Untitled Linux Show 197: You Linux Fool

Summary

Podcast Summary: Untitled Linux Show 197: You Linux Fool

Released on April 6, 2025, the 197th episode of the Untitled Linux Show, hosted by Leo Laporte, delves into a range of current topics in the Linux ecosystem. Joined by regular contributors Rob Campbell, Jeff, and Ken Starks, the panel discusses everything from humorous April Fool’s revelations to significant updates in package management, desktop environments, and popular applications like Firefox and Thunderbird.

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1. April Fool’s Joke: "One Package to Rule Them All"

At the episode’s onset (00:00), Leo Laporte introduces an April theme, leading into Rob Campbell’s discussion about a purported major shift in Linux package management. Rob elaborates on a fictional scenario where the Linux community supposedly decided to adopt a single universal package manager named "One Package" during the Linux 1 conference. He humorously cites notable figures like Mark Shuttleworth expressing confusion and Linus Torvalds making a sardonic comment:

Mark Shuttleworth: “I feel strange. Like thousands of forum complaints suddenly went silent.”
(02:45)

Linus Torvalds: “It's about expletive time now we could focus on what really matters.”
(02:45)

Rob eventually reveals that this announcement was an April Fool’s prank orchestrated by the FOSS community. The hosts reflect on past April Fools’ jokes, noting the creativity and occasional believability of such pranks.

Rob Campbell: “This is your annual warning for any news you read out there this week. Check the date and always view anything released on April 1 or around it with a bit of skepticism.”
(06:23)

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2. GNOME and KDE Plasma Wayland Benchmarking

Transitioning to desktop environments, Jeff discusses recent benchmarking conducted by Michael Erbor Phonix, which compares GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 running on Wayland versus their X11 counterparts. According to Jeff, the findings showed:

• KDE Plasma 6.3.3 on Wayland being the fastest desktop environment.
• GNOME 48 on Wayland following closely behind.
• Both GNOME and KDE on Wayland outperforming their X11 versions.
• XFCE 4.20 and LXQT 2.1 on X11 showed similar performance levels, with KDE slightly ahead.

A notable insight from Jeff emphasizes the negligible performance differences in everyday use, advising users to choose desktops based on personal preference rather than performance metrics.

Jeff: “Pick the desktop that feels right to you because performance differences are negligible in everyday use.”
(08:32)

Leo raises a technical query regarding Wine’s compatibility with Wayland, though Jeff remains uncertain about the specifics.

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3. Kubuntu 25.04 Beta: Jeff’s Troubleshooting

Jeff shares his challenging experience upgrading to the Kubuntu 25.04 beta. Initially opting for an inline upgrade, he encountered several issues:

• Grub Bootloader Errors: Initiated at 02:45, Jeff describes landing at a grub command line prompt post-reboot, which required typing exit to proceed to the proper grub menu.

• Login Screen Anomalies: At 08:32, he recounts encountering a large virtual keyboard that obstructed access, making it impossible to log in.

After multiple reboots and attempts to fix Nvidia drivers, Jeff opted for a clean installation. However, enabling updates during installation led to a kernel panic due to corrupted Grub in the EFI directory. Subsequent clean installs without enabling updates resolved the issue. Jeff communicated these problems to Kubuntu maintainers, who are actively working on fixes.

Jeff: “They told me that dropping to the console and running sudo space app space install space Kubuntu Desktop fixes it.”
(56:38)

Rob adds context by suggesting that such beta software is best for experienced users comfortable with potential system reinstalls.

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4. Steam Survey Insights

Rob Campbell discusses the latest Steam survey results, highlighting:

• A slight increase in the percentage of Linux users on Steam, currently at 2.33%, aligning with his 2025 prediction.
• 35% of these Linux users are likely using the Steam Deck, contributing to the overall numbers despite SteamOS not being officially available for installation.
• The dominance of AMD in the survey, with approximately 70% of Linux gamers using AMD processors, bolstering AMD’s market presence.

Rob emphasizes the importance of participating in the Steam survey to ensure accurate representation and continued support for Linux gaming.

Rob Campbell: “Gaming on Linux is really good for all of us Linux users because it's only going to help bring developers and improve things further for us in the whole ecosystem.”
(20:37)

Leo notes fluctuations in the survey, attributing changes to factors like reimaging in Asian net cafes and regional internet policies.

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5. Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird Updates

Firefox Updates: Ken Starks presents two key updates from Firefox:

1. Mozilla Connect Enhancements:
   Mozilla Connect, launched in 2022, facilitates better interaction between Firefox users and developers. Features like vertical tabs, tab groups, and improved profile management are either being built or rolled out, responding directly to user feedback.

2. Firefox 138 Beta Release:
   Marius Nestor details the beta release, which includes:

   • Improved Address and Credit Card Autofill: Better handling of dynamically updated forms.
   • Enhanced Tab Grouping Features: Options to add/remove tabs to/from groups via the context menu.
   • Color Settings Revamp: Introduction of contrast control settings for consistent color usage across websites.

Jeff mentions the potential issues with OBS virtual camera integrations with certain Firefox versions, although he notes that Firefox itself functions smoothly.

Ken Starks: “Mozilla Connect becomes a tool for every phase of the product cycle, from exploring ideas to testing prototypes, to validating decisions.”
(15:11)

Mozilla Thunderbird Updates: Ken also discusses Thunderbird 137, highlighting minor feature additions and bug fixes:

• Donation Encouragement Splash Screen: Aimed at supporting Thunderbird’s development.
• System Tray Icon Disabled for Linux: Temporarily until functionality is improved.
• Support for File Names in Mail Folders on Windows: Enhances file management.
• Cross-Posting News Articles: Enables cross-posting across different newsgroup servers.
• Visual and UX Improvements: Various interface tweaks to enhance user experience.

Ken urges listeners who rely on Thunderbird for email to consider donating to support its ongoing development.

Ken Starks: “If Thunderbird is your daily email driver, please consider supporting it.”
(60:38)

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6. Steam Client Update

Jeff outlines the recent Steam client update released on April 1st, emphasizing that it was a legitimate update rather than an April Fool’s joke. Key improvements for Linux users include:

• Enhanced Download Speeds: Faster installation of games and the Steam client itself.
• Accurate Download Progress and Time Estimates: Improved based on system and network learning over time.
• UI Consistency and Clarity: Byte counts now specify the number of bytes to download, and progress bars reflect overall installation progress, accounting for disk usage and other tasks.
• Compatibility Tool Fixes: Resolves issues where non-Steam Proton versions were incorrectly assigned, and UI fixes related to compatibility tool filtering and notifications.

Jeff advises users to check the full breakdown in the show notes for detailed information.

Jeff: “For the full breakdown, check the article linked in the Show Notes where they also have links to the official Steam announcement.”
(29:13)

Leo expresses enthusiasm about the updates, noting immediate improvements he observed during his testing.

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7. Nitrix Linux Distribution Update

Ken Starks introduces Nitrix 3.9.1, a Debian-based, immutable, and systemd-free GNU/Linux distribution featuring a customized KDE Plasma desktop. Key updates include:

• Linux Kernel 6.13.8
• MauiKit Frameworks and Maui Apps Update
• Mesa 25 Graphics Stack
• AMD ROCM Open Software Stack
• New Convergent Web Browser "Fury": Built using QtWebEngine and MalloryKit, though it has known issues like an unresponsive close button.

Ken recommends consulting Marius Nestor’s article for comprehensive details on Nitrix's latest release.

Ken Starks: “Nitrix 3.9.1 still uses the KDE Plasma 5.27.1.1 desktop environment while updating some KDE frameworks packages to version 6.8.0 and the Qt components to version 6.7.2.”
(34:21)

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8. Package Manager Updates: APT 3.0

Rob Campbell discusses the release of APT 3.0 by the Debian project, highlighting significant visual and functional enhancements:

• Enhanced Command-Line Output: Improved readability with column displays and color-coded changes (e.g., red for removals, green for additions).
• Smoother Install Progress Bars: Utilizes Unicode blocks for a more refined display.
• New Solver: Incorporates a fallback to non-candidate versions and makes apt autoremove more aggressive in retaining only essential packages.

Rob notes that APT 3.0 will be the default in the upcoming Debian 13 (Trixie) release and anticipated in Ubuntu 20.05.

Leo underscores the complexity of dependency resolution and praises the new solver’s advancements in managing dependencies more effectively.

Leo Laporte: “That new solver it allows apt to fall back to non candidate versions and makes auto remove more aggressive keeping only the strongest automatically installed packages.”
(44:38)

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9. Command Line Tips

Rob’s Flock: Rob demonstrates the use of Flock, a file locking utility essential for preventing concurrent processes from writing to the same file simultaneously. He showcases practical examples using terminal commands to lock and unlock files, ensuring data integrity during script executions.

Rob Campbell: “Flock or F lock or file lock F lock, it's a file lock. So it's used to lock a file to make sure multiple processes don't try to write to the file at the same time.”
(71:29)

Leo’s Trash CLI: Leo introduces Trash CLI, a command-line tool that interfaces with the graphical desktop’s trash system. Unlike the traditional rm command, trash moves files to the trash can, allowing for recovery if needed. He highlights commands like trash, trash list, trash empty, and trash restore, emphasizing its utility in preventing irreversible deletions.

Leo Laporte: “Trash by itself, trash [filename], will move a file to the trash can.”
(84:12)

Leo also shares a tip on piping pw.dot outputs directly to Graphviz for on-the-fly visualization without saving intermediary files.

