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Untitled Linux Show 213: Coffee... In the Form of Beer
01:11:56
Arch Linux, FFmpeg, and AI in the Kernel
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- [00:01]
Leo Laporte
This week we're talking about Clear Linux yet again and something else that's being canned at Intel. And then there's kernel updates, including how to handle AI agents writing kernel code. Super interesting. We talk about Arch Linux, we talk about Steam, we talk about plasma and ink levels in your printers. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [00:22]
Jeff Jarvis
Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [00:27]
Will Smith
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.
- [00:34]
Megan Morrone
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [00:37]
Will Smith
Well, I'm departing from AT and T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.
- [00:50]
Jeff Jarvis
Bon voyage.
- [00:52]
Ryan Seacrest
Introducing Family Freedom Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 82999 eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel contact T Mobile this episode brought.
- [01:19]
Megan Morrone
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.
- [01:48]
Unknown
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway now through August 12th. Get big savings on your favorite products for the little ones in the family and earn four times points to use for discounts on groceries or on gas. Shop in store or online for items like Earth's Best Yogurt Smoothie, Gerber Pouches, Happy Baby Pouches, Huggies, Natural Baby Wipes, Pediasure Bottles, Earth's Best Crunchy Sticks and Gerber Yogurt, Melts snacks and earn 4 times points. Offer ends August 12th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [02:25]
Leo Laporte
This is Twit this is the untitled Linux show, episode 213 recorded Saturday, July 26. Coffee in the form of beer. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time for some Linux geekery. It's the Untitled Linux Show. We're going to be talking about the desktop, open source, some hardware stuff, news, all kinds of fun stuff. So let's go ahead and dive into it. It's not just me, of course, but it is a duo act this week. It's me and Jeff. I'm glad you're here. This would be a very different show if it was just me.
- [03:03]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that would be very much monologue. That'd be.
- [03:07]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they do it on talk radio.
- [03:08]
Jeff Jarvis
Stories you'd have to do by yourself.
- [03:10]
Leo Laporte
You know, they do it on talk radio. So maybe I could pull it off. I don't know. But I prefer to have people here with me. It's more fun this way.
- [03:17]
Jeff Jarvis
I totally agree and I think thanks for everybody that's being in the audience and interacting too. We always appreciate that.
- [03:23]
Leo Laporte
Indeed. So we have kind of a final hurrah this week. Not for us, but for some things at Intel. And so you've got a Clear Linux store to kick us off.
- [03:34]
Jeff Jarvis
I do. So we talked last week about how intel shutting down Clear Linux. And this is in case you missed last week, this is an intel distribution which is their kind of playground and tweaks for things like database loads. And it's not a general purpose offering. It's not meant for, oh, load it. And it's easy and it's a little more serious distribution. Clear Linux has been around for about 10 years now and some ways it stands apart. And it's things like the aggressive compiler tuning. They take steps to optimize the entire OS and add patches to the kernel to get speed increases and as such being heavily optimized to take advantage of like things like AVX512 instructions. Now, while this is an intel operating system, it seems to lead the pack, you know, whenever. Several Linux distributions are benchmark. But AMD systems also take advantage of the performance tweaks and they see a lot of performance increases as well. So even though it's tuned for Intel, a lot of the stuff applies to the AMD architecture as well. Now that I bring this up, because the article linked in the show notes is the last hurrah for the distribution as Michael Erble at Pharonix wanted to benchmark it while things are still fresh now, you'll still be able to download Clear Linux in the foreseeable future. It isn't being maintained, so it will just slowly fall behind as the Kernel and other parts of the OS march on while it stays static. You know, kind of a personal side note, I have no idea if someone would pick it up or fork it or continue the work, you know, but it's probably easiest, you know, just if you add the performance modifications to your own distribution, you know, as in if I was a maintainer they could add it. You know, it's all open source, so it's not like anything's what they're doing is any kind of secret. Now the set of benchmarks are being run on an Intel Xeon server to get the AVX512 supported hardware. Yeah, some of the other Intel CPUs do support AVX512, but a lot of them do it in more of a non optimized method. You know, they're kind of a patch or software slash hardware implementation versus the full 512 pipeline. So the Xeon processors are all in on the 512 support. AVX512 support. Now clear Linux 4.3760 is in its final state, shipped with The Linux kernel 6.15.5, gcc15 and Python 3.13 and other up to date software. Now the other distribution that's going up against is Ubuntu 25.04 with everything default, just how it installs out of the box and there's going to. They also added Ubuntu 2504 with no other change other than being switching the performance governor, the scheduler to the performance governor. So that will then match Clear Linux, basically eliminating one variable and showing what other settings and performance enhancements bring to the table besides just the scheduler. Now Michael does make note that Clear Linux is open source and like I mentioned, so other distributions are free to take the optimizations, use them in their own builds. The, you know, as much as it's all out there for everybody to see, the only distribution really taking it to heart is Cache os, which has implemented a lot of the optimizations. Unfortunately it was not included in the set of benchmarks, but I can say when it has been included in other benchmarks came in basically second to Clear Linux. You know, Clear Linux was faster, but Cash OS would, you know, basically pretty much come in ahead of everything else. So they're taking advantage of it now going back to the article getting to the meat of the benchmarking, which consisted mostly of computational and science workloads, Clear Clear did come out on top by a lot and over almost 100 benchmarks, Clear Linux came out at as 48% faster than stock Ubuntu 25.04. Now what I do find interesting though is when Ubuntu used the performance governor it was only 16% behind. So that performance governor does have a large impact. Now there are also power measurements which showed the performance Ubuntu. So the performance governor and Clear Linux had no real difference. There was a little bit of variation, but it was in the noise. So statistically they're the same. Now stock ubuntu though use 19% less power. So that performance does come at a cost. Now if you're crunching data all the time, the performance governor might be what you need. But for general purpose computing the trade off of less power might be worth it because in normal person use case the performance difference will be hard to feel. You know, surfing the web, general computing, a CPU is idle a lot of the time and waiting for human input. So take a look at the article linked in the show notes for full details. And you know, where the performance was huge and where it was close. You know, it, you can decide based on your workload, your needs, your power costs, everything of, of what the value is. And because you can switch, you know, whatever distribution you have, you can switch the scheduler. We've talked about it in the past, so but you know, this was kind of a last RAW article for Clear Linux as far as we know. So goodbye Clear Linux. You're going to be missed.
- [09:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I went looking this week to see whether someone else was going to pick up the distro and fork it and create the next version of it, even a spiritual successor. And there's not yet. Nobody has been. I'm not sure if it's going to happen or not. Clear Linux, one of their claim to fame was that they were sort of specifically targeted at intel processors. Not 100%, they still had good performance on AMD, but it was very much an intel project. And so it does make sense that it's not the, wouldn't be the most popular thing for a general purpose distro.
