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Untitled Linux Show 204: The Scrollodex
01:44:23
Microsoft Open-Sources, Mozilla Kills, & SteamOS Goes Country
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- [00:00]
Jonathan Bennett
Hey, this week we're talking about the Wayland future yet again. Gnome's documentation problems, a pipewire update, Mozilla killing Pocket kernel announcements this week in Plasma steamos Cachios It's a lot of fun, you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [00:17]
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- [01:17]
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- [01:47]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.
- [02:09]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
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- [02:24]
Jonathan Bennett
This is twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show. Epis 204 recorded Saturday, May 24th. The Scrollodex hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It is time for the Untitled Linux Show. We're gonna geek out about Linux and open source. Some hardware, some software. We're probably gonna talk about Wayland and video cards, all the normal stuff we talk about. But what's going on this week? I've got the regular crew here with me and welcome to the guys. I am on location for those of you that watch, maybe for those of you that listen too, I may sound just a little bit different, borrowing a different mic on location in somebody else's office, been graciously loaned to me. But that's all right. The show must go on and we've got a lot of fun stuff for today. Starting off, we've got Rob, who is going to talk about, I think, Wayland, right?
- [03:19]
Ryan Reynolds
Yes.
- [03:20]
Jonathan Bennett
That desktop environment enablement technology from the future, the one that we're all running now. Everybody's running Wayland once again.
- [03:30]
Ryan Reynolds
Once again we're saying goodbye to X11 and hello, welcome to our new Wayland world. Our Wayland only world, that is. All right. So I know I feel like I keep saying this on here over and over through one story or another. You know, we just keep progressing forward, you know, with the continued growth of Whelen and the continuing demise of x x 11, that is don't get that confused with the different X. So. So this week the Fedora engineers and steering committee have signed off on having the next version of Fedora 43, that's Fedora 43, to be fully Wayland only and completely removing the Gnome X11 packages. This changes in keeping keeping ahead of Gnome's plans as they plan to drop X11 a couple of releases in Gnome 50 and right now they're on 48. Gnome has taken the first step this week by removing x11 sessions by default in the GNOME Display Manager when to be merged in their upcoming Gnome 49 release. This means that the underpinnings of X11 are still planned to be upstream Gnome 49 but won't be available as a default option or as an option by default unless you go on and modify your your GDM in your System to support X11. And then also in their own words quote, this is the first step towards deprecating the X11 session. X11 has been receiving less and less testing. We, we have been defaulting to the wayland session since 2016, which really surprises me. Back to the quote and it's about time we just we disable and eventually drop the X11 session completely. So it really surprises me that it's been that long that they've been defaulting to it. But yeah, they're finally, you know, 10 years now making that step. So. So though now with Fedora Moving ahead to completely remove X11 from its next release, there is some talk that GNOME might progress the removal of x11 a little quicker, at least a release earlier to align with the Fedora removal, but we'll see it happens there. But I know there's still x11 diehards out there for you x11 fans. You can still enable X in GNOME by adding or uncommenting because it should already be on there. The line that says x. Org enable equals true, just make sure that's uncommented or set to equal true. Whatever you want to do in your gdm.cfg file and. And you can still have your X. And for those worried about your old X11 apps not working, well, suck it up. They just need to get ahead. Give it the times. No, no, I'm just kidding. There, there, there is still X Wayland. It's still going to be the shim. They're available for those, you know, along until. Until those things, those apps you're using get updated or replaced for now. I mean, eventually, eventually it's not, but. So if you have an app that requires it, push those devs to get that thing updated. Come on.
- [07:09]
Jonathan Bennett
So I went into the KDE fedora chat room because famously there is still the KDE X11 packages against the KDE Special Interest Group's wishes. But the packages still exist because a different Fedora developer. Yeah, a different Fedora packager said, no, no, I'll keep making them like, fine, I guess. So I went. And I'm like, so with GNOME dropping it, does this mean that you're finally going to go murder those packages? And they're like, no, we can't do that yet. Okay, fine. So, you know, we've talked about this before, but I just, I want to mention it real quick again. So Keith says 512 says, Ah, this news is annoying. And I think he's saying this slightly tongue in cheek, but still. I thought Linux was about being able to do things the way you want to. You should be able to use X11. This is not a dictatorship. Who do you think you are?
- [08:05]
Ryan Reynolds
Windows?
- [08:05]
Jonathan Bennett
And you can still run x11 if you want to. The problem is that nobody is. Nobody's working on X11. There's nobody maintaining it. There's maybe one guy maintaining it and he is not the one that wrote it and so does not know the code base all that well. And so let's just say that the next time they find terrible vulnerabilities in X11, there's not really going to be anybody there to fix them. And maybe there's not anybody there, you know, looking for them out in the public. And what you're eventually going to find, what you're quickly discovering actually within the next release or two of all these major distros is distros are just going to stop shipping the X11 server. Not X Wayland. X Wayland is going to be around for a long time, but the actual X11 server, they're going to look at it and go this is unmaintained, therefore by our rules we are not allowed to ship it. And so the within, I would say within two years, none of your major distros are going to ship the X11 server at all for that reason.
- [09:05]
Ken Starks
But if you're a die hard X11 fan, you can download it and install it yourself.
- [09:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, sure. I mean there's going to be, there's going to be boutique distros for years, maybe decades to come that are like similar to we don't ship system D, we don't ship Waylon, you can run X11. So if you want to, you know, if you want to have your Linux experience from the OTS, then you can have your systemd free Wayland, free Sysvinit +x11 Linux experience.
- [09:36]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, there are still, there's still plenty of vulnerable old software you can install and download anytime you want. So as long as someone has the code out there, you could still use it just like anything else. But yeah, with, with everyone moving away from it, the developers, the distros, there's just a lot less testing on it. And to be to something to be wary of.
- [10:02]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Well, I was gonna say saying someone's maintaining even one person is pretty generous. There is one person that's added a couple little niche features for their particular use. Basically it's pretty much unmaintained. But like you said, there's going to be those boutique distributions, also known as welcome to my operating system hackers. The front door is open.
- [10:26]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, I mean so running X11, it's not like it's available on the network. X11 is good for escalation of privilege because it generally runs as root. But it's not really all that useful for actually getting into a system. So it's not like it's the end of the world to run it. One of the other interesting things here that's kind of part of this is that Red Hat just went general availability with Red Hat 10. And Red Hat engineers are actually a big part of what was keeping X11 sort of on life support with patches and fixes. And so with them sunsetting the previous version and moving into Red Hat 10, literally losing the few engineers that were that were doing the development on it.
- [11:17]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Yeah, and for we've talked about this previously, but for anybody that wasn't around, you know, in our earlier days, the people that were maintaining and working actively on X11, they're the ones doing Wayland now.
- [11:31]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [11:33]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
So that's where they went.
- [11:35]
Odoo Advertiser
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- [12:35]
LinkedIn Advertiser
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- [13:06]
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- [13:57]
Jonathan Bennett
Let'S talk about something that is not at all controversial, and that is the Linux audio subsystem, because nobody's ever hated on any of the replacements for that.
- [14:09]
Ken Starks
Audio and video subsystem. Oh, and this week we hear from two of my favorite reporters, Mario Snester and Barbie Borisov. They both wrote about the Pipewire project's latest release of Pipewire 1.4.3. It brings support for correctly writing MIDI streams, better error handling, support for sending custom commands, support for using the default value of filters, and many NetJack 2 improvements, including fixes for the drive manager roles for users and developers who dig into diagnostics. The PW mididump tool that I went over a while ago now correctly debugs ump sysrt messages, making troubleshooting MIDI data flows easier. At the core pipewire level, the update introduces the ability for all commands to be directed to the node, unlocking the potential for sending custom commands and providing greater flexibility for developers and power users alike. I know we've got some of those power users out there on the modules front. Beyond NetJack 2 fixes, improvements to filter graph state management within the filter chain translate to more stable and predictable audio processing chains. The SPA or simple plugin API component receives several targeted fixes as well to include RAW format buffer handling in V4L2, and it's optimized to avoid dropping important headers. ALSA supports these enhancements particularly around audio channel validation, helping to ensure more accurate audio device integration. There are still more details in Marius and Bobby's articles that I haven't even touched on.
- [16:28]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, interesting. So I have to go back. Every time we talk about either pipewire or obs, I have to go back and look at the the different patches that are out there for making the pipewire virtual camera work in obs. That's the thing that I'm waiting for. That's when all of this is really going to get interesting and get cool. But obviously we do all kinds of stuff with pipewire for audio.
- [16:51]
Ken Starks
When I went down the rabbit hole looking into this article, it looks like.
- [16:56]
Jonathan Bennett
We'Re getting closer a little bit.
- [16:59]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Yes, I'm definitely waiting for it because right now if, if anybody watching my green screen is a little funky, it's because my obs, I started the show and it went about two minutes before it locked up and crashed on me and it just loses connection with the camera and it I. I need that pipe wire video so I can get rid of the loopback device.
- [17:25]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I'm, I'm looking forward, I'm looking forward to being able to do all the things with video that we can now do with audio. With pipewire where people start writing video plugins and you can just drag and drop and have virtual cables to wrap things around. Yeah, interesting. People are talking about. Yeah, like you said, Ken, it's getting closer.