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10. Closing Remarks and Community Engagement

In the concluding segments, the hosts engage in light-hearted banter, recapping the episode’s highlights and encouraging listeners to support their community through Club TWiT. They also address technical hiccups, such as Jeff’s OBS virtual camera issues, and remind listeners to back up their systems before experimenting with beta software.

Ken Starks: “Before you try any of those how-to’s that were published April 1st, back up first.”
(99:57)

Rob and Ken promote their personal websites and social media channels, fostering community interaction and support.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Mark Shuttleworth on "One Package":
  “I feel strange. Like thousands of forum complaints suddenly went silent.”
  (02:45)

• Linus Torvalds on Focusing on What Matters:
  “It's about expletive time now we could focus on what really matters.”
  (02:45)

• Rob Campbell on Linux Gaming:
  “Gaming on Linux is really good for all of us Linux users because it's only going to help bring developers and improve things further for us in the whole ecosystem.”
  (20:37)

• Ken Starks on Mozilla Connect:
  “Mozilla Connect becomes a tool for every phase of the product cycle, from exploring ideas to testing prototypes, to validating decisions.”
  (15:11)

• Jeff on Choosing Desktop Environments:
  “Pick the desktop that feels right to you because performance differences are negligible in everyday use.”
  (08:32)

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Conclusion

Episode 197 of the Untitled Linux Show offers a comprehensive exploration of the latest developments in the Linux world. From debunked April Fool’s pranks and desktop environment benchmarks to significant updates in package management and essential command-line tools, the hosts provide insightful analysis and practical advice for Linux enthusiasts. Their discussions not only inform but also engage the community, fostering a deeper understanding of the evolving Linux landscape.

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For more detailed information and to explore the topics discussed in this episode further, listeners are encouraged to visit the show’s website and consult the show notes for relevant links and resources.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

Hey folks, this week we're talking about the start to April with one package to rule them all. More news on the Steam survey. Then there's Gnome and KDE Plasma Wayland Benchmarking. Jeff has some notes about Kubuntu 2504 beta and we talk about Firefox and Thunderbird getting some big updates. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Chris Gethard]

Hi, I'm Chris Gethard and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number. Thousands of people try to call, talk to one of them. They stay anonymous. I can't hang up. That's all the rules. I never know what's going to happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings. Crazy funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's gonna happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today. Beautiful Anonymous podcasts you love from people you Trust.

[Leo Laporte]

This is TWiT. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 197, recorded Saturday, April 5th. You Linux fool. Hey folks, it is another wonderful Saturday, although it's a little bit cold here. But we're gonna put the cool weather to the side and we're gonna celebrate some Linux. It is the Untitled Linux Show. We're gonna geek out over open source, the Linux desktop, all kinds of fun stuff. It's gonna be a great show. It is not just me, we've got the full crew, the regulars here. Rob Cann and Jeff are with us and it is now April and our first story is sort of about that. We're going to let Rob kick it off. And why does one package have anything to do with April?

[Rob Campbell]

Well, it's time for those April releases. And one big complaint people often have about Linux is the fragmentation. You got Debian with your devs and the APT and Red hat with your RPMs and, and, and yum and TFDN, DNF and Arch and you know, all those, all those packages, it's, it's all over the place. So, so the fix, they made a fix was to come up with a universal package manager. And that's what they did. In fact, now we have at least three that I know of. App Image, Flat Pack and Snaps, you know, with the Canonicals, beloved Snaps. Because that's, you know, we need to have a universal package manager. Well, we got three, so. Still not ideal. There's good news as, as Abishik says, Mark this date, as I reveal the most shocking development since Linus Torvald smiled at a conference. So at the Linux 1 conference this week in April. Well, at the end of March, April, whenever it was, I don't know. The Linux community has agreed to adopt a single package manager called One Package. And some quotes from the story. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, appeared visibly disoriented when asked about abandoning Snaps. He says, quote, I feel strange. Like thousands of forum complaints suddenly went silent. Linux creator Linus Torvalds issued his typical measured response. It's about expletive time now we could focus on what really matters. Telling people their code is garbage. But constructively, the roadmap expects full adoption around 2055 or whenever they get to it. It says, but that's what's on the road map. But, but you know what else happened around the world the start of April? And if you haven't figured it out yet, this was an April Fool's joke brought to us by the IT foss or it's FOSS folks. So I hope you figured it out maybe a little quicker than, than I did actually. I scammed and I'm like, wait, what I just read. I tried to figure out what are they even talking about. What's. How come? I was confused. I then checked the Internet. I'm like, well, I always look for supporting information for my stories. I, I don't. I try not to go just off of one person's word on things and I Found some links similar like dot1 package formats that someone wasn't able to open Windows, that I'd even dig into it because I'm like, I don't care. It's. I'm not looking at Windows. It's got to be something else. And I really couldn't find much out there. Then I noticed the date on the article was April 1st. And that's when it all hit me. So this is your annual warning for any news you read out there this week. Check the date and always view anything released on April 1 or around it with a bit of skepticism. So with that said, April Fools.

[Leo Laporte]

I like the continuation of the article. It is. We're looking forward to the Unified Desktop GDE or KHNome.

[Rob Campbell]

That was taking it too far. Plus I gotta add when I was confused about it, I had not read that part either, that that part would have had to have been a giveaway. Of course, maybe it also better giveaway.

[Ken Starks]

Actually the link I posted in the Discord chat gave it a. Also gave it away of course, because it starts off a little humor doesn't hurt, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. No, this is fun. I've always enjoyed most of the April Fools stuff and it seems like the Internet sort of let us down this year. Not very much April Fools stuff going on. We had this one, this one was good.

[Ken Starks]

Nothing came out on the 1st except this article.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know everybody was kind of done with the April Fools thing, I guess. But I have very fond memories of say, the old ThinkGeek. Who remembers ThinkGeek being a thing? The old ThinkGeek site coming out with their new April Fool's products. And other sites have done it, but ThinkGeek is really the one that comes to mind. And then the thing that's the best is like some of their products people legitimately wanted and there was more than one ThinkGeek product that became a real product that started as an April Fool's joke.

[Rob Campbell]

I mean, that's exactly what this is. This is a product people want, Right? We don't want the fourth universal package Manager though, which is what it would be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, see, that's the thing. It's the XKCD comic, right? And I posted that it's comic927. You know, situation, there are 14 competing standards. 14? How ridiculous. We need to redevelop one universal standard. Next thing you know, situation, there are 15 competing standards. This is what happens every time. Every time. So what is next? Next we have. Speaking of KHNOM and gde, Jeff has a story about Wayland on these what's up with Wayland? What's new with Wayland?

[Jeff]

Well, and I will first preface this saying, you might not see my lips move because my camera froze, but luckily you've got a decent picture and the audio still works.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll get to that.

[Jeff]

Yeah, there's a reason behind this, but it's the third story, so you're going to have to wait a little bit, but Michael Erbor Phronix is known for his extensive benchmarking, but we don't always get the chance to cover everything he publishes. Last week, for example, he tested GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 for gaming performance on Ubuntu 25.04. After reviewing the article, I decided not to cover it because the results showed GNOME and KDE on Wayland were nearly identical in performance, and KDE had a slight statistical edge, but nothing significant while it was notable. What was notable, however, was that KDE and GNOME on wayland outperformed their X11 variants. Well, the KDE variant. In fact, GNOME couldn't even run properly under X11 for proper benchmarking, but KDE was slower under X11 than Wayland. Now that brings us to this week's article linked in the show notes Some of Michael's readers speculated that the Wayland advantage in GNOME and KDE might come from these desktops, neglecting X11 optimizations or simply being too bloated. So Michael decided to test a couple more desktop environments, and in this latest benchmarking roundup he added XFCE 4.20 and LXQT 2.1, both running on X11. Now this week's article presents combined data so the Wayland next 11 results for Gnome and KDE from last week, and then adds in the X11 performance of XFCE 4.2.0 and LXQT 2.1. Now, these desktops are the latest available packages for Ubuntu 25.04, and these tests were conducted on the same hardware as last week, Ryzen 9.9900x3D processor paired with a Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU. And of course, like I said, the system was running Ubuntu 25.04 with Linux kernel 6.14 and Mesa 25 0.1 for the graphics driver. Now let's talk results, because they may not be what you expected. The fastest desktops were KDE Plasma 6.3.3 on Wayland, followed very closely by GNOME 48 on Wayland. When comparing x11 environments, KDE, LXQT and XFCE performed at about the same level. Interestingly, KDE I think even appeared slightly faster than the two lightweight desktops. Now keep in mind, however, the differences across all environments were minimal. So small in fact, that users wouldn't notice any impact on daily performance. And some of the results may even fall within the margin of error. There was one clear takeaway though. When comparing Wayland vs X11 on the game Strange Brigade, Wayland demonstrated a significantly better performance over X11. Now I'm just going to note here that that was the one standout. The rest were very, very close. I don't know what was going on with Strange Brigade, that why it ran away on Wayland vs X11, but just take note of that. So what's the bottom line? Some might say KDE and GNOME are bloated, but they hold their own or even outperform lighter desktop environments. And you know, side note, I have seen some, some data showing that they're not really that much lighter than KDE or gnome. My advice, pick the desktop that feels right to you because performance differences are negligible in everyday use. So, happy desktop hunting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'm curious about one thing with this, and that is the version of Wine he was using, did it have the native Wayland stuff in it or was Wine running into Ex Wayland and then into Weyland?