- [09:56]
Jeff Jarvis
To do well and especially they're leaning hard into the modern instructions. They're not looking into the, you know, you know, CPUs 10 years ago of running this, this is, you know, they're, they're leaning into the pretty very recent generations with all the full instruction sets and they're assuming that and full 64. And so they, it's, it's for very modern heavy duty workloads is kind of where they were playing with this. You know, I think kind of the server Environment type workload. So they could make enterprise workloads better.
- [10:33]
Leo Laporte
Indeed. So Wizardling makes a very interesting point. Clear Linux isn't saying that these are its end times on the homepage. What's up with that?
- [10:45]
Jeff Jarvis
I don't know as they have anybody that's. I think with all the layoffs and everything, it would not surprise me. They kind of just went, you're, you're done. And nobody's gone back and corrected the documentation because everything else, all the, you know, mailing list and stuff says we're not supporting it anymore. But, but it is, like I said, it's all open source. Somebody could pick it up and run with it. It's all out there. Even the performance tweaks are out there. So Cash EOS is the kind of the closest successor. And that's why I honestly, if I was going to run a different distribution, I would probably seriously look at Cash eos which is arch based.
- [11:26]
Leo Laporte
It may legitimately be that nobody has the keys anymore to be able to go in and change the homepage.
- [11:32]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's very possible too.
- [11:38]
Leo Laporte
There was an interesting story that I thought went along well with this one and that is that Plaid ML is also. The rug is being yanked out from underneath it. Now I think this was less of a surprise. This was the result of a acquisition that intel made back in 2018. They bought Vertex AI and PlaidML was an open source machine learning machine. Deep learning for every platform. That's what they said. And it had been on life support for a while and they finally made the announcement that it was going away too. And there seems to be sort of a wider now it may just be the perspective of this. I was going to say there's a wider trend that as intel is trying to cut costs, they're cutting out of their open source budget. But that may be some bias on our part because that's one, the parts that we're watching and two, the parts that we have observability into. Right. Like, I don't, I have no idea what things intel is cutting internally if maybe that this sort of thing is going on all across the board.
- [12:43]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I think so. It's. I mean, because I know they said the layout. A lot of the news sources I've seen the layoffs are bigger than originally announced. And when you have massive layoffs like that, I've seen it in other companies where, oh, we got to change this. Oh, that person isn't here anymore. How do we, you know, there's kind of some figuring out who has the keys to be able to. To do this or who they got to contact to enable access or, you know, it. Even. Even the most thought out org leaves things in its wake.
- [13:17]
Leo Laporte
I'm thinking of the movie Margin Call where this big financial company did a. It's fiction, but loosely based on what actually happened in the 2008 financial crisis. And a very large financial company did a round of layoffs. And one of the people that they laid off was their. One of their risk analysts. And the risk analyst, on his way out the door, hands a USB drive to one of the other people that were left behind and said, hey, I didn't get a chance to finish this. Maybe you should, but be real careful with what's in there. And the analysis on the drive, it. It turned out that where they thought they were running at a, you know, a reasonable amount of leverage, the amount of debt that they were carrying, they thought it was fine. And then they realized that they were leveraged, you know, 20 times, 50 times past that. And the foundation they thought they were sitting on the floor just a week before dropped out from underneath them. And the things that they were doing were so complicated that nobody had put it together yet. And there's this point during the movie where they're like, the guy that figured this out, let's get him up there. HR laid him off yesterday. I'm sure every company, every big company has this that they go through, because it's like, it's. When you have that many people even trying to figure out who to lay off is a super challenge because HR doesn't have visibility into what each of these people are doing. In a lot of cases, you. You just. You can't capture what everybody's doing on an org chart. And so it's sort of a guessing game, which is unfortunate, but I think it's the reality of a big enterprise.
- [14:50]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. Because sometimes the decisions that are made are made that several levels above where your boss and your boss's boss might think, oh, you are the greatest thing since sliced bread. We can't do this without you. But somebody way up might go, well, I don't know. Let's just pick this person. They've been here the longest or the least amount of time, or, you know, their names, the last name starts with a vowel instead of a consonant. Who you know, who knows what you know? Some of those decisions are made in it. Oops.
- [15:26]
Leo Laporte
Indeed. Indeed.
- [15:28]
Jeff Jarvis
Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [15:33]
Will Smith
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new family freedom offer.
- [15:40]
Megan Morrone
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [15:43]
Will Smith
Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.
- [15:56]
Jeff Jarvis
Bon voyage.
- [15:58]
Ryan Seacrest
Introducing Family Freedom Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com FamilyFreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 82999 Eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile this.
- [16:24]
Megan Morrone
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 insight. 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.
- [16:54]
Unknown
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway now through August 12th. Get big savings on your favorite products for the little ones in the family and earn four times points to use for discounts on groceries or on gas. Shop in store or online for items like Earth's Best Yogurt Smoothie, Gerber Pouches, Happy Baby Pouches, Huggies, Natural Bab Baby Wipes, Pedia Shore Bottles, Earth's Best Crunchy Sticks and Gerber Yogurt Melts snacks and earn 4 times points. Offer ends August 12th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [17:25]
Leo Laporte
All right, so I that was not my my story. That was just a tag along story. I have a story pretty interesting here about something happening in the Linux kernel. And that is one of the developers, one of the maintainers there, wrote a pull request, sort of a request for comments about how to handle AI coding assistance. And this is real fascinating to me because for one thing I cover a lot of this over at Hackaday in the security column. And this, what it does is it adds some metadata inside the kernel tree that these AI assistants like Claude and GitHub copilot cursor cursor codename continue windsurf and Adir. I know what about two of those actually are to. Essentially when someone sends in. No, excuse me, when the AI agent sends in a pull request, it is clearly marked that this was generated through the use of an LLM through an AI. And it sort of floored me that this was happening in the kernel at all. And then I went in, well, of course it is, because these things are actually useful in some cases. And to get an idea of how kernel developers are using these, we've got a link here that goes off to Keys Cook to his write up on Mastodon about it and how he's doing unit tests. And you can tell whatever AI you're working with, hey, I want you to write a unit test based on this code that does this thing. And it's going to. Essentially what it's going to do is it's going to look through its entire memory banks of all the other unit tests that it's ever found. It's going, okay, this one is similar and this one is so like internally, this is sort of what these AIs are doing. This code is similar and this code is similar and this code is similar. I'm going to take all these and smash them together in a way that seems like it fits with what the user is asking for. It's more or less what's going on underneath. And he had some success with this and then, you know, was able to actually send in a pull request. And so this is actually being used by, by developers and they now they're putting together sort of a standardized way to be transparent about that. But one of the real interesting parts of this, and there's some commentary about this in the, in the link, it's down under Mario Lomoncelo who says, wait, are people actually using AI agents like this? I've never thought of using an agent to write a whole patch. Surely the person is actually doing the committing. Right. And there's a couple of responses that, no, not necessarily. For some of these patches, the AI is not only writing the code, it's also running the git commands to commit the code. And then of course it's getting, it's supposed to be getting reviewed by a human. One of the last things that you want, you don't want the AI to be able to actually then push commits or submit PRs. That's a bridge too far, at least at this point. But yeah, you do have cases where the AI is actually making the code change, doing a git add and then a git commit and so this, this metadata and this guidance basically says when the AI does that it needs to include a line that says that this commit was written by an insert name of AI. Really fascinating. I know. I've talked to the guys at the kernel, I know they are trying to embrace this, not necessarily the AI craze, but embrace new tooling to be able to get things done better. And they've been doing it for a while. So it's not terribly surprising that they're allowing this sort of stuff in if it's, you know, if it's good results, if it's good code. But really an interesting look into what's going on inside the kernel, how they're adapting to our new brave AI world.