- [17:45]
Ken Starks
Yep. To the point where you've got pipewire options within OBS for capturing video.
- [17:58]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, so that's kind of the new thing that's interesting. Lib Camera is all about. Let's just not even use V4L2. Let's just go straight to Pipewire for capturing some of these new webcams. And that's kind of a big deal because then all of a sudden the browsers had to. Running a browser on Linux, you've got to support pipewire as an input. Firefox does it very well at this point, from what I understand. And so, yeah, now it's just the. We just now need to get to the point to where your, your video handling things can do kind of raw pipewire output streams. And that's sort of what we're waiting on for things to get fun.
- [18:33]
Ken Starks
I got a feeling it may be easier in the interim to create a virtual V4L2 device or pipewire device to capture your OBS output and then have that streamed into chromium.
- [18:52]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, boy, that's a, that's, that's a fun. That's kind of a mind trip of what you're doing there. Even adapter to an adapter to a virtual device. Whatever works. All right, let's talk. Let's talk plasma, which interestingly, just a little plug. I've actually got Nate Graham, who I think Jeff is going to talk to, talk about. We're talking with him on Floss Weekly this upcoming Tuesday.
- [19:16]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Oh, wow.
- [19:17]
Ken Starks
Who's your co host?
- [19:19]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't have a co host yet, so that's why I went ahead and mentioned it.
- [19:23]
Ken Starks
Anybody out there want to volunteer?
- [19:28]
Jonathan Bennett
I was kind of thinking that maybe we should get Rob to do it because he's not running KDE and he's.
- [19:32]
Ryan Reynolds
Kind of a KDE skeptic who made me a convert.
- [19:35]
Jonathan Bennett
Maybe we can get him to convert. All right, Jeff, what's the story?
- [19:38]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I'm already preaching the KDE Gospels, but, you know, with Rob discussing GNOME this week, we can't overlook what's happening in KDE and most of us are probably using Plasma 6.3.6 or a similar version somewhere in the 6.3 stack there in his blog, Nate Graham highlights KDE's focus on bug fixes and preparation for Plasma 6.4 release, which is scheduled in about three weeks. While the priority is stability in a a few features have been introduced, you know, little tweaks here and there just to make things even better and add little extra polish before 6.4 is released. Such a tweak is time of day wallpapers, so these automatically switch between light and dark versions based on the daylight cycle. So and these are special wallpapers so when you look to install them they will be indicated as dynamic and this this would be in the wallpaper manager Another notable UI improvement in is in Discovers excuse me, in Discover, which is KDE's graphical interface for installing programs. So when you're searching, wallpapers and other add ons are now excluded from results unless you specifically request making the searches, because then it makes the searches more relevant. You know, personally I found it frustrating to sift through excessive add ons and wallpapers when trying to locate a specific program. So in this change it's going to be a welcome improvement and just help find what you actually want to find. Looking ahead to Plasma 6.4, the audio volume widget is receiving a refresh to make it less cluttered, particularly for users with multiple audio devices. And while the changes aren't groundbreaking, they help smooth out the rough edges, making the interface more streamlined and organized. I know I've got quite a few on mine and it sometimes can get a little confusing. You've got to really pay attention to what's going on so you know what's happening. And I looked at some of the screenshots of the new interface and I think it makes it look a little cleaner and a little more organized so you can better find what you want. I won't go into great detail yet, but several UI improvements are also planned for Plasma 6.5.0. Oh, but we'll cover more of those when it's closer to release. We haven't got 6.4 yet, so let's tackle that first. In the meantime, Plasma 6.3.6, the latest in the 6.3 series, they included some bug fixes, so they included a Kwin crash fix when disconnecting multiple KVM connected screens. Screen tearing settings now apply immediately without requiring a restart the removal of a brief graphical glitch that appeared along the edge of the screen during login. But it was before Plasma splash screen or the desktop loads, and they also improved X Wayland's app behavior, ensuring they open on the requested screen and it more reliably matches the one that they wanted. So that'll help the lingering X stuff out there. You can find a full list of bug fixes in the Show Notes, including performance for improvements across various plasma versions. And when I say performance improvements, it was like there's some like little clipboard things that open quicker now and so not overall desktop performance, just a few, few little pieces going better. Quick status update. The number of high priority plasma bugs has decreased from four, from four to three this week and, and the count of 15 minute plasma bugs has risen from 22 to 27. Now, while bug numbers fluctuate, many issues are actively being resolved. So they're, you know, as new ones come in, they're moving other ones through the pipeline and solving them. So don't think these are very static. It's, it's when you, if you look at the show notes, you'll see there's a lot of bug fixes going on. So it's, it's a pretty dynamic list or number of bugs here. Check out the article linked in the Show Notes for full details on all these changes, bug fixes and performance enhancements and everything. Kde.
- [23:50]
Jonathan Bennett
Very cool. I'm very tempted when I get back home to go ahead and update to Fedora 42 and run the KDE 64 beta, just to see, kick the tires, as it were, and see what's going on there. They've got some really interesting stuff that they've done and I want to play with it.
- [24:10]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
So go ahead.
- [24:13]
Ryan Reynolds
I was just gonna say, you know, as you implied earlier, I'm not a KDE user these days. I, I have been a user way back, you know, early 2000s for, for a long time and I just, just had to give GNOME some love and try it out. I like it. But the one question I do have, Jeff, because I haven't kept up with it, not really since before KDE6 is where on there on their Wayland, you know, get rid of x11. Have they disabled x11 sessions by default yet?
- [24:47]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
They're Wayland's the default option. You can still switch. There's a little switcher in the bottom left corner that you can use to go back to X11. So it's the default choice, but it's not like it's really hidden, it's just a toggle.
- [25:07]
Ryan Reynolds
So it's where GNOME was, is now right before this next release. So it's getting there.
- [25:13]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Yeah.
- [25:13]
Ken Starks
Now, are you talking about the KDE distro?
- [25:18]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
No, the desktop. You're thinking KDE Neon.
- [25:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I know what Ken's getting at. And that is, isn't that really a distro choice whether it's going to default to X11 or Wayland?
- [25:34]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Really? I, I suppose it could be but I mean, yes. And the, the six, the six series. Yeah because the six series is designed by kde so I mean you could, you could have a distro Force gnome, you know, x11 into gnome and still say well it wasn't the default, you know, it, it's KDE6 was planned to be plasma first so that's they've been dumping or I mean into Wayland first. So they've been dumping everything into Wayland.
- [26:06]
Jonathan Bennett
And I'm gonna KDE 7 that's gonna be Wayland only.
- [26:13]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
That I don't know, I don't remember.
- [26:15]
Ken Starks
Which means that if it's Wayland only and your distro has the option to switch back to X11, what desktop is it going to use?
- [26:23]
Ryan Reynolds
Knucky, I do want to expand on my yes or no comment. Just, just to, just to clarify though. Yes, in that a desktop environment has their defaults. They set them, that's what they are. But yes, and also that the distros should have the ability to modify those defaults as they see fit. So yes and no but it doesn't.
- [26:50]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Mean you make good choices all the time.
- [26:53]
Ken Starks
Going Distro agnostic GNOME and KDE are moving forward to Wayland only.
- [26:59]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, looks like KDE 7. Whenever KDE 7 is released, that is when they will drop the X11 support. Wonder how many lines of code they're going to be able to get rid of when that happens.
- [27:09]
Ken Starks
But once you've picked a distro then that distro may modify it to whatever they're currently using as the default.
- [27:20]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Sure, yeah but yeah, there's going to be a lot going away and now this is just going from memory but I think based on the timeline we probably would see KDE 7 end of the calendar year ish first of the next year because they usually only go to about 6, maybe 0.7 before they rev to the next whole number.
- [27:45]
Ryan Reynolds
It if a distro Watts though, I mean they don't even have to use X11 and Wayland they can use, they could make their own and use that they can use I, I, I know there's some other something else out there.
- [27:57]
Ken Starks
There's a couple of others and they.
- [27:59]
Ryan Reynolds
Can use those too. Even though it's not, not made for it, you know, whatever you want.
- [28:05]
Jonathan Bennett
There's something that's not X11 or Wayland.
- [28:08]
Ryan Reynolds
Not popular but yeah.
- [28:11]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm curious what this is that exists. That's not either of those two. That's not just you know, curses on the terminal.
- [28:18]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Well I was gonna say a bash cell.
- [28:20]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. I guess there for a while with KDE you could run it with a frame buffer direct and it wasn't using any of those things. I don't know if that's even still a thing that was for like KDE on embedded systems.
- [28:35]
Ryan Reynolds
Arcan was that I think.
- [28:39]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't know.
- [28:40]
Ken Starks
There is also Micro X Win, dfb, Y Fresco and Zint basically Stuff nobody.
- [28:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, stuff nobody nobody uses that whole point you can.
- [28:58]
Ryan Reynolds
What I'm nobody.
- [28:59]
Jonathan Bennett
What I'm really. What I'm really curious about with all of those is like are any of actually maintained by anybody or is this a 15 year old project that's.