[Jeff]

I'm not sure.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't see that in the article.

[Jeff]

I don't know, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Because at least some of the games he was benchmarking were running on Wine.

[Jeff]

Yeah.

[Rob Campbell]

So those lower end or lighter desktops, what they would probably say is of course KDE and GNOME is going to be faster. I mean, if we were using that much memory too, we'd be faster.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure there's some way to spin it, but.

[Jeff]

Well, I think you should buy more memory. Buy all the memory you can afford.

[Rob Campbell]

Memory?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Rob Campbell]

Brought to you by.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's not get that rumor started.

[Ken Starks]

Here's a question I have, dad, was he using the minimum memory required for testing these?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, probably not. I'm sure, I'm sure he's got a rig with a bunch of memory on it.

[Jeff]

Yeah, it was like 62 or 34. I forget what it was quite a bit of memory. It was not the minimum. It was at least 32.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So you may run into those lighter weight desktops. They may actually perform better with less memory. That might be a thing.

[Rob Campbell]

Well, yeah, I mean, now that you say it like that. That's probably way more than maybe XFC could even use. So maybe if they were more on like all on 8 or 16, maybe, maybe it would have been. Maybe XFC would have performed better on the comparatively on the lower memory.

[Ken Starks]

Try going down to four gigabytes of memory.

[Rob Campbell]

I haven't done that for like a decade. This is 2025.

[Jeff]

Yeah, I don't have anything that old that would have that low memory.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what's really sad is you go to the usual places and they're still selling laptops and desktops with four gigs of memory. It's like it's really not enough these days your browser uses that much by itself, doesn't it?

[Ken Starks]

Especially if it's Chrome.

[Leo Laporte]

Especially if it's. But all right, so Ken has a story about that other browser out there. Not Chrome or Chromium, but Firefox. What's new with Firefox?

[Ken Starks]

Well, actually going to give you a bit of old and new because I've actually got two articles about Firefox. The first is a blog post by Jennifer and I do apologize if I pronounce the mispronounced the last name. I'm going to say Boss Caskey about how we can help improve Firefox through Mozilla Connect. Now, Mozilla connect launched in 2022 where Firefox users and builders could share ideas, feedback and feature requests. Now, before Mozilla Connect, there was a platform called does anybody remember Ideas at Mozilla?

[Leo Laporte]

No, not really.

[Ken Starks]

Well, people could submit suggestions, but the tool wasn't set up for honest interactive dialogue, according to John Sidaway. And here I am quoting them. We need it. We needed something better, a place where people could not only share IDs, but also get updates, participate in discussions, and feel they were heard. Right after Mozilla Connect launched, users jumped in with some big requests, vertical tabs, tab groups, and better ways to manage profiles. Fast forward to today, all three are either being built or already starting to roll out. Mozilla Connect becomes a tool for every phase of the product cycle, from exploring ideas to testing prototypes, to validating decisions. The second article comes from Marius Nestor. Marius writes about Mozilla promoting Firefox 138 to the beta channel for public testing. It looks like a smaller update, promising only support for copying links for background tabs using the tab strip context menu on Linux and macOS systems, as well as an improved address and credit card autofill feature that better handles dynamically dynamically updated forms. Firefox 138 beta adds more tab grouping features such as Add tabs to new tab group and remove from group. Right click Tab menu entries. It also promises to revamp the previous color settings into contrast control settings, allowing users to use the same colors across websites for improved readability. If you feel adventurous and this is for you, Jeff, then try Firefox 138 beta and provide your feedback via Mozilla Connect. I've got links in the show notes for both of these articles.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting stuff.

[Jeff]

I could be on it. I got a lot of betas running right now. It's. It's showing. Yeah, just.

[Ken Starks]

Just stay away from Alpha.

[Jeff]

Well, you know, sometimes that, that Venn diagram, you know, everything, the. Those lines blur a little.

[Rob Campbell]

If you're looking for an Alpha, you could be running the Cosmic Desktop, the whole thing already.

[Leo Laporte]

He could be. I'm trying to. I don't see it in here. I think Firefox, the 30th of the May actually ship with a hidden option. So, you know, you've got to go into the flags, be able to turn on HDR for some of the Linux desktops. That may actually be a thing that's landed now. It's obviously still very much in progress. I've been messing with it with the nightly.

[Rob Campbell]

I think I saw that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff]

I'm only on 137 right now.

[Ken Starks]

For Firefox. I'm 137. I'd have to look and see what I've got for Chromium that I'm currently running. Since the latest update to Chrome broke the OBS virtual camera usage.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's very weird. I got to dig into that and figure out what's going on with that. I will eventually get hit by that too, when we got to do floss next week. But I'm sure there's a way to get it back.

[Jeff]

Figure out what's going on with Firefox in the OBS virtual camera.

[Leo Laporte]

I would assume that it's the same thing.

[Jeff]

I'm guessing there's probably some security.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe. The virtual camera plugin, though, is a Linux thing and it just shows up as an extra like V4L2 device. So that seems a little odd. What we really need is OBS to get on board and actually give us pipewire outputs. But we're not there yet.

[Ken Starks]

Not with 31.0.3.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know there are people working on it, but it's not there. Not there quite yet. All right, well, let's move along to the Steam survey, Rob. I remember about a Month ago the sky was falling, there were hardly any Linux users. We were back under 2%. What happened? We have the rest of the story now, right?

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah. So this month on the Linux Steam survey, it's gone back on its trajectory, inching closer to my 2025 prediction, which was 2.5% and my stretch goal, which we'll see, we still have many months to get there was 3%. This month we have a new record on Linux on Steam at 2.33%. So as, as Jonathan hinted at, this number, you know, this number goes up and down all the time. It's, it's the trend that you really got to pay attention, attention to, you know, because last month there was a 0.61 drop and then this month there's a 0.88 increase. So anybody who's plotted things out on graphs, it's the trend that you gotta look at. Those individual plots are just data points. So you know, digging into these numbers, it's a lot of, a lot of the same. You know, sales of the Valve Steam Deck clearly help these numbers with about 35% of these Linux users or Linux gamers, I guess, appearing to be running SteamOS. And since you know this, the SteamOS isn't released for users to officially install. People have figured out ways, but it's not officially out there, so there's probably not many people doing it. So most of these that we're looking at are probably actually Steam deck users. So 35% of those are likely to Steam Deck. But you know, the Steam Deck, you know, another thing on there, the Steam Deck being based on AMD also boosts the AMD over intel numbers with 70% of the survey users use an AMD and 30% intel approximately. There's the point stuff here and there, but keep voting on the survey because you know, no matter what dist you're using, Steam OS, even if these are 50% steam deck, as we always like to point out, what is good for the Steam deck. And gaming on Linux is really good for all of us Linux users because it's only going to help bring developers and improve things further for us in the whole ecosystem. So boat, this is one place I don't want you paranoid penguins to be hoarding or afraid to share that data. Let them know you're here for all of us.

[Leo Laporte]

That's great. Yeah. The Steam survey has always been a little, well, it's always been a little weird, right. So you get, things will happen, something will change in the way they count or in what machines get counted. There's been things like they do reimages. So in Asia they have the Net cafes, right, where you can rent a desktop for an hour. And apparently a bunch of those had some system where they reimaged every time. And that resulted in the Steam survey happening a lot for those devices. We had something sort of in that same ballpark this time where there was like a 20.8% increase in the simplified Chinese language. And you know, so maybe that's a change was made in the great firewall letting more of these machines talk to the Internet. You know, it's hard to say, but whatever it is, it seems to have been rolled back and we're back into the numbers, into the ballpark thing we expected.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, you know, also, as I said, you got to look at the trends because the, the survey is, it's random. So statistically at least over time it should kind of show you where things are at.

[Leo Laporte]

But Right.

[Rob Campbell]

Also it really, you know, it's luck of the draw. So it could be one month. Just more Windows users in a ratio get it than, than Linux overall. I should balance out.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, you figure the. And so here's one of the things about this, right. We do not have very good visibility into the Steam survey, but you figure that the more respondents like the overall, the bigger the numbers are, the more the noise floor drops and you get better data out of it. Just kind of the way statistics work.

[Jeff]

Well, the one piece of missing information we don't have is absolute numbers.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Yeah, that's kind of, that's kind of what I'm getting at. Right. We don't, we don't know how many survey respondents there were altogether. And if we knew that, then we would have a better idea of, you know, what's going on. Like, so you see 20% more simplified Chinese. Well, it. Was there also a. Was there 20,000 more survey respondents? We don't, we don't know. We just can't. So we're sort of reading the tea leaves trying to figure all that.

[Rob Campbell]

I think, I think like once a quarter, once a year, Once. Half year or something. They should just make sure everybody gets it because it's been a long time since I've seen the survey. I bet it's been close to two years since I've seen the survey even.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an interesting thought. Yeah, that could be useful.

[Rob Campbell]

And in the past I've had it like once and then again just maybe a month or two later.

[Ken Starks]

But basically you can say there's a seven out of every 300 Steam clients that are Linux, their own Linux.

[Jeff]

Yeah, well, and the amd, just side note too, the AMD numbers don't hurt because not only all the Steam deck, and we've got future Steam decks come or Steam like decks coming.

[Leo Laporte]

Steam machines. Are we calling them Steam machines this time around? I don't remember.

[Jeff]

Yes, Steam machines, Steam like deck something. I mean, all those lights. Yeah.

[Ken Starks]

Consoles, PCs, handhelds that are going to be running Steam OS.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's good. Yeah.

