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Untitled Linux Show 209: Riding Off Into The Sunset
01:13:19
Kernel Parting Ways, Gaming Performance, & Canonical's Year in Review
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- [00:00]
Rob Campbell
Hey folks, this week we're talking about faster gaming on Linux and the parting of ways that may be coming to the Linux kernel. Regarding BCash FS, there's an affordable Linux phone that secretly runs Android Wine is getting closer to supporting the NTFS sync, and a bunch more stuff that you don't want to miss, so stay tuned.
- [00:21]
Ken MacDonald
So when I ask, what is Odoo? What comes to mind? Well, Odoo is a bit of everything. Odoo is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth. But you know, some people also say.
- [00:37]
Rob Campbell
Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because.
- [00:40]
Ken MacDonald
It grows with your company and is also magically affordable. But then again, you could look at Odoo in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks. I mean, whatever your business needs, manufacturing, accounting, HR programs, you can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company. So what is Odoo?
- [01:02]
Rob Campbell
Well, I guess Odoo is a bit of everything.
- [01:05]
Ken MacDonald
Odoo is a fertilizer, magic beanstalk building blocks for business. Yeah, that's it. Which means that Odoo is exactly what every business needs. Learn more and sign up now@odoo.com that's o d o o.com does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? Well, with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the decision makers. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company seniority skills.
- [01:37]
Rob Campbell
Wait, did I say job title yet?
- [01:38]
Ken MacDonald
Get started today and see how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started at LinkedIn.com results, terms and conditions apply.
- [01:52]
Rob Campbell
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- [01:55]
Ken MacDonald
Keep dry eyes off your schedule with.
- [01:57]
Rob Campbell
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- [02:11]
Ken MacDonald
PF Extra gives you lasting relief equipped with a soft squeeze multi dose bottle featuring a double lockout system that keeps.
- [02:18]
Rob Campbell
Drops sterile so you can feel confident using it.
- [02:21]
Ken MacDonald
Refresh has been delivering relief from dry.
- [02:23]
Rob Campbell
Eye symptoms for 35 years. It's a track record of success that has earned the trust of physicians and patients alike. You deserve relief from your dry eye symptoms and your eyes deserve extra. Find Refresh online or in the Eye Drop section at all major retailers FSA.
- [02:40]
Ken MacDonald
And HSA eligible.
- [02:44]
Rob Campbell
Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 209, recorded Saturday, June 28th. Riding off into the sunset. Hey, folks, it is Saturday and you all know what that means. It's time for the Untitled Linux Show. We're going to talk about the OS itself, gaming, hardware, all kinds of stuff. There'll be drama, there'll be wins. It's going to be a lot of fun. It is the trio today. I've got Mr. Rob Campbell and Mr. Ken MacDonald with me and we're going to have a lot of fun today. Guys, we've got some stories here. We're going to let Rob go first and we kind of have a theme. We have a couple of themes and it's a good theme, most of it. We'll get to the drama later. Rob's going to bring the drama too.
- [03:40]
Ken MacDonald
I saved that.
- [03:41]
Rob Campbell
You saved that for last. Yeah. But Rob, what is the. Give me the good news first.
- [03:47]
Ken MacDonald
So, anecdotally I've always said my games run faster on Linux using Proton that than they even do natively on Windows. And you know, I've had debates, arguments, whatever you want to call them with, with people at various places online with people disagreeing and, and all the, all the stuff involved, you know, and I didn't know, you know, if. If I was just imagining it or what. I didn't think I was. But now Ars Technica has published some benchmark testing. I mean, I won't say it's extensive, but they've done some testing that pretty much confirms exactly what I have been saying. Specifically ours tested a handful of games on the Legion Go, which is this, the Steam Deck competitor, which by default comes with Windows. So they test on the Legion Go under three different scenarios. So, so the competing scenarios where they tested Legion Go with Steam OS, it tested with the default Windows 11 with the default Lenovo drivers, and they tested with Windows 11 with the ASUS drivers. So the actual manufacturer drivers, they tried with them, the Legion Go, you know, being a Lenovo product, and the Lenovo drivers were default, but they found that everything ran better with the Asus drivers. And like Doom the Dark Ages, for example, actually wouldn't even run at all with the Lenovo drivers, citing that. Yeah, it gave an alert saying that the drivers were out of date. So, you know, I guess there's something that Gano is looking for the deeper manufacturer drivers or. I don't know what they're looking for, but they could even Test that one on that scenario. So the, so they tested five games. The five games that were tested were Returnal Borderlands 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Homeworld 3 and Doom the Dark Ages. So they tested under a couple different graphical scenarios, resolutions. And you know, obviously you raise the resolution, the FPS is going to go down, you know, but that, you know, the FPS the comparisons were, were still the same. So I'm just gonna go, I'm just gonna focus on the results of the high graphics presets 1920 by 1200 resolution tests. Because the smaller one, you know, it's, it's the same thing but faster FPS. So in these, if you look at the Ars Technica article yourself, you can see these graphs. But in this for the FPS is what I'm talking about here. Returnal SteamOS had 33 frames per second FPS while Windows 11 and the Lenovo drivers only had 18 FPS. Now when they updated to the ASUS drivers, it got a little better, but it still wasn't as good as the SteamOS drivers at 24fps Borderlands, it was a lot more even there with actually SteamOS kind of falling behind. SteamOS 18.3, Windows 11 with Lenovo drivers 18.44 pretty much the same. And then the ASUS drivers under Windows 11 19.6 a little bit higher, not much Cyberpunk 2077, we're back at it with the Linux SteamOS kind of whipping the others again. So 17.9 FPS SteamOS 14.4 with the Windows 11 Lenovo driver, 16.6 with Windows 11 ASUS drivers. Home World 3 very similar. You got 17.1 for SteamOS, 14.5 for Windows 11 Lenovo drivers, 16.4 Windows 11 ASUS drivers. And the last game that they tested on was Doom the Dark Ages there Steam was also came out ahead with 15.3 FPS Windows 11 Novo drivers, we have an NA because they couldn't even get the game to run on that, huh? They got the game to run under Linux when under a scenario under Windows 11 they couldn't even get to run. And now if they updated ASUS drivers, they were able to run it, but still less than SteamOS with only 13.9. So all those only on Borderlands 3 was the FPS slightly faster on Windows, but overall showing it obvious clear winner for Linux Proton and you know, the Steam os, Valve and all them in general, all the hard work they've done. But you know, unfortunately overall, even though most games run great on Linux today, There are some games that still require tweaking, others still don't work and which, which to be fair, apparently some don't work on Windows either. But you know, and some online games are blatantly hostile towards Linux. You know, while while the games function just fine on Linux, the games or the game servers themselves will actually block you from playing online with their game if they detect that you are using Linux. But you know, we're kind of showing that the technology is there, it's just the support for, you know, from, from the, the devs and those. So you know, we all deserve a better gaming future. The ability to run games on the best systems that actually are capable to run it, the best. So vote with your dollars. Complain to, you know, the game companies when your game doesn't support Linux. You know, because it's becoming obvious with right support that this is the better option.
- [10:11]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, you know, it's interesting to me this is what Valve said back when they first started porting things to Linux even before there was like a Steam os they did this whole write up about how that it was the left 4 dead. Left 4 dead. Left 4 dead 2. Left 4 dead 2 I think about how that porting that to OpenGL they were able to push the frame rate up but also like the latency on it down significantly using I think back then it was OpenGL versus the X. And yeah, it's interesting that that's still a thing. It's still possible. It's real fascinating to me that this is true even with the Proton layer in between. But yeah, very cool.