- [29:06]
Ken Starks
Nobody's touched the list I pulled up. Doesn't say whether or not they're maintained.
- [29:13]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I bet you a lot aren't because when you have something like X you're going to replace or Wayland. Yeah, we're going to do it better and we're going to do it right until they go oh my gosh, this is so much work. We had no idea that this was like 12 full time jobs to do this.
- [29:30]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, or their hobby projects.
- [29:33]
Ken Starks
DFB by the way is a display server that was developed by Dell.
- [29:40]
Jonathan Bennett
Okay, interesting. Probably for running inside their BIOS or something like that. Anyway, there is another big company that is not Dell. Somebody else that just released some open source. I saw this story, Rob. I'm not surprised that you're the one that picked it up.
- [29:58]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, I mean it's.
- [29:59]
Jonathan Bennett
He's on it all over it.
- [30:01]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I knew it was going to be Rob.
- [30:04]
Ryan Reynolds
So this week not Canonical, not Red Hat, but Microsoft. Microsoft. So they had their big developers conference called Microsoft Build and. And what else would we expect from a Microsoft developers conference but more open source news. Unfortunately this isn't the big news that some of us have been waiting for. You know, Windows being open sourced or Microsoft releasing their own Linux distro. Oh wait, they already.
- [30:37]
Jonathan Bennett
That already happened.
- [30:40]
Ryan Reynolds
But what is in the news this week it's still pretty cool. So first on my list is that WSL is now open source and available for all on GitHub under the MIT license. The act of open sourcing allows Microsoft to close WSL's very first GitHub issue from 10 years ago. Way back on April 6, 2016, Surinath opened an issue saying Quote hopefully Bash on Windows will be open source. I believe Bash on Windows is what they first called it. The response response at that time wasn't I mean it wasn't completely negative but it wasn't positive. All they said is quote we have no firm plans as yet but we're not averse to open sourcing some of this tech. And look where we are now 10 years later WSL is open source with as Microsoft is hoping to get some community involvement, you know up helping make it even better. So if you're interested there's something for you next on my list. And I bet you thought it was the end of new command line tools like command line text editors on Windows. Well, it isn't because Microsoft announced a new open source command line text editor for Windows and, and it's written in Rust. So you know, think of, think of it like the Nano or Vim by whatever for Windows. It's still, it's still in early development stages but if you want to contribute to that, that's also open source under the MIT license I believe it was third on my list is they announced they will be open sourcing the GitHub copilot in versus code and not much more. Not much to say about that but hey, there's another one. But final finally on my I don't want to get into too much about AI on, on this show because I don't want any more hate mail. Oh, just kidding. I've really only had like one message. It was even close to hate mail and it wasn't hate mail. It's just a critique. But anyway, anyway the final major contribution Microsoft Microsoft contribution is to the, the. The Mesa 3D graphics stack. They have contributed 62,000 lines of code introducing a new Gallium 3D front end 62000 lines of code. That means they actually have some, some, some real developers working on this stuff. They're paying them. Anyway, Microsoft's main interest in MESA appears to be getting more API implementation implemented atop direct 3D12 hardware drivers as well as where it ties into their Windows subsystem for Linux or wsl. As I mentioned earlier, as we all know, it's obvious here, Microsoft loves Linux and Open Source because they just keep on contributing.
- [34:10]
Jonathan Bennett
You know, it's kind of a meme and you're kind of joking. But at the same time I have been very impressed with the streak that Microsoft is on with actually doing things that are useful now. They don't hit it out of the park every time because there is also Microsoft Recall is a thing that is happening and my words have not been warm for that.
- [34:35]
Ken Starks
Let's get away from recall a minute and look and focus on WSL again because it's been an exciting year for wsl. Yeah, Fedora can be set up. Arch Linux and it's also already got its first GitHub issue closed.
- [34:53]
Ryan Reynolds
Yep. I said after a 9 year old one 10 years, it's 2026 now here's, here's an alternate. Never mind, it's 2025. Oh wow. I don't know what year it is.
- [35:07]
Jonathan Bennett
Rob is living in the future. Good.
- [35:11]
Ken Starks
Thank you for coming back to visit us.
- [35:17]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Here's an alternate take. Microsoft is offloading some of their development to the open source community so they can take those developers and dump them into AI and their cloud.
- [35:27]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean that's not entirely wrong. I'm sure that's fine though. I would prefer something to be open sourced so that I can go in and fix it or the thousands of other people like me rather than it being closed source and having to depend on sometimes less than stellar Microsoft engineers to fix it.
- [35:48]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I'm okay with terms their driving force might more be economic than goodwill. And I mean yes it is good that they open source it, but it.
- [36:00]
Jonathan Bennett
Could be that it's.
- [36:02]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
They know they've got to stay on Linux if they want any development to be done on Microsoft since most of the heavy duty infrastructure runs on Linux and so that makes them relevant and then they get to have the win of offloading. But I'm kind of cynical sometimes.
- [36:19]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't even think that's a cynical take. I would go so far as to say that if a company looks at it and they decide that they would lose by open sourcing something, they probably shouldn't do it. Open source is such a powerful thing and it makes so much sense for that very reason that you get fixes and security enhancements and all the other advantages that open source gives you from the community. I don't even think that idea of goodwill necessarily even has to be part of the, part of the equation.
- [36:54]
Ryan Reynolds
I think they're utilizing open source the way open sources is meant to be. You know, it's not like, it's not like they're doing like some companies, you know, using open source and completely, I don't know, not, not contributing, not paying, not doing, giving anything back to the community like what Amazon has been, has been you, you can, you can, whatever the word is, not say anything about this but you know, like excuse yourself from this conversation. There we go. That's the word. Yeah.
- [37:31]
Ken Starks
Rob, I think I've actually got a article down in the rabbit hole that touches on this.
- [37:41]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, you have to pull it out and tag it onto this particular conversation.
- [37:47]
Ken Starks
But I think it's a, it helps to improve the return on investment.
- [37:53]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, yeah. But I guess the one thing I was trying to get is, you know, some, some, some software things have, have tried to change their licenses to because of how certain big companies had treated them, which didn't necessarily go well for them either. But it's a lose loser.
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- [40:03]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, well, speaking of big companies trying to watch their bottom line that we have been watching for years now, it feels like Ken, what is what's getting killed at Mozilla this week?
- [40:18]
Ken Starks
Ah, don't play the trumpet yet. We've still got a little bit of time, but we can thank Bobby Borisov, Michael Larabelle and Joyce Nilden because they all wrote this week about the end of Pocket. Who remembers Pocket? I first knew of it as a Firefox extension called Read it later by Nathan I hope I'm saying this pronounced correctly. Weiner in August of We're going all the way back to 2007, folks. Now, Weiner's intention was for the application to be like a TiVo directory for web content and to give users access to that content on any, I repeat, any device. I still remember using it to store web pages that I then transferred to my Palm devices.
- [41:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh my.
- [41:16]
Ken Starks
Now, in 2017, Mozilla was gracious enough to acquire Pocket and then integrated it into the Firefox web browser. You no longer had to worry about it being an extension. It was built into it. This past Thursday, Mozilla announced Pocket will shut down July 8, 2025. Now, users can export saves anytime until October 8th of this year, after which their data will be permanently deleted. Now, if you also use the Fake Spot extensions, mobile apps or website, effective July 1st of this year, it is no longer available. Now, the Fake Spot feature within Firefox, known as Review Checker, will shut down on June 10, 2025. If you're going what is Fake Spot? It was basically an application for checking reviews. Now, Joey asked why kill Pocket? Mozilla said, and here I am quoting from their blog. The way people use the web has evolved, so we're channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs. While Pocket is shutting down, we will continue to invest in this promise through the new tab experience, our email newsletter, and more. Well, I just want to say goodbye Pocket. I do recommend reading the articles linked in the show notes, especially on how Mozilla is handling paid subscriptions. Yes, there were paid subscriptions for both Pocket and Facebook Spot.
- [43:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Interesting.
- [43:22]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I never knew anybody who used them, so I got.
- [43:26]
Ryan Reynolds
I got no opinion. So is this Mozilla trying to follow Google steps, killing everything? Or are they just focusing on what's important like we continually always say they need to do?
- [43:43]
Jonathan Bennett
Or are those the same thing?
- [43:47]
Ryan Reynolds
Okay, I think no, they're not okay with Mozilla. They could be the same thing with Google. No, they've killed good things. Very good things. If they want to focus, they have a lot more things to kill that they shouldn't start.
- [44:00]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Google doesn't have focus, I would argue, but no. Mozilla. Yeah, they got too spread. I don't know where some of these ideas came from. Where they're like, this is going to be a great idea. I'm like, in what little fishbowl were you coming up with this? No, just make the browser really good. That's it. You know, and then make, make Thunderbird really good. I'm good with that.
- [44:25]
Ken Starks
I'm gonna take a risk, step out on this creaky limb and say Mozilla probably acquired a bit too much over the years.
- [44:36]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I think. Well, I think that's one of the same. I mean like both of, both of these things were projects that existed outside of Mazzilla that they, they bought. And so that like, if you really love Pocket, sounds like Ken actually uses it. Ken is the only person I know that actually uses. Ever used Pocket used.