[Jeff]

Well, at least handhelds Steam OS deck. Yeah. But also it doesn't hurt that AMD is kind of running away with the video card sales right now. And right now their processors are flying off the shelf too.

[Leo Laporte]

It'd be a good time to own AMD stock. Yeah, yeah. Although apparently it's a good time to own Nvidia stock too, for different reasons.

[Ken Starks]

But anyway, especially if you'd bought it 10 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, I mean, that's the best time to buy any stock.

[Jeff]

Yeah, every.

[Rob Campbell]

Every stock that's around today, the best time to buy it was 10, 20 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ken Starks]

When nobody had any money.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's how that works.

[Jeff]

About every one of them you can.

[Leo Laporte]

I have distinct memories of thinking, oh man, this bitcoin thing is great. I wish I had a hundred dollars to be able to buy one of them.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, well, it's back. Back then you didn't know. Well, with every stock, well, not so.

[Ken Starks]

Much to buy it, but to mine it.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they would have been more than a hundred bucks to be able to buy in and get a minor rig, but. Yeah, no, I was aware of it and I thought it was the coolest thing before. Even before many people really started before you could buy dedicated miners. Right.

[Rob Campbell]

And so 15 years ago, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, somewhere around there.

[Jeff]

But the whole problem is, even if I remember when it was like two bucks a coin, all right, I bought $100 worth. Hey, it went up to where my Investment's now worth $500. I more than doubled it. I'm gonna sell, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yep, that's true. And I guess that's really the same thing with stocks. You don't know how high it's gonna go. Nobody knew that eventually an individual bitcoin is going to be worth $100,000. So really the way to do it was to buy it when it was nothing and then forget about it. And 20 years later, rediscover the hard drive and pray that it still works.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, but then you forget too long and it's worth nothing again.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ken Starks]

Or you end up just losing it completely because it goes bankrupt.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, we shall see if that ever happens, if Bitcoin is the long term tulip, or if it's going to stick around. No clue. All right, let's move on to speaking of Valve and the Steam deck. Was that an attempt at a segue that I totally missed?

[Jeff]

Not for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, Jeff is also going to continue this Valve centric conversation and talk about the Steam client.

[Jeff]

Yeah, Steam released a client update on April 1st and no, it wasn't an April Fool's joke. They even made a point to clarify that this update was necessary to fix a display issue on the game details on the Game Details page for titles with queued updates. So ideally they wouldn't have released it on April 1st, but a patch was needed. Beyond that fix, this update brings some great improvements for everyone, especially Linux users. For Linux users, download speeds have been improved, meaning games and the Steam client itself should install faster. Valve has also enhanced the accuracy of download progress and time estimates, so the more you and the more you use Steam, the better these estimations will become. Additionally, the consistency and clarity of the download install update UI has improved and also byte counts refer specifically to the number of bytes to download. Progress bars and percentages now reflect the overall progress of an installation or update, which includes covering the work before, during and after the download. So it takes into account all the disk usage and everything else. The exception is the top blue progress bar on the downloads page which shows the bytes downloaded. And I should mention that part of the the more you use it, the more accurate it's going to be. They're looking at having of previous data and it's going to keep so it learns your system learns your network so it can better estimate over how your system and network reacts over time time. Remaining estimates apply to the entire installation update process now and again. It's just learning on your system in another fix is if you encountered the rare issue where non Steam Proton versions such as Proton Glorious Eggroll were incorrectly assigned the wrong compatibility tool. This update should resolve that. But that was pretty rare. But it got fixed. Another Linux specific fix addresses the initial positioning of dropdown menus and the UI no longer incorrectly applies compatibility tool filtering to shortcuts. This update also resolved issues such as notifications displaying incorrectly in certain games and the update news window being obscured by the Steam client at startup. Now I had that one it kept it would pop up that, you know the little news window with you know, oh here's the latest sales or whatever it would always hide it behind so that that has been fixed. There are additional fixes for remote play, Steam input and the Find Friends who Play feature. But for the full breakdown, check the article linked in the Show Notes where they also have links to the official Steam announcement. So happy gaming.

[Leo Laporte]

Very cool. I have to make sure and go grab that and then run through my series of tests for the various fancy things that I try to do with Steam and see how many of them work. You know, there. There have been things that historically you have to go into the. What, what do they call it? The Steam Compositor. I forget what they call it. It's what runs on Steam Deck. You can. You can boot directly to it. I can't. There's a name for it. It's just totally escaped me at the moment. Anyway, there's some fancy things that you can do in Steam on Linux. You've got. You've got to like go directly into that and not have KDE or Gnome running underneath it. But they have been, you know, slowly, over time, working towards making all those things work with the, with the regular desktop managers. Yeah. Very, very brave of them to do an April 1st release though.

[Jeff]

Yeah. And they specifically, you know, made sure to note that. No, this is not a joke in any way. But.

[Leo Laporte]

What was that, Ken?

[Ken Starks]

Just thinking about the fact that yesterday I did the update to the Steam client.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Ken Starks]

And it did load up quick. I turned around to get a drink and back and it was already done.

[Leo Laporte]

Cool. Very cool.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Spring is in full swing, so take some time for self care this spring now through April 22, buy two self care items and save $2. Shop in store or online for self care essentials like Tom's Toothpaste Soft Soap, Liquid Hand Soap, Colgate Optic White Toothpaste and Colgate Total toothpaste. And save $2 when you buy two participating items. Offer ends April 22. Promotions may vary. Restrictions apply. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Ken, you've got a story here about another Linux distro that I have never heard of. What is. Is it Nitrix?

[Ken Starks]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

What is this?

[Ken Starks]

I thought we'd covered it. It's been a while. I can't even remember what episode. Off the top of my head, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Was going to say, just the fact that we've talked about it here doesn't mean that I'm going to have any memory of it.

[Ken Starks]

True. Sometimes I have trouble remembering what we talked on the Previous episode yeah, but I can thank Marius Nester since he wrote about Nitrous developer Yuri Herrera's recent announcement. He released the latest ISO snapshot of Nitrous. In this case it's 3.9.1 now nitrous is a Debian based, immutable and systemd free GNU Linux distribution using a highly customized KDE plasma desktop environment. By default, Nitrix 3.1. 3.9.1 introduces Linux kernel 6.13.8, a huge Maui kit, Mauikit frameworks and Maui apps update, the latest Mesa 25 graphics stack, AMD ROCM open software stack and a new convergent web browser called I'm pronouncing it Fury. It's F I E R Y now Fury uses a QT web engine and was built using mallorykit. The release announcement includes some of Theory's known issues and missing features including how to close the browser. Apparently the X at the top of the screen doesn't close it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the VI of browsers.

[Ken Starks]

Nitrix 3.9.1 still uses the KDE Plasma 5.27.1.1 desktop environment while updating some KDE frameworks packages to version 6.8.0 and the Qt components to version 6.7.2. It's running right on the edge, isn't it? The Nitrix Update Tool system or NUTS upgrade utility has been updated to version 2.2.2. You gotta love that acronym. How would you pronounce that? Nuts? If you want more details, check out Marius's article. It even has a link to the announcement, the release announcement so you can see how to close that browser.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to figure out what the fiery browser is apparently so Google searching finds it as like a Google app or an Android app.

[Ken Starks]

I found I ended up getting more information by using the link in Marius's article.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, interesting. Is it just a reskin of Chromium?

[Rob Campbell]

Probably.

[Ken Starks]

Does Chromium use a QT web engine?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a complicated question. The answer is sort of Is it Chromium a fork like multiple years ago of Conqueror which. Which probably is based on the QT web engine. Browser history is weird. Just a thing.

[Jeff]

I think it is a fork of.

[Leo Laporte]

That I know Chromium is a fork of Conqueror from or I don't know if it was called Conqueror, but it was the KDE web browser from years ago. Yes. I just don't know if that means it's based on the QT engine these.

[Rob Campbell]

Days I was getting confused with Firefox which kind of has a Netscape.

[Jeff]

Yep, but there's A bit of a gap in there because they got so far with the Netscape code, went, this is garbage. And then redid it.

[Rob Campbell]

That's what Windows did too. They got to Windows 8, so this is garbage. And kind of went back to Windows 7 like code.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that's kind of what. That's kind of what happened with Windows. Not me, the one after me. Vista.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah.

[Jeff]

Maybe it went me and then it went xp.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff]

And then it went Vista.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. XP was based on the NT, whereas me was based on the Windows 3.1 code.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, XP was the first consumer one based on nt.

[Jeff]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a weird rabbit trail to go down.

[Rob Campbell]

Anyway, how do we get on Windows?

[Leo Laporte]

I have no idea. So I do have some interesting stuff in here about Fiery. Apparently it is. It is their browser. It does not have a plugin system. It's based on QTWebEngine. I'm have to look into this a little bit more. The whole idea of a new web browser just always intrigues me because so much of the world runs on Chromium, you know, and so when someone says we've got our own web browser, it's like, mm, it's a reskin of Chromium. Right. So to have one that's not. Is just very fascinating.

[Rob Campbell]

Well, yeah, I mean, it's having a new web engine that would be fascinating. There's many skins around other web engines.

[Leo Laporte]

Indeed.

[Jeff]

Yeah. Well, I remember Steve Gibson talking about it and just saying, part of the problem is the web code is so complex, it's kind of haphazardly grown over the years that to fully be compliant with today all the web standards, it is so hard that that's why most people don't write their own engine.