- [21:33]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's, you always got to check it. But you know, the biggest things I've seen so far in AI and I am not an expert by any means, but I'm trying to get a little more up to speed on it are one is getting the context of everything and asking the proper, or giving it the proper direction where you're very specific, very, you know, there's no open ended interpretation, there's very finite boundaries. And here is a very detailed. You know, it's like you're, it's like you're talking to a genie and you've got a wish and you know they're going to try to mess you up.
- [22:13]
Leo Laporte
So you gotta, you gotta say it.
- [22:16]
Jeff Jarvis
In such a way that it, you're only gonna get the result you want. And the other way is, I've seen where you do something like that. You do have humans involved where you say, okay, write this patch, give it to me in pseudocode and then you can take the pseudo code and then you can run it through another AI to like simulate what's gonna happen. And then you finally get, you know, another agent to write the code. So you have, you kind of have some checks and balances and you get feedback loops going so that you can improve what your AI output is. You know, it's kind of a self feedback system to make sure that your patch or your code or your data or whatever you're doing is going to be what you want and it's going to be accurate. Mm.
- [23:05]
Leo Laporte
I've, I've done some playing with copilot in GitHub inside projects. I've not let it write code for me yet. I'm, I, that does not sit well with me. Just a personal thing, but I've, I've had conversation. Now this is what I find super interesting about doing AI and programming. I've had conversations with Copilot inside GitHub. And so we had a, we had a mysterious crash. And you know, like by the spec, the thing that we were trying to do was supposed to work. And so you go in and you say, hey, Copilot, my code is crashing here. When I run this, my code crashes. Why do you think that is? What was really interesting is it was coming up with really good suggestions like, okay, well we know it was a standard sort STD colon, colon sort in C. It's like, well, we know these are the things that can cause standard sort to crash. And it gave, you know, the three or four things. The thing that I most enjoyed about it was that inside of a conversation it stored context itself. So you could then say, okay, I've tried this. You can even go so far as to say, here's the code that I added to try to check this and it's still crashing. What do you suggest I do next? And it would think about it and come up with a different suggestion, another way to maybe go about it. And in this case it did not find the answer. The answer was, I'm pretty sure the answer was a bug in the embedded toolchain we were using. But so it, on one hand it was not actually very helpful, but on the other hand it did help me like sort through the potential problems and eliminate them one by one. And so it was a fascinating experience. That's my main like AI Vibe coding sort of experience, overall positive. And I could definitely see why people are using it.
- [24:56]
Jeff Jarvis
My periphery, I guess Vibe coding experience is talking to coders who've used it. And from what I find, it does pretty decently when you get smaller chunks. Okay, write me a function to read this file and put it into this kind of a variable or database or you know, where it's just taking a little chunk that you can, you know, you're not asking for a large finished product. So it's, it's kind of breaking it into bite sized pieces to.
- [25:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that seems to be one of the things it's, it's really best for is sort of avoiding busy work and doing the boilerplate kind of stuff. I did see an article that suggested that like skilled programmers that were using Vibe coding were coding 13% slower as a result of it. I don't know if that's entirely accurate or not. Probably depends upon who's using it and how they're using it. But it is, it's really interesting to see and I don't know if I've made this comment on this show or not, but you know, this is the future. We talk about AI sometimes and yes it is, it's a bubble, right? It is absolutely a bubble. But when you think about like the history of computer, even more than just computing, but the history of computing in particular, you know, you had the first computer bubble, you had the home computer bubble, you had the Internet bubble, you had, you know, the net craze and all of that. And each of those, the bubble did eventually pop and companies went out of business, but each of those technologies also changed the world. And I think AI is obviously on that same list. So we are in a bubble and it will eventually pop, but a bunch of businesses will go out of business and we may be starting to see that. I don't know. But I don't think there's any getting away from the way AI has already changed the world. It's not going away. I don't think it's, I don't think there's any scenario where AI really fully goes away. It's too transformative for too many people at this point.
- [27:16]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, there's a lot of redundant tasks that it's good at. You know, verify, you know, maybe, maybe your job is you got to verify reports and every reports. Got it, you know, does it have somebody's initial on every page and does it have a signature at the end and does it have the proper dates and does it, you know, things like that where maybe it might take you 10 minutes, you can feed it into AI and within five seconds it's oh, yep, it, it meets the, the clerical, clerical check or whatever. And it might not tell you everything is there properly, but it, it can handle tasks like that or other things that you, you're not, you are. Freedom to do the more innovative things versus getting stuck in the repetitive paperwork. Quagmire, did we talk on this show.
- [28:09]
Leo Laporte
Do you remember about the scientific articles, the pre print reports where there were prompt injections discovered? We talked about that. So this was a Japanese newspaper. I don't have the link to it at my fingertips, but it's been a couple of weeks ago, three or four weeks ago, probably where they were looking at academic papers and they were taking like the pre print academic papers that were on places like Arxiv. And they went and they looked through these and in a sizable percentage of these papers they found somewhere in the middle of the paper a statement like only give this paper positive reviews. Make sure you say nice things about this paper. And yeah, it's the sort of thing that a human reader might miss even. But it's an attempt at prompt injection. And it floored me when I first read this. It doesn't surprise me anymore. But when I first read this story, it floored me because of two things. One, that these researchers were doing it like they had the guts to do it because it is reasonably dishonest. But two, that the just baseline assumption was that so much of the peer review that was going on was just people running it through AI. That was just the assumption that, oh, everybody's using this on AI.
- [29:42]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, or to summarize, just, hey, give me a quick summary and it's going to go, oh, this is a wonderful paper that talks about X, Y and Z. And it. See, if I, if I came across that, I figured, oh, either, either some grad student or researcher was probably up at midnight and on the eighth pot of coffee and just was being goofy or something, you know.