- [10:56]
Michael
And on a handheld design for Windows.
- [11:00]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, yeah, but it's AMD hardware so like not necessarily purely designed for Windows.
- [11:08]
Ken MacDonald
I mean it's all designed for Windows and us Linux people have to make it work often. But I mean, I mean a lot of the manufacturers today are providing more actual native Linux support. But it wasn't that long ago where you know a computer manufacturer that make their device, they make their Windows drivers, they never made it Linux drivers, someone else had to come in and figure it out and make drivers for them, which is improved a lot.
- [11:46]
Rob Campbell
Yes, things have sort of changed though. So like when you're talking CPUs and where they get used, so many of those will go to data center and so much data center work is on Linux. The interesting thing with GPUs is a lot of those GPU cores are actually going to power AI things now. And guess what OS it is that's doing all of that number crunching? It's Not Windows.
- [12:09]
Ken MacDonald
You know this article also Talks about like 10 years ago they did a write up a similar one where back then running, running these games on Linux it, it didn't compare. But you know a lot of that is thanks to this Proton layer and the huge improvement they'd done. But even back then, my experience 10 plus years ago. Yeah, I, for, for 10 to 15 years ago I was, I was a Minecraft player for some time there. I ran a server, all kinds of stuff like that. And, and at that time due to gaming I dual booted. I boot into Windows to play a lot of my games. I'd boot into Linux to you know, go out through my day and do everything. But at that time for, for Minecraft, you know, the native Minecraft because you know they're, we're fortunate enough to have a native there, I would boot into, you know, this is exact same computer, I would boot into Linux and get literally double the FPS. This is older computer. So I want to say I was getting like 64 FPS compared to like 30 at the time, if that.
- [13:17]
Rob Campbell
You said native Minecraft. Well, as native as anything written in Java can't.
- [13:21]
Ken MacDonald
I mean it's Java, it's cross platform but it's. Yeah, yeah.
- [13:25]
Rob Campbell
Either way, one step away from native.
- [13:27]
Ken MacDonald
It's as native as it gets anywhere.
- [13:31]
Rob Campbell
Yes. As that application gets anywhere. Yes, yes.
- [13:33]
Ken MacDonald
Yeah, yeah. Even then it ran faster.
- [13:38]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. All right. So speaking of which, there's a couple of things that I am going to jump into right now and that is we've got another wine release, wine 10.11 and there is a thing that is percolating in Wine that is not quite ready yet, but it's really close. So this is Michael's coverage on it and it's in T sync. No, not the boy band from the 2000s. This is the synchronization primitive that got added to the kernel to make it act more like Windows specifically for wine. And Wine 1011 has some of the groundwork laid for that. I believe programs like Proton already support this. I'm pretty sure it's already in there. So this is just getting this upstreamed in a way that is acceptable to the Wine developers. And then I'm sure Proton will switch to it eventually. But if you're still running vanilla Wine, then this is going to make quite a difference. It really is a big speed up on some titles in particular. And of course there is your other, you know, fixes and new things in Wine as there normally is. They have 25 known bug fixes for a bunch of different games. Some very fun games mentioned here like Command and Conquer, General Zero Hour, Fallout 3, Thief 2 and Civilization 3. So some big titles. So Wine is continuing to make progress. There is another bit of interesting gaming speed up news and that is that the RADV Vulcan driver. So this is the, this is in mesa. The driver inside of MESA has added a ray tracing optimization that is strictly rdna3 and newer, which I believe rdna3 is. The AMD that just came out is their, their latest, their latest cards. And you know, we looked at sort of the performance between Windows and Linux and the Rdna3 cards and the older cards and one of the things that we pointed out. Oh no, excuse me, RDNA 3 was the ones released in 2022. So that's the 7000 series and newer. So we're on our RDNA 4. I misremembered that. I'm glad I looked Anyway, so this is a plug for rDNA 3, our DNA 4 and it's going to make ray tracing quite a bit faster on those particular cards. Let's see. I mean it's a, it's a moderate improvement. So in one case a trace took 4.45 milliseconds and it dropped down to 4.40, which that you're not going to be able to feel but. But in another case it dropped from 5.39 to 4.35 milliseconds. That's like a 20% improvement that you'll be able to feel. So it just depends. It's going to vary from game to game. But this is another, you know, it's another win. We'll see it in Mesa 25.2 and if you have a current generation or previous generation AMD card, you'll see a bump in ray tracing performance as a result. So that's cool. Gaming on Linux, it's getting better.
- [17:06]
Michael
Yes, it is.
- [17:08]
Rob Campbell
Yep. I enjoy that. I. Boy, I've not gamed, I've not gamed for a long time like a game that actually has ray tracing a AAA adjacent title. Well, I haven't done much of any gaming for quite a while, but a title that's AAA enough to have ray tracing turned on. It's been a long time. I enjoy it, showing time for it.
- [17:30]
Ken MacDonald
Yeah, all the graphics are great but I've. I've historically have had cheaper PCs and just wanted to get performance so much than high graphics. But you know, I guess if I, if I had all the stuff I needed, which I, I mean, I guess I kind of. I do now, but I guess it'd be nice to use it. This episode brought to you by Red Canary when cybersecurity threats hit fast, you need an MDR partner that moves faster. Red Canary delivers 24.7expert MDR support, total visibility, and actionable insights. Plus it helps you detect four times more threats so you can stay ahead without burning out. Red Canary clears the noise and has your back every hour, every incident. Get the backup you deserve. Visit redcanary.com difference to learn more. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile now. I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com switch upfront payment of $45 for a 3 month plan.
- [18:45]
Rob Campbell
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- [18:48]
Ken MacDonald
Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks.
- [18:49]
Rob Campbell
Busy taxes and fees extra c mintmobile.com are dry eye symptoms frequently interrupting your day?
- [18:55]
Ken MacDonald
Keep dry eyes off your schedule with.
- [18:58]
Rob Campbell
Refresh Relieva PF Extra Lubricant Eye Drops.
- [19:01]
Ken MacDonald
Offering an advanced formula to soothe and.
- [19:03]
Rob Campbell
Hydrate your eyes with innovative hydrocell technology to lock in moisture and prevent further irritation, Refresh Relieva PF Extra gives you lasting relief.
- [19:14]
Ken MacDonald
Equipped with a soft squeeze multi dose bottle featuring a double lockout system that.
- [19:18]
Rob Campbell
Keeps drops sterile so you can feel.
- [19:21]
Ken MacDonald
Confident using it, Refresh has been delivering.
- [19:23]
Rob Campbell
Relief from dry eye symptoms for 35 years. It's a track record of success that has earned the trust of physicians and patients alike. You deserve relief from your dry eye symptoms and your eyes deserve extra. Find Refresh online or in the Eye Drop section at all major retailers. FSA and HSA eligible, y' all. All right, Ken, if I at least am going to be gaming, I'm going to be doing it on kde. And there's some new news there, isn't there?
- [19:51]
Michael
Yes, there is. This week we hear from Marius Nestor and Nate Graham about various improvements and bug fixes to Jeff and Jonathan's favorite desktop environment. As you said, KDE Plasma. According to Marius, KDE Plasma 6.4.1 improves text contrast for labels used in subtitles or other secondary roles throughout the plasma desktop, improves the text readability of list items in Krunner and Discover when they are pressed or clicked, and improves the readability of graph axis labels throughout the plasma desktop to meet the WCAG AA standard. Now Nate talks about turning off the highlight window effect for Task Manager thumbnails. By default, KDE Plasma 6.4.1 improves the Plasma Discover graphical package manager by improving the list views to be properly navigable. Try saying that three times with the keyboard trimming all white space on the search field to prevent errors when copy pasting text that ends in a space. I've tripped over that a time or two. And fixing the missing backends section in the Settings window that prevented it from working correctly. Now, this release fixed several bugs, including issues related to Jonathan's favorite subject HDR tone Mapper, reducing reference luminance, and syncing virtual desktop grid to new virtual desktop order. Now, since I've only touched on the various fixes improvements, I do suggest reading Marius and Nate's articles for more details, especially how Nate feels this is going to help with addressing accessibility issues.