[Rob Campbell]

But there is one. There's at least one new engine, Lady Bird.

[Leo Laporte]

There's Lady Bird and there's Servo. There's the two that I'm aware of.

[Rob Campbell]

They're not new either, but new in web engine terms.

[Leo Laporte]

Lady Bird is pretty fascinating. We did an interview with the guy behind it, whose name I can't remember at the moment. Back on Philosophy, Andreas Kinning. That's right, Back on Philosophy several months ago. Very, very interesting project there.

[Rob Campbell]

Since. Since all your videos have been freezing today, I changed my background to kind of match.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll get the rest of the story on that here in just a minute. All right. So Rob, is it. Is it the time? Is this the year for big updates to package managers? Right. Because we have DNF5, which is amazing, by the way. And now we've got apt 3.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah every everyone seems to be hitting major milestones over this last year with their package managers. But unlike one package, this isn't an April Fool's joke. So the Debian project has released APT 3.0 this or this week with a nice new visual features. Visual features on a command line you say well I'm not talking about tui but there is still quite a bit you can do to make command line output output look better with App 3.0 providing a new concise and well laid out command line output when you're updating, installing or removing packages via the terminal emulator. So with that new features including things like column display that will make it easier for users to scan for package name, new color support for removal and or red for removal and green for all other changes so you can you know more quickly at a glance just take a look and kind of see what's going on instead of just all this all this scrolling past you. There's also a smoother install progress bar that uses unicode blocks and like I said scrolling all the stuff going on this app 3.0 has is now less verbose and offers more padding to make it easier to separate sections and extract the relevant information. And then there's also a new solver so using the dash dash solver option. So this new solver it allows apt to fall back to non candidate versions and makes auto remove more aggressive keeping only the strongest automatically installed packages. So Debian users who are really looking forward to this can expect to see App 3.0 as a default in the upcoming Debian Linux 13 or Trixie operating system which is due out in June or July around there 2025 but if you want it even sooner be an Ubuntu user because Ubuntu 20.05 is expected to have that which is also expected to release later this month. And you know also I believe I feel like I tried out a beta of this but Maybe it was DNU5 or something but I feel like I've seen this already before this announcement and demoed it but maybe not either way it I can't remember so me being refreshed looking at again it looks pretty slick because I am a Ubuntu user on my servers so they're still on 2204 but if I decide to upgrade them to well I like to keep on lts so I guess I I don't know I probably won't see it for a little bit but it still.

[Leo Laporte]

Looks pretty nice Interesting. I'm very interested by their new solver. I will add this blog post to the show notes where apparently one of the devs is talking about what exactly it means that there's a new solver and it is the code that manages dependencies and figures out what needs to get installed to satisfy all your dependencies. If you think about that for a little while, that's not a trivial problem, particularly when you have things like three or four. A single dependency could potentially be provided by different packages. Right. And that gets really, really complicated. And trying to sort all of that out to where it does indeed give the user the choice that they should have and not give them a choice when they should not have one can be. Can be really difficult.

[Jeff]

Well, a good example would be something that takes maybe FFMPEG and then it takes a specific version of libc and then LIBC has got libraries, it's based on many deep.

[Rob Campbell]

Or are you looking at the Debian version of LIBC or the Ubuntu version?

[Leo Laporte]

That's going to be one of them or so something we see in Fedora quite a bit is you can install, I think FFMPEG is available from the Fedora repositories, but there's a bunch of the codecs that are disabled because of patent issues. And then you can go get, you can go get other versions of FFmpeg, install them with DNF and then so you might have multiple potential installs of FFmpeg. So how do you sort out which one you need? How do you do updates when that's the issue?

[Jeff]

So circular dependencies.

[Leo Laporte]

Circular dependencies, yes.

[Rob Campbell]

I always forget that you can also install dev packages with apt. So they would be in that bundle.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, yep. So cool stuff in there. I like it.

[Ken Starks]

Bless you.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Ken Starks]

I hope you're not having the same problem. Steve Lasset Links Linkus had who this latest version is being debited to are dedicated to?

[Leo Laporte]

I hope not. I don't want anything dedicated to me yet. Not like that.

[Jeff]

Maybe in another 50 years.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, yeah, 70. So if. One more thing I'll point out like if you want to, there is a screen a side by side screenshot at the top of the linked article and I've got to admit like the new APT3 output is way better than the APT2 output. Much easier to look at and understand what's going on.

[Ken Starks]

It's very similar to the output from nala.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, we won't need NALA anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean you think about it and like that is the sort of the ultimate win if you would like. Oh well, a package or a program. An application became irrelevant because all of its best features got pulled in by the one it was trying to replace.

[Ken Starks]

Well, it's basically acting as a front end.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, a wrapper just to make it prettier for you. And. Well, now it's pretty enough all by itself.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly, exactly.

[Ken Starks]

But it doesn't replace top grade.

[Jeff]

Hey, prime members, are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts?

[Ken Starks]

Good news.

[Jeff]

With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad free top.

[Rob Campbell]

Podcasts included with your prime membership.

[Jeff]

To start listening, download the Amazon music.

[Rob Campbell]

App for free or go to Amazon.com.

[Jeff]

ADFreePodcasts that's Amazon.com ADFreeP Podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Spring is in full swing, so take some time for self care this spring now through April 22, buy two self care items and save $2. Shop in store or online for self care essentials like Tom's Toothpaste Soft Soap, Liquid Hand Soap, Colgate Optic White toothpaste and Colgate Total toothpaste. And save $2 when you buy two participating items. Offer ends April 22. Promotions may vary. Restrictions apply. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.

[Unknown]

When the Moore family ditched cable Internet and switched to Siddly fiber, they got so much more. Mr. Moore got more upload speed for next level gaming and live streaming to the masses. With reliable service, Mrs. Moore is no longer her family's IT guru, leaving her more time to stream games into overtime.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's go.

[Unknown]

And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing without freezing.

[Rob Campbell]

The numbers look good. Brad, you're on mute.

[Unknown]

Switch from cable Internet to Zibli Fiverr and get more of what you love for $65 less per month than cable@ziply fiverr.com.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's talk about Jeff continuing to freeze. Well, he's good now.

[Jeff]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So what. What is going. What's going on, man? We tease this all throughout the show.

[Rob Campbell]

You have to work more on your timing. This is when it should have froze.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff]

Yeah. Well, I had to kill obs because it was. It just was dying on me. And if you notice my screen looks. I look a little different. I seem a little choppier because I'm going only through restream. So it's. But we got some movement. I'm at least partially running here, but Astute listeners of last week's show will recall that I talked about updating to the Kubuntu 25.04 beta. Since I really like the KDE desktop it and you know, and this version comes with Plasma 6.3 and Wayland updates, I want to give it a try and share my experience. Well, it didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd hoped. So I originally planned to format and reinstall my operating system, but at the last minute I decided to try an inline upgrade, just see how it would go. You know, my plan was just do it, do an upgrade now, and when the official release came out, redo the desktop. Because, you know, you know, just because of the show and because I enjoy experimenting, you know, I thought, what the heck, I'll. I'll throw caution to the wind, you know, and I played around with all sorts of alpha and beta software, downloaded a ton of different things and generally caused chaos on my system. You know, that's why I was going to reformat and reload. And I should note any stability issues I run into are frankly 99% my fault. So if you stick to normal software and packages, Linux distributions tend to be rock solid overall. So I fired up the terminal, ran Update Desktop D, you know, it's it saw there was a new version available, proceeded with the installation. Everything seemed to go well until reboot time. Upon restarting, I was greeted with a grub command line prompt which I found really odd. A bit of googling told me I needed to type exit, which would drop me out of the command line and into the normal grub menu. From there I could proceed. Odd, but okay. Next I reached a login screen, though something seemed very off. There was a session dropdown in the upper left hand corner that I couldn't interact with, and below that my username and password field. I could find that. But when I tried entering my password, a massive tablet sized virtual keyboard appeared. So it covered about 3/4 of my screen. And while I could type my password, I couldn't actually press any enter or go anywhere from there. Well, thinking maybe something hadn't booted up correctly, I restarted my system. You know, hoping a second reboot would fix things. Because you know, I have had that happen in the past. Unfortunately I ended up back at the same spot just to make sure nothing was stuck. I did a full power down and reboot, but then again, same result. Well then I thought it was an issue with the Novu driver because I've had issues in the past. So I Dropped to a command line prompt, installed the Nvidia drivers, reboot. No luck. At this point, I figured something must have gone wrong, you know, after all, it is a beta. So, using another machine, I downloaded the ISO, put it on a Bentoy USB stick, and proceeded with a full format and fresh install of the operating system. And I decided to be adventurous. I selected full install with updates enabled during installation. Everything seemed fine until at the very end when I got an APT can't execute error, which was odd. Long story short, it was completely borked, totally broken, and wouldn't boot. So I started to wonder, you know, am I going to have to go to back to 24.10 and wait for some fixes to land? I did another clean install, this time without enabling updates during the installation, and I selected the normal install. I figured that would at least give me a solid base. And this time, everything came up fine. And it was. It was fine from then on out. So what happened? First, the grub issue. Turns out this one was on me. I have another drive where I've experimented with different operating systems and done a ton of installs. Somewhere along the way, my BIOS was set to boot from that drive first, which also had a Grub instance on it. Well, that drive had an old Gen 2 install, but I tinkered with it until I broke it and unknowingly corrupted Grub in the process. Once I pointed the BIOS to the correct drive, everything worked fine. So what would happen is it would go in there, grub was broken, you hit exit, it then would fall through the tree to the next Grub instance, which was on the other drive, which worked fine. So that's why hitting exit worked. It took me out of that grub and into the proper one. I also spoke with someone who works with the Kubuntu maintainers and discovered that having Steam installed can wipe out the Kubuntu desktop. And that's exactly what happened during my upgrade from the existing os. They told me that dropping to the console and running sudo sudo space app space, install space, Kubuntu Desktop fixes it. Now, the team is actively working on resolving this issue, and as of today, it might already be fixed. This was about three days ago when I did this, so it's probably already fixed. But if you happen to run into this, that's. That's what you need to know. And just for context, removing Kubuntu Dash desktop package removes both SDDM and all the KDE packages. So that explains why my desktop essentially disappeared the second issue was related to enabling updates during installation. When you do this, the kernel gets updated, but the correct image file doesn't land in the boot EFI directory, leading to a kernel panic at boot. There's already a bug report on this and developers are working on a fix, which again, may already be done. The good news is that all my issues have been reported. They're either already fixed or actively being worked on. And that said, I do want to. I would. I do want to set expectations. This is beta software now. While the last few releases have been surprisingly stable, you know, usually installing and working perfectly, running beta means there's always the possibility of running into hiccups like these. Ideally, if you're testing beta releases, you're pretty comfortable with Linux and reinstalling or dropping to a command line isn't a big deal. So the recap. You know, I hope it helps anyone out there who's testing Kubuntu 2504 beta. You know, I'm coming at you right now from the 2504 beta, and I did have in the notes. So far it's solid and. Well, not everything is solid. It has fixed some little graphical glitches that I had on 2410 with Wayland, so that was good. So it has been improved. 6.6.3 so far is mostly good. One final note, on beta, you are going to get updates, and a lot of them every day. So be aware that if you decide you want to try beta, you know, keep on top of the updates as they pound out a lot of fixes at a pretty fast rate. So, you know, happy upgrading if that's your desire.

