. For those of you all listening, I just switched to the screenshots I took earlier in preparation for this, where it's showing the output of using a dash H as well as the ever present dash dash version. The dash H listed all the options you can use, such as the dash dash version, dash R or dash dash remote. And I'll go over all the others in a minute. But first I want to explain how just typing in PW metadata and entering hitting enter will just display all the options without any options will show all the metadata for your default pipewire configuration or default name. You can use the dash l or dash dash list to list all the available metadata objects. When I did just the PW metadata it listed for my pipewire setup, it said that the default was default and it gave had an object ID of 0 with key keys, names and values for my audio sync so and sources as well as my video source. Now when I did the dash L or dash dash list, the list gave me option objects such as settings, schema, SM settings, persistent SM settings, SM settings, SM objects, default again, filters and route settings so that you can use PW metadata and name the one you want to configure. The example I did was dash in space settings space zero for the object and that listed all the metadata for that object. And for this one it showed that it found the settings formatted out at 32 and the keys were for log level, clock rate, clock dot, allowed dash rates. And in my particular case for those of you all listening, it gives the values for that one as 44,000, 100, 48,000, 82,000, 296,000. You've all got clock quantum, by the way, if you haven't Figured it out yet? Rate is basically your sample rate and quantum is your buffer size. For all intents and purposes, with clock dot quantum you've got clock minquantum that's got a value of 32, clock max doc quantum with a value of 2488. And there's a clock four stock quantum which has a value of 1024. That's the default setting for my system. And then you'll. For those of you listening, the clock rate and clock force dash rate are showing a value of 96. I actually went in playing with my system and set it to that. And the way you do that is by using PW metadata. In my case, I went and used it to do a dash in space settings space zero clock dot rate. And the example I use with the screenshots is going to 48,000. And when I hit entered that set the property ID zero key clock rate to the value of 48,000. And then I did that again also for the clock dat for stash rate. And it did the same thing and another then I went back and just printed it all out. So you can see it in this next screenshot where it's showing that the all the values had been updated to what I just changed it to. You've also got dash M which allow or dash dash mon that lets you monitor your metadata as it changes. I started it off and it started with just five settings. Default configured audio sync which was set to my UMC 22 preamp which it lists as an ALSA device. ALSA dash output USB dash bird dash brown from TI Underscore USB audio codec. Yeah, I'm going to stop reading there. That's too long to read.

[Michael Larabel]

Thank you.

[Marius Nestor]

And I had my system configured at the time so that the default configured audio source was also to the UMC 22. That's a lot easier to say. But then you've also got the default audio audio sync, same thing and default audio source. And it even shows the default video source which was going to the V4L2 device, in my case my webcam itself. Then I went and changed what I was using for the my headset to connect to. I moved it so that it went from the UMC 22 to the internal audio card for the headset line out connection that caused it to can change the default configured audio sync to the and it gives the ALISON name for that my audio card for both the configured audio sync and the audio sync. Then I switched it to the so the audio was going to my TV and It changed it. They configured audio sync and the audio sync to the Alison name for the Sanyo TV's HDMI stereo out. And the last thing I did was play around with unplugging and plugging the webcam to the USB port as well as the UMC 22. So the last two are showing all the changes that that made.

[Jonathan Bennett]

That's actually pretty interesting in and of itself. Being able to plug and unplug with the Dash M to monitor, I could see that being super useful to understand what happens in your system when you make changes. I like that one particularly.

[Marius Nestor]