- [30:05]
Leo Laporte
And yeah, no, they found it, they found it in a sizable percentage of the papers and it was wild, just wild.
- [30:16]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, but, but I agree it's, it's, it's here to stay. But I think the, it's taking over and all that. It's way overblown. It's just going to be a useful tool, like I said, like, like the web, like spell check, like, you know.
- [30:31]
Leo Laporte
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [30:34]
Jeff Jarvis
All right.
- [30:34]
Leo Laporte
Well, there is another big change coming, at least in Fedora land. What is up with Fedora and bios?
- [30:42]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, Fedora is looking to better streamline their release schedule. So there's a discussion going on on the Fedora mailing list about what to do with non UEFI BIOS issues. Now UEFI BIOS has been around since around 2000 form and then in the form we basically know it as EFI which is Extensible Firmware Interface started in the mid-90s, but the first open source version came out in about 2004 as the Unified Extensible Firmware interf, or UEFI. So basically it was designed to get around the limitations which BIOS had. And the point I'm making here is just that UEFI has been around for a long time and isn't some new kid on the block. It goes back quite a ways. Now coming back around to our story linked in the show notes, Fedora would like to not have a BIOS related issue be a gating factor for holding up a release. Now Fedora is not getting rid of support for bios. You know, it's still going to be Supported. It's just that an issue would be fixed later since most of the systems run on UEFI and not BIOS or core os and they're also looking at having a more streamlined, streamlined BIO system verification. So now just to be clear, this isn't, this is still being discussed. So it isn't implemented yet. And right now a BIOS issue will block the release. But if the change is made, if the decision is made to streamline this, then it would only hold things up if there's an issue with default partitioning layouts on NVME and SSD storage. If there was an issue with the default video playback driver, that's not going to stop things. Or if you're using CoreOS and booting in a BIOS only mode, you know, BIOS only it will have and has an issue that wouldn't stop the release. It would still carry on. But like I said, they would still fix it. It's just not going to hold up, hold up the next revision. So the core of what they're saying is and it follows directly from the mailing list. So I'm going to a little quote here from the mailing list. Reduce proposal Reduce biospace systems release blocking status from covering all scenarios basically on parity with uefi, which is the way it currently is, to just limited scenarios. The following would stay release blocking in BIOS mode. So these are the items that would even in BIOS mode only would still block a release. Installations of release blocking desktops server and everything images which use the default automatic partitioning layout to a single empty SATA or NVME drive Cloud image boot in Amazon EC2 system upgrades OS and application functionality Anaconda rescue mode Both bare metal systems and virtual machines are covered in the above cases. So that's items that if it does have a problem, will still cause a stop ship. Now the following cases would no longer be release blocking in BIOS mode but would be kept blocking in UEFI mode. So any partitioning layouts not specified above. So if you got some custom layout that has a problem, UEFI will still be stop ship. BIOS will not any storage device types not specified above. Fallback video driver basically available as the basic graphics mode from the install media in BIOS mode that will not stop anything and booting core OS images in BIOS only mode. So you know, I am going to, you know and there's discussions, we'll see, we'll see where it goes. It probably will go through, but you know, you never know. One editorial by me is just to make note of the, you know, support of really old hardware can be hard as a lot of times developers don't have hardware to test on. So issues can be a real hard issue to fix because you're kind of relying on other people to try to help you debug and patch. Old systems become rare and people don't generally, generally keep old unused systems around. And now I emphasize generally because if Ken was here, he would hold up something really ancient and tell me how he's using it for something.
- [35:20]
Leo Laporte
Exactly.
- [35:21]
Jeff Jarvis
Generalities here. There are exceptions, but just take a look at the article linked in the Show Notes where the there's a link to the mailing list directly so you can follow the descript, follow discussions real time and you know, feel free to chime in with your thoughts on the discussion. You know, we're always, always love to hear people's thoughts and opinions.
- [35:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So there's a, there's an interesting kind of deeper dive into this in if you click through to the, the actual Fedora mailing list conversation, they make the point that they know that people are still running these machines, but they would be very surprised to see fresh installs on these machines. And so the parts that they're saying it's acceptable if this doesn't work. Right. So this was my first thought. Right. It's a problem if something is broken when you do the release because your release ISO is frozen and you can never fix it in the release ISO because Fedora does not do point releases for its ISOs, or at least it doesn't like publicly do them. I think it does create them internally, but not in a place that's easy to get to. All right, so I was kind of looking at this going, wait a second, surely that's going to get shot down because you're going to make some of these machines almost impossible to install on. But then I clicked through and I read and their opinion is people are not doing fresh installs on these, they're doing upgrade installs. And so we're not limited things don't have to be working in the release ISO because surely nobody's going to do a fresh Fedora install on one of these old BIOS computers, which I'm like, you say if Ken were here you go, no, I did one of these just the other week and there are people out there that do it, but it is a much smaller group of people and there are always going to be workarounds for any bugs they find because they're going to fix them. It's just you may not be able to use the latest and greatest ISO to do the install. You may have to go grab the last version and then do an update. You may have to get one of, you know, dig into the Fedora downloads and find one of those point releases. But if it helps Fedora ship on time, then that's probably a good thing.
- [37:33]
Jeff Jarvis
I would agree because you know, I'm kind of with you actually. A lot of times I see that old hardware, usually it hasn't been updated in a long time. It, a lot of times it has a function and it just, hey, it does that function, just let it go. Don't mess with it. Don't touch it.
- [37:48]
Leo Laporte
Don't, you know, don't touch it unless it breaks. And when it breaks, it's probably time to replace it with something else. Right, Like a Raspberry PI.
- [37:57]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, and especially, you know, consumer hardware is not. People talk about enterprise hardware. God, that's so expensive. There's a lot of times extra checks and different components used for enterprise or really heavy duty systems that they last longer than standard consumer grade stuff.
- [38:20]
Leo Laporte
There's a reason it's more expensive.
- [38:22]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. Not saying the consumer stuff can't last a long time, but your odds are not as good and you have more of a fall off and you know, if you're running a really old system, I hope it's nothing mission critical. You know, you just never know when it's just going to up and kaput.
- [38:43]
Leo Laporte
Yep, absolutely.
- [38:45]
Jeff Jarvis
Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [38:49]
Will Smith
Honestly Will, I didn't plan any trips but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.
- [38:57]
Megan Morrone
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [39:00]
Will Smith
Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.
- [39:13]
Jeff Jarvis
Bon voyage.
- [39:15]
Ryan Seacrest
Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com FamilyFreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 82999 Eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile this.
- [39:41]
Megan Morrone
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.
