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Untitled Linux Show 214: Multiple Kernels for the Price of One
01:24:48
Filesysytems, Firewire, and Network Forwarding
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- [00:00]
Jonathan Bennett
This week we talk about the new threadripper hardware and its many, many cores bcache FS might get removed from the kernel. We're still watching that one. Wayland's not ready yet, But Network Manager 1.54 is. With some really cool new features around IPv4, forwarding and more, the Steam survey almost hits 3%. There's a lot of stuff to cover. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [00:25]
Rob Dunwood
25 years ago, a small group of business and government leaders met in Washington, dc. They envision the creation of an independent non profit organization with a mission to help people, businesses and government mitigate the growing threat of cyber attacks. Today, the center for Internet Security embodies that vision. For 25 years it's worked with a global community of IT and cybersecurity experts to develop the CIS benchmarks and CIS critical security controls. These proven security best practices defend against common cyber threats and and streamline compliance with industry frameworks, regulations and standards. Today, CIS provides cybersecurity services, threat intelligence and critical resources to help public and private sector organizations alike strengthen their Cyber defenses. Visit cisecurity.org today. That's the letters cisecurity.org to find out how CIS can help your organization as we create confidence in the connected world.
- [01:26]
Jeff Massey
Lets map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [01:30]
Jonathan Bennett
Honestly Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile.
- [01:36]
Jeff Massey
With their new Family Freedom offer. That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [01:41]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, I'm departing from ATT and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile.
- [01:47]
Rob Dunwood
They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four.
- [01:52]
Jonathan Bennett
New phones on the house.
- [01:54]
Jeff Massey
Bon voyage. 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.
- [02:14]
Jonathan Bennett
With finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16.
- [02:16]
Jeff Massey
128Gb 8299 eligible trade in eg iPhone.
- [02:18]
Jonathan Bennett
11 Pro for well qualified credits end.
- [02:19]
Jeff Massey
And balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile.
- [02:24]
Jonathan Bennett
Podcasts.
- [02:25]
Jeff Massey
You love from people you Trust.
- [02:28]
Jonathan Bennett
This is TWiT. This is the Untitled Linux show episode 214 recorded Saturday, August 2nd. Multiple kernels for the price of one. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you all know what that means. It's time for the Untitled Linux Show. We Talk about open source, the Linux desktop, hardware, hardware, software, all kinds of stuff. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's not just me. I've got Jeff Massey with me and it is the two of us. But we're going to have a blast today. If for those of you watching live, we are getting started even later than usual. I had a headache that was doing a great impression of a migraine. But back at 100% now, thankfully, and we're going to go. The show must go on. So we've got some stuff to talk about.
- [03:23]
Jeff Massey
See, I was going to say Jonathan's feeling better. So that means Linux fixes everything. Exactly, exactly. Oh yeah, lots of stuff to talk about.
- [03:35]
Jonathan Bennett
You've got a big review of a big chip, don't you? To start with?
- [03:39]
Jeff Massey
I do. I mean, come on, it's got to be me. If we got new silicon out, I got to talk about it. So this week AMD released the new 9000 series Threadripper line of chips. The 9960X which has 24 cores, 48 threads for about $1,500. The 9970X, 32 cores with 64 threads for almost 2,500. It's you know, 2499, but yeah, we'll round to 2500 and finally the 9980X which has 64 cores and 128 threads. Now there's also the Pro series of chips which have been released which have even more cores, more PCI lanes and use a different motherboard so you can even get more memory on them. But we're not going to talk to the Pro series, the Threadripper series we're talking about, they target the high end desktop market and the Pro series targets workstations. So they're kind of the midpoint between super high end desktop and you know, like the Epic Server full enterprise. So but they're a lot more expensive, they take different motherboards, they, you know, they're a class unto themselves. So we're only dealing with the high end desktop. So Michael Larable over at Pharonix got his hands on a couple of the chips. Well, because AMD sent them for testing the 9980X and the 9970X chips to be exact. And he benchmarked them against the 7000 series of chips, the Threadripper chips, I mean, and he even included a 3990X thread ripper. So that was, that's going back a few generations. Remember there was no 5000 series threadripper. Also included is a 9950x3D. A 9950 and an Intel Ultra 9-85K were also included because that's again high end desktop and you're kind of crossing over to where you need more cores. Now there's no Xeon, there's no EPYC CPUs in this test is again same way was the pro chips. They're in a whole different class and aimed at, those are aimed at enterprise users. And it's, it's not, not the same use case. Ubuntu 2504 was used along with the 614 kernel and each chip was run at the maximum rated memory channels. So if it was dual channel, quad channel and max rated frequency of the memory. So this is not holding back to a standard. It is, this is how the chips you can get them to work as you would run them in your system. Now I want to state this up front. If you're going to get a threadripper chip, there are two basic reasons you need it. The first is going to be you need more cores. Now they're not going to be faster cores and say a 9950X, there's just going to be more of them. So anyone thinking this is going to be great for playing games? No, this is going to be wrong. Yes, they will play games, but they're not going to be at the top of the heap as most games don't use all the cores available to them. And the single core performance is very important to gaming. And the single core performance isn't as high on the threadripper chips. When you have more cores in a package, you have to have them clock down a little bit to both heat dissipation and you're kind of limited by the lowest common denominator. And the more cores you have, the more restrictive on the clock frequency you need to be. Now the second reason you might need one is more PCIe lanes or memory. You know, personally if I was getting a threadripper I would, I would get the lowest level the because I would use more PCIe lanes as I have run into that bottleneck in the past. Now am I going to get one? No. It's much cheaper to get an NVMe to U2 adapter and invest in a new than to invest in a new motherboard and cpu. So I don't and I don't really have a real use for the more cores than I have. So I'm running a 12 core system now and that's more than enough cores. Now back to the benchmarking. There were over 200 benchmarks ran and there's a link to the test results in the article which is in the show notes and there's a lot of compile benchmarks, you know, like for example compile of the 6.8 kernel with default configs. It was compiled in 21.35 seconds. For the 9980X that is getting fast. I mean boy, that's, that's just hauling AI workloads, scientific workloads and media workloads like rendering and transcoding are the rest of the benchmarks. So there was no