[Rob Campbell]

I think my servers might be waiting for the LTS like I hinted at just earlier.

[Leo Laporte]

That's probably a good idea for your.

[Ken Starks]

Servers waiting for 2604.

[Jeff]

Yeah, yeah, you don't want to be running servers on a beta that just.

[Rob Campbell]

Well, I wasn't going to do on the beta, but even the final release of 2504 is expected to be out pretty soon already, so.

[Ken Starks]

But yeah, I need to look at upgrading the one I'm using as a file server from 2004 to 22.04.

[Leo Laporte]

It's about time.

[Rob Campbell]

Why not 2404 since that's the most recent LTS, I just want to see.

[Ken Starks]

If it'll even run 2204.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also a valid question whether Ubuntu supports jumping that many versions. I know they. I'm sure they support going from one LTS to the next, but skipping an LTS in the middle and jumping four years.

[Ken Starks]

That's a lot. You can't. You've got to do it sequentially.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the way most of them work.

[Ken Starks]

Yeah, I found that out when I was trying to upgrade from 1204 to 1604 after I duplicated to another computer.

[Rob Campbell]

That was a long time ago though.

[Ken Starks]

Yeah, don't remind me.

[Rob Campbell]

That was a decade ago almost.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, ouch.

[Rob Campbell]

All right, maybe it's. Maybe you did it a few years after 1604 came out.

[Leo Laporte]

So, Jeff, are you having enough problems with Coupon 2 that we're going to convince you to try Fedora KDE?

[Jeff]

Not yet.

[Rob Campbell]

Or regular old Ubuntu with Gnome?

[Ken Starks]

But not.

[Jeff]

I would. I would go Fedora before I went regular Ubuntu, but I tried. I forget which one it was.41 or whatever. And it was solid. The biggest thing is just learning the package manager.

[Ken Starks]

But I do definitely recommend installing Chromium.

[Jeff]

I run Firefox 99% of the time. Other than doing this show, I don't use Chromium.

[Ken Starks]

That's why I say install Chromium just for this show. Get away from Chrome. That way you don't have that OBS virtual cam issue.

[Jeff]

I think it was OBS that was freezing, not Chrome.

[Ken Starks]

Well, my case, all I had to do was launch Chromium and I was able to get it to work.

[Rob Campbell]

Even with that high end system you have, Jeff. I mean, I imagine you must have a ridiculous amount of memory and just like the top end CPU.

[Jeff]

Last. Last gen cpu.

[Rob Campbell]

Well, that's pretty good compared to the stuff I get.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, save us from this measuring contest and let's talk about Mozilla Thunderbird's new release. Ken, what's new in Thunderbird?

[Ken Starks]

Well, let's ask Boris Nestor Apps and when I did, he wrote about the latest release of the open source email calendar, address book, chat and news client. Yes, That's Mozilla Thunderbird 137 chat. Yes, chat and news client. Now, it doesn't introduce any new features apart from a splash screen to encourage users to donate to help keep Thunderbird's development alive. Now, if Thunderbird is your daily email driver, please consider supporting it. This release disables the system tray icon in Linux systems until it gains functionality, and adds support for using file names when storing mail folders on Windows systems. Thunderbird 137 fixes RSS feeds to let users use the space bar to scroll the message like it does in emails. It also fixes missing edit menu entries when selecting the group header in the Grouped by Sort view, improves the threaded search view to update correctly when the results are sorted by date, and addresses an issue with in app notifications failing to display correctly when using the high contrast mode. Starting with this Release, Mozilla Thunderbird 137 is also now possible to cross point, cross post news articles. If newsgroups are on different servers, that'll be nice. Some visual and user experience improvements have been added as well, along with other bug and security fixes. Since I have only highlighted some of the changes, I do recommend reading Marius article for more details. And again, if you can afford it, please donate.

[Rob Campbell]

All right, what's this chat feature you're talking about?

[Leo Laporte]

It's got some chat in Thunderbird.

[Rob Campbell]

Who do you chat with? I mean, is it only with other Thunderbird users or do they have their own protocol?

[Ken Starks]

Depends on whatever chat service you're set up with.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's got support for IRC Jabber. So the xmpp it used to work with Google Talk. I don't think it does anymore because Google changed the way that works.

[Ken Starks]

Is this still around Google Talk?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean Chad Google Chat. But it's their own. It's their own sort of proprietary format to do it. But yeah, there's some instant messaging support inside of Thunderbird.

[Rob Campbell]

Okay, so it's not their own. It's just a client for other.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I mean I would imagine though that Mozilla has a server somewhere.

[Ken Starks]

It may even work with Mozilla Connect.

[Leo Laporte]

It might.

[Rob Campbell]

You know, you know one other, one other thing you mentioned on there was the removal of the, the system tray icon which at first, second there I was like upset for a second and then I realized, you know, 10, 15 years ago I would have been upset because I always like things like mail in my, in my system tray because I could so I could quickly see how many. But then I kind of realized I don't use that anymore. I don't have anything in my system tray. Don't really even like that anymore. But there was a time when, when I, I liked things like the mail client at least check clients in the system trade just so I can quickly see. But I guess for a second there I was, I was a little upset about that. But thinking about I'm not anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So there's, there's one outstanding feature that Thunderbird I don't think it has yet. I know they are working on it and that is being able to use Thunderbird with Exchange with the native Exchange protocol. It's getting there, but I don't think it's ready for primetime yet. When I talked with the Thunderbird guys on Floss again a few weeks ago, this was their big, big outstanding to do and it was like they knew they had to get this done if they wanted Thunderbird to be really usable.

[Rob Campbell]

Especially in the business world.139 I wonder and maybe nobody knows but is the Exchange, I don't know, API or whatever open enough for Thunderbird to utilize and connect to or do they have to kind of hack it to make it work?

[Leo Laporte]

I believe they had to backwards. They had to reverse engineer it I.

[Rob Campbell]

Think better word reverse engineer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah you can do a little googling and find some things like blog.thunderbird.net has a story from about the same time last year talking about trying to bring it in. They're building it in Rust. Their, their Exchange supports built in Rust interestingly enough.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, I'm not aware of any third party ones that really have consistently at least worked with Exchange over the years. Even Windows Own built in Windows 10 mail client I think only fairly relatively recently started to support it. I think they do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, yep yep yep. It's coming.

[Rob Campbell]

It's too bad, but I guess they don't want I mean it's too bad that there's not just an open here's how you work with our systems but that kind of would eat away at their higher end licenses possibly.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to say actually that they've gotten a little bit of support from Microsoft on this. Like not officially but I, I'd have to go back and listen to the episode where I talked to talk to the guy about it but I, I believe they've gotten some patches sent in by Microsoft folks if I remember correctly.

[Ken Starks]

Some of their engineers that want to use Thunderbird something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, basically.

[Rob Campbell]

Then again, you know I say it would eat into their own which it would probably into their own apps, you know, their own outlook that you had to pay extra for if you're on 365 but they've kind of already started doing that with their own Windows. I could say 10, but I guess that's 11 is their more current one with the built in app. So I mean if they're already doing it might as well let someone else do it.

[Ken Starks]

Actually isn't Microsoft wanting you to go with the web based version of 365?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure they want you to.

[Rob Campbell]

You don't have to pay extra for that though. That just comes with the lowest Tier of Office365. I'm sure they'd much rather have the. The paid Outlook tiers.

[Leo Laporte]

So if you want to use Exchange on Thunderbird, you have to use a beta or daily build and then you can. Yeah, you can go in Exchange. Mail support is enabled by default starting with the July 11, 2024 build of version 130 on daily builds. So go in for a daily or.