- [44:53]
Ryan Reynolds
When you have all that.
- [44:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Good.
- [44:54]
Ryan Reynolds
When you have all that Google money, you have to spend it somewhere. So.
- [44:58]
Ken Starks
And even then I was using the free form of it.
- [45:01]
Jonathan Bennett
Right. Right.
- [45:01]
Ken Starks
Until I found out about Caliber's news feeds.
- [45:07]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. So four. For the. The three people worldwide that actually still use Pocket, here's the good news for you. It's open source. It was originally an extension. I am sure it will come back as an extension. It will. It can happily live outside of Mozilla. And. Yeah. So nothing, nothing was lost.
- [45:28]
Ken Starks
Convert it to a plugin for Caliber.
- [45:31]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I was gonna.
- [45:32]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, sure.
- [45:33]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I was gonna say. And that's not a creaky limb that you were out on, Ken. That was a, a steel reinforced wood floor that just had a little, little noise in it.
- [45:43]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, that's Ken's kind of risk.
- [45:48]
Jonathan Bennett
I kind of hinted at this during the. The segue there, but I think we're gonna see a lot more of this because Mozilla has brought in a new CEO who is not a shaman. And what is the thing that the new CEO said, like his very first blog post that he wrote? We're going to go back to fundamentals. So I very much anticipate seeing lots of this from Firefox. Lots of. Let's shed all of this weird crap that we've picked up over the last few years, try to get back to fundamentals. Here's what Firefox is really about. And this is what we're going to work on.
- [46:21]
Ken Starks
Even though this may have been a very, very small, small source of income, we're spending more maintaining it than we're making. Get rid of it.
- [46:34]
Jonathan Bennett
Even, even if they were making source of income, even if they were making money off revenue. Revenue, even if they were making profit on it. I, I would still maintain that the, the ability to narrow though focus internally, but also just with the outside world. The perspective of the outside world on Firefox being able to say this thing that all three people use and all three of them paid for it, but it doesn't matter. We're going to ditch that and get rid of it. It's bringing about conversations like these, which is a good thing for the Firefox brand, because what is the one thing that everybody wants Firefox to do? Focus on what's Mozilla to do? And this focus on Firefox and Thunderbird. And by killing a product like this, what are they, what is the signal that they're sending to the world? They're focusing on Firefox and Thunderbird. Dang it. And they're getting rid of all this extra stuff. So it's a huge win. It's a great idea.
- [47:34]
Ken Starks
Yeah, they're getting out of the city and going to the country.
- [47:40]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't.
- [47:42]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Yeah, I don't understand that.
- [47:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Now you're on the creaky limb, kid.
- [47:46]
Ken Starks
Yeah, with that segue.
- [47:50]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, goodness. Oh, he's talking about steamos.
- [47:53]
Ryan Reynolds
They're riding a segment.
- [47:55]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes, we're riding a segue out into the country, I guess. Jeff, save us. What's going on with SteamOS?
- [48:02]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Well, the new version of SteamOS comes with a steel guitar and a fiddle, so it's known as Go. No, I'm just kidding. So this next story actually made big waves in the mainstream tech press because it signals an opening of opening up of Steam OS. Now the big news. SteamOS 3.7.8, known as Go country, has officially been released. Some key updates in this version include a newer Arch Linux base, Linux kernel 6.11, updated Mesa graphics drivers, and Plasma 6 for desktop mode now. In addition, SteamOS now supports frame limiting with variable refresh rate displays both internal and external. And a noticeable improvement is the addition of a battery charge limit control, allowing users to set maximum charge level for their Steam deck. Why does this matter? Well, limiting the charge to 80%, for example, can extend battery health over the long term, especially for devices that are frequently plugged in or rarely depleted. Now, why did the mainstream tech press take notice of this release? SteamOS has now officially added support for the Lenovo Legion Go S while also improving compatibility with other AMD powered handhelds like the ROG Ally from Asus and the original Legion Goes. Now this update also includes an improved Steam OS recovery image for repairing the Steam Deck and the Legion GO S. And it also makes it easier for users to test the Steam OS on their own AMD powered handhelds. And while this might seem like limited to existing hardware, the reality is that most handhelds today are powered by AMD CPUs with integrated GPUs, meaning SteamOS could become a common choice for future devices. You know, for example, attempts have been made to release Windows based handhelds, but those devices have struggled with poor reviews. Or the ones that actually worked pretty well, they were exorbitantly priced. I mean the one I can think of that got rave reviews, it was costing several thousand dollars for a handheld. Yeah, it was like, okay, this is just nuts. That doesn't even to me it doesn't fit with the idea of a handheld, which should be at least a somewhat affordable device. But I digress. While many of the latest fixes and improvements specifically target the Legion GO S and other AMD handhelds, this release isn't just about handheld gaming. It also includes significant graphics performance and desktop enhancements, along with features aimed at developers. So, you know, looking ahead, SteamOS could see a widespread adoption across more handhelds. But a bigger question remains. How close are we to seeing a full fledged SteamOS desktop experience? You know, a modern one, not the old one that's out of date now, you know, and if more handhelds embrace SteamOS, what could this mean for gaming as a whole? At this point, it's unclear whether mainstream developers. Well, I think it's pretty clear that mainstream developers are not going to start developing Linux games. But we might see an increasing trend of games designed to be Proton friendly, basically emulator Linux emulator friendly, because DirectX 12 provides a stable development interface, avoiding some of the fragmentation that Linux can sometimes face. I mean, even Linus Torvalds has said in the past he had a dive application that they didn't make for Linux because he talked about the fragmentation of Linux. While everybody has choice, it's hard to write a program and especially if you don't have a development team that's used to having a lot of Linux history and skill set to make it work across a wide number of distributions. So overall, the future of Linux gaming looks brighter than ever. And maybe just in a few years we'll see Linux reaching low double digit numbers in this Steam survey. You know, here's to hoping.
- [52:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's interesting to see it. I will be curious to see if anybody does any steamos powered desktops or steamos powered conventional consoles that are not intended to be portable. I think those really fascinating too.
- [52:38]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
And this would tie in with last week's story where we talked about the AMD AI Max plus chips which. Yeah, I know I'm leaving out a whole bunch of letters and numbers in there.
- [52:51]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I was going to say that's not the whole name.
- [52:53]
Ken Starks
No, no, we don't have time for that. Right.
- [52:57]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
But though at the time in the story I even commented they're almost like mini desktop replacement chips. I mean they're because of the power and what they can do and you know they eat battery pretty good too. But they are meant to be mobile. You know, they're, they're much more power efficient than the full fledged desktop chips. But that could lead to you know, like hey, here's a nice little console, you know, and especially maybe it comes in like a nuc style form factor, you know, one of those little tiny form factors. You don't have a physical drive, you run Steam on it. It's all right there. You just.
- [53:37]
Ken Starks
And you don't have to worry about having problems where it thinks your Super NES controller is hooked up when it's not.
- [53:45]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
That is true. They did fix that. I mean now I should mention, you know, take a look at the article in the show notes because there's a lot of details that I left out of things. They fixed, they corrected, they. Yeah there, there was a lot of good updates but I just wanted to kind of catch on why the mainstream tech press took kind of sat up and took note of this. That it they're predicting a lot of future handhelds coming out. Steam os.
- [54:09]
Ryan Reynolds
I've also seen some speculation online wondering you know with, with Our end of 10 discussion last week speculating wonder if like Valve, if they, if they may like release a desktop. Haven't we haven't heard of any leaks like that. Maybe they should in time for like the end of Windows 10 something to kind of fill that gap as a gaming desktop.
- [54:33]
Jonathan Bennett
That would, that would be pretty interesting actually if it was hey your Windows 10 machine. I could just imagine this pop up next time somebody starts steam. Your Windows 10 machine is about to be obsoleted. Click here to upgrade to Steam os.
- [54:50]
Ryan Reynolds
Oh wow. That's like playing the Windows pop up game on them.
- [54:57]
Jonathan Bennett
No, if they did it, if they did it Windows style, it would just do it automatically.
- [55:01]
Ryan Reynolds
Well yeah, you don't force it but I mean.
- [55:05]
Ken Starks
It would get a warning.
- [55:06]
Ryan Reynolds
It's more like using IE and Google saying hey, upgrade to Chrome or would.
- [55:14]
Jonathan Bennett
You like to get to Google faster, Click here to upgrade to Chrome. Yeah.
- [55:19]
Ken Starks
Would you like to get to your games faster?
- [55:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah, I could see it. I mean, who knows, I could see SteamOS, I could see Valve jumping on the end of 10 bandwagon and becoming part of that now.
- [55:30]
Ryan Reynolds
Sure.
- [55:30]
Ken Starks
And I look at Linux, Steam OS, does it support ARMS, the Arch64 option chips?
- [55:41]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't think they have an official ARM64 image.
- [55:46]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I think they do have some support, but I don't think it's official. Official yet.
- [55:50]
Ken Starks
Right.
- [55:51]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I thought, I remember reading that they did have it.
- [55:53]
Ryan Reynolds
It's just, it's something quite ready working on I think.
- [55:57]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Yeah, it's not quite ready for prime time yet.