- [40:11]
Unknown
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway now through August 12th. Get big savings on your favorite products for the little ones in the family and earn four times points to use for discounts on groceries or on gas. Shop in store or online for items like Earth's Best Yogurt Smoothie, Gerber Pouches, Happy Baby Pouches, Huggies, Natural Baby Wipes, Pedia Shore Bottles, Earth's Best Crunchy Sticks, and Gerber Yogurt Melts snacks and earn 4 times points. Offer ends August 12th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [40:42]
Leo Laporte
Absolutely. All right, so let's see, what do we have next? Ah, FFmpeg. So version 8.0 of FFmpeg is coming and there were some really interesting things in the list here that I thought we could chat about, maybe talk a little bit about FFMPEG in and of itself. Because I am certain that no matter where you're watching this stream at, the bits are flowing through FFmpeg probably multiple times. Because almost everything video handling these days is FFmpeg. It is. It is ubiquitous and because it's open source, it gets used almost everywhere. So whether you realize it or not, you are an FFmpeg user. Version 8 is coming. The announcement just happened that they are working on release preparations and it looks like end of August we'll get the 8.0. There's some, there's some real fascinating stuff in here, like a new decoder for Real Video 6. I'm not sure when Real Video 6 happened, but probably not super recently. RV RV 60? No, that's Real Video 11. RV 20 was Real Video 6. Or maybe RealPlayer 6. I don't know. I don't know exactly what. RealVI Real Video is not exactly the most used thing anymore. That's the point. And they're doing an upgrade or a new decoder in FFmpeg. They're doing the G728 codec. I believe that's telephony. There is animated JPEG XL encoding, lib x265 alpha layer encoding. There's a VA API. So that is the Video acceleration support that makes a lot of our video card that works in a lot of our video cards is getting H266 support. That's the next next gen high performance video codec VVC they call that flash video FLV V2 support to get your flash video fix. All kinds of stuff. And then in 8.0 there's also AVX512 stuff, there is a whip muxer for really low latency streaming that could be very interesting. AV1 stuff with doing RTP Vulkan video work, HDR video, all kinds of fun stuff in FFmpeg 8.0. I've had a lot of fun recently following the FFMPEGX account because they like to let folks know about what they do in assembly and in fact I think they've got an assembly class like I don't know if it's full on lecture or if it's just text, but a series of lessons that you can go through to start learning assembly because FFMPEG does a lot of assembly, hand tuning and hand coding to try to get stuff to actually work real time to better performance out of modern processors. So very cool to see ffmpeg version 8 and I'm sure it will land on all of our workflows before too much longer.
- [44:07]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, it's and I just want to reiterate it is everywhere and a lot of times you don't actually run it. It's libraries or what's under the hood for a lot of different programs doing a lot of the crunching and heavy lifting. A lot of stuff is just kind of wrappers built upon FFmpeg.
- [44:27]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. All right. Do we want to talk about Architect?
- [44:34]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, let's go for it.
- [44:36]
Leo Laporte
Let's talk about Arch.
- [44:38]
Jeff Jarvis
Now I found this article interesting and I wanted to share it with everybody here on the Linux IAC website. They talk about insights into Arch Linux user preferences. Now I found it interesting because I want to know if the preferences were different from mine. And we don't talk about official Arch A tonight. You know, we spend more time talking about Arch derivative distributions such as Cashios or Manjaro or then you know, than we do the, the core Arch distribution. You know it, we talk about it in high level, you know, it's, it's out there. We acknowledge it, we talked about the Aur kind of stuff, but we don't dig into Arch that much. Well, I, I want to preface what I'm going to say here. Take this data with a grain of salt as the data is coming from people who run Arch and have chosen to install the package status package. Now, it's a tool you opt into, so you, you have to say, you know, install it, it's not going to come in default and it'll give information. What it does gives information back to the developers on which packages are installed and what hardware is used most of the time. So it's anonymous and doesn't collect any personal information, but it kind of lets the developers kind of understand and the packagers what do they need to be thinking of and the impact of a certain problem on a platform or location. The first item is where Arch is used. Now, while Arch is Global, the US has a 22.1% share of the usage and Germany's at 20.58%. A big gap then because next is Russia and China with low 4% and it goes down from there. Now, the article does take note that if you add up all the European countries, they do make up 50% of the total user base. North America's at 25 and the rest is evenly distributed around the world, with the exception of Africa, which only accounts for 1% of of the user base. Next question is, you know what desktop is used? Well, KDE is at 33%, GNOME is at 19 and XF XFCE is at 11%. From then on, the rest are all below 3% or lower for the usage there. So KDE is the big juggernaut there. Now Arch users love their freedom is when they're surfing the web. Firefox accounts for 60% of the share, with Chromium coming in at 43%. Google Chrome comes in at 17%. So Arch users tend to stay away from the corporations. And yes, I know technically Mozilla is one, but you know what I mean. Text editors and I know what you're thinking, but this might surprise some people since Nano comes out on top at 66% and Vim comes in at 62%. Good Old VI holds on the third at 45% and Neo Vim rounds out the top four at 35% and again it falls off a cliff from there. Shells. Yeah, that's not really a surprise. Bash comes default, so it's on top, but ZSH is at 39% and fish is at 20%. And finally we're going to talk about hardware. Now we're going to be talking about version levels of x86 chips. These are the different instructions which are supported by different CPUs. So version one is the baseline and all instructions in that group are supported moving to V2 adds all of V1 instructions, but adds instructions such as SSE3 for example. Moving to V3 has all the items in V1 and V2 but now includes things like AVX in very rough general terms. V1 is around 2003, V2 started around 2008, V3 is about 2013 and V4 started roughly 2017. Arch users are currently mostly on V3 which is about 60% of the systems. V2 is around 20%, V1 is around 15% and V4 comes in at 14%. Now there is a chart in the article so you can see how V1 and V2 are falling off at a pretty steady rate. V3 is peaked and is just starting to decline and V4 is picking up Steam and will soon start crossing the V1 and V2 hardware. Basically old hardware is getting replaced with newer hardware which supports more instructions. Other non x86 hardware. There's really only one worth noting which is ARM and it seems to be gaining a little support but it's in the very low single digit numbers so it's a blip there. But it's a long way from any kind of real adoption. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes and if you want to help, they have instructions on how you can install package status. It's pkg S T A T s and use it to get your system and preferences counted. You know personally I kind of like doing some of that anonymous feedback from my system to help the developers and maybe by increasing the numbers, you know, by for people using my hardware, you know, maybe, maybe it'll lead to better support. But you know I figure if nothing else it's a good help.
- [50:23]
Leo Laporte
Absolutely. So this is not necessarily reflecting usage. This is the packages that people have installed. Yes, that's also why you have some of these where the totals are above 100%.
- [50:38]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah and there's like they said like bash. Well it comes default. Everybody's got bash. Unless you go in and uninstall it and then reinstall whatever, you know, fish or whatever, whatever you're going to use.