gaming. It's all, you know, lot, a lot of things that really showcase where the cores come out. And for those that like to watch videos, for example, Jay's 2 cents. He was having problems benchmarking because he got a threadripper and a lot of his benchmarking software. It was not set up to handle that many cores and so he only had a few tests he could run to truly show what they could do. Because you know, if, if your software maxes out at eight cores, well, however many you have in addition to that, it's not going to do you any good. But looking at the Overall results, the 9980X came out on top and it showed a 30% improvement over the 7980X and the 9970X showed over the 7970X a 28% improvement. So that's I think a pretty good generational uplift. Basically you're running roughly 30% improvement in a generation. So that's, that's pretty decent. The 3990X came out slightly behind the 9950X which were, that was well behind the threadripper chips. I didn't do the math, but it was probably about 20% to 30% behind the other Threadripper chips. The 9950X, 9950X 3D, they were just a sliver away from each other. So it, the 3D was slightly faster, but it was, you know, it's such a small margin that it's, it could have been just rounding error, you know, not statistically significant. You know, I honestly would have loved to see the intel chip do better this round. But the 285 was dead last and by a fair margin it was another double digit percentage down from the other chips. It just in these scientific compile type benchmarks it did not hold its own. Power consumption was slightly up on the new Threadripper chips, but it was just a tiny bit. And Michael Erbil even said, you know, really it could be considered the same. So basically you can get 30% improvement for roughly the same power. There was like a couple watts difference, but because they're pulling in the triple digits, you know, you're looking at like a 1% difference. So overall it seems like a great deal to me. Take a look at the article in the show notes for the full details and decide for yourself if you need all the cores, which for an entire system do, do come at a pretty hefty price tag. Don't forget you got the CPU price which we talked about $600 or more for a motherboard. And really if you're going to use this, you should get quad channel memory to fully take advantage of this. And that's going to be another nice price tag on there. So, you know, and that's not counting if you need even more parts because you don't have to have other existing, you know, power supplies and things that are going to be able to fully power the threadripper.
- [12:01]
Jonathan Bennett
So you're probably going to need a dedicated power supply just for that. You will probably need a new power supply.
- [12:06]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, most likely. So, you know, yeah, just keep that in mind that it's going to be pricey and realistically that's where a lot of us even could say, you know, I compile quite a bit but you know, for the cost a few thousand dollars, I can wait another 30 seconds or one minute to just let things go.
- [12:30]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I watched the Linus Tech Tips video on it as well and some interesting stuff there. But apparently like they recommend a 1.5 kilowatt power supply for this thing. It's just, it's nuts how much power it can pull. Oh yeah, I think part of that is when you load it up with all, you know, multiple GPUs in a system. But still it was, it was pretty impressive how, how much power they said that they wanted it to have. And of course Linus on Linus Tech tips, they, they kind of went all out and turned all of the overclocking all the way up to 11 and then did a open loop out of a trash can full of ice water. I mean it was, it was pretty glorious and it's ridiculousness, but it worked. It's not dumb if it works.
- [13:16]
Jeff Massey
I, I did, I did watch that video as well. And you're right, a lot of times they Recommend a huge power supply because you're, you're, if you're using that many PCI lanes, you're either hooking a ton of drives, which, okay, isn't going to take it a whole lot of power, but a lot of times too, you're going to have multiple graphic cards or things like that, or high speed networking. You're, you know, it's, it's built to be worked. One thing though is with switching power supplies you could run a higher. If you happen to have a 220 or 240 volt power around, you could run like a European style supply. A lot of those supplies have a wide voltage range and frequency range. So if you need a little more, that's, you're going to switch to 240.
- [14:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Unplug your dryer and plug your computer in there.
- [14:13]
Jeff Massey
Yeah. With the realization they might be giving off the same amount of heat, you.
- [14:18]
Jonathan Bennett
Know, just drape your clothes over your server and call it a day. Yeah. All right. Well, there's something caught my attention this week and that is the latest update to Network Manager. It's one of those tools that you may not realize you've got running on your computer, but you almost certainly do. It's almost certainly part of your linux distribution. And NetworkManager 1.54 dropped this week and it has some interesting things in it, one of which being the IPv4 forwarding setting per device. Now those of you, those of us that have done VPNs in the past, you may be very familiar with the IPv4 forwarding settings. I've got a buddy that we've set up VPNs together in various iterations for various reasons. And we have this running joke going that whenever anything doesn't work, it's always, have you checked if IPv4 forwarding is turned on? And about half the time that's what it is. You need to go turn that on for traffic to actually flow. So I saw this and really perked up like, oh, you can do it in Network Manager now and you can do it per device rather than turning it on globally as a kernel setting. That's very interesting. And then there's some other things in there. There's some IPv6 stuff with the prefix delegation, which if you've got multiple IPv6 addresses from your ISP, super interesting to be able to work with that. Some other things in there with network manager and Wireguard and Wireguard and IPv6. The NMTUI network manager TUI also has support for configuring the loopback interface, which that's not something that you often need to do, but when you do need to mess with it, it's nice to have the tools. And then there's even some upgrades on being able to change certain connection properties without needing to bring a connection all the way down and back up, which if you're SSH into the machine you're working on, might be really important. Yeah, various things around that. And one of the last things in this article that's mentioned is the early boot network configuration has improved and so like Network Manager now understands the boot firmware table and so it gets a better idea of what devices are available right after boot instead of having to wait. And so that's also pretty interesting. Some neat stuff in 1.54 and again, it's just now released. So, you know, you'll probably see this in most distros we'll roll out in like the next major. Maybe the next major release may come as an upgrade to this one. It just sort of depends upon how aggressive a distro with doing these in between major version updates. So something like Fedora, I would assume we will get this in a few weeks. Something like Ubuntu. You may have to wait for 2510 to be able to get a hold of this. It's some neat goodies in there.
- [17:30]
Jeff Massey
Yes. But you can turn on backports if you want to live a little more dangerously, which is a lot of the pre Software. The upcoming 25.10.