- [21:53]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, interesting stuff. Where was the detail about tone mapping? I was doing the thing where I was looking at another link and now I'm trying to remember exactly what you said and find it in your articles.
- [22:06]
Michael
Well, it's actually in Marius article. Or I may have gotten that from the actual.
- [22:14]
Rob Campbell
The changelog itself.
- [22:15]
Michael
Yep.
- [22:17]
Rob Campbell
Let's see.
- [22:20]
Michael
But Tumbleweed is up there with it.
- [22:23]
Rob Campbell
Kwin Core OpenGL allow the tone mapper to reduce reference luminance more. I am. I am very intrigued by this.
- [22:34]
Michael
I don't know if that's going to be big enough for everybody to see on their screen, but my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed virtual machine is actually running 6.4, 4.1.
- [22:47]
Rob Campbell
It is mirrored. Got to look at it upside down and backwards.
- [22:54]
Michael
All right, let me.
- [22:56]
Rob Campbell
Can you hit the right buttons? Don't crash your browser again.
- [23:01]
Michael
No, we don't want to do that.
- [23:04]
Rob Campbell
No. I mean it was entertaining, but we'll.
- [23:06]
Ken MacDonald
Take your word for it.
- [23:07]
Rob Campbell
That's all right. Yeah.
- [23:11]
Michael
And I might be able to trying to think where I can we could.
- [23:15]
Ken MacDonald
Fix that in post. You got that twit guys, right?
- [23:19]
Rob Campbell
I mean, I mean they could. I doubt. There it is.
- [23:23]
Michael
I saw that Restream was mirroring.
- [23:27]
Rob Campbell
Even came with a fun little animation when you did it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it. It's cool.
- [23:38]
Michael
There. All right. Yeah. So OpenSuse Tumbleweed's rolling right along with it. Yeah, I'm just waiting for it to get the next update of pipewire, which I'll talk about later.
- [23:50]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. You know, there is another bit of KDE news this week. Another KD Nate Graham blog that actually came out Today and I think it's got some new stuff in it that you didn't mention, Ken. And one of the big ones here is that they've implemented support for the xx Session Management v1 hooks in Wayland inside QT 6.10. Right. And so you kind of have to imagine the way this whole, the whole stack for KDE works. So when they want to add something, they go to the Wayland GitLab where it's hosted there and they say, hey, we would like to add the ability to do, in this case, session restore. It's not just the KDE guys have been asking for session restore, but they're one of them. We would like to do session restore. Well, in this particular case, there's been bike shedding and yak shaving around it for years, but finally it landed and then because KDE is built on top of QT of qt, the QT libraries, it has to be added to qt, which that has now happened. And so, you know, if Wayland is the top layer, QT is the next layer. And then we're ready now to be able to do the bottom layer, which is. It's not the bottom layer, it's the next layer, which is, hey, let's add the session management stuff to be able to do session restore into KWIN and KDE plasma and great, that'll be good. And then, you know, you get to the layer below that and you'll have the ability for a web browser next time you open it to go, I would like the windows to be here, here, here and here. And then finally when Chrome crashes and you open it back up, instead of having all of your windows stacked on top of each other, it can actually put them back where they were and talking through all of that. This is a lot of work for a silly feature, but it's going to feel so good when it finally works. There's other things in here as well, and one of the, one of the particularly interesting one is the accessibility thing. And so this is something that I don't know if you've paid attention. There's been a lot of chat and chatter around accessibility in Wayland and how there are still some problems. But Nate has a bit of a comment about it in here and he talks about a couple of things that they've changed for accessibility reasons. And I believe it's in. I'm not seeing it at the moment, but I believe it is in this article that he makes a statement that, you know, we've all heard about the Accessibility problems in Wayland, but it's actually not bad in KDE and they're definitely trying to make it better. In fact, the article I was reading, he made the statement they're putting their money where their mouth is and paying for some work for accessibility in kde. So it's coming along, it's coming. Fun stuff.
- [26:54]
Michael
Yes, it is.
- [26:57]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. I'm totally lost into the HDR and the tone mapper thing, you guys. You've got me on this rabbit trail. Goodness gracious.
- [27:07]
Michael
Now should we get you going down looking for a phone?
- [27:11]
Rob Campbell
So is this a different phone? We just like two weeks, one or two weeks ago we talked about one phone. Is this a different one, Rob?
- [27:17]
Ken MacDonald
I haven't heard of one phone. Who makes that one?
- [27:21]
Rob Campbell
Well, I think there is a one phone, but maybe that's.
- [27:26]
Ken MacDonald
We didn't talk about that.
- [27:27]
Michael
Listen to Android Faithful to learn more.
- [27:29]
Ken MacDonald
About that one, I guess. Yeah, I do bring up Linux phones on here from time to time. Once or twice a year it seems like, because there's a lot more of them than you really kind of realize, you know, and mainly the reason is because this is a future I really want to see happen, you know, and, and this year I, I'm bringing it up twice so far, you know, and it's something, I think it's something we really need and there's no reason we shouldn't have more mainstream Linux phones. So there are a handful of, of phone makers out there, you're trying to make it a thing. Unfortunately they are all somehow mostly very forgettable, you know, like we forgot what we just talked about a few weeks ago or like this one, the Fair phone. I've heard of them before and I forgot about them, but I've heard about it again and I looked into them now to see what they have announced here. So they just announced their Fairphone 6 and you know, although I've heard of the Fairphone, I have forgotten all about them until now. So the new fairphone still isn't as cheap as the Pine phone, probably not as cheaply built either, but it is much, it is far more cheaper or should I say affordable, far more affordable than the quote affordable phone option I brought up a couple weeks ago. This one coming in at around US$695. So besides being a phone that can run Linux, one of the great features of the fairphone is that it's, it has a focus on repairability, you know, being easy to take apart, swap out parts and put back together, you know, unlike these glued monsters that most of us have today. And the specs of the Fairphone 6 should be a lot faster than, you know, most computers. Most of the old computers we used to have, you know, faster than what Ken is running today. Starting with being powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7S Gen 3 processor, 8 gigs of RAM, 512 internal storage expandable to 2 TB via micro SD, a 6.3 inch OLED, 120 Hz display, 4415 milliamp battery, last up to two days. They say there's a 50 milliamp main camera and a 13 megapixels. I meant a 50 megapixel main camera and a 13 megapixel ultra camera. So by default this phone isn't exactly a Linux phone. I thought that's what I was going into when I went down the rabbit hole on this. But so out of the box, it's not Linux phone. You know, after reading the Pharonics article about this new Linux phone, I went to the site to find out more about it. How can I purchase it, where can I purchase it? And all I could find were Android options. You know, they have the regular one, they have a D, Google Android one. So it's pretty cool. But eventually in their FAQ under the support section, I found that they provide detailed instructions to install Linux on this phone. And the recommended way, you know, I haven't tried it. The recommended way sounds pretty easy as they say, the recommended way is to just do it through their fairphone updater app. You know, I suppose that's like their software center essentially, which unfortunately the link in their FAQ section, it goes to a dead link in the Google Play store. Oh, it's not there. So I don't know if they just haven't updated their fact FAQ and it's, it's somewhere else and hopefully they still have it.