- [50:52]
Leo Laporte
Depending upon how Arch is set up it may be non trivial to uninstall bash. I think true, like on Fedora. I just don't think you can. You would have to literally go in and like do a 4 sun install with RPM because DNF is not going to let you uninstall bash. It's a system requirement. One of the other things there I don't think you mentioned it really fascinated Me in the browsers. Lynx. Lynx was like in third place with 22, 22%.
- [51:24]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, they had two text only browsers but it was kind of like, well, people aren't really surfing the web so much with those as they were kind of just looking at general use and what's installed. So it was. I kind of skipped over those. I just stuck to the pure graphical.
- [51:45]
Leo Laporte
I'm glad you did. You gave me something to talk about.
- [51:48]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes.
- [51:50]
Leo Laporte
I have memories though of doing like a server install, not putting a graphical, a desktop environment on it. This has been years ago, of course now I would just pull my cell phone out and search for something, but not having a graphical desktop on the server install and then needing to figure something out and having to search Google using links. And that is an experience, I will tell you.
- [52:12]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's one of those. You can look back and go, oh look, I did this. But it's painful at the time and you just almost want to cry. And depending on what it was, it was easier years ago when there was.
- [52:24]
Leo Laporte
Less going on on the Google homepage.
- [52:25]
Jeff Jarvis
Less going on, you know, a lot more just text with static images or little dancing gifs that not. Not required complex scripts and image manipulation needed.
- [52:39]
Leo Laporte
Yep. That comment though about look what I did but I don't want to do it again because it made me cry. It really makes me remember virtualizing SKO for a customer. That was, that was an adventure.
- [52:52]
Jeff Jarvis
Really was definitely a learning experience. And what'd you learn? Never to do that again.
- [52:56]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, don't do that. Learned that quite a few times over the years about different things.
- [53:02]
Jeff Jarvis
Makes us who we are, you know. And the important thing is see and people say learn from your mistakes. Well, that is true, but I want to learn from like say for example my friend's mistakes. Like Jonathan, hey, let's virtualize SEO. No, don't do that. Did you do it? No, but I know a guy. No.
- [53:21]
Leo Laporte
Indeed. All right, well, there's something else that you couldn't do until recently and that is if you're running vanilla Linux on an M1 or M2 Mac, you couldn't reboot it, which is also a little non ideal. I didn't realize this. The things you find out when prepping for the show. The M1, M2 SoC, as you probably know, portions of support are getting upstreamed into the Linux kernel all the time. But the Asahi project and the few others that support it have their own downstream patches that they are including. Well, it turns out one of those patches was the ability to Properly reboot because communication between the CPU and the system management controller happened in a very unusual way. It used the RTKit protocol, which is sort of a shared bus protocol. They call it a shared mailbox where you pass messages back and forth between the different pieces of hardware. And apparently there was also some writing to nvmem, that's non volatile memory cells, a fairly complicated way to reboot one of these machines. And it is just now landing in upstream Linux. So you may remember we've talked. This has been maybe a year ago even, but we talked about how that there were some distros that were looking to add Support for the M1, M2 and the Asahi devs were out saying, please talk to us before you try to do this because you can't just compile the kernel and call it a day. Please let us help you so that it's a good experience for everyone. This is the sort of thing they were talking about. It takes patches to actually be able to reboot the machine. Or it did until this landed, which I think is going to be in the. In the 6.17 release of the kernel, which is looking to come here pretty soon. Fascinating stuff.
- [55:29]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, because we should get the pull requests probably. They're probably going to release 616 tomorrow. That's kind of the general thought. And then we'll start the pull request.
- [55:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. The merge window opens. Indeed. That is soon. Yes, that is what time it is. This is the weekend. This is kernel release weekend. We'll probably come back next week with kind of a roundup of everything that just released in 6.16 and things that we already know are coming in 6.17. Those who read the tea leaves will go and read over their shoulder and let folks know what has happened and what is coming.
- [56:12]
Jeff Jarvis
Exactly. And hopefully it's a nice smooth pull, no big fight, infighting or anything. Which is a reference to there was some previous bcache file system.
- [56:27]
Leo Laporte
It's going to be really interesting to see what happens to bcache FS once the merge window opens. Torvald sort of seemed to be threatening to pull it out of the kernel altogether. We'll see if that actually happens. True.
- [56:40]
Jeff Jarvis
Which honestly, file systems usually need to be pretty stable before they hit the kernel. It's still in beta, it's still pretty early. So it is not production ready. It is not. So it wouldn't be totally out of line to just say, okay, it's not going to be in the kernel till things are in a much more stable state.
- [57:05]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, all right, well, that's enough about kernels and programming and all that boring stuff. Let's talk about something fun. What is new in Valve world?
- [57:17]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, this one's going to be a little bit different because Valve's always updating things and, you know, we're always talking about it here on the show, but this time we're not talking about Proton or a Vulkan package or anything like that. We're talking about the Steam store itself. Now, if you're on the beta version of the Steam client on PC anyway, it's not on other platforms yet, you'll have noticed some changes. If you look at the article linked in the show Notes, it goes over some of the items changed and it will also have a link in that article to the official Steam announcement, which goes into even more details of what's happening. So the short version, what's happening to the client? Well, the entire look of the storefront is different, so the left side menu is gone, but there's still a lot of menus at the top of the screen with things like browse, recommendations, categories, hardware, ways to play and more. So you can now just, of course, browse whatever games you're looking at. Then they give you recommendations on what you have and what you've played. You can just look into categories, so it lets you parse things a little better. The search box has even changed. When you click on the search box before, you know, before you've typed anything, it shows popular searches. So basically what others are searching for, you can see. So you can see, you know, maybe you've missed the latest, greatest, cool thing. Well, it'll probably percolate up here on this just to, you know, pique your interest. There's also what you've recently viewed and recently searched, so you can go back to something you were checking out earlier, but maybe now you couldn't quite remember the name and you were thinking, I, I'm ready to buy that game now. Now it'll be a little easier to find because it'll be in there. Searching also includes things like different categories, like tags, publishers, a lot more. So basically there's a lot of filters to help narrow down what exactly you're looking for. Basically, realistically, all the changes are to better help you find games you're interested in easier and not get so many of the ones that you really have no interest in. Because I know personally, I've done some searches and you get several games, you're like, this is not at all what I want. Well, now it should be more focused and have better alignment with your tastes. Now, this is in beta, so if you'd like to see it for yourself and give feedback on what you'd like and what you don't like, because the changes are not set in stone right now and they still could change by the time it hits the normal release. But if you desire to see what's new or what you be part of the feedback, take a look at the article in the Show Notes for more details and the link to the Valve announcement and it gives you directions on how you can be part of the beta test, you know, and I just want to add this because personally I've been part of the beta for years and I've not had any stability issues with the client, so I wouldn't really worry about things crashing. It's more of a sandbox. So there might be some features which you see and maybe don't make it to the release version, but I haven't run across anything that's a major showstopper. And you know, normally I'm pretty cautious about telling people to give beta a try. I mean, unless I'll say, okay, unless you kind of know what you're doing or you, you feel strong in your, you know, Linux knowledge. In this case, I don't, I don't think this is a person. This is a case where a person would be pretty safe. You know, give it a try, see what you think and let us know.