- [17:40]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I think almost all distros have something like that. It's. It's scarier in some of them than in others because like in Fedora, the way to do that is just do start pulling packages from Rawhide, which is the, you know, the tip of the spear as for the next version. But I've done it. I've run rawhide. I've run partial Rawhide before. It's always a good time.
- [18:01]
Jeff Massey
I have too.
- [18:03]
Jonathan Bennett
For the same reason, wasn't it?
- [18:06]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, I wanted the new plasma.
- [18:11]
Jonathan Bennett
But.
- [18:11]
Jeff Massey
I let mine slip a little too much and I did a whole bunch of updates and that kind of didn't work out so well.
- [18:17]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes that causes problems. Yeah.
- [18:20]
Jeff Massey
Too much at once. Just choked it a little bit.
- [18:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes. Yes. All right, so it is time to talk kernel stuff. And we have a kernel release we have some news coming for. So we just got 6.16. We've got news about 6.17 because the merge went. Window is open there and we're Starting to see what's landing. But you've got something for 6:18. We're looking a few months off down the road, off into the horizon for this one kind of.
- [18:49]
Jeff Massey
Well, we're going to touch on 617 as well. So you get multiple kernels for the price of one. What a bargain. So BCash FS says they're going to drop the experimental label in the 6.18 kernel, which it means then it could be considered stable. Maybe. Now I say maybe because Kent Overstreet and Linus Torvalds don't see eye to eye on some things. Now, we've covered issues in past episodes, but to catch people up, Linus said that he was going to part ways with the bcache file system in the 617 kernel. Linus was upset that Kent would be trying to put in new features into the file system. And after the pull request window was closed. Now the normal process is your new feature code or, you know, everything new goes in at the pull request window. And then the rest of the time in the RC stages, you're just fixing any bugs that might have come up with the new code. So you're not supposed to be adding new features at that time. It's just a pull. Everything in RCS are just for polishing and taking away the paper cuts and the bugs. As, as of the time of this show now nothing has happened. The the code is still in there, but the merge window is still open. And maybe Linus won't do anything until after the merge window closes. Now, if he does do something, what does that even mean? He could push out the code to be under the broken kernel configuration option. So then you would to. To get it into the kernel, you would have to compile it with the broken flag set, maybe do another timeout cycle. So, meaning in the past when Kent was pushing Linus's buttons and making him upset, the code froze for release cycle, so no changes were allowed for, for a kernel life cycle. So from the pull window to the final release, Linus just said, no, I'm not accepting code, I'm not taking any polls, I'm not. He just wouldn't let Kent have any code change in the kernel. You know, maybe there's something else that could happen, or maybe things have cooled and they're going to just let the code stay where it is because, you know, maybe, maybe things have cooled. Maybe Kent will behave himself and. Yeah, we'll. We'll see. Back to today though, Kent said the following. I've been digging through the bug tracker and polling user to see what bugs are still outstanding and it's not much so the experimental label is coming off in the 618 kernel. Now that would mean the file system would be stable for this year's long term support release possibly which is thought to be the 618 kernel. Now that's if the kernel timings stay somewhat regular so that's always subject to change depending on you know how 617 goes. If it goes out the window then the 618 won't be the LTS kernel. It's the last released kernel of the year is the LTS kernel a few highlights of the code pool going into 6.17 or requested to be pulled we'll see if it makes it in is fix a major performance bug when deleting many files and this was caused by the key cache caching keys. Well that's a mouthful that had been deleted causing certain lockups in the inode triggers to scan previously they also fixed the ioread no promote counter has been broken out into sub counters. These can be seen with the B cache FS space FS space top on a recent bcache FS tools this helps when diagnosing why reads aren't coming from the cache. Congestion tracking is now a little bit less aggressive and that controls when we decide to do a promote but he can't acknowledge that this area still needs more work. Metadata rights are no longer throttled by write back throttling no cow, probably no copyright rights can now be rebalanced for example background target background underscore compression options and almost all recovery passes now have progress indicators. There's also repair improvements. He says we'll now reconstruct missing inodes if we find contents for that inode more than one or two keys just not just if the inode B tree was damaged Sim similar for dirent to missing inode and they also fixed the fix an in memory accounting going out of sync with the accounting B tree when doing accounting updates before going read write take a look at the article in the show notes for the full details and all the fixes. I just listed a few of those and I edited out some that were a little more archaic sounding. I didn't know if they were super important or not. So definitely check that out especially if you're a coder or really playing with the bcache file system and we're just going to wait and see what's going to happen. You know, kind of exciting and we'll let you know what what the results are and If. If things change and keep everybody apprised.
- [24:19]
Jonathan Bennett
When was the last time that we talked about file systems in the kernel and called it kind of exciting in this sort of way?
- [24:26]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, it. But you know, that's one thing though. You don't want an exciting file system.
- [24:32]
Jonathan Bennett
Exactly. We don't want this kind of excitement.
- [24:34]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, you want boring. Very boring. And personally, even if it goes stable, you know, I'm kind of interested in the Bcache file system. I would probably wait a good year before I even would attempt to get in to get on it. You know, maybe. Maybe even longer than that.
- [24:51]
Jonathan Bennett
I was going to say you're more aggressive than I am. I'm thinking give it five years of stability before you actually trust it for any kind of critical data.
- [25:00]
Jeff Massey
Well, no, that's just putting it on like my gaming machine, my server with all my file stuff and all that. Oh yeah, that's not getting tied five years. Long time. It's staying on ext 4 for the foreseeable future.
- [25:17]
Jonathan Bennett
Indeed. It's funny, I've got a couple of servers that I've moved over to. I think it's XFS is what like the Red Hat stuff uses by default and it's got some nice features, but it's also sort of a pain to work with. And I sort of. I sort of wish, like, man, I wish I just put ext4 on these. It'd be so much easier. Boring is best.
- [25:42]
Jeff Massey
As x 1011 says, last time we had excitement in file systems we got reezer file system and boy, that did not turn out well.