- [31:46]
Rob Campbell
It may be that as an American coming to the Play Store from the US you cannot get to that link. That is the thing that happens sometimes.
- [31:52]
Ken MacDonald
Well, maybe so. So you know, if.
- [31:54]
Michael
Time to use a vpn.
- [31:56]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, but.
- [31:57]
Ken MacDonald
But if that doesn't work for you, they continue with the directions as to how to manually do it. So although their fairphone seems like a decent Android device, you know, even selling a DE Googled version, I'm a little bit disappointed it doesn't come with Linux out of the box. But also, you know, it's great that they at least provide Linux tree drivers, you know, right out or on day one that is that's been released and directions which I haven't been able to test because nobody's bought me one of these phones yet. But there's directions everyone, you know, you would need. Hopefully everything you would need is there to. To upgrade it to Linux. I had hope for a little bit more, but, you know, it is what it is.
- [32:47]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I mean there's. So there's some phone distros out there that you could totally put on this thing.
- [32:53]
Ken MacDonald
Yeah, I mean, sure there are. There are plenty of other more mainstream phones out there that you can pull Linux on, but they, they don't make it as easy as this one is supposedly. So it seems like a fairly standard spec phone could be. Could compete with most of your phones today, I think so. You know, it, it seems like potentially a good option.
- [33:19]
Michael
Do you think they could guarantee eight years of soft server support if they did ship it with Linux on it by default?
- [33:29]
Ken MacDonald
I mean you can't. Oh, you can guarantee stuff, but.
- [33:35]
Michael
Anything.
- [33:36]
Ken MacDonald
You can promise anything, but you never know what the future brings. I, you know, if you could install Linux on it, I, I guess the only thing that would stop it is if whatever, you know, the hardware in there gets dropped from the kernel. And I wouldn't see that happening in eight years at least unless they're using some really old hardware, which from what I read, they're not.
- [34:01]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I think, I think it's probably more. The danger would. More would be that the, the support never fully lands in the kernel at all. That would be the, that would be the one to really worry about.
- [34:14]
Ken MacDonald
Yeah.
- [34:16]
Michael
Unless you had a hardware manufacturer helping to support that.
- [34:21]
Rob Campbell
I mean, even then you can't guarantee that it's going to happen.
- [34:24]
Ken MacDonald
But yeah, I mean, we'll talk later on about how Linus, you know, keeps things out of the kernel.
- [34:33]
Rob Campbell
He didn't keep it out of the kernel this time.
- [34:34]
Michael
Just don't try to submit it as a feature in the middle of a.
- [34:40]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Yeah, no, this is a. This is interesting. The almost Linux phone from Fairphone is definitely interesting.
- [34:48]
Ken MacDonald
Yeah, Fairphone's been around for a while. I've heard of them. You know, I hear they're up to six already. Yeah, yeah, they're already up to six. I do hear about them every few years and then forget all about them and maybe.
- [35:01]
Michael
Would you like to go back to the days of BIOS with it?
- [35:05]
Rob Campbell
That would be an experience. Probably not a good experience, but it'd be an experience.
- [35:10]
Ken MacDonald
An experience.
- [35:12]
Michael
But Liam Proven wrote about a new iteration of a project as a modern C user interface library. The project is called Cosmetic, that's C O S M O E and it pulls off several neat tricks. First, even though Cosmo is a newly announced project, it is surprisingly mature and complete while being lightweight. Now, Cosmo on Wayland is a set of C libraries that allows developers to build rich, easy to code native Linux apps with the, as I mentioned, beos API. That's beos for those of you that are listening only and not able to want to make sure you're hearing right now it comes with supporting infrastructure and tools plus style guides. According to Liam, developers can build multi threaded Linux apps in C US that natively target Wayland. So I think this may be a good way to support the applications coming out in Wayland now. Although Cosmo on Wayland is new, it has well established guidelines and a distinctive fresh and clean look and feel. This iteration of Cosmo is an implementation of a project project to recreate BOSS or BOS on top of the Linux kernel and it's now called Cosmo Classic. Now Cosmo Classic started out as a port of the user land of I'm going to spell this out first and then say a way I think it sounds a T H e o s or Atheos to the Linux kernel. Athos. Yeah, one of those two. Over time the original Cosmo evolved into an effort to implement a BOS compatible operating system on top of a Linux kernel. Liam gives a brief history of the project in his article, including a link to developer Bill Hayden's home for Cosmo. Now I'm going to ask, could this be a contender in the field of the free and open source software user interface toolkits going up against opposition from QT or gtk? To answer that, you may want to read Liam's article for more details before making up your mind.
- [37:58]
Rob Campbell
Probably not, but it is definitely interesting to see it. Sometimes though, some big company will find something like this and go oh, it's from the ground up and it has the right license, doesn't have any of the tech debt that we're trying to get rid of. Let's go get it and run with it. And that's how you have things like Chromium based on the KDE browser and other crazy things that have happened.
- [38:27]
Ken MacDonald
I'm going to say Athos. That's what I'm going to say. Athos.
- [38:30]
Rob Campbell
I was thinking Atheos but H o.
- [38:34]
Michael
S H t H e o s.
- [38:37]
Ken MacDonald
Atheos at the operating system yeah, at the os.
- [38:46]
Rob Campbell
Athyos. Yeah, that works too. However you want to say it, man. The thing, the thing with the letters. Yeah. No, it's always fun to see stuff like this. People doing it just for the kind of the throwback. And it's really interesting to see a new project spin up to be able to do Wayland stuff. Like I said, you might see somebody pick this up and actually do something really interesting with it. It's so hard to tell, especially if.
- [39:11]
Michael
You do download and play with it. It comes with some example applications.
- [39:15]
Rob Campbell
It's always handy. Always handy. All right, so let's take a look at, take a look at Canonical. Hey, I think that's, I think that's what's next.
- [39:26]
Ken MacDonald
Oh, time to bash on them, huh?
- [39:28]
Rob Campbell
Well, actually we're going to, we're going to. They're doing sort of a victory lap, be honest with you. So this is something that Michael Lerbel at Pharonix found. And this is the annual report for Canonical. It's for the year 2024. So you know, we're getting close to. We are halfway through 2025 already. Oh my goodness. Almost through. Basically.
- [39:53]
Ken MacDonald
What is their calendar year though?
- [39:56]
Rob Campbell
Well, so it says that it's the annual report for the year end, 31st of December 2024. So apparently canonical has a business year that coincides with the calendar year, which I don't understand why a company would not want to do that. I'm sure there's legitimate business reasons. Anyway, they have their revenue and their margin percentages and their headcounts on here and it's really interesting. So in 2023 Canonical had a revenue of $251 million. In 2024 they had a revenue of $292 million. They're doing, they're doing well. Their cash flow before taxes in 2024 was 85 million. They, they, they did well. They made bank. They did really well and they are, they are. They have 1175 employees. That is their average headcount for the year, which is up from 2023. It's, it's good news for, it's really good news for Canonical. Yeah, it looks like their operating profits, if these are in millions, was 15 and a half million dollars. So they did very well for their shareholders. I mean it's not huge, right? It's not Apple money or ExxonMobil money, but for a purely open source group or mostly open source, a Linux group like Canonical is. Yeah, it's really good. Michael has a thought in here. About it's been a while since he's heard any talks of Canonical going for an IPO. They talked about that back in 2022, but it came and passed and there wasn't one initial public offering. But their numbers look really good and so if they were to spin out into an IPO, it would be successful. IPOs are really good for making the founders lots and lots of money. It's not necessarily a great thing for most businesses, but definitely makes some people very wealthy. Anyway, we will see if that happens. But you know, we do occasionally like to bash on Canonical, but I will say good on them. Good on them for making some money and giving people a really good Linux distro. One of the, one of the, one of the most popular Linux distros for sure. I don't know if I'd say it's the best, but it is one of the Linux distros, definitely.