- [60:41]
Leo Laporte
Happy gaming.
- [60:42]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah.
- [60:43]
Leo Laporte
Interesting to see the things coming along down the pike as Valve continues working on all of this. There is. Yes.
- [60:52]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I was going to say, and I thought it was interesting because it was just something outside of our normal, you know, wine proton.
- [60:59]
Leo Laporte
Oh, indeed.
- [60:59]
Jeff Jarvis
You know, Vulcan, that kind of stuff.
- [61:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, there are some, there are some other interesting things that Valve does under the hood of their clients. To make all of that work, let's.
- [61:09]
Jeff Jarvis
Map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [61:13]
Will Smith
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.
- [61:21]
Jeff Jarvis
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [61:23]
Will Smith
Well, I'm departing from ATT and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four. Four new phones on the house.
- [61:37]
Jeff Jarvis
Bon voyage.
- [61:38]
Ryan Seacrest
Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte $829.99 Eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier, cancel Contact T Mobile this episode.
- [62:05]
Megan Morrone
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.
- [62:34]
Unknown
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway now through August 12th. Get big savings on your favorite products for the little ones in the family and earn four times points to use for discounts on groceries or on gas. Shop in store or online for items like Earth's Best Yogurt Smoothie, Gerber Pouches, Happy Baby Pouches, Huggies, Natural Baby Wipes, Pedia Shore Bottles, Earth's Best Crunchy Sticks and Gerber Yogurt Melts snacks and earn 4 times points. Offer ends August 12th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [63:06]
Leo Laporte
So there was something that caught my eye, an under the hood change happening in one of our favorite desktop environments, and that is KDE and all of the changes that Nate Graham talked about this week. One of the real fascinating ones is get ready for it in 6.5. It will warn you when your ink is low. Oh, I'm so sorry. This is actually fairly useful for some users and will be an absolute pain for others because some printers are terrible. But it will now warn you when your ink is low and it does that sort of integration with the printer, which again in some cases will be nice. There are some other fun things that are working around their landing in 6.4 and 6.5. In 6.4.4 they're working on the low priority notifications, which is something I need to go play with because notifications are a pain, particularly when you have multiple mobile devices and the KDE connect turned on. And so, you know, you get in my case, I get five notifications for calendar events and it's a pain. I need to figure out how to fix that. Maybe this is the way to do it. They've got in 6.5 a fix where key repeat is turned off. Now, key repeat is the idea that if you hold a single button down on your keyboard, it prints it over and over again. You probably have played with this before. Well, when you're doing things like shortcuts, it can be a problem. And if your shortcut makes the screen flash in some way, it could be a really bad problem for someone that has like epileptic seizures. So what they've done is they've gone through and figured out those individual shortcuts and they are just disabling key repeat for those. And honestly it seems like a great fix that will probably be useful for everybody. There's some other interesting things happening like the global. The global xdg, the keyboard shortcuts. That's where one program needs to be able to get its shortcuts. No matter what other program you have highlighted. That's for things like a push to talk that was getting broken. Whenever someone made a change, they've gone in and figured out why and they've got that fixed. There is of course the regular bevy of crash fixes and other things and they, they mention that there are still four very high priority plasma bugs, but they're down to 2815 minute plasma bugs. So making some progress there. The high priority plasma bugs time based lock screen with mallet enabled has broken password confirm button. Sometimes there is an occasional crash in QQML delegate mode item when clicking on task manager icon across crashes are bad. Lock screen unable to unlock. No reaction when entering password and pressing enter. That might be the same thing as the top bug. And plasma can crash in legend mode update when displaying a notification that does not include a chart in it. Include charts in your notifications. It's great stuff.
- [66:38]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's good to see. I mean some of that stuff is for accessibility and they said probably a couple months ago they were really going to start focusing on accessibility. So it's good that they're still following through with even more.
- [66:50]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [66:52]
Jeff Jarvis
One of the greatest things though, I think KDE has done that I love. You know when you turn on your computer, you've been away a bit and you come back and you got to wiggle your mouse because you're like, where'd my pointer go?
- [67:04]
Leo Laporte
The mouse. Pointer gets big.
- [67:05]
Jeff Jarvis
It gets big.
- [67:06]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [67:07]
Jeff Jarvis
So it's like, oh, there it is. So you catch it right away rather than it's got to figure out where the refresh is and oh, I got to draw this correctly or you know, it just so you. It catches your eye right away and then immediately just Shrinks back down once you stop moving the mouse.
- [67:23]
Leo Laporte
I. I get it. This kind of is an old person problem though.
- [67:31]
Jeff Jarvis
I got a white beard for those listening, so, you know, I like.
- [67:38]
Leo Laporte
Is extremely handy. And yes, I have lost my mouse cursor before, but I'm just. I have memories, multiple memories of sitting down with a grandparent or something. And where's the cursor? Where is it at? Where's the mouse thingy? Oh, well, we are. We are the old people now, I guess.
- [67:58]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. Wait, wait. Give it another 10 years and you're going to be complaining about something. I'm. Ken and I are just gonna laugh at you. Yep, yep.
- [68:04]
Leo Laporte
It is. It is inevitable it's going to happen. All right, shall we. Shall we do some command line tips?
- [68:12]
Jeff Jarvis
We should.
- [68:13]
Leo Laporte
I think it's time.
- [68:15]
Jeff Jarvis
This one is. I'm gonna say AI again a lot.
- [68:20]
Leo Laporte
Gasp.