- [25:56]
Jonathan Bennett
No, no, it didn't. All right, so we've got some more kernel news and that is. I alluded to this briefly, but we got this past weekend the release of 6.16 and there is some fun stuff in there. New stuff in the no view. Excuse me, nouveau driver for Nvidia hardware. Although a lot of that new stuff does not yet re clock and so it's still not particularly performant. But it works, turns on, it could fire up a display. Now one of the other things that really fascinated me was that we got the OpenVPN DCO, the data channel off loading driver. And I talked earlier about doing VPNs. I used to use OpenVPN a lot and I mean, it's great software. I've just almost entirely gone to wireguard now and I'm actually really curious whether wireguard can make use of any of this DCO work or if it's just architected completely differently and therefore it doesn't make sense to. There's some stuff from intel that's working on landing and some AMD stuff. There's the AMD GPU user mode queues which this one is really interesting. This lets a. If I remember correctly this allows a game that you have full screened to skip the compositor and do calls more directly to to the GPU and you might get some important some improved frame rates out of that. There's your normal file system stuff. The boring file systems do still get fixes and changes but there's also. I remember seeing some additional AMD stuff around ray tracing as that's getting better and better. A lot of little things like that have landed in the 616 kernel and then as I was looking through what all is in 6.17 I saw an article here about FireWire support being worked on and FireWires old technology at this point I think of it rather fondly because I've done quite a bit with it over the years. Between the digital video link that a lot of I think it was Sony camcorders came with that was actually FireWire underneath. And then I've done FireWire audio interfaces multiple times and I have one in the rack. I don't think it's actually active and connected to the computer because last time I tried it firewire and pipewire did not get along very well together. I need to try that again. I think it's better but we got some changes to FireWire and one of those was it removed a tasklet usage and replaced it with a work queue. And what that does. I know that doesn't mean a whole lot to people that don't spend time doing kernel stuff, but that gives you asynchronous packet transition transmissions so you don't have to wait. Packets can just go. You don't have to wait for Things to go one at a time into the FireWire link which means that you can do low latency which is super important for things like audio firewire interfaces. There's a couple of those other things that was the main one. Work queues also support preemptible work items. So again you do something like a real time kernel and that will suddenly work better and you can guarantee those low latencies. So interesting stuff going on in the kernel when it comes to FireWire and you know we've got sort of this guarantee of support or at least a promise of support from Takeshi Sakamoto that he is going to support it in the kernel until at least 2029 which it's kind of scary how rapidly that's coming up. But that's four good years of work on it and I doubt it will go away then he may just move on to other stuff. But yeah, firewire, it's been around for a long time. Still gets used to, still gets used for some of this stuff. Oh yeah.
- [30:12]
Jeff Massey
But you know, 2029, at that point it might be just a. Okay, the code just stays there and nothing changes. Well, that's why in the kernel there's some, you've got some of the old sun workstations and things like that that have code in there because the hardware never changes. So they don't have to really tweak anything. It just stays where it is, you know, so there's, there's no big overhead. It still works and it just kind of sits there for people that need it.
- [30:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [30:46]
Jeff Massey
On, on file systems though, I did see something that caught my eye too, was the ext 4. They're, they're adding to 617. They gain better block allocation scalability.
- [31:00]
Jonathan Bennett
Hmm.
- [31:01]
Jeff Massey
And I didn't, I didn't go deep into the, to the story, but looks like block allocation scalability is greatly like 650% improvement in scalability.
- [31:17]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, wow. So better, better performance on very large drives.
- [31:22]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, yeah. It, this isn't something that we're going to see day to day, but on the, on the real high end and certain corner cases, it.
- [31:32]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't know, I've got a couple of different raid 6 drives that are ext 4 that might see a little bit of improvement from this.
- [31:39]
Jeff Massey
Well, yeah, but, but don't expect 600, you know.
- [31:43]
Jonathan Bennett
Sure.
- [31:44]
Jeff Massey
Plus percent.
- [31:45]
Jonathan Bennett
No. 600% improvements. No, indeed, indeed. That is fair. All right. Jeff has a story here about small Linux projects having big problems. And the tagline you've got here is when passion isn't enough. I'll have a book plug at the end of the show. I guess that this very much reminds me of.
- [32:14]
Jeff Massey
Well, I'm going to start out. This story is an opinion piece and you know, I personally though I found it kind of mirrored a lot of my thoughts and I thought it would be a good story to have on the show. And especially, you know, we're supposed to be kind of a users group, kind of feel. Well, not everything has to be cut and dried facts. So it's just we're going to throw out a little color commentary, if you will. So, you know, and on this show we cover a lot of different distributions which pop up with you Know, a new idea or a new software packaging scheme or something, you know, and out front I want to say that this is not a dig or any kind of negativity that I'm giving to those startup distributions, just some things to be aware of. And the article says, and I quote, this isn't a dig at small Linux projects. In fact, they're a big part of what makes Linux so exciting and full of possibilities. The real focus here is on newer users who dive into Linux for the first time, get swept up in all the options, and then later realize that maybe they picked the wrong distribution for their needs. Now for those that don't know, which I sure our audience, probably a lot of our audience does, but just in case somebody's new there, there are a ton of distributions out there and if you want to see some, just go to distrowatch.com which we've mentioned on the show before. And on the right side of the screen they have a list of the top 100, kind of by popularity. I say kind of because we've talked in the past how the system can be game, game, so take it with a grain of salt. But bottom line, they always have a top 100. So there's always new ones popping on and some falling off and there's just a lot of distributions out there. Now there are some hidden risks with these small distributions, especially when they're driven by a single person. The article goes into more details but basically someone is really excited because they have a new way of packaging, configuring, using software that most distributions don't or some, some unique flavor. They, they get excited about something, some particular thing and they get excited and build a distro and push it out there and you know, then you get some bugs back. While they love making the original spin, they find you know, hey, okay, I can fix the bugs and then more come in and you know, then they find that maintaining the distribution is a full time job and can burn a person out and that enthusiasm can fade away. Even a small team can burn out because just the big workload of maintenance and you know, you kind of have the big, all right, we released this, but the maintenance stuff kind of some, some people look at as more drudgery and you know, it, it's not for everybody. Well, and maybe, maybe they tried, you know, so then, then that release disappears. Now maybe the original release was they, they were setting something up in a unique way and then find out there was a reason others didn't do it that way. Because while the idea seems cool. It causes other issues downstream or in other parts of the release. And as mentioned in the article, real life doesn't take a break. And all this, in addition to what you know, your daily life has and jobs and family and everything is, can also cause people to kind of just drift away. And that distribution either disappears, it falls behind, doesn't get regular updates. You know, the article also brings up security both in maybe writing a custom wrapper around another piece of software to make it better, easier to use, maybe for example, packaging software. You know, if the distribution doesn't get a wide adoption and thorough testing, there could be security issues that are not found. Or maybe the distribution is built on top of another known distribution, like for example Fedora. Say someone built a distribution on top of Fedora 40. Well, if they're not constantly keeping things up when Fedora 40 goes end of life and is no longer updated, the distribution built on top of it won't get on any updates. So security issues won't get fixed. They got to stay on top and move to the next revision of Fedora if they're going to, you know, have a distribution built on top of it. Now I am cutting this article way down from the original as it would be the length of probably about three stories to do here. So I'm not going to touch on some of the other reasons the issues a person might need to be careful other than to say, you know, support can be an issue in the single person or small team spins. And there's also the issue of ecosystem compatibility. You know, the, the excitement which first spawned the distribution was great. It might have focused around a single piece of software and you know, but not had the proper testing for the.