- [56:00]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [56:00]
Ken Starks
When that gets to where it's ready for prime time, I bet you see a lot more game consoles come out.
- [56:07]
Jonathan Bennett
That are ARM 60 the Pro. So there's two problems with that. One so far we don't have ARM 64 chips that have quite the horsepower that an AMD 64 does. And the other is that we don't have games that are being made for ARM 64. And so all of these are to do like just in time cross compilation to run those AMD 64 Pro compiled games on the ARM 64.
- [56:30]
Ryan Reynolds
And that is part of the story that we talked about in the past.
- [56:35]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I mean you can do it and people are having reasonably good success for some of these titles but it's not like running in Ultimate Mode, the newest thing. So you're not going to be running, you know, you're not going to be running Doom, Dark Ages or whatever they call that. And on, you know, ultimately high graphics and all of that, it's just, I.
- [56:56]
Ryan Reynolds
Think that makes more sense for handhelds possibly, but for consoles that you're plugging in and you have all the power in the world, I mean it's not like Xbox or PlayStation or any of them are using ARM. So I don't think it makes sense for, for any other console really use ARM yet.
- [57:14]
Ken Starks
At least what's in the Nintendo Switch.
- [57:18]
Jonathan Bennett
The Switch is ARM I believe. But again that is a portable with Nvidia graphics. It's docked portable. Yeah. So it's the Nvidia, it's the Nvidia Tegra, which is an ARM and it's got Nvidia's fun ARM based stuff on it. Yeah, I've got a buddy that does development on this stuff. Not for Nintendo, Nvidia uses some of his stuff, has never paid him for it, but that's a whole different Story, whole different story. He tried to get a job at Nvidia and they're like, probably not. But we'll take your code though, if you still want to keep open sourcing that.
- [57:54]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I think the end of Windows 10 is going to cause a bump in Linux. I bet you of the people that are going to switch, it's probably like 3% would go from 10 to Linux, but it's still going to be, I think a sizable number. And I think with you start including that, you, including the handhelds are going to be coming out because, hey, they don't have to license it with Microsoft. It's easier to do. A lot of this is already just plug and play. Then that's going to start getting a big enough percentage that I think more game manufacturers are going to say, hey, we're not going to write this for Linux, but let's make sure it's Proton compatible. Or maybe, oh, it's not. Let's add this patch to Proton so that it will be compatible and we'll have more of that going forward.
- [58:44]
Ken Starks
Or just write it for Proton, not Windows.
- [58:49]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Well, that would be DirectX 12 for 11.
- [58:53]
Ken Starks
Yeah, or 10.
- [58:55]
Jonathan Bennett
That's a, that's an interesting thought. I don't think there is a like dedicated Proton API, but yeah, you could totally do that. You could write something for, write it for Windows and then test it on Proton the entire time and make that sort of your, your targeted API.
- [59:10]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
And if you're a AAA house, you're going to be able to call up Steam and go, hey, what, Give us some documentation of the, you know, what protocols do you fully support? What don't you support in DirectX 12, for example. And they would do it if you're, if you're a AAA house.
- [59:28]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, absolutely.
- [59:29]
Ken Starks
Would they even need to. In Proton open source, it would just.
- [59:34]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Be easier to have the documentation than you don't have.
- [59:37]
Jonathan Bennett
You don't have EA developers. Let's just say ea, you don't have developers at EA that know the ins and outs of getting something to work on Proton the way that they do getting something to work on Windows.
- [59:45]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, they, they could spend lots of time and lots of money learning and digging in like, you know, but there's no, there's no reason when you can just talk to the experts.
- [59:56]
Ken Starks
So I can just see this conversation. EA calls Valve, Valve says, hey, crossover, what would they use?
- [60:06]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh yeah, well, for sure, right? It's the crossover guys that do a lot of this. It's not the only ones. There's some other companies out there that Valve is hired to do this. But I mean, that's part of what being a company like Valve is all about, is having this Rolodex which for you kids out there, that was before we all had cell phones. We would put people's names and numbers on pieces of paper and a Rolodex was this neat thing that you could, you could roll and the papers would like flip automatically and so you could flip through the list of people that you know. Whereas nowadays we just kind of scroll through our contacts. It's the same thing.
- [60:37]
Ken Starks
And when we did start transitioning to smartphones, one of the first steps was called Rolodex.
- [60:46]
Ryan Reynolds
Now we should call it a scroll of decks.
- [60:48]
Jonathan Bennett
Scroll a decks. Yep, yep. VAL has a deep. Scroll the decks.
- [60:53]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
And as Harold Finch in the chat says, Proton is probably the best thing that's happened to Linux gaming for sure. And I would agree because all the feedback I've read from people that do native development of games on Linux, it's just the APIs change and everything. It's just very hard to say it's going to run on Arch Fedora and a Debian distribution and just keep up with it. And not even counting all the, all the unique ones like SUSA and.
- [61:27]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, and what's good for Linux gaming is good for Linux in general.
- [61:32]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah.
- [61:33]
Ken Starks
Speaking of which, what would really help would be getting some help with documentation.
- [61:46]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. So are you to help open source, as Microsoft has been doing, and be part of the community? GNOME could use your help. So the GNOME release team is issuing a call for help as GNOME help and the associated GNOME documentation are much in need of some assistance. That's what they say. So documentation, it's one of those things that people often ignore, forget about, don't put a lot of effort into. But it's also one of those things that almost anyone of any skill level can help and contribute to. So you always want. Lots of times people are like, how can I contribute? I don't know how to develop, I don't know how to code, I don't, I don't know how to do graphics. What can I do? Here's the thing you can do. But you know, if you are more into the development side, the GNOME help viewer called Yelp, which that's kind of weird, not to be confused with the online review website. Yelp also isn't actively maintained. So while GNOME is using, for example, while gnome is using GTK4, Yelp is still stuck on GTK3, like GIMP, I guess but anyway, contributing to the struggling documentation is the software also uses a niche mallard format that relies on its own tooling and is not actively maintained itself. So there's a lot of issues here with their documentation. So what we're looking at, you know, is an out of date insecure. Also it's had some vulnerabilities. Help viewer utilizing an obscure niche help format built on top of an old version of jtk. All right, here's what the solution is. I think this was, I don't know, I think this is kind of obvious somewhat. I didn't really read anybody saying this, but maybe it did, maybe I missed it, but you know, it's going to be a lot of work but necessary for long term success I believe if you want to have good documentation, which everybody should want. One, develop or find a new help app to use for GNOME help documentation. Two, use a format that isn't niche or proprietary to that app. This, this will make it portable and easier to maintain. You know, maybe something like markdown or HTML or you know, whatever, something that's standard, common you can use outside of the the that app itself. Three, then you got to migrate the current documentation in the new system. That, that may be some of the hardest work depending on what format you do. And I don't really know about this mallard, how hard it is to migrate. Probably maybe someone has to make a migration tool once they figure out that converts it. If that doesn't exist, I don't know. 4. Finally update, add and actively maintain the documentation going forward. So if this is something you're interested in, GNOME could use your help.
- [65:05]
Jonathan Bennett
Has GNOME offered to spend any money on this? Are they going to hire anybody to help them do it?
- [65:09]
Ryan Reynolds
I haven't seen that yet. And we all kind of know where their financial situations are. At least last time we did a story on that. Maybe things have improved.
- [65:18]
Ken Starks
Pay volunteers.
- [65:21]
Jonathan Bennett
You can believe it or not, that is an option. You sure can. I mean maybe we're thinking about here then.
- [65:31]
Ryan Reynolds
You sure can.
- [65:32]
Jonathan Bennett
You sure can.
- [65:34]
Ken Starks
I just gotta find some time to volunteer.
- [65:37]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that's the trick.
- [65:39]
Ryan Reynolds
You can always retire.
- [65:44]
Ken Starks
What's that?
- [65:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Yeah. So what about Questing Quokka? Ken, if you're gonna volunteer, maybe you should volunteer to help test Questing Quokka for Ubuntu.
- [65:57]
Ken Starks
I just may. But as you're talking about Questing Kaka, we actually got confirmation this week on some more changes coming with. When he's saying quest and cocky, he actually means Ubuntu. 25:10 Michael Larabel writes about the canonical kernel team, confirming their plans to employ the it's not even out yet, but they're Talking about Linux 6.17 kernel and switching over to Crony by default. This will be replacing the systemd Time syncd. Now Kroni utilizes network time security. I'm sure Jonathan can give us more details on that. I'm just going to basically say that the NTS standard is more secure than NTP and can prevent spoofing and avoid possible man in the middle attacks. And if, for those that don't know, NTP was network time protocol. Now Saurav Rudra wrote about the Questing Quokka roadmap, revealing two new applications. I'm not even sure how to pronounce this one. It's spelled P T Y X I S. I'm going to say patyxis and the other one is Loop, which will respectively be the default terminal emulator and image viewer on Ubuntu 2510. Pitaxis has been designed with a strong focus on providing container integration and an intuitive user experience for both developers and power users alike. Some of its interesting features include integration for container tools like Podman, Distrobox, and I don't know if this is a Mistype in my notes, but I've got toolbx and Terminal Inspector for debugging issues when writing terminal apps. Similarly, Loupe is a Rust based modern image viewer for Gnome, replacing the aging eye of Gnome Image Viewer. It takes advantage of GTK4 and.