- [42:24]
Ken MacDonald
If the founders are making profiting 15 million a year, sure they can make more money with an ipo, but do they really need it?
- [42:33]
Michael
Not this particular founder.
- [42:35]
Rob Campbell
I mean, how big of a yacht do you want?
- [42:37]
Ken MacDonald
I guess some of them are pretty expensive. I, I, I assume, I've never looked into it, but so, so I think, I think the moral that you're saying here is if you're looking to donate to an open source project, Canonical doesn't need your money. Give it to somebody else.
- [42:52]
Michael
They'll accept it, but they don't need it.
- [42:55]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. You know, there are, there are places out there that are really in need of operating funds. I'm not going to tell anybody to not give to Canonical. But yeah, they're doing, they're doing all right. They're making some money.
- [43:08]
Michael
And they are for profit, aren't they?
- [43:10]
Ken MacDonald
Yes. They're just a business.
- [43:12]
Rob Campbell
Yep. Yes.
- [43:14]
Michael
One that's helping to keep Mark Shuttleworth. Did I say that right?
- [43:19]
Ken MacDonald
You did.
- [43:20]
Michael
For once, as wealthy as he was.
- [43:22]
Rob Campbell
Before he started it, I mean, hey, they actually made money. That's a, that's a good step towards not losing money.
- [43:32]
Michael
Unless that's what you intended to do because you needed a tax write off.
- [43:36]
Ken MacDonald
Yeah, that was the purpose. He got into it, he thought, I need some tax write offs. And it backfired. Horrible. I need to find a way to make that kind of money.
- [43:46]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. Not there yet either.
- [43:48]
Michael
Legally.
- [43:51]
Ken MacDonald
Ideally, yeah.
- [43:54]
Rob Campbell
All right, Rob, let's talk about the drama now.
- [43:58]
Ken MacDonald
This episode brought to you by Red Canary. When cybersecurity threats hit fast, you need an MDR partner that moves faster. Red Canary delivers 24.7expert MDR support, total visibility and actionable insights. Plus it helps you detect four times more threats so you can stay ahead without burning out. Red Canary clears the noise and has your back every hour, every incident. Get the backup you deserve. Visit redcanary.com difference to learn more. Today's show is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Hi Zoe Saldana. Welcome to T Mobile.
- [44:53]
Rob Campbell
Here's your new iPhone 16 Pro on us.
- [44:56]
Ken MacDonald
Thanks.
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Rob Campbell
And here's my old phone to trade in.
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Ken MacDonald
You don't need a trade in. When you switch to T Mobile, we'll.
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Rob Campbell
Give you a new iPhone 16 Pro. Plus we'll help you pay off your old Phone up to 800 bucks and.
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Ken MacDonald
You still get to keep it. There's always a trade in.
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Rob Campbell
Not right now.
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Michael
@ T Mobile.
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Ken MacDonald
I feel like I have to give.
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Michael
You something in return for karma.
- [45:12]
Ken MacDonald
That's okay.
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Rob Campbell
I don't really have much in my purse.
- [45:14]
Michael
Oh, let's see.
- [45:15]
Rob Campbell
Hand sanitizer.
- [45:16]
Michael
It's lavender.
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Rob Campbell
I'm good.
- [45:18]
Ken MacDonald
Seriously. Let me check this pocket.
- [45:20]
Michael
Oh, mints.
- [45:21]
Ken MacDonald
Really, I'm fine. Oh, I have raisins. I'm a mom.
- [45:24]
Michael
Wait, wait one sec.
- [45:25]
Rob Campbell
I've got cupcakes in the car.
- [45:27]
Michael
It's our best iPhone offer ever.
- [45:29]
Ken MacDonald
Switch to T Mobile.
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Rob Campbell
Get a new iPhone 16 Pro with.
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Ken MacDonald
Apple intelligence on us. No trade in needed. We'll even pay off your phone up.
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Rob Campbell
To 800 bucks with 24 monthly bill credits. New line $100 plus a month on experience beyond finance agreement. $999.99 and qualify imported for well qualified plus tax and $10 connection charge payout via virtual prepaid card allow 15 days credits end in balance due if you pay off early or cancel CT mobile.com All right, there is some definitely drama.
- [45:56]
Ken MacDonald
We talked I think it was just last week about the bcash FS drama how Linus scolded them for trying to add features a feature updates at the release candidate stage of the Linux kernel. You know, the stage in which updates are supposed to be completely, you know, only bug fixes, no new features. So bcachefs, you know they have a lot to say in response but I'm not going to go into that this week because there's a, you know, check out last week's worth if you want, but there's plenty of new stuff to talk about, you know, this week. I'm only here to update you that on what's new. You know, they. So the Linux 6.16 RC3 was released and you know, notably there was initially there was going to be some things missing, but on June 26th. So as of today, a couple days ago, Linus wrote, I have pulled this, but also per that discussion, I think we'll be parting ways in this 6.17 merge window. You made it very clear that I can't even question any bug fixes and I should just pull anything and everything. Honestly, at that point I don't really feel comfortable being involved at all. And the only thing we both seem to really fundamentally agree on is that decision was or on that discussion was we're done. That's pretty strong words, but Kent's reply from the BCash FS team, he says, linus, I'm not trying to say you can't have any say in BCASH fs, not at all. I positively enjoy working with you when you're not being a D with a male body part, but you can be genuinely impossible sometimes. A lot of the times when BCash FS was getting merged, I got comments from other file system maintainers that were pretty much great. We finally have a file system maintainer who could stand up to Linus and my words, stand up to that bully and continue on with his quote. And having been on the receiving end of a lot of ending from them about what was going on and more that I won't get into, I don't want to be in that position. I'm just not going to have any sense of humor where user data integrity is concerned or making sure users have the bug fixes they need. Well, then just put the bug fixes they need, not features. So anyway, back to his quote. Like I said, all I've been waiting for is for you to tone it down and stop holding pull requests over my head as the place to have that discussion. You have generally good ideas and you are bloody sharp. It is fun getting stuff done with you when you're not battling. When we're not battling. But you have to understand the constraints people are under, not just myself. So there's, that's, that's really the full thing from, from, from the log. And I don't know, I don't know where this is going to go. You know, will this conflict be resolved or will they be parting ways?
- [49:54]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. So what does parting ways mean? What does that look like.
- [50:00]
Ken MacDonald
You'Re out of the kernel and you can do dkms. I don't know.
- [50:07]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, that's kind of what it sounds like. Sounds like Torvalds is Planning to pull bcash fs out of the kernel for 617. Interesting times. Interesting times.
- [50:19]
Ken MacDonald
Yeah. When's. I don't pay a whole lot of attention to the cadence. I know we've talked about it. How soon can we expect to see this? I mean, year more which are.
- [50:30]
Rob Campbell
Which RC. Did we just RC3?
- [50:33]
Ken MacDonald
Yes.
- [50:33]
Rob Campbell
So somewhere between three and six more RCs, you know, somewhere in there, depending upon how long it takes for things to settle down, then they will.