- [37:06]
Jonathan Bennett
Rest of the system.
- [37:07]
Jeff Massey
So while the whatever works great, they kind of ignored other corners of the distribution and things fall apart at the edges. Now I'm going to let the listeners take a look at the article in the show notes and see the details and lengthy conclusion to the article. So like I said, it's, it's, it's a lot bigger than what I'm giving it justice here. So please, please go back and check it out because there's, there's a lot of interesting points in there. Now, my personal feelings, while I will play with any distribution on a spare drive or something, I don't care about, you know, we're, if it crashes, it goes down, I don't care. I'll be okay, you know, then sure, I'll run the alpha, first distribution beta, you know, whatever, you know, But I don't rely on a distribution unless it has a couple of years at least of regular updates under its belt. That's for me. Bottom line though, know your risk you can take. How, how valuable is your data you're using for this distribution and be mindful of what you want out of your system. So not, not to say don't go play and have fun. Just make sure you take calculated risks. And because you could have, you know, something go wrong with the software, it corrupts something, you lose a drive, you don't have support security issues. Just, just be aware and plan accordingly.
- [38:32]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. So what you're telling us is that we should make sure and only run distros from big established companies like intel that won't let us down.
- [38:43]
Jeff Massey
Exactly. But, but they had a notice that they were shutting down and it was advertised. So there was a difference there versus things just stop getting updates or aren't getting full updates.
- [38:57]
Jonathan Bennett
So it's true.
- [38:59]
Jeff Massey
The same way with. You can say the same thing with. What was, what was the red hat? Citos Centos. There was an announcement. Yes, it stopped. You know, no distribution is safe from that. But there, there was, there was forewarning.
- [39:18]
Jonathan Bennett
That's fair.
- [39:18]
Jeff Massey
So that you were able to make the transition before. Oh hey, this hasn't had an update for what's going on here. Oh they. Everything disappeared. The repositories poofed or you know, whatever.
- [39:31]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, obviously taking a little dig there at intel and clear Linux because there wasn't any warning giving given it just happened. But you're right, they did at least let people know it was happening. Whereas with a little distro the maintainer may just disappear and there may not be a notice anywhere. You may not know that it's not getting updated until a year down the line and you finally realize wait a second, I haven't pulled any updates for a while.
- [39:58]
Jeff Massey
Well, there was, there was one distribution I remember too that kind of originally made me wary because it was. Oh, I can't even think of the name of it now. It was. It was run by a guy named Textar like T E X S T A R. It was like it sounds star Linux or so I can't. But I remember it was. It was there and then it wasn't and he came back and then it. Somebody else took it over and then that languished and he was back in it again.
- [40:27]
Jonathan Bennett
PC Linux os.
- [40:28]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, that's it. PC Linux OS and it seemed like it had a little bit of a shaky history there for a while. Now the article specifically calls out, there are exceptions to every rule, Slackware being one of them. Led by one, one guy. And he's been doing it for a long time. We had had its birthday last week, so being small doesn't mean they're going to go away. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket until stuff has been around for a bit.
- [41:01]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, and there's sort of a broader application of this to not just distros, but to open source in general. So we've seen in the corporate world you see a lot of this, particularly in languages and so languages like JavaScript and some of those ecosystems where you end up with a bunch of really small packages and you may have individual people maintaining some of those packages that get used all over the place. And there's the left pad example. It's the right, or was it right pad? I think it was left pad. But it was the kind of the big one of the first times this happened. Big example of it. Somebody got fed up with it. He's like, I want to get paid for my work, I'm working too much, I'm not getting paid. So I'm going to start pulling some of my repositories and broke, you know, a large fraction of the Internet by pulling, by pulling left pad. Oh yeah, off of npm. And it, it's a problem, right, that you have so many of these little open source projects that don't have any sort of funding model, they don't have any sort of secession model. None of this stuff exists. And it's not a problem that they exist because obviously people can write code if they want to and throw it out there. That's part of the beauty of this whole thing of the way open source works. But you do run into a problem where it starts getting used and it becomes a very important piece of infrastructure and there's nobody thinking about, well, is this just one guy? Are we making sure that the guy that's propping up this corner of the Internet has his rent paid? You know, it gets back to that excuse, that XKCD comic, the famous one where it's like all of the Internet and then you have this one little piece that's maintained by a single guy in Kansas. And you know, when that was written, I'm pretty sure that was about ntp, the network time protocol. But there are now countless projects that, that should, that could, could refer to, could describe so well.
- [43:13]
Jeff Massey
And I think, I think it's a little more salt in the wounds too, because I've Seen some stories where they talk about you get companies like Google making billions and they're like, I can't get just a couple bucks or something or some help here, or can you throw me a bone? And.