- [68:14]
Jonathan Bennett
To.
- [68:14]
Ken Starks
Offer sleek and responsive user interface that doesn't feel clunky. Michael and Saurav's articles have more details and links if you are interested in other plan features or how to set up Crony now or to just go down the rabbit hole with.
- [68:34]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, so this is in addition to like the Rust stuff that they're doing. That's all landing in 2510 as well, isn't it?
- [68:43]
Ken Starks
Yes.
- [68:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's going to be quite the adventurous update for them for Ubuntu, really stretching their legs and getting everybody outside their comfort zones.
- [68:53]
Ken Starks
Jeff, I'm going to let you dive into Kumbuntu 25 Den before I move to Ubuntu Studio 2510.
- [69:03]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Oh, I'll. I'll be on it, you know. But yeah, they're really determined to be a much more cutting edge.
- [69:11]
Jonathan Bennett
They're.
- [69:11]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
They're kind of following Fedora in a less rolling or less frequent, frequent release format, but cutting edge on a lot of stuff.
- [69:25]
Ken Starks
Yeah, that's what this interim release is for. Cutting. Cutting your fingers.
- [69:32]
Ryan Reynolds
They still have an interim release every six months, just like Fedora has. Every six months. It's just Ubuntu also has the LTS every two years.
- [69:42]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Oh, I thought, for some reason, I thought Fedora was a little more frequent than six months.
- [69:47]
Jonathan Bennett
No, it's every six months. It's twice a year.
- [69:49]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Oh, okay, then I guess it's there.
- [69:51]
Ken Starks
Unless something breaks, then it's with.
- [69:54]
Jonathan Bennett
No, they don't do. They don't do major releases sooner. Fedora is also a little bit more willing to ship major updates of components inside a release. So like Fedora 42 right now, ship with the KDE 63 series. They will almost certainly update that to KDE 64 inside Fedora 42.
- [70:14]
Ken Starks
If 6. 4 comes out before 43, it's.
- [70:18]
Jonathan Bennett
I think it's intended to. Even if it doesn't, Even if it doesn't come out before, they may still jump to it. It's just the way they roll.
- [70:24]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Yeah. Mid June is when 6.4kde comes out.
- [70:29]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [70:30]
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- [72:51]
Jonathan Bennett
So Jeff came to me before we started the show and he's like, have we talked about Cashios recently? And I went and I looked, I'm like, dude, you talked about Cashios just last week, but it was just some benchmarking numbers and before that it had been like a year and a half. So it was a side note. Yeah, what is Casheos? Remind us what's cool about it and what's new.
- [73:18]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Well, last week, like I said, we, just as Jonathan mentioned, we discussed Cashios and it was one of the fastest Linux distributions available for the general public when using the AMD mobile chips. See last week's show. Michael Leribel over at Pharonix had a big benchmark across multiple processors and, and we looked at it, the top was clear Linux, but it's not really a general usage. So Cash EOS is the fastest general usage operating system on those AMD chips. Well, that was nice, but it came across my screen again this week and it's, it's in the spotlight thanks to an article on Boiling Steam, which is a Linux gaming website. Now according to the article now there's going to be a lot of caveats in here, so before you, before you just say oh no, that's not right, hear me out. They said Cash EOS is the fastest growing Linux distribution based on a trend analysis using the Proton database. But they do have several disclaimers like one the data set may not fully represent all types of Linux users. 2 It might not entirely reflect the broader linux gaming community. 3 the results could have biases based on who contributed to the database. Flatpak is listed in there, but it's not a distribution, it's just a reporting quirk from Steam. Feel free to ignore it. It's just how it gets reported so don't have too much heartache on that. Arch Linux also appears strictly as a desktop OS while Steam Deck OS is reported separately as Holoiso. So claims that Arch ranks first solely due to Steam Deck users are not accurate.
- [75:10]
Jonathan Bennett
So that was my first thought.
- [75:12]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Yeah, it is reported separately, so it is not including the Steam Deck so and the article linked in the show notes includes a video timeline showing monthly distribution popularity trends over the past several years. So you can see how they changed over the last several years per month they animated so you can see the bars go up and down and distributions come in and go out and it's kind of neat. Now the latest data from the April ranks the distributions or just the top few? There's a lot more but just hitting the top. Arch Linux has 20.9% Linux Mint at 11.4, Fedora at 8.7, Ubuntu at 8.6, Endeavor at 6.7, Cashios and Flatpak are both at 6.2, Nebrara at 5.2 and Bazite at 4.5. And like I said there's more distributions but I just hit the hit the top ones and you know it's kind of interesting. Cashio S appeared on this list only a few months ago but has been steadily climbing in popularity. Now like I said, the article features video visual growth trends but they also have a nice image for the same the same thing just with a static it looked like stacked bar charts basically and you know it it you can see how things have risen and fallen over time. For example, Manjaro, which once held a significant portion of Linux gaming on Proton has been shrinking and it seems to be now a minor player. Again with all those caveats though. But those unfamiliar with Cash us just such as Manjaro just like Manjaro, it's based on Arch Linux. Now Casheos does something else. It includes you can get a handheld optimized version so you know, kind of kind of dipping its toes into steamos that we just talked about. Now a few observations they had on the data set the author did. Arch based distributions dominate with more than 37% of users in the report. Debian distribution came in second and Fedora based distributions ranked third. Again you know it's big grain of salt taken here but with notice Cashew's OS rapid rise is worth noting. It's, it just keeps growing every month they look at this and it's, it's on a pretty steady noticeable growth trend now they do also touch in the article on the downward trend for Manjaro and popos and suggesting that both are probably going to continue to decline. Now this is. The author of the article speculates that Manjaro has long struggled with quality assurance and there are better options that exist for users seeking a safe and efficient Arch based distro. That's the author's words, not mine. And as for popos, its development developers have reportedly been preoccupied with other projects, primarily the Cosmic Desktop. So they're leaving a little energy, leaving leftover little energy for maintaining the base distribution. You know, they point out that Pop OS's main download page still offers a version based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS along with the Raspberry PI 4 image which, you know, the author notes is about three years outdated. So for full details, check out the article linked in the show notes and see what you think about this up and coming distribution. You know, personally, if I was going to try a distro based on Arch, I might try Cashy. It looks like it might be interesting.
- [79:10]
Jonathan Bennett
It really fascinates me that we see so many of these becoming popular that are re spins of existing sort of very old, very well maintained distros, sort of like what Ubuntu has historically been for Debian.
- [79:29]
Ryan Reynolds
And it's fascinating, it's interesting how these gaming distros seem to focus around Arch.
- [79:38]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes, well, so, okay, so the data set they're working with is protondb, right. So it is going to be a very gamer centric data set. So that's why it's not terribly surprising that you see these distros that are sort of specifically designed for gaming like Bazite and Nobara and I guess Cashios sort of fits into that same category being, you know, well represented, maybe a little bit above what you would expect because it's measuring what the gamers are using.
- [80:10]
Ken Starks
And I doubt you'll find any enterprise based systems in the Proton db. You better not.
- [80:18]
Jonathan Bennett
And very few, very few people visiting this from, you know, enterprise Linux.
- [80:23]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
And it even said that's why even the beginning they said it doesn't represent all Linux gamers. These are Steam gamers. So there's a lot of.
- [80:32]
Ken Starks
It doesn't represent all Linux users.
- [80:35]
Ryan Reynolds
A lot of people playing Solid. We said that game.
- [80:38]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah. So I think, I think that's a big part of why so many of them are coming from the Arch based. Because these are Steam gamers and that is what steamos is. So yeah, it's interesting. Super, super fascinating stuff. All right, shall we get into Command Line Tips.
- [80:58]
Ryan Reynolds
Let's do it.
- [80:59]
Ken Starks
Who's first?
- [80:59]
Jonathan Bennett
Let's do it. Rob's up first. Rob is first. Rob's gonna run away with it.
- [81:05]
Ken Starks
All right.
- [81:05]
Ryan Reynolds
I am still continuing on my more utils series. I think after this, I only have one left. So sad to see it go. I know you're all depressed, but most of all I'm depressed because it means I need to find some more things.
- [81:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Because you have to work.
- [81:23]
Ryan Reynolds
This one's kept me going and going. I had to think too hard. Anyway, today my command line tip, it's another simple one. It is called Z run. So let me make sure to get that on the screen for those watching the video. So Z run. It's very simple. All it does is it will uncompress the arguments in a command. So for example, for those watching, I have a file txt or file1.txt I guess, and file1.txt GZ. So all I did was gzipped the file and made the other file there. So one is gzipped up and the other is not. So just for example, I'm going to show, I'm going to cat them. So if I cat the file 1.txt, it just shows a text. This is an example file, blah blah blah, stuff like that. Now if I were to cat the other one, the gzipped one, I get a bunch of garbage. Now sure, if I had that file I could uncompress it, run my command against it and then I'd have all this extra stuff that I either needed to delete later or whatever. If instead I could just do this in line. So if I run Z run space cat space file dot file one txt gz, it's gonna uncompress that and inline and put it right in as an argument. And I'm just doing cat because it's a real simple way to show what is happening there. But obviously you can put any command there and. And it's going to decompress those contents or uncompress those contents. So 0 second to last tip in the more util series.