- [50:42]
Ken MacDonald
I mean, that'll be the summer then.
- [50:44]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. Yeah. So three to six weeks, basically the end of the summer is.
- [50:50]
Ken MacDonald
Well, I should say this summer for us in the northern hemisphere. I know we have some listeners in the southern hemisphere, which is winter now, I guess. Well, not even yet. Is it. What day is it? Never mind. It is summer here in winter there.
- [51:04]
Rob Campbell
Yep. Yeah. So three to six weeks somewhere around there. We'll see. We'll see the RCN get a full release and then the merge window will open. We'll see how Linus fills then.
- [51:14]
Ken MacDonald
I'm definitely curious to see what happens here.
- [51:19]
Michael
I wonder if this article by Michael has anything say about it.
- [51:24]
Rob Campbell
Which one is that?
- [51:26]
Michael
The one I just put in the club twit.
- [51:30]
Rob Campbell
The one Week later merge. Yeah, this is. This is the article that. That talks about the. The mailing list message.
- [51:36]
Ken MacDonald
Yeah, I didn't see that article yet, but it's. It's exactly. He's just writing it up from the mailing list message that I found.
- [51:45]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. So I mean the whole thing was. It was. It was questionable whether what Kent sent in was a bug fix or if it was a new feature. Because what they did is they found a scenario where data could be lost, but to fix it, they sort of had to invent a new feature to catch it and fix it. Right. So it was this bit of code that really walked the line between the two.
- [52:10]
Ken MacDonald
And, you know, I don't know why he didn't like specifically, you know, Kent, why. Why didn't you just specifically say that? Like it looks like a. If that's the case, like I haven't dug into that, you know, why not? Why not, Kent? Say Linus, this is. I understand this is a gray area, but what I put in there is fixing a bug. I mean, say that specifically if that's the case instead of halfway walking around it.
- [52:46]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I, I think from a certain perspective it was obviously a new feature, but from another perspective it was obviously there to prevent data corruption. And so that's, that's where the, the, the difference of opinion came from. Yeah. Anyway, let's.
- [53:03]
Michael
It's one of those. Where it was both.
- [53:05]
Rob Campbell
Sure. Both. And.
- [53:08]
Ken MacDonald
Well, I guess was it at a corruption, a bug? That's probably the real question. Nope, that's just how it was designed.
- [53:19]
Rob Campbell
All right, Ken, is there a new pipewire release? Is that what I see?
- [53:23]
Michael
Yes, just yesterday in fact, Marius Nestor wrote about the Pipewire project releasing Pipewire 1. Now, this latest maintenance update is here to fix bugs that could crash the filter chain and also plugin fix a ref count issue in the device provider, improve latency reporting in the module combined stream and improve save activation deactivation of the filter graph in module filter chain to avoid crashes. It also enables interrupts after an ALSA error to keep the data flow going, adds an option to disable Remote Audio Output Protocol, or what's commonly referred to as RAOP with a context property Add support for the alsa use UCM property for the ALSA UDEV plugin Improves some code paths in the Pulse server mixer and improves resetting of some stats after an ALSA error. Mario's article also reviews some of the other features provided by the 1.4 series of PipeWire that we have mentioned in some of the previous episodes. As always, I recommend reading the article just to see what I skipped over.
- [55:00]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, interesting stuff. I. I'm. I'm desperately considering installing Fedora 43 to this laptop and getting all that new.
- [55:13]
Michael
Pipeware goodness just to get up to 1.4.5.
- [55:17]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, well, that and a whole bunch of other things. I'm on POP OS on this machine and it's beginning to feel a little creaky. So I don't know. We may temporarily abandon the POP OS experiment on this until maybe it's time to test run.
- [55:35]
Michael
How long did we ask you to do it for?
- [55:39]
Rob Campbell
Less time that I've done it. I don't remember. Maybe a year. Was it a year? It's been way over a year at this point. Six months?
- [55:47]
Michael
I don't remember. Two years? Yeah, I think it was only six months when you.
- [55:50]
Rob Campbell
I think it was six months. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe. Maybe soon. Maybe soon might wait until we get the new laptop and set them both up at the same time. I don't know.
- [55:59]
Ken MacDonald
You pass, so.
- [56:01]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I pass.
- [56:04]
Michael
Will come out with 2404.
- [56:06]
Rob Campbell
Maybe. Yeah, I Think their next release is going to be Cosmic powered and so they're waiting for Cosmic to get to, you know, beta or stable.
- [56:13]
Ken MacDonald
Yep.
- [56:14]
Rob Campbell
All right, well, there is a release with some fun stuff that I want to cover real quick and that is the latest Blender version. We have Blender 5.0 and it has. Well, it has some really interesting things in it. One of the big ones though is support for HDR on wayland. Not on X11, but on Wayland. You can run Blender with HDR support. It is an alpha right now, and so not a full release yet, but you can go get the alpha and try it out. You want to make sure you're using the Vulkan backend and then go into Developer Extras under preference and interface and then you can enable the Vulkan HDR support under preferences. Experimental. It's experimental. Are you getting the impression that this is sort of an experimental alpha thing that is not quite ready for primetime? But they've got it and so now you can in a scene, configure it to use HDR and display it in with high dynamic range. And yeah, that's actually a really cool thing to see come along in yet another. Yet another program. And one of the last things that they mentioned here is that the feedback from this will be used to decide if they're going to move the feature out of experimental and if it's going to be a full on part of the 5.0 release. So any of you that are Blender users, if you're on a modern Linux system, meaning it's running Wayland, go give it a try, pull the alpha and go flip the things on and see how well it works. So the top comment on this thread is are there any plans for Windows support? And the official response is no official plans yet. Linux Wayland support was easy as it fitted into what we'd already laid out. We did test on Windows, but it had limitations and required more work than expected. Any developer could pick it up. Patch is welcome. Wow, that's great. So yeah, if you want to work in HDR and Blender, time to come.
- [58:24]
Michael
To Linux and bring an HDR monitor with you.
- [58:30]
Ken MacDonald
I think the theme of this show is how Linux is better.
- [58:36]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, 2025 is the year of the Linux desktop.
- [58:40]
Ken MacDonald
There we go.
- [58:42]
Michael
Gaming desktop at least.
- [58:44]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, at least. Oh goodness.
- [58:47]
Ken MacDonald
This episode brought to you by Red Canary. When cybersecurity threats hit fast, you need an MDR partner that moves faster. Red Canary delivers 24.7expert MDR support, total visibility and actionable insights. Plus it helps you detect four times more threats so you can stay ahead without burning out. Red Canary clears the noise and has your back every hour, every incident. Get the backup you deserve. Visit redcanary.com difference to learn more.
- [59:18]
Rob Campbell
Race the rudders. Race the sails. Raise the sails.
- [59:22]
Ken MacDonald
Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over.
- [59:25]
Rob Campbell
Roger, wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [59:29]
Ken MacDonald
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Rob Campbell
Thing Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless Everybody to get 30, 30B to get 30.
- [60:01]
Ken MacDonald
Better get 20, 20, 20 better get 20, 20 but get 15, 15, 15, 15.
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Rob Campbell
Just 15 bucks a month.
- [60:05]
Ken MacDonald
So give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan.
- [60:11]
Rob Campbell
Equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35GB of network's busy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com all right, well, speaking of Linux, there's a fun little thing in the kernel, Rob, is this. What is this, Rob? It's not a command line tip.