- [43:35]
Jonathan Bennett
And it's not even so with something like that. It's not even that Google is intentionally being evil and like, haha, we want to just exploit your work, blah, we're not going to give you any money. No, they just don't know. Like nobody at Google even knows that the dude exists. Right. Like that's the problem. It's just so difficult to even catch somebody's attention.
- [43:56]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, and I didn't mean to imply anybody was being malicious. I was just meaning that, you know, see my codes everywhere, but it's just kind of works everywhere and it spreads everywhere and people don't realize the impact.
- [44:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. All right, so let's chat about the Steam survey. Rob's not here to do this, so I'm going to do it. Rob, this is what you get. And when you're off for a week, I cover your stories. The July Steam survey is announced and there's some real cool stuff in there. For one, we are all the way up to 2.89%. Sorry, the July Steam survey, a month behind here. The July Steam survey, we're up to 2.89% of the people running the survey were running a Linux desktop, which we're really edging close to that 3% mark, which is fun. There's some big shakeups in the distros being run or it may be that we're now collecting data a little bit better because the percentages by distro, the other percentage is now only at 17.58%. That's a fall of like 3, 3.29%. And we've got several distros here that basically went from 0% up to. So for example, Fedora. Fedora Linux 42 KDE Plasma Desktop sits at 1.79% and that is an increase of 1.79%. So that makes me suspect that these were just falling into the other category before this. The other Fedora 42, the Workstation Edition was at 2.21% and then Bazzite 42 from Fedora 42 is at 3.2% now. Quite an increase there too. So Fedora is really holding down its fair share of the SteamOS, the Steam Linux market. Then of course you've got Arch Linux and Ubuntu and all of the others that you would expect on the list. AMD actually fell just a little bit and intel gained about a percent. So AMD is sitting at 67.91% of the Linux gamers and. Or no, of all gamers, not just Linux gamers. And genuine intel is now sitting at 32.08. So some interesting stuff in the Steam survey, but another month of growth of Linux users, which we always love to see. It's fun, it's fun to watch it. And like I said, we're really closing in that. That 3% mark.
- [46:45]
Jeff Massey
I bet we hit it, especially with Windows 10 going. And, you know, the sentiment for Windows is just getting worse and worse. And realistically, you know, Linux now is getting a lot easier. You know, it's not the. All right, I got to be in the terminal. I got to know. It's a lot of just point and click gui. And there's a lot of them, especially like kde where. And there's, there's other desktops too, that if you can run Windows, you can figure out KDE pretty fast. Oh, let me click on the corner icon. Oh, there, here's my office suite or here's my web stuff. Or here, you know. Yeah, very familiar.
- [47:30]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. So it's interesting to think about this. So, like, Microsoft is not doing itself any favors with the overall user experience of Windows, right? And they have not been for a long time. I think the Windows experience really started to suffer, we'll say, when they started putting ads in the start menu, when they started essentially downloading games automatically that were paid. Right. So you would see your dorky. Essentially browser games in some cases were automatically getting downloaded to people's computers. That was the beginning of the end for being able to take Windows seriously as like a serious desktop. In my opinion, that was the beginning of the end. It's real hard to take it seriously when they're automatically delivering you adware. And then now you've got things like Windows recall, you've got the push to Windows 11, which nobody likes Windows recall. The big problem with it is it's just, it's creepy. It touches people. It triggers the creepy response, which is not ever a good thing for a company. And then on the other side you say, oh yeah, everybody's going to Apple. Well, Apple sort of gave up on gaming years ago when they said that Metal is going to be the only game in town and they just absolutely refuse to support OpenGL or Vulkan and everything has to be Metal. It's like, who's going to put up with that? And so I don't know, it almost seems like we're approaching this point to where if you want to game on a computer, Linux is about to be the place to do it. Which is so wild for those of us that have been watching this for a while and particularly been trying to game on Linux for years, it's such a wild thing to see.
- [49:28]
Jeff Massey
Oh yeah, well, and now some games run better on Linux than they do on Windows. And I think, you know, Windows has a key in this. Not only just because everything they're doing Mac like you said, is they're kind of like, oh sure, you can game on Mac, just go figure it out, you know, we'll allow it.
- [49:46]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [49:47]
Jeff Massey
And that was kind of the response. Windows gives Linux something it needs a stable gaming API. With DirectX 12 it does. That's one of the problems in Linux is some of that stuff changes so much. You're like, ah, freedom. It's great, we evolve. But you can't write anything without having it changing all the time. And that's why even games that a lot of times you don't have as many native games when you could just because they can look and say, you know what, let's just do it for DirectX 12. Proton will do it. We'll just make sure we use the proper DirectX commands so that it works in Proton or we'll just add into Proton so that the software will work and then they got one platform they develop for, it takes it over.
- [50:45]
Jonathan Bennett
We've talked about this before, but it is, it's interesting. So it's not a problem for open source games because somebody will get in there and fix it. But when you have a closed sourced game, particularly one where like it's done and they don't want to continue making changes, they don't want to push updates to be able to fix things. Yeah, you run into the same problem on Windows, by the way. You know, there are games for older versions of Windows that are almost impossible to run on modern Windows. Right. Like Windows XP games. Trying to get that running on Windows 11 is a challenge. Anything older than that, I mean, I think you can just forget it. Right. So anything that's a 16 bit game just will not run on a 64 bit OS inside windows at this point.
- [51:30]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, there's a lot of those older ones that you have to run it on Linux if it's going to run, that's where it's going to happen. Because they had so many custom libraries and special, you know, they didn't really follow the standards as well as games do now. And so there was in Linux was more apt to be able to load in those special libraries in their, in their containers, you know, for like Proton.
- [51:56]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah. So it is, it's kind of ironic, but I think it's actually accurate that the best gaming API we have right now is the Windows API running inside of Wine. That that is where things actually work and will continue to work, which is wild.
- [52:14]
Jeff Massey
And I could see, you know, as long as they don't come out with a new Direct X, which I don't see why they would that, you know, that that could be the new standard for Linux gaming is just here's your API and we can just handle it.
- [52:30]
Jonathan Bennett
If they come out with another DirectX, what are they going to call it?