[Rob Campbell]

A beta must still be not ready for primetime if it's been in the beta for that long and not in the release.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it is an extremely complicated thing to add this new, not entirely well documented email exchange format. They don't want to roll it out broken. And that makes a lot of sense to me.

[Rob Campbell]

My fear is that Microsoft will change something and then it'll be broken again.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that. Apparently Microsoft has two different things. They call it like AWS and flock. No, not flock. I read and said the same thing. I read and didn't mean to. Graph. Graph is what they call it. The EWS is getting replaced by Graph and the Thunderbird support is for ews. I don't know if they've started working on the graph support or not yet. So. Yes, yes, that is exactly the thing. But the other thing Microsoft tends to do is when they do a version rev of a protocol like that, they tend to just reuse things. And so that's just a few more things you have to add to it.

[Rob Campbell]

I mean, even using their own products every year after year they're older. Unsupported products of Outlook get harder and harder to function with it.

[Ken Starks]

They've got unsupported products? Well, I mean, yes, I thought everything had backwards compatibility built into it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, have you ever tried to get support for Microsoft products? They're kind of all unsupported.

[Rob Campbell]

Yeah, but I mean like they don't even have updates anymore for like Outlook 2013 or 12 or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's not true.

[Ken Starks]

You can find plenty of third parties that will support Microsoft.

[Jeff]

My biggest fear is they're going to go to the new. They're going to force the new Outlook or force Web Outlook because both of them are just so terrible.

[Ken Starks]

Then it's obvious they will.

[Jeff]

Yeah, I could rant for an hour on them. They just. All the things they don't support, they're broken. Their layout is horrible. They.

[Rob Campbell]

All right, why don't you save that for your Windows show, okay.

[Ken Starks]

You'd be better off going back to using Excite.

[Jeff]

It's just a lot of profanity that. That's all My Windows show would be.

[Ken Starks]

Oh, you're talking about Windows Weekly.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Unknown]

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[Leo Laporte]

Let's go.

[Unknown]

And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing. Without freesight, the numbers look good.

[Jeff]

Brad, you're on mute.

[Unknown]

Switch from cable Internet to Zibli Fiber and get more of what you love for $65 less per month than cable@zibly.

[Leo Laporte]

Fiverr.Com all right, let's get this command line tips. Rob has it first and Rob is talking about Flock. What is Flock?

[Rob Campbell]

What is Flock? So I was on my more utils that I was do my more utils series that I was going to do and with that I was going to do a tool called LCK do, but this is being deprecated since the util Linux package now has a program called Flock that does the same thing. So I just had to bounce over to Flock, kind of being in the vein of covering what things in the more details does. So Flock or F lock or file lock F lock, it's a file lock. So it's used to lock a file. And this could be used in a script to lock a file. Make sure multiple processes don't try to write to the file at the same time or corrupt things. So for those watching, I got on my screen I have two console windows terminal windows I'm going to demonstrate here. The first one I have Flock space, just a random text file I made. Space dash dash, command space, quotes, sleep space, 10 quotes. So what that does is it runs flac on that file and then it runs whatever command you have after it. So in this I just have it sleeping for 10 seconds. And what that's going to do is while whatever command you have in there is running, that file is going to be locked. Once that command stops running, the lock will get released. So I'm going to run that and then we're going to go over to the second one, which is the same thing, but it's going to echo lock is removed. So I have flock space the file space dash dash command space quote echo space lock is removed quote. So that's going to demonstrate when that lock is up. So if I hit enter on this first one and I go over to this next one, hit enter. Well, nothing's happening because the first one's still running the slave for 10 seconds and the second one is waiting for that lock to be undone. So boom, right at the same time you see the, the lock went away and then the second one came up. So now just, for example, if I run the second again because it's not locked, I could just keep right on, right on running that. So that is like the, the base way to do that. I mean, that's just a demo example, but you could do this in scripts. Now there are other flags you can use. So if you use the dash U flag, if I use that in the second one while it was locked, dash U will unlock a file. So I could lock the file and then basically ignore the lock and just, and just take it. Then there's also a dash S which will do a shared lock. So what this will do is if I did the dash S and it locks the file for write access, but it allows action to take place that's only going to read the file. Now if it writes the file, it's going to wait until the lock is free and then there's also a dash n and that will just stop if the file is locked. So for example, if I ran that first one locking the file, and the second one, if I had N, it would go to run and see that the file is locked and then it would just exit out and not run the program at all. So obviously not something you're going to run unless you're, I guess maybe want to lock a file from other systems. But mostly you use this as a script to have, have locking control of files. So that way, you know, you don't have all kinds of processes writing and, and messing things up. And you know, I could have used something like this years ago. Long, long time ago. In my early days, I remember doing websites. I mean, I've done websites for years, but making a counter on a website. And this was before my MySQL days, I'm talking so I didn't even have a database and I would just have a flat text file that was basically a counter. And I don't know if you guys remember 25 years ago, all kinds of website had visitor site counters on them and I would have this text file and I would find that if multiple things were visiting the site, sometimes it would hit that text file at the same time and it wind up resetting it back to zero. Because basically I would read it and, and then add one to it. And if one was in the process of, of of its action, the next site thing would come along. It's like, oh, nothing here. Okay, one. So obviously that's more specific to PHP that I'm talking about and not a command line. But you know, I could have executed it or if there was something in, in php but something like that in your scripts could be useful, definitely.

[Jeff]

But that was a big improvement because before even the counter, Rob had to just sit there and watch the incoming traffic with a hand counter. Click, click, click.

[Rob Campbell]

You know, I just went through the logs and I counted, let's see, 1, 2, 3. Okay, three visitors yesterday. Update the webpage.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Jeff, what is, what is your apt related tip?

[Jeff]

So I've got APT modernized sources. Now this came around as part of my upgrade and doing some of this because I, you know, didn't update right away, you know, I loaded the operating system and then I went, okay, let me apt upgrade. Well, I ran across a message, it says notice some sources can be modernized. Run APT modernized sources to do so. Well, what does that mean? Should you, shouldn't you? So basically in January, Debian Unstable released a new source format. The sources which mean the repositories we download our software from went from a single line description to a multi line description. So in your operating system there's a text file, there's, they call it lists that describe the different repositories that the, that your system will reach out to to get the software and see if there's any updates and load them and there's some information in there of, you know, what they are and what, what they support and things like that. Well, now it went to multiline. The extremely oversimplified exclamation explanation is this format addresses the file length duplication and machine parsability issues present in the one line style format. So the first link in the show notes is a high level view of using the apt modernized source command. It's got a bunch of different apt things in it of different commands and whatnot but it's right towards the top. You'll see modernized Sources is in there. Now the second link in the show notes goes into deep details on the new format. Now I should mention though that when I say deep I don't mean hard to read. So if you've ever messed with sources lists, you'll easily be able to understand the new format and the reasoning. They also give examples of the new and old format so you can compare the differences. And I also used it to implement a fix to a message I was getting with the apt update command. So I ran I just, you know at this point I'm throwing caution the wind, right? I'm I run my apt modernized sources command and then after that every time I did an update or I mean upgrade, I would get the following message Notice skipping acquire of configured file main/ Binary i386/ packages as repository and then basically google chrome/deb space stable and release doesn't support architecture i386 which is just like it sounds. Chrome doesn't have an i386 package. So what did I do in my slash etc app sources list d directory I edited my now it's this is this is what it's called my Google Chrome sources file and I added the line architectures colon amd 64 that removed the message I was seeing because now I said for Chrome to use only the AMD 64 architecture and don't try to pull in any others. So now the message I was getting before wasn't an issue other than it bothered my OCD so I didn't have to fix it. I didn't don't have to go in there. It's nothing bad, it's just saying hey Chrome doesn't support more than one architecture so I but I wanted anybody else to also would have that OCD going. I want to get rid of this messaging, this is the fix and the second article because it lists all the different flags and options in there will help you fix any issues you're going to have. So be aware this is coming for anyone on Debian based that has a Debian based distribution. So it, it will be coming whenever as things trickle down and SID becomes or the unstable becomes stable. I guess not sid, but it's eventually going to hit all the regular non beta distributions.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, very interesting. Good to know. Do you figure that when it's a non beta update that the update script is going to take care of that for folks?

[Jeff]

I don't know because maybe it, you know like in this case, it just didn't specify an architecture for Chrome because certain things still take the i386 libraries and albeit it's not a lot, but because they didn't specify it, it still tries to grab it in there because I have the i386 set because I think it it either pulls it in because of Steam or because of Wine. One of the two is still makes sense pulling those or both or both.

[Leo Laporte]

Or both could be.

[Jeff]

And that's why it was just confused. If I didn't have that, I don't think I'd ever see that message and I'd never even noted well, I guess I would still get the message to modernize it just wouldn't have thrown the can't poll.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right, good to know about ken what is PW dot? And also what is dot?

[Ken Starks]

Well, let me go ahead and explain PW first. That's PipeWire's dot graph dump command. We talked about PW dump a couple of episodes ago, but today we're going to talk about PW. And it's got a few commands to it.

[Leo Laporte]

You're mirrored. Your screenshots are mirrored.

[Ken Starks]

Yes, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see. There we go. I fixed it for you. I got it, I guess.