- [60:33]
Ken MacDonald
Well, it's not a command line tip. It's just a fun little tip on seeing things in the kernel. I'm guessing you've already maybe took a peek at this. Going to share my screen and there's a little URL. So for those not watching, you want to know what I'm looking at? It is a Vidarholand.net content word count. So it's V I D A R H O L E N and hopefully you got the rest. Otherwise just find the show notes for the link. So what this is is this. You can see a various word count over time on the screen. I have the the file systems word count which by default they have butterfest XFS, NTFS, ext4, um DOS. And looking at this graph, you know what, the NTFS file system had a big peak where it was in a lot of the parts of the kernel commits. Whereas in the end here more recently XFS is top one. They have UMS dos, which you know has a tiny little. Well it was, it was number one I guess at the very beginning and then dropped down to nothing. But you can change, you know let's do ZFS or ZFS and see if that. What does that do? And you can also remove stuff like that. So there's zfs in there. Huh? Nothing recent. It was in there from like 3.11 to 4.18 release candidate. But there's also other defaults like Star Nix hacks. Garbage. So they have various forms of the word garbage. Trash, garbage, rubbish, junk and on. Yeah, the word garbage just grows and grows and grows. And you know those are kind of down there. 64bit Booleans. Love, hate. You know, love hate. Meh. How often those are in there? Love is in there a lot. And people. Torvalds, whatever you could put. Put your own name in there and find out where you talk about or where it's in there. I'm surprised to see my last name has been mentioned a few times over the years. Probably not me because I haven't done anything. Companies. Yeah, Red Hat, Oracle, Google right at the end there. What? Apple? Oh yeah. I suppose that that's with Asahi. Asahi probably really brought that up to the top. And there's even a tab for swearing. I'm not going to click on that. But it's still fun to see how much swearing is in the kernel commits. So it's just a fun little thing to see these things. Looks like it was somebody's personal project. If you go to Vidar Holland. Net. I think I said Holden before, but Holland, Holland Holland. Anyway, if you go there, he's got some other projects too. I. I haven't looked at any of them, but maybe there's some other fun things to look at for this person's personal pet projects or whatever they are. Thought it's cool.
- [64:10]
Rob Campbell
Cool. Yeah, I like it. I like it. All right, Ken, I think you've got a entertainer teacher.
- [64:18]
Michael
Yes, I do.
- [64:19]
Rob Campbell
Right.
- [64:20]
Michael
And this week I am going to be going over how to sit or get permissions for the clients that you have in pipewire. Permissions that we're talking about are going to be for being able to read, to read from, write to and execute change metadata or in some cases create a link. Now the basic command for getting a client's permission. Let me go ahead and bring up my screen here. There we go. And just so I'm not having to try to type it in and y' all wait forever for me, it's going to be get permission followed by the client id. What I want to first do first is find us some links that we can work with because they will help us with getting the information for clients, I need to have links up. Let me pull up real quick. Rob got me playing around with that. And y' all may remember this episode of the Apple wwdc. Thought I'd play that back. It's already muted, which helps. And now that I've got that playing back, there you go. Up here I've got the. My QPW graph interface showing. There's that. So as you can see down here I've got two links for the front left and front right. And they give me the output ports and nodes, but they also give me the client ID, which in this case is 33, which just happens to be what it was the last time I was playing with it. So we're going to get the permissions for that and the permissions that. The information that comes back with when you type in pw cli, get permissions 33 comes back providing remote 0, which is the. The pipewire daemon, the node for the client, which is in this case 33 with an index of 0. And the default permissions are RWXM for read, write, execute and metadata. Now, you can also change permissions. In this case, what I am going to do is the link id83 is the one I'm going to change to just no permissions at all. Try the node 50 and it's not doing it today.
- [67:57]
Rob Campbell
Live demos, you gotta love them.
- [68:00]
Michael
Yeah, but you see it's hanging. They're trying to do something.
- [68:05]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, that's probably because you've got. You've got live data going across that pipe.
- [68:13]
Michael
Well, I was doing that the other day, no assistant.
- [68:17]
Rob Campbell
So that should. That disconnect them when you.
- [68:20]
Michael
When you change it should disconnect that link.
- [68:22]
Rob Campbell
Yeah.
- [68:26]
Michael
So let's try now you can put an R and it's not doing it either.
- [68:42]
Rob Campbell
I suspect that something is very unhappy.
- [68:46]
Michael
I want to try something else here.
- [68:50]
Rob Campbell
Live debugging.
- [68:56]
Michael
There. It did set the permissions. We're going to change that to that now. It took me a while to actually to get it to do anything and I love the way that bounces around.
- [69:18]
Rob Campbell
Yeah.
- [69:25]
Michael
Go back to the command line and see, look at the links again. And the links have disconnected when I paused it.
- [69:43]
Rob Campbell
Oh, you're getting the. You're getting the spinny circle now on Chrome, I've seen this.
- [69:52]
Michael
Yes. Had problems with that as well.
- [69:55]
Rob Campbell
That is what happens when Chrome cannot get an audio output. It just doesn't know what to do. It's like I've got bits to shovel and I can't shovel them anywhere. Yes, I'm familiar with that also from playing around with pipewire.
- [70:16]
Michael
So we'll close that and we'll go back to vlc. Something more trustworthy.
- [70:25]
Rob Campbell
We'll see what it does. I think it's going to fail to open.
- [70:35]
Michael
Possibly this shouldn't have any effect, but let's see if it does.
- [70:43]
Rob Campbell
Did you set your permissions on your there it can up. I was going to say did you remove all the permissions for the main output so now nothing can talk to it?
- [70:58]
Michael
If I did, I know how to get it back. There we go. And let's just find the command. Got a whole bunch of notes here.
- [71:10]
Rob Campbell
I was going to say it's in the notes somewhere.
- [71:12]
Michael
I've also got it in my show notes.
- [71:14]
Rob Campbell
Oh, there you go.
- [71:17]
Michael
What I'm wondering is why it keeps hanging like that, like it's trying to do something.
- [71:25]
Rob Campbell
That Dash dash user is interesting with systemctl Pipeware is one of the few things that runs as a user service.
- [71:32]
Michael
I even just to see what would happen. Try doing this with a sudo command. It couldn't find the remote.
- [71:41]
Rob Campbell
Yeah.
- [71:43]
Michael
The pipewire system.
- [71:44]
Rob Campbell
Because it's still it's user only. Yep. That's because it's doing the same thing as Wayland is. It's not running as system wide. It's just running connected to your user logged in. I. I suspect that for things to start working, you're going to have to restart pipewire, which I just did. Oh, did you?
- [72:07]
Michael
No.
- [72:07]
Rob Campbell
You listed.
- [72:09]
Michael
Okay.
- [72:11]
Rob Campbell
That's why I didn't fix anything. It's a systemctl user. Restart pipewire.
- [72:20]
Michael
I thought I had that in one of my notes somewhere.
- [72:25]
Rob Campbell
I would do it on my machine, but I'm not running in a vm so it would not be good.
- [72:31]
Michael
I can go back up to here.
- [72:35]
Rob Campbell
I think it's restart and then the name I can Never remember because systemctl does it 1 way and the old service command did it the other way. Yeah, there you go. Your video started playing like magic.
- [72:48]
Ken MacDonald
Yeah.
- [72:51]
Rob Campbell
That'S fun. You had pipewire real confused.
- [72:54]
Michael
Yes, I did. So that's what the permissions can allow you to do. Really confuse pipewire if you're throw it something that it's not familiar with.