- [52:34]
Jeff Massey
Who knows? It could be 758 or something.
- [52:40]
Jonathan Bennett
But surely, I mean they're not going to call it DirectX 13, right?
- [52:43]
Jeff Massey
Well, it would follow their DirectX naming convention. But if you got the Xbox then they could add whatever random number to it. Or we're going to go up by one, we're going to multiply it by itself, we're going to square it, we're going to take the cube root of PI to that number to come up with the. Who knows?
- [53:06]
Jonathan Bennett
DirectX 144. There you go. That's the right name for it. That's what comes after DirectX 12. DirectX 144 for the next Xbox.
- [53:15]
Jeff Massey
There you go.
- [53:15]
Jonathan Bennett
It's brilliant. Be an Xbox exclusive. Never come to Windows.
- [53:20]
Jeff Massey
Well, ETA oligarchs said Microsoft just wants Xbox on Linux. Well, I could see that because the hardware they're not basically kind of given up on. Sony won that one. But if you think, well, handhelds or other things, they want the gaming, they want the games, that's where the money is. And if it's like, oh, these all run on Linux, all right, we just get the, we get the cash from the games. We don't have to support an operating system. We, you know, makes it, makes it easier.
- [53:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. I don't think Microsoft has ever made money on the Xbox consoles. I think they've always, it's always been a lost leader to sell the games.
- [54:04]
Jeff Massey
Usually they do make money towards the end of the run, but yeah, the first couple years they're losing money on them, but they make it up in the, they make it up on the sales of the games. It's like when they, hey, this phone is free. If you sign up for this plan.
- [54:19]
Jonathan Bennett
They'Re losing money on the individual units, but they make it up in bulk.
- [54:23]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, it's just like a service plan where it's like, hey, okay, we're going to give you this hardware for free, but guess what? You have to sign up for this contract. Well, you're paying for it, you're just not paying for it. Right up front.
- [54:36]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, Keith S512 says it's going to be DirectX 12B. No, we got to follow the Windows naming scheme. It's going to be DirectX 1225 H2.
- [54:50]
Jeff Massey
Service pack.
- [54:50]
Jonathan Bennett
Six service pack. Yeah, Servicing pack. All right, well, I'm glad we don't have anything like this on Linux. Oh, wait, there's Wayland.
- [55:04]
Jeff Massey
And that's a segue right there.
- [55:06]
Jonathan Bennett
It wrote itself. It did.
- [55:09]
Jeff Massey
We just walked right into that one. Can it be proud of us? So the next story is a hackaday article and a YouTube video from Brody Robertson. So Brody put out a poll on several different platforms asking why a person was still on X11. Now he did say he wanted real reasons, not theoretical issues which you don't personally use. You know, he want, he wanted the actual. Here's what's a showstopper for me personally. And he said there was mostly good responses. There were a few which were off the wall, but 99% he said were usable and very, you know, very clear what the problem was. And one of the like for the first ones was the desktop environment of choice doesn't support it. Now this would be like XFCE Mate or a window manager that no one uses. Now the example he gave on the video was like one person was using Stump Wm. You know, he, I know he said, he's like, well, he kind of looked it up and it was, I don't remember the language it was in. It was. But he's like, yeah, that's just not going to be one that's probably going to support Wayland because it's such a small project that it's not going to have the resources to build, build the Wayland support into it. But he, you know, but he does go on to say that's a valid reason. And there are some others which are, you know, still in experimental stages, like Cinnamon, because it was called out. Somebody said, you know, well, Cinnamon supports it, but it's not very good. And you know, it's still pretty, pretty bad support. Well, that's not Whalen's fault. That's Cinnamon because. And, and it's flagged as experimental. So they're not claiming support is where it needs to be. It's, it's just, you know, people may be not realizing experimental or they're, they're just too optimistic and don't realize how flaky experimental can be. Now the next reason is because you're limited by your software. Now some users reported very specific, civic, very specific programs they needed because of their job and they couldn't change out to others. Now think, think niche type programs and not mainstream ones which have known replacements. So it's like well I, I can't use Open Office because I have to use which I mean could be. But a lot of the ones they, they gave were ones I hadn't heard of before but it was required by their, their work. So and those programs did not work on Wayland. So it very, very specific use cases. Now they also brought up X11 display forwarding which is used a lot of times in corporate settings and you're limited by the software and hardware you're allowed to use. And that could be a reason. Brody goes on to say that you can display forward through Wayland and there's X Wayland which can also display forward. It's just in this case the Wayland and X Wayland options were not available. Again corporate setting where you know, a lot of your software is very locked down and very controlled. So you, you can't just say oh just use this. And anybody in a large corporation when you try to say hey, I want to get this open source software. Yeah, good luck. It's probably if you do get it, it's going to take you probably a year to go through all the checks. And you know, you probably need to know a few people on the inside just to keep it moving other things. Brody goes on to mention the graphic tablet support which does work on wayland, just not 100% like it does on X11. So this, this is brought up as a known issue. And for example he, he gave it, he showed a posting on the KDE website where they're, they've got people working on it or I mean on the Wayland website and they got people working on it. So if you're a professional and need to have your graphics tablet work in a very specific way because you know you're a graphic artist and how it, it, how it operates affects your art, you know, that's also a valid reason there are there but know that there is a plan to have it fully working in the future. So it's, some of this is, it's getting worked on, it's just not there yet. Now some things were brought up which they Blamed Wayland. But there's some issue with you know, other desktop environments that are having problems or like I said before, things like Cinnamon, Wayland, where it's still flagged as experimental. So there was some things that people listed that you really can't blame Wayland because the, the desktop environment is still building out support or they had another bug that people just filed under Wayland which was, wasn't true. An issue which is a problem is playing games when you have more than one monitor. So when you're trying to play a game, a person never knows which monitor the game is going to land on. And Brody does call out that that's a real problem, needs to be fixed. You know there's, there needs to be a way to set which monitor a program is going to open up on. So it, that also he, he talked about that and you know, you can do it on other operating systems but we need to figure out how we do that on Wayland. Global Hotkeys has been called out as a known issue. Now there is a solution but he mentions it was written kind of in a vacuum and developers were not involved. So their hotkeys are not set up in the application. They need to be set up in a third party app. And you know, Brody goes on to even say with KDE and gnome they support this but there really is going to need to be an official supported way to pass Global Hotkeys. This current solution is considered to be kind of kludged together. Basically it's just kind of a in case non native English speaking clued together means it's, it's a, a terrible fix. You know, it's, it's not a true lasting perfect fix. It's just we, we, we were able to get it working so don't touch it because it might fall apart, but it works. Now the last one I'm going to mention is old hardware which like for example somebody was using an Nvidia 710 so they're stuck on the Nvidia 470 driver which is not going to have the full Whelen support. The driver's just too old and there's aren't going to, there aren't going to be any kind of changes of the old driver. You know, old laptops are in this issue with Wayland which again fall into the old non supported drivers. I mean well, it has supported drivers for the hardware at the time but they don't support Wayland or they don't support it fully because it's just too old. And even, you know, partially supported, you'll never have the fullest, full polished implementation. So take a look at the article in the video, in the show notes and, you know, let us know what you. If you're on still on X11, you know, why, you know, I left out a ton of reasons and thoughts from the sources. So there, there's a lot of reasons that are very valid. So, you know, love, love to hear it all, you know, put them on the discord and let us know.