[Ken Starks]

Thank you. But PW dot will create a file that you would and put a dot after and it contains basically a script that could be used by a graph is command dot to create a ping file. So that's why I'm covering both of them today with my can aligned. I'm starting off by showing you the pw dot, the standards, the dash h, the dash dash version, and there is the dash R of course, in case you want to work with a remote daemon. But with PW. I'm not going to worry about that since I'm having too much fun with the local pipewire daemon. Now, the next command that I do is I just ran PW.with no flags, and what it does by default with no flags is create a pw dot dot file. And as I said, that's just a script of commands that the graph layout program dot uses. It's in the dot language, in fact, which could become a whole another series by its of commands. By itself, yes. But when you run that, as I did here, it then turns around with the dot. I use a dash capital t p a n g to tell it that I want to create a dot PNG file, then dash o to give the output name of the file. In this case pw.png and then I list my working directory and it shows that you've got the pw dot dot and the pw dot png. Now what good is that dot PNG for? If you've got a image editor, you can bring it up. GIMP would work on this case. Just for viewing, I use gwen view and that lets me bring it up. And here I have the PW dot and what you see is it shows all the nodes that my pipewire instance has. So it's a quick way to do that. Now, you do have some other commands that you can use with the PW dot. I'm going to quickly run through those. One is for giving the output file that you want to go to. You do a PW space dash. And in this case I said space basic dot dot.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody had too much fun with that.

[Ken Starks]

And then again I use that file as the name for the dot command. And in this case I changed it to the output file name to basic PNG or basic dot ping, which would really be confusing. And then I also use the dash A command which tells it to run for all the nodes. And I did it to a basic-all.file and brought it out. And here's what the output of the those look like. This is showing the basic dash all png and you'll see there that I've got two other PNG files in the folder that I'll be going over in a minute. So. And here's the basic dash all PNG with all the nodes. And you see there it's showing. Well, I didn't with a screenshot I didn't catch up to all the way to the far left, but it's showing all the nodes and how they connect with all the information or to the different factories that were used to create certain adapters. And then I went and did use the basic the dash D option along with the dash O to get more detailed information. And there's all the detailed information. So it's a quick way to take a snapshot of your pipewire instance so you can look into it to get the information you may need for reviewing certain things. Get back up here. There we go. And then of course there's another option that is dash s or dash dash smart and that lets you just. It just looks and do does anything that's got links to it. In this case I was doing ran vlc. Yep, this is without any thing linked, so there's nothing. Then I started VLC and with some audio files playing and that gave me this and this one I'd called, looking back at the command line VLC smart. And I output that to VLC smart ping just to keep it better. And you see, I've built up quite a few files in that folder, just doing that. But here you've got the VLC media player. It's got the left and right audio outputs showing those being linked to the left and right inputs of the audio sync, which in this case is maintained by Alsa's output. It's the HDMI stereo for my Sanyo tv. And you. It's a great way to do a snapshot, see what you've got when you've got, or playing around with different links to get information.

[Leo Laporte]

I find this super fascinating and I played around with it a little bit myself while you were going through that and I discovered something that it's not documented, but it works. So the dash for pw, the dash ok, flag is where you tell it. This is the output file I want. You can use dash to send it to standard output. So PW O and it'll go to standard out and then you can use the pipe redirector and pipe that into dot and then you can. You can then use something like T XLIB on my install, at least to run it without saving anything to your local directory. It'll just generate it on the fly.

[Ken Starks]

And show it on the screen in another application or.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. So it runs a little. I'm not sure what technically this is. It's graphviz. Yeah. So it runs a graphviz instance. It might be Dottie. I'm not sure.

[Ken Starks]

I played around with that, but I didn't like the way it looked and I couldn't. Had trouble managing the output file in it. So I prefer Gwen View for myself. It's what you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The nice thing about this though is, like I said, it doesn't throw any extra files onto your file system. You can just.

[Rob Campbell]

You can type that right into that file frame buffer image viewer that I did probably a few months ago.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. Yeah, I'm sure you could do that too. All kinds of fun stuff in there. All right, I've got a command line tip and I've actually had quite a bit of fun with this just in the past couple of hours since I discovered it. I was looking through my lists of like, oh, which command line tip came up with trash? And this one is really fascinating. It is essentially the name of the program is actually trash cli and it comes when you install it, you get multiple commands for the command line. And it essentially lets you work with the graphical desktop's trash system from the command line. So it's like the standard free desktop trash. And the whole idea there is when you delete something from your desktop using your desktop environment, it doesn't actually delete the file in the same way that just an RM does. It moves it to the. The trash can. And we've probably all been there where we RM'd something and then realized moments later that we RM'd it up as it were, messed up. And the thing that we deleted when you use RM is gone forever. So you can use trash instead of rm. Just trash by itself, trash. And then a file name will move a file to the trash can. And then there's things like Trash dash. I think it's trashdash list will show everything that's in there, which unfortunately it's not sorted very well. There's a couple of outstanding feature requests in the Trash CLI that I found because you would think, oh, surely it sorts them by the date you deleted it, or it sorts them by name. No, it doesn't do either of those. It just sort of randomly sorts them. That's less than great. But there's also the ability to empty the trash trash empty. Or you can do trash restore to be able to get a file back from the trash can. And so there's kind of two main use cases for this that I see. One is having a command line interface to be able to work with your trash can from your desktop. So you've deleted something within your desktop environment and you want to be able to look at that, maybe pull it into a script or automatically restore something like that. It's useful there, but I think it's also pretty useful to be able to trash files from the command line and they're gone, quote unquote, but they're still in your trash can if you ever wanted to get them back. And so I think both of those are potentially pretty useful things. And it's available on both Fedora and my POP OS machine. So I think it's going to be pretty, pretty widely available just to install from your repositories.

[Rob Campbell]

What was it called in the. What was it called in the repository? Was it just Trash or Trash cli?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm pretty sure that's what I installed to get it. To get it to. Working on both Fedora and popos, you can just run the trash command and if it's not installed, it will tell you, hey, do you want to install.

[Rob Campbell]

App install Trash CLI on Linux Mint.

[Leo Laporte]

Cool.

[Jeff]

Yeah. Trashcli 2504 says gives you the command sudo apt install Trash CLI. So it's aware.

[Rob Campbell]

I'll just alias that to RM and never make that mistake again.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, that's not a terrible idea. You could do that.

[Rob Campbell]

The flags won't be the same, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I don't know. I haven't looked into that. It may try to reuse some of the flags. I don't think there's. I don't think there's many flags actually to Trash itself.

[Rob Campbell]

Well, I guess they have the dash R recursive. So I don't know. How many other flags do I use with the remove? That's like the only one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, not many. And then it has a little note here that some of these are ignored for GNU RM compatibility. So like, apparently that is a thing that people actually do is alias RM.

[Ken Starks]

Trash just to alias RM to Trash put.

[Leo Laporte]

You can just use Trash by itself.

[Rob Campbell]

When I make a new distro, it's just going to automatically alias that and that's going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I bet Trash is just pointing at Trash put because it's giving me the exact same. The help gives me the same thing. No, it's its own binary. Anyway, it's cool. Play with it. It's fun. Hopefully it'll save you from accidentally deleting something that was actually important.

[Jeff]

But how are you going to learn if you don't just totally trash your system every once in a while?

[Rob Campbell]

How are you going to learn to have backups?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, you're not wrong, but.

[Rob Campbell]

It'S much better if you learn to have backups when you delete one file than when it's all gone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes, yes, indeed. All right, it has been fun. I'm let each of the guys plug whatever they want to plug, get the last word in, and we're going to start with Mr. Rob Campbell.

[Rob Campbell]

All right, just my usual come visit my website Connect with me websites, robertp Campbell.com and on the website at the top you can find links to my LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky, Mastodon, and a nice little cup to donate me a cup of coffee in increments of $5.

[Leo Laporte]

Robert's P camp Bell with the P in there.

[Rob Campbell]

P C-A M P B E L L dot com.

[Leo Laporte]

Robert P. Campbell. That's somebody else. He exists, but that's somebody else.

[Jeff]

And we have had coffees donated to other members of the team through that site.

[Leo Laporte]

Indeed. Which we will eventually get paid our coffees eventually. All right, Ken.

[Ken Starks]

Well, I'm just going to recommend to everybody before you try any of those how to's that were published April 1st, back up first.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Ken Starks]

And since Rob stole my main one liner that I was going to do, that was April Fools from Foss Weekly.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. All right.

[Jeff]

And Jeff, one thing to say is I think Ken is right and it is Chrome that's messing up because I had to like totally shut it down and restart it because Chrome died on me. So you know the wonders of beta. But Firefox works great. Just saying. Nothing else other than a poem. Laptop had issues. We knew exec started seeing a few. He can't place a ticket. Said that you bricked it won't fare well at your next review. Have a great week, everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that hits a little too close at home. All right, appreciate you guys. Oh, the penguin. The Penguin. I have a Tux penguin. I have a tux penguin from ThinkGeek, the old geek store of yore that is sadly no longer in existence. I need to get that out. Anyway, I appreciate you guys being here. If you want more of me, there is of course Hackaday and you may have seen a little bit of a penguin going by there because the Floss Weekly is actually in the, in the slider there at the top of the page at the moment. But so I've got Floss Weekly is there and then also the security column goes live every Friday morning over at Hackaday. Make sure to follow there for your up to date security news mostly. Well, a lot of it is Linux flavor, but not entirely. But other than that we just appreciate everybody being here. And if you're not a part of Club Twit, you should really think about it. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month and it's the way to support to show you care. And we appreciate everybody that's there watch us and listens both live and on the download. We will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.

[H]

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