- [73:03]
Rob Campbell
I believe it. I believe it. I've got a command line tip that I'd like to talk about real quick. And that's something that happened this month to a certain group of our users of our audience. Maybe if you are in the Irun arch by the way camp, then you may be familiar with this already or if you're about to do an update and you haven't done it for a while, you're about to hit this. So we're going to let you know it is that Linux firmware. The Linux firmware package. If you're going past the 2025613 upgrade, there is a manual intervention that you have to do and this is sort of a perfect storm. It's one of those accidental breakages where two different things happened at once and together it's real bad. Well, I say real bad. It just. I don't think it bricks machines. I think it just doesn't work. What Arch did is they split the firmware into several vendor focused packages and Linux Dash Firmware itself is now an empty package. And this is because they've got to be. There's so much firmware now that gets shipped with the kernel. They didn't want a single package that was just huge and so they've split it out into multiple packages as well. I see. Unfortunately, this coincided with the upstream reorganization reorganizing the symlinks layout of the Nvidia firmware, resulting in a situation that Pacman cannot handle. When attempting to upgrade from2025 0508 or earlier you see the following errors and it's that Linux firmware Nvidia already exists in file system. Basically it's complaining that it's getting the same file from two different packages to progress with the system upgrade. First remove Linux firmware and then reinstall it as part of the upgrade. And so they even have the commands here. It's pacman RDD Linux firmware and then pacman Capital S Y U capital SYU Linux firmware I believe brings it back. The first one to delete it, the second one to bring it back to update it. I don't know. I don't run Arch. I don't know what Pac man does. But anyway we've got the link in the show notes and so if you've had trouble trying to update in Arch and you were not aware of this, that is what's going on. And now you know. So it's nice to know that some of the other. Rob is muted, he's over there flapping.
- [75:33]
Ken MacDonald
Pac man is like dnf. Pac man is DNF to you.
- [75:39]
Rob Campbell
I know what it is, yes Rob, thank you. I just, I don't use it.
- [75:42]
Ken MacDonald
Well, you should.
- [75:45]
Rob Campbell
I should, huh? Maybe one of these days I will join the Arch club.
- [75:51]
Michael
But I did find a way to use Grep with the pipe wire information so that you can display up to 15 lines before and or after the item you're looking for.
- [76:12]
Rob Campbell
That is a super useful thing that GREP can do. Give you context. Context lines. I have to talk about that in a command line tip at some point. Exactly how to do that. Sounds like a good one for one of us to handle next week. All right, that is it. That is the end of the show. We've covered the news, we've covered the tips. I'm going to let each of the guys plug whatever they want to plug. Rob is trying to fix his camera with some success, but we're going to let him cut away to his website and plug. I'm guessing Robert P. Campbell.
- [76:45]
Ken MacDonald
You got it all done for me. I don't. My. My work here is done so you.
- [76:51]
Rob Campbell
Can run over to the sunset.
- [76:52]
Ken MacDonald
So for those who want more me, come find my web presence@robertp.campbell.com and from there you can find links to my LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky, Mastodon, and a place to donate a coffee to me. And that being said, I forgot to mention it, but someone did donate me a coffee a few weeks ago. I. It was. It was anonymous. I don't have a name. So thank you someone and, and they. With donating that coffee to me. They. They said thank you for the update or not. They said update Kuma, but they meant update up uptime Kuma. One of my tips I had a few weeks ago. So you are welcome and I hope I can bring more. I hope I can be useful to more people.
- [77:50]
Rob Campbell
Fun. All right, Ken, you have anything you.
- [77:53]
Michael
Want to plug, just remind everybody. Backup back up and make sure you're able to SSH into your system. For those of you on Discord, you may have saw where I posted earlier that I finally got the. The Tumbleweed boot on my system working again by sshing into it after just letting it go through its thing. So I knew it was at least booted up. And when I SSH in, I got the DOS prompt and I was able to just use top grade to go through and do a upgrade from the terminal.
- [78:43]
Rob Campbell
And then I said re installing updates, installing updates.
- [78:47]
Michael
Fixed was an update to cause the problem and update the fixed.
- [78:53]
Rob Campbell
Y' all. Fun stuff. All right. Appreciate you guys being here. Covered a lot of good stuff this week. If you want to find more of me, most of it is over at Hackaday. That's where the. That's where Floss Weekly is at. And that's also where my security column goes live every Friday. Morning if you care to check that out. Sure appreciate you doing so. And we appreciate those of you that get us here on Twit should think about Club Twit if you're not part of it. It's a price of one or two cups of coffee depending upon where you go to buy your coffee per month. Definitely worth it. It gets you access to the shows ad free. And it's a way to say, way to support the shows and the people that you care about. We appreciate that. We appreciate everybody that watches and listens those that get you live and on the download. And we will be back. We'll see you next week on the Untitled Linux show.
- [79:38]
Ken MacDonald
Hey buddy, are you a geek? Are you a tech enthusiast? Then I would love to invite you to join a tech community like no other. You can gain exclusive access to our incomparable quality tech content with Club Twit as a member. You'll Enjoy all twit TV shows ad free plus access private video feeds for insider shows like iOS today, home theater geeks and so much more. Dive into the members only Twit plus bonus feed for behind the scenes content club discussions and special events. But here's the best perk. Join our incredible Discord community to watch live show productions, chat with hosts and participate in exclusive members only activities. It's your backstage pass to the world of twit. Whether you're a tech enthusiast or a lifelong learner, Club Twit elevates your knowledge while entertaining your interests. Get two weeks free when you sign up now and unlock unparalleled access at TWiT TV. That's TWiT TV Club TWiT. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you and welcome to the club. Hi, Zoe Saldana. Welcome to T Mobile.
- [80:58]
Rob Campbell
Here's your new iPhone 16 Pro on us.
- [81:00]
Ken MacDonald
Thanks.
- [81:01]
Rob Campbell
And here's my old phone to trade in.
- [81:02]
Ken MacDonald
You don't need a trade in. When you switch to T Mobile, we'll.
- [81:05]
Rob Campbell
Give you a new iPhone 16 Pro. Plus we'll help you pay off your old Phone up to 800 bucks and.
- [81:10]
Ken MacDonald
You still get to keep it. There's always a trade in.
- [81:13]
Rob Campbell
Not right now.
- [81:13]
Michael
At T Mobile.
- [81:14]
Ken MacDonald
I feel like I have to give.
- [81:15]
Michael
You something in return for karma.
- [81:16]
Ken MacDonald
That's okay.
- [81:17]
Rob Campbell
I don't really have much in my purse.
- [81:19]
Michael
Oh, let's see.
- [81:20]
Rob Campbell
Hand sanitizer.
- [81:21]
Michael
It's lavender.
- [81:22]
Rob Campbell
I'm good.
- [81:22]
Ken MacDonald
Seriously. Let me check this pocket.
- [81:24]
Michael
Oh, mints.
- [81:26]
Ken MacDonald
Really, I'm fine. Oh, I have raisin.
- [81:28]
Rob Campbell
I'm a mom.
- [81:29]
Michael
Wait, wait one sec.
- [81:30]
Rob Campbell
I've got cupcakes in the car.
- [81:31]
Ken MacDonald
It's our best iPhone offer ever. Switch to T Mobile, get a new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence on us. No trade in needed. We'll even pay off your phone up to 800 bucks with 24 monthly bill credits.
- [81:43]
Rob Campbell
New line $100 plus a month on experience beyond Finance Agreement 999.99 and qualifying forwarded for well qualified plus tax and $10 connection charge payout via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days credits end in balance.
- [81:54]
Ken MacDonald
Due if you pay off early or cancel.
- [81:55]
Rob Campbell
See T mobile dot com.