Yes. That way you can identify what the device is recognized as by your system.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, very cool. All right. I've got a shorter tip, but it comes with a little bit longer story. So I got hooked on an old adventure game. Actually, I found that I'd already purchased a couple of them on gog.com and then found the other two for next to nothing. So I now have the complete set of the Cyberia spelled with a Y. So it's S Y, B E R I A Siberia Games. It's an old sort of adventure game, sort of in the vein as a mist or that sort of thing. And played through the first one and it went great in Wine and went to play the second one. And I had two options with the second game. Could either go full screen, which on the big monitor behind me is a little excessive. It's not really what I wanted it to do, or I could go windowed, but in windowed mode. It was only displaying at like 800 by 600. So, you know, it was. It was this size. The whole game was this size on my tv. It's like, I can't see that. So I started going down this rabbit hole of how do you. How do you make this work? How do you essentially zoom in to a video game in Wine? How do you. How do you scale something if you don't want it? So, like, if you want it to be full screen, scaling is easy. Generally your monitor takes care of that for you. But if you don't want it to be full screen, how do you scale a Windows application up? And I looked into this for a while. I have used the virtual desktop option in Wine, and you can do some of it with that. But that was not working here. And as I did some looking around, one of the solutions that people suggested was to use gamescope. And it's sort of. Once you hear that, you go, oh, of course. That's sort of what GameScope is designed to do. It's taking and it's running Windows games at lower resolution and then scaling them up. It's bread and butter. So I've got a screenshot from Lutris. Actually, it's the way that I played this and it's super simple. In Lutris, you just under system settings for the end of the game, the system Options, you enable GameScope, you set your output resolution to what you want it to actually be on your screen. So in my case, it's 1920 by 1080. That fits nicely into one quadrant, one corner of the screen. And then you tell it the actual game resolution, which in my case was 800 by 600. And then I went in and I told it windowed. And so what it did automatically then is it took that 800 by 600, it scaled it up to fit inside the 1920 by 1080 window, and then threw it on the desktop. It was good to go. Except with Siberia 2, I ran into a problem. That game has a little splash screen and it's not a full screen splash. I'm sure you guys have seen some programs that'll do this. So the game, when it says it actually gets into the game, it thinks it's full screen while it's loading the game. It gives you the little square splash screen in the middle of the screen. It's almost not even a true window, but it's there. Just to let you know that, yes, you did really double click on this. We're working on it. That's sort of the point of it. GameScope was seeing that as the main application. And then as soon as that splash screen closed, game scope closed as well. And so the game that I actually wanted to play was then running in the background. And so, you know, I then went down this rabbit hole of, well, okay, surely this is not the only game that has this problem. And no, it's not. There's an open bug in the in the game scope, the GameScope repo there. And it took me a while to figure out how to do this. I got to looking around in the Siberia two initialization files, the settings, and come to find out there is. It's like a Siberia 2exe is the application that they intend for you to start. But there's also a game exe that if you run that, it just skips the splash screen and runs the game straight away. So the solution for that problem was just to go into LUTRIS and point it to the other binary. And then it worked perfectly, exactly what I wanted it to. But the main tip here is gamescope, but I thought the hackery to get Game Exe works working was pretty interesting too.

[Michael Larabel]

The side tip is to look for a second Exe if there's a splash and it's not working right.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, there are other options too, for that. You can also go in and delete the image. A lot of times in those old games, that splash will be like a PNG in there. And so if you delete that image, sometimes it won't ever show the splash and it'll do what you want it to.

[Michael Larabel]

Yeah, but you. You'd actually. It's still run the XE the wrong exe, though, even if it doesn't show it.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Right. But my problem was that because it was showing it as a window, gamescope was latching onto it and thinking, oh, this is the game, you know, this is the game application that we want to show inside, which is not what I wanted it to do.

[Michael Larabel]

So it wasn't because of the splash screen.

[Jonathan Bennett]

And then it was because you had two separate executables. They were running two separate. They were running as two separate processes, and each of them was creating its own, essentially, windows. And so gamescope was just locking on to the first application, the first process that created a window.

[Michael Larabel]

Oh, that created a window.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah. Yeah, that's what it was. So. But eventually found the solution for that and was able to move on, but.

[Jeff]

So in two weeks, I hear about how you fixed it, the bug in gamescope.

[Jonathan Bennett]

No, no, not going to do it. It doesn't irk me enough. I found a workaround. Now, if I hadn't found a workaround, maybe, but nope, not going to happen. Too much on the plate right now.

[Michael Larabel]

There's already a bug report in. I think you said there's already a bug report.

[Jonathan Bennett]

They are aware of it. I may go and list the additional game as another replicator, but other than that, I don't care. I fixed it. Fixed it for myself. All right, we got one more tip, and that is Jeff's. And Jeff, we're going to talk. We're going to talk about it. Just.

[Michael Larabel]

We just talk.