- [62:39]
Jonathan Bennett
One of the things I wonder is people that have tried Wayland and had problems with it, or even have recently tried it and had problems with it, are they running a. We talked about this earlier. Are they running a bleeding edge distro like Fedora, or are they trying it on something like Ubuntu where they're running, you know, two or three versions back and seeing all of the bugs that were there when that version was written? That might make a difference to some of this. I know there is always the whole. You have very interesting hardware and your very interesting hardware does not play well with everything else. Laptops were really bad at this for a while, but they would have, you know, you'd have a video card that only existed for this one laptop. It was the only place where you could find this exact configuration. Configuration. I had one of those. It was a pain. You know, you get into things like that.
- [63:33]
Jeff Massey
Well, and. Oh, go ahead.
- [63:35]
Jonathan Bennett
One of the things to keep in mind is no matter whether Wayland or is ready or not, X11 is basically unmaintained. And so that's. That's going to. That's going to be a reality check for distros here. Soon it's going to have to get dropped from places like Fedora that have strict rules about not shipping unmaintained software. And I know Ex Libre exists. I still have doubts about how well that's actually being maintained with only one main developer there. But who knows, they may actually make that work. We may see that they could be.
- [64:17]
Jeff Massey
Dedicated and stick with it. Time. Time will tell. One thing he did talk about though, is there was some friction in the Whalen camp. It sounds like there's certain, certain things that are done on like Mac and Windows and X11 that sounded like people kind of were pushing back against just because it's on Windows, you know, like some of the graphical selections of like, where Windows open.
- [64:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Wow.
- [64:45]
Jeff Massey
We can't, you know, it's on Windows, therefore it's bad. It's like. No, it doesn't mean it's bad. It's we just, we should implement it because, you know, even, even an operating system we don't like is going to have good ideas in it. And we shouldn't shun those ideas just because of where they came from. If they're good ideas, they're a good idea.
- [65:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Blind Squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.
- [65:06]
Jeff Massey
Exactly. And hopefully this, you know, his video gets a little traction and maybe gets the Wayland supporter, the developers to kind of soften their view on certain topics.
- [65:18]
Jonathan Bennett
Of things it's been an issue with like that. That's probably the one thing that has annoyed me the most about Wayland is that they have been very purist. We could say, could say other things, but we'll be nice and go with purist about what they want to land inside the Wayland protocol and what they think should exist outside of it. And just the bike shedding and the wool gathering over some of these things that it's like, you know, this pull request. Some of these pull requests were open for years and just constant bickering and debate back and forth like, oh no, I think it should work like this. Oh no, you shouldn't do that. Nobody should ever do that. Well, our OS wants to do that. Well, your OS is wrong. If you want to do this, like, oh my goodness, guys, users want this. Just get over yourselves and pull it in. And what actually happened is. And again, we've talked about this before, but Valve, Valve came along and said, okay, we're just going to fork Wayland. We'll start making our own protocol. They called it the Frog Protocol. And not very long after that happened, Wayland sort of got its act together for a while. And it's like, all right, we're going to drop some of these developers that have really been causing problems. We're going to make some rules about what people are allowed to threaten to do. And you know, if you don't have veto, actually have veto power, then you don't get to tell people you're going to veto their ideas. And yeah, it was, it was fun times. We finally got some stuff to land though. So I don't know, maybe Valve will have to step up again. It's like, let us tell you about our new Toad protocol.
- [67:00]
Jeff Massey
Well, I remember when that happened because they had single people that could veto that really, or just kind of a standard developer. And it. Well, you know, and I appreciate every open source developer, but sometimes it's like, boy, I think, dude, some of you live in a bubble. And it's like, hey, let's Even. Even an idea you think is crazy, you should at least stop and rather than immediately reject it, say, okay, what happens if we did this? What is. What is the real reason? What's. What makes sense? What. You know, even critically evaluate something you think is crazy? Because maybe it's not that crazy. You know, maybe. Maybe your ideology could shift a little bit and you could open your mind and go, maybe. Maybe this would work. Maybe this would be something that would be helpful.
- [67:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, there's a. There's a term for that. Is. Is it called iron manning? Steel manning, I think.
- [67:55]
Jeff Massey
Opening up your thoughts like that. Or.
- [67:59]
Jonathan Bennett
The opposite of a strawman. Oh, yeah. Steel manning. Right. It reminds me very much of this idea where a strawman argument is. You take someone's argument and you sort of represent it in its weakest form so that you can easily defeat it. Steel manning is the opposite. You take someone's argument or their idea, and in trying to think about it, you kind of represent it in its strongest possible form and then evaluate it. And it gives you a much clearer, like a much more. A much less arbitrary view of what they're actually talking about. It lets you evaluate it a lot more clearly and rationally.
- [68:41]
Jeff Massey