- [83:25]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, very cool. There's a nifty little hack here that this documentation tells you about and that is that you can link a name beginning with a Z and when the link is executed, this is the equivalent to running zrun space proxy. So you could write your. You could make your own zcat command by linking zcat to zrun and it'll just automatically do what you want it to do. That's very clever. I like that a lot.
- [83:55]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
That's cool.
- [83:56]
Jonathan Bennett
That's real clever. All right, Ken, we are going to take another look at pyfewire and the pwcli. What do we have this week?
- [84:05]
Ken Starks
Well, this week we're going to go back into the interactive mode and we're going to be. I'm going to be demonstrating using, you've probably heard this term, Jonathan, object introspection commands. Let's go ahead and bring up my terminal. Let me resize that a little bit so that we can actually see everything instead of having the live over it. Just take me a moment here.
- [84:42]
Ryan Reynolds
Just hit enter a couple times.
- [84:44]
Jonathan Bennett
That works too. Unless these are screenshots, then you can't do that.
- [84:50]
Ken Starks
No, it's live tv.
- [84:53]
Jonathan Bennett
We're live, we're doing it live.
- [84:56]
Ken Starks
And I'm feeling brave on doing it live on the live, the ACT physical computer, because I'm just doing inspections. How can I actually be changing anything? That's going to be two commands, List dash objects or ls. In fact, let's go ahead and type. Let's get into the pipewire command line interface.
- [85:26]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that's pwcli.
- [85:28]
Ken Starks
And yes, I still get that error when I do that. But the first one is list dash objects. Now you can just run that all by itself. And yes, everything goes down. Let me go all the way back up so we can start at the top. And what you see here is a whole bunch of. As we're looking right here at the very top, we have ID 0. It gives you the type pipewire colon interface colon core 4. That gives you the object serial, which in this case is zero, and the core name, which is pipewire zero. Now let's go back down to the very bottom and if we. You'll see we've got id159. This one is pipewire interface node and the client API is pipewire pulse. The application name is OBS. The node name is obs. Media classes stream input audio media row is production. And if you glance up you'll see you've got some others that looking at them all look like they're dealing with audio. And let's go ahead and just scroll back for a minute because I know we're going to have. We've got QPW graph for one application name, which is a client. Then a node which is a, has a media class of stream output video ID139. But it's a bit hard to go through and find all that. So let's go ahead and narrow it down by typing what we're looking for. Now you can list the type of object you're looking for from core to client device, factory module, node or port. As I said, I'm going to type core first. And there is the core object. That's what we saw as zero. Now here's a really interesting one is device and is quite a few devices on my machine looking, glancing through all the information for those listening ID 48 which is type pipewire interface device has a device description of HD Pro webcam 920 and a device name of V4L2 underscore device PCIe or PCI followed by a lot of zeros, underscores and a D dash USB dash 0_ 3 dash underscore 1.0 so if y' all remember when we went over a pipe PW dash metadata, you can actually go in in and change that device name to whatever you wanted to to make it easier, especially in your QPW graph. If you're running that, you got another device that's using the ALSA API is my Rembrandt Radeon High Definition Audio controller. Sounds fancy, doesn't it? But it's basically just HD Audio generic device. And then I've got another audio device which is called has a description of family 17H 19H HD audio controller. I think y' all have heard me talk about that in the past. And that's a house underscore card pci. And I'll let y' all read the rest of that when you watch it.
- [89:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Those are basically just your H, the audio on your HDMI output and the audio on your physical output, right?
- [90:00]
Ken Starks
Yeah, the. Yeah, line out, line in and the headset go through that family one. Now as we go on down, we'll see. I've got another video device ID number 119. It's got a device API of V4L2. The device description is OBS Virtual Camera. And the device name it gives is V4L2_device._sys_devices_virtual_video for Linux_video2. So I've actually got that listed in my pipeware, so I could actually do something with that if I wanted to make changes. And then of course, I've got my Behringer preamp that I'm using for my mic down here at the very end. Now, as I'd mentioned, you can also list clients. What's the difference between a client and a device? Well, the clients give you information like the process id, user ID and gid, as well as labels and the pipewire access.
- [91:33]
Jonathan Bennett
Sorry, those are programs your clients are your programs that are running that are talking to pipewire.
- [91:39]
Ken Starks
Correct?
- [91:40]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [91:41]
Ken Starks
Now there's also. Why would you want to look for a factory?
- [91:52]
Jonathan Bennett
This is going to give you info probably about the defaults of how some of these things are going to come up.
- [91:56]
Ken Starks
Whether it's going to have a scrolling through here you'll see it's got like factory name of metadata, spot dash device factory where the factory type name is a pipewire interface device or spot dash node dash factory is a as a type name of pipewire interface node. That's another. Another one I'm going to go through in a minute and I'm looking for endpoint endpoint stream. I don't see C port so I'm just going to go ahead and show you the ports by guess how I'm doing this list objects port and here's all my ports and glancing through them real quickly as I scroll back. Looks like a lot of them are audio though we do have one here which is a video capture port for my HD Pro webcam. And then you've got obs monitors for audio.
- [93:28]
Jonathan Bennett
And then if you wanted to get more information about one of these, one of these devices in particular, that's where the info command comes in.
- [93:34]
Ken Starks
Correct. Let's take the very last one we've got here ID 157. You just type info157 to look at that one and there it gives all the information to include the properties. You've Got the format DSP 32 bit float mono auto audio port monitor whether that that can be will be true or false. Port group gives you the stream port id 0 port direction in this case out object path. This is it's obs monitor 0 port name monitor fl port alias is obs monitor underscore fl then it gives you the node id. Now I don't think it done nodes yet but we could go info that node ID was 159 and there's a lot of information about that node. One interesting thing is it gives you permission what the permissions are for the node. In this case it's rwxm which is read, write, execute and monitor. And in this case it says that the state is idle client API is pipewire pulse so it's an audio stream obviously application name is obs gives you the icon name as well Media row In this case production process ID user host and binary language. In this case it says It's EN_US UTF8 in other words, English US version and it's using the UTF8. Now here's the one that's probably going to confuse a lot of people. Since I am running on wayland, it's window x11 display equals colon one.
- [95:59]
Jonathan Bennett
That is a little interesting.
- [96:02]
Ken Starks
And I'll prove to you when I get done here that I am on Wayland the easy way.
- [96:11]
Jonathan Bennett
The easy way.
- [96:15]
Ken Starks
Well, actually, I don't even have to do that. Y' all remember was showing Kwin earlier that that only happens in Wayland. But you got all this information that you can use. Where this is advantageous is you could take this and use it to create a virtual device that mimics this node so that you could use it to do maybe to connect to before actually connecting to this node. And now if you really want to get all the information, info has a all option. Actually, before I do that, I'm going to quit and then clear and guess why I'm doing that? So it's easier to scroll back to.
- [97:20]
Jonathan Bennett
The beginning.
- [97:24]
Ken Starks
And I'm blocking it so you can't see it. But the bar for scrolling way down here is about that big. And you see how far back I'm going.
- [97:41]
Jonathan Bennett
Lots and lots and lots of stuff.
- [97:43]
Ken Starks
Yeah. So if you wanted to, you could.
- [97:51]
Jonathan Bennett
Do that from the command line pwcdli info all just run the whole thing. Then you can pipe it around however you want to through grep less or more.
- [98:05]
Ken Starks
I'm off the center. There we go. Or you could save it to a file.
- [98:15]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep.
- [98:17]
Ken Starks
That way you could have that as a reference for pulling up that information about all that stuff and then go back into pwcli. And I'm going to show you next week how you can create devices.
- [98:35]
Jonathan Bennett
No, not have to use one of the graphing tools to be able to do it. Yeah, very cool. All right, and let's see, Jeff, what is Y Cruncher?