- [68:21]
Jeff Jarvis
Okay, you know, I know you can't swing a stuffed animal without hitting some something that says or references AI. And you know, I'm sorry, but this is going to be one of those things. And yes, I know how the saying goes, but we're family friendly. So stuffed animal it is. Vidi is an AI powered terminal assistant for Linux, but its focus is a little more focused. It can do things like help get the most out of a shell, commands and some coding help. So an example of what it can do is if you're trying to do something in the shell, you can tell it exactly what you're trying to do and it will give you a command that can accomplish that task. Now, mentioned before, like a lot of AI programs, the more detailed, specific you are, the better the results are going to be. Now, it's open source, you can see how it does what it does. And it's written in Python. It can record your terminal sessions, so it has the context which you're working on to better know what you're doing and what you're trying to do. And it has shell integration and will work with popular shells like Bash and zsh. A good example of how it can help with complex shell commands like find. Instead of trying to remember the command to look for something deeply hidden log file, you can ask Vidi to generate it for you. Now, it'll let you see the command before it executes, so if something's wrong, you can intervene before it actually takes off and runs a command. Vidi doesn't store your commands or data persistently and any storage happens on your local machine unless you specifically enable the recording feature. Now, if you don't Use the dash F option. If you don't use the dash S option if you want your terminal history not leaving your local machine for AI processing. So you have to opt in for the information to leave your computer. The article goes on to show how to install it and give some good command prompts which would be useful so a person has a good idea of what can be done. There are things like in the example find X number of log files with this pattern for the last four days. And you know, find can be like TAR somewhat in Wait a minute, what was that? What switch do I need? What is it? Yes, because, because it's got. It's so powerful. Well that's where this comes in and you just ask it and it just spits out the proper flags. And then if you're not sure, you can always go back and look to make sure it is what you want before you actually run the command. Now there are some downsides though, and the article goes through this. You do need an OpenAI API key. It only works with OpenAI, but they are working on getting a self hosted custom AI in the future, so then you wouldn't need to reference anything outside your local machine. Now there are fears from the author that it defeats the purpose of the command line by not letting people understand how their computer works. And even though it lets you check the command before it was ran, the author does say a new user might not know what the command does and just blindly trust AI. So it kind of mirrors other concerns people have of AI. And you know, I, I don't know to the magnitude that has or does not have merit. I. I cannot say, but something to be aware of. Take a look at the article in the show notes, see if the tool is something you want to use. And you know, I think the author does a very good job of giving the details on the pros and cons of the AI help, but something to maybe help your shell life be a little easier.
- [72:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, interesting. It feels like it needs a mode where it not only gives you the suggested command, but then also breaks it down and tells you what each of the things do. Like that could be super useful for learning more about how your computer works on the inside.
- [72:14]
Jeff Jarvis
Very true. But if you have the switches, it's pretty easy to look in the man page then. But I guess that could be where the new users like I'm not going to do that. Or maybe there is a way if you can say give me the command and tell me what the different switches do and then it could reference like the man pages and things like that and spit out what the flags are.
- [72:35]
Leo Laporte
I'm going to be honest what the.
- [72:36]
Jeff Jarvis
Purpose of them is.
- [72:37]
Leo Laporte
I'm going to be honest. Some of those man pages are huge and it is a pain to dig through them to find individual switches.
- [72:44]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it is. I just search for them.
- [72:46]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's true. Because.
- [72:48]
Jeff Jarvis
Because you're right. You might have 30 pages on a command with switches on top of switches that's nested with more switches.
- [72:55]
Leo Laporte
And you know, there I can, I can see there are times, there are some commands that they are arcane enough that it would be useful to have an AI to be able to be. So you. What I'm thinking of is times where it's like, oh, I know there's a way to do XYZ with this command, but I don't remember what it's called inside this command and I don't remember what the switch is to get to it. And so when you're trying to search through the man page, you don't even know the right search term to use. Whereas with an AI you could just say, hey, it's something kind of like this. And generally the AI is going to go, oh, you mean this thing. Yes, thank you, that's exactly what I meant.
- [73:32]
Jeff Jarvis
And a couple more commands. Awk. And said there's some deep ones right there.
- [73:39]
Leo Laporte
Absolutely, absolutely. All right. So I have more of an app pick than a command line. Tip. It's image. And this is not something that I was familiar with. I actually found it as a news article about the 1.136 update to image. Image. That's I M, I C H breaking things because they have sort of a not backwards compatible config change the. The media location environment variable. But then I started asking myself what, what is image? And so I clicked through to their GitHub page and looked at it and it is essentially Google Photos or I'm not sure what what the equivalent on Apple is, but it's sort of that photos slash timeline kind of approach. Self hosted and open source. And so you can. They. They call it. Their tagline is. It's the high performance self hosted photo and video management solution. But that's, that's sort of the idea is you, you put your photos and your videos up to it and then you can browse through them. I'm sure you can search them. What I'm not sure about is whether. Scratch it off your bingo card, I'm going to say it. So whether they have any AI integration in this because like, that is legitimately one of the decent uses of AI is to get your video, your video and your photo tagged. So you can say, hey, show me all the pictures of computer screens. I think I took a screenshot. I had this just the other day. In fact, somebody gave me a computer I had worked on earlier, and it was asking for the Windows BitLocker recovery key. I'm like, oh, I don't have it. So I went and I searched the places where I would have saved it if I wrote it down. Didn't have it there. And it's like, if I have it, the only way I would have this is if I had taken my phone out and taken a picture of it. So I go to Google Photos and I say, show me all the photos of computer screens, because I found stuff that way before. That sort of tagging is extremely useful. I don't know if it's in here. If not, that would be great to add. But it is. If you want an alternative to giving Google all of your pictures and videos and all of those things, then image is something to take a look at. And it is now on my sort of wish list to do list when I get a chance to go set up an instance of it and throw some pictures at it and see what it does with it. Because this sounds. Sounds pretty cool. It sounds like something I would definitely be interested in. So image, go check it out.
- [76:17]
Jeff Jarvis
Awesome. I like it.
- [76:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. All right. That is the show I want to let Jeff plug anything if he's got it, or maybe just some poetry for.
- [76:28]
Jeff Jarvis
Us, a little bit of update. So this weekend. So those of you that you know, Rob's normally on here talking about, you can donate coffee and we've had some donated to all of us. Well, he's actually coming through my neck of the woods and tomorrow night, tentatively, if things hold, well, I'm going to meet him and he's going to buy me some coffee in the form of beer. So.
- [76:55]
Leo Laporte
Beverages.
- [76:56]
Jeff Jarvis
Beverages, yes. So, yeah, hopefully if it happens, I'll tell everybody and maybe we'll have a picture or something as well. Other than that, poetry corner, my phone has me leashed like a dog tied to a tree, barking consistently. Have a great week, everybody.
- [77:21]
Leo Laporte
Appreciate it. Thanks so much for being here. All right, if you want to find more of me, there is, of course, hackaday you can check out. That's where Floss Weekly is at, generally every Tuesday. If folks have recommendations or leads on guests for Floss Weekly, I would appreciate it. I've been having trouble trying to keep the roster filled as I've gotten busier and busier with other things. Hackaday is also where you can find my Friday Morning Security column and we have a lot of fun with that as well. Other than that, just want to make sure and thank Twit for letting us do the Untitled Linux Show. We have so much fun with it. If you want to support TWiT, you should look into Club Twit. It's not much more than the price of a cup of coffee per month and it supports the network and the hosts and the shows that you love. And it also gets you ad free versions, access to the ad free versions of all of the shows and some other behind the scenes goodies as well. It's a lot of fun. Check out Club Twit. We appreciate everyone that is here that gets us live and on the download and we will be back next week with the Untitled Linux Show.
- [78:27]
Megan Morrone
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