[Jeff]

We are. And I'm. I'm feeling almost a little insecure. This is going to be a quick one. A couple weeks ago, we talked about the app message, or mesg, which allows or denies other users to send you messages. This week, we're going to talk about Talk. So this is the program that one of the programs that ties in with it and Talk, as the name suggests, is used to talk to another user the syntax is simple talk space user where user is the login name of the person you want to talk to. Optionally, there's a dash X flag which allows you to talk to a user with a dot character in their username or a period. You can also include an optional TTY name which is for talking with a user who has logged in more than once using the terminal name. There's an article linked in the show notes that includes installation instructions for both Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. But both are straightforward, requiring just a simple install command from the package manager. I installed it. No weirdness or anything. Some configuration is needed in the Etc xinetd directory, but after setup it's pretty easy to use. You just can start a talk session which brings up a basic chat interface where one part of the console is for your message and the other part is for the reply from the other user. If you encounter issues with someone you know seeing your messages, remember that it might be blocked due to the MESG command settings. So you have to allow those messages to come in. And you know, while there are plenty of modern programs for communication, if you're on a limited interface or need a command line conversation, you know, know, here's a reliable way to do it using a common Linux program. So. Happy chatting. Very cool.

[Jonathan Bennett]

That's actually really neat.

[Michael Larabel]

There have been times since Skype is going away on Linux, we're gonna have to use this, right?

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Larabel]

Or I mean going away everywhere, man.

[Jonathan Bennett]

There have been times I've been SSH into a machine with somebody else and something like this would have been handy. Like that's. That legitimately can come in handy.

[Michael Larabel]

Collaboration.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yeah, yeah. All right.

[Jeff]

I was going to say you might not always have the GUI or some lot of overhead you can run and just. Here you go. It's pretty standard on most UNIX Linux machines.

[Jonathan Bennett]

If it's not installed, I'm sure you can get it. It's only an apt away.

[Jeff]

Yep.

[Marius Nestor]

Speaking of GUIs, I forgot to mention when I was covering PW metadata, I did come across two links that I do have in the show notes. One does cover on how you could write a script to give you a GUI for changing the sample rate and the buffer size using PW metadata. And then this second link talks about how you can configure your pipewire for using multiple rates. Sample rates.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Very cool. All right, we have reached that part in the show where we let the guys plug what they want to plug. Rob is up first. I'm sure he's going to tell you something about coffee and a website and some other websites. Take it away, Rob.

[Michael Larabel]

You already got it covered, so what's the point? I'm going to say thank you to Aunt Pruitt. I totally missed this about a month ago. He did donate a couple copies to some of us and I. I don't know. I didn't see the notification. I just haven't gone in there, look, because I didn't think there were any donations. But there has been one a month ago and Pruitt. So thank you. I didn't miss you. And otherwise, if you want to donate a cup of coffee, since it has been a month since anyone has. Aunt Pruitt did. Thank you. You can go to my website, Robert P. Campbell.com on my website there at the top is links to my LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky, Mastodon. And this cup of coffee is where you can donate a cup of coffee to me or do what some others have done, Aunt Pruitt. And some others. Tell me who you want to donate to. I currently owe Jeff, I believe, two and, and. And Jonathan and Ken both at least one coffee. It's all logged in there. I plan to go out west this summer, so hopefully I'll. I'll actually get to meet Jeff in person and. And get him his coffees and we'll figure. I'll figure out what the other two.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Cool you are. You are welcome to Oklahoma too, sir. We will. We'll let you in the door.

[Michael Larabel]

I will. I will become down there at some point.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Sounds fun. All right, Ken, anything you want to plug?

[Marius Nestor]

I just want to remind everybody you want to back up. There's definitely several utilities out there. My favorite for backing up my whole hard drive is Clonezilla.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yep, there you go. All right.

[Jeff]

And Jeff, not much to go over this week. 1. One quick question or reply. Here is Mr. T7 has a question about, you know, where should they start? As a beginner, I always recommend Fedora or Ubuntu just because there's so much stuff on the Internet for help and a lot of programs are set up that way. So start there and then once you get your legs under you, then you can take off to a different distribution.

[Jonathan Bennett]

Yes.

[Jeff]

The other thing is just Poetry Corner this week, so I'm going to keep it short with Haiku Typing document. When OS suddenly crashed. Crap. Forgot to save. Have a great week, everybody.

[Jonathan Bennett]

I like it. All right. If you want more of me, of course there is Hackaday. That's where Floss Weekly is at these days. And My security column goes live there on Friday mornings. If you do want to put a little bit in the tip jar, I [e-mail] JBennett and that is always much appreciated for those that want to do so. Appreciate all of the guys being here and all of you that watch and listen and we will be back next week for more Untitled Linux Show. Goodness. We will see you then. Take care of it.

[I]

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