- [98:49]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Well, today's command line tip isn't so much of a tip as it is a fun experiment or maybe just a way to push your computer to its limits. So Y Cruncher is a powerful number crunching tool capable of computing PI and other mathematical constants to trillions of digits. So Y Cruncher is designed for extreme computation. It's multi, threaded, so meaning it can leverage several cores and multi core processors or even multiple CPUs for calculations. It's also vectorized, allowing it to take advantage of advanced instructions like for example, AVX512 for faster processing. On top of that, it can handle swap space, meaning if your computations require more memory than available. It can offload to your hard drives or even multiple drives. And it's built to be somewhat fault tolerant. So if there's a computational issue or your hardware hiccups, it might be able to recover. You know, it's, they, they, they specifically said somewhat because it's, it's not fully, fully fault tolerant. So what can you compute with Y cruncher PI, the golden ratio E also known as Euler's number or and you can also do Euler Massaroni's constant. You can do square roots and logarithms of numbers and if you try to say well I want the square root of nine, it's going to come back and say yeah, that's an exact number. That's boring. Give me something else, you know, and Catlin's constant. Or you can even do custom constants using user defined formulas. So if you check out the article linked in the show notes, you'll find not only this list of record breaking, you know, you'll find not only a list of record breaking computations, but there's a link in that article to a world record run by Storage review where PI was calculated to 202 trillion digits. And they go over what they had to do. And there's a link to a video from Linus Media Group or as a lot of people know it as Linus Tech Tips where they showed their Guinness record of 300 million digits Calculation of PI. They go over how they set up the hardware, what it took, the software, all of it. And ties into last week's tip where they specially configured their CPUs to be able to handle the data. So it, they, they would specifically have cores just to handle the caching of data. And they had to take into consideration the architecture of the machines on you didn't want, you know, Data passing between CPUs if you could help it just to keep things rolling, you know. And so it was really interesting watching the hardware and the software, optimizations, configurations and what it took. I mean it was a beast of a machine to be able to do it. And really you could say machines. It also includes links to mathematical constants and computational methods and a fact explaining key details, you know, such as why the program runs on a CPU rather than gpu and among other insights in the computational methods, I mean they go over like some of the equations used to how you calculate PI and these other constants so that you can see the math behind it. Now it, it's going to be, you know, calculus based. So there's a lot of limits, some integrals, things like that. So it's, it's probably geared a little more for engineers and mathematicians and maybe the curiosity inclined. But you know, if you don't have to know the equations to be able to calculate it and, but I will say that, you know, it can take a fair bit of memory and whatnot to be able to calculate really big numbers. I should also mention, and they, they mentioned this in the article. If you decide to use a hard drive, if you have an ssd, be in mind that they mentioned that if you're really making a big number, this thing will thrash an SSD and just basically wear it out. The amount, yeah, the amount of hitting the drive, it's, it will do if, if you're not just going to limit yourself to memory. So, yeah, take a look at it and I did some playing around with it. It's pretty cool. So, yeah, happy crunching, everybody.
- [103:35]
Jonathan Bennett
Very neat. It was, it was 300 trillion decimal points.
- [103:39]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, 300 trillion though. I just did a Google and I don't know, the very first article I pull up says 3/7 trillion.
- [103:51]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
They listed as 300 trillion.
- [103:54]
Ryan Reynolds
Okay.
- [103:55]
Jonathan Bennett
Digits of PI, who can tell?
- [103:57]
Ken Starks
So you got any computers that can take 500 terabytes of memory?
- [104:04]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
No, I do not.
- [104:06]
Jonathan Bennett
It's a lot. It's a lot of memory.
- [104:08]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, Jeff.
- [104:10]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Yeah.
- [104:10]
Ryan Reynolds
You want to know how I crunch.
- [104:12]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Pieces at the restaurant with my teeth?
- [104:18]
Ken Starks
I don't crunch it, I chew it.
- [104:20]
Jonathan Bennett
There's some pecan by bars upstairs. I think I'm about to go crunch. All right, so I've got a quick tip. This one is probably not something that you're going to use on a daily basis, but it is something that you might want to know about. And there's actually two of them. LS MEM and Ch Mem. Lsmin you might get some use out of because it'll work on your machine and it'll tell you how much memory you've got. But the really interesting thing is it will tell you how that memory is split up into blocks and whether it's removable. So LSMM and CHM are designed for big iron machines where you have multiple banks and multiple rows of memory where you can hot swap that memory. And so if you're talking about like a super high availability cluster, you might want to be able to go in with Ch Mem and turn some memory off because you know you've got a problem there. Yank a dimm, yank a stick of memory out, get the new One, punch it in there, run the command with CHMM again to turn it back on and literally hot swap a stick of ram. Now that's not a thing that most of us are going to be doing on our own systems, but it might be useful to know exactly where your system is putting its memory and some of those things. So for example, on this laptop, it, it shows me that I've got 15.5 gigs total online memory. Those are split up into two different banks. I have a 3.3 gig bank that starts at 0 and then the remaining 12.3 gigs start at, you know, it's a 0 x00010000 and goes off through like 40 FFF. So that probably doesn't mean a whole lot to most of you, but it is really fascinating to see. And again, this is something that Linux can do. And maybe, just maybe somebody out there has got a system that actually supports this. But if you have run across these two commands, that is what they're for. So I found it looking at commands, it's like, oh, what LS things have we not covered? And this is one that came up. It's like, oh, that's fascinating.
- [106:28]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
That is cool. And for those that have never been in a, like an enterprise server room, it's easy to change memory a lot of times because your servers, you can slide them out on rails, pop the top and they, they've got like a hinge top or an easily removed top. Pull it off, you have your banks of memory, pull it out, put it in, put the top back on. I mean, it's quick attach, slide it in and you're going to buy your coffee. Yeah, well, you would. You're not allowed to have.
- [106:59]
Jonathan Bennett
I was just thinking, and a good data center, that's one of the things that you're on the list you're not allowed to bring in. I've been in data centers before where they're like, no cardboard, by the way. You have to unbox your server where you get in there because you're not allowed to have cardboard. Why no cardboard? Like it'll get pulled up against a fan and stuff.
- [107:15]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Oh yeah, just the, the dirt and contamination will build up on the coolers.
- [107:22]
Jonathan Bennett
And now that too.
- [107:23]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Yeah. You treat it like a semi clean room.
- [107:27]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah. Cool stuff.
- [107:28]
Ryan Reynolds
I've never cleaned a semi, but I know some people have.
- [107:32]
Jonathan Bennett
There you go. All right, it is time to let these guys, these knuckleheads get the last word in. Rob gets to go first, against my better judgment, and I get to Go first.
- [107:42]
Ryan Reynolds
That way I'm out of here first. Get rid of me. All right. If you want to know more about me, you can find me@robertp. Campbell.com it's for those watching the video. It's been down there in the corner the whole time. So, Robert P. Campbell dot com. It's always there on that page. You can connect with me at. There's little links for LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky, Mastodon, and if you really want, there's a spot to donate a cup of coffee to me in five dollar increments. So you're not really giving me a coffee, you're giving me five bucks or however many five bucks you want to give me.
- [108:21]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Me.
- [108:22]
Ryan Reynolds
That's five US Dollars, by the way, for those. I know we have some people outside of the States too, and I don't even know if it works for them because I know sometimes sites do weird things on different countries. I have no idea. I've never tried it. But give it a shot. Let me know when you go on vacation.
- [108:39]
Jonathan Bennett
Rob, outside of the country, you have to go pull it up and see if you can donate a coffee to yourself.
- [108:43]
Ryan Reynolds
Oh, yeah, I'll be doing that sometime soon here.
- [108:46]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, there you go.
- [108:48]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Donate a coffee to the rest of us.
- [108:50]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, there you go. That's a better idea. Yeah, Jeff has it right. That's a better idea.
- [108:53]
Ken Starks
Yeah.
- [108:53]
Ryan Reynolds
I'll just give you the money for that because why pay them the their cut? That goes to me. Experiment and I check it out.
- [109:02]
Jonathan Bennett
That's the whole experiment, man. That is the point. All right, Ken.
- [109:08]
Ken Starks
Well, I just wanted to share a couple of articles. The first is by Liam Provman. It's about the FOSS recreation of a Amiga OS making progress.
- [109:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Amiga os.
- [109:24]
Ken Starks
And I love that. That's probably the longest open source on OS that represents from the 80s that you can still run today.
- [109:37]
Jonathan Bennett
Nice.
- [109:37]
Ken Starks
The second one, I think Mirror or. And Travis K. A couple of our Discord Discord members may find more interesting. It's article by Michael Larabel about FFmpeg.
- [109:50]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I've been watching the FFMPEG stuff. I need to. I need to try to get them on Floss Weekly and talk about it too. That'd be fun.
- [109:56]
Ken Starks
Have they ever been on?
- [109:58]
Jonathan Bennett
If they have, it's been a long time. They need to come back. Need to get them back.
- [110:02]
Ken Starks
If it's been more than two years, it's probably time for them to come back.
- [110:06]
Jonathan Bennett
Definitely. All right, Jeff.
- [110:08]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
I was a big Amiga fan, so I'm gonna have to check that out. And for the oldest open source, I would say we need to look up when OpenVMS came out, that could, could beat it. Other than that, you can find me both on LinkedIn through Rob's LinkedIn and thank you to the people that have actually linked up with me through Rob's page. And definitely always love that. The other thing is you can find me on Floss Weekly this week. So definitely check that out. Very, very good show. And closing with a poem. Clouds hold your data. Where does your data reside when it's sunny? Have a great week, everybody.
- [110:58]
Jonathan Bennett
That's great. Thank you guys. Appreciate y' all being here. All right, so I don't have my normal monitor in the background to point at. There's no Hackaday, but you can find me there. Hackaday.com. that is where Floss Weekly lives. That's also where my security column goes live every Friday morning. And we sure have a lot of fun doing that and hope you guys go and check that out too. Other than that, we appreciate everybody being here. Those that catch us live and on the download, those that watch and those that listen. And you know, if you watch and you listen and you want to be able to do it ad free, you should consider Club Twit. Go and check that out. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month. And yeah, with that said, we appreciate everybody being here and we will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.
- [111:40]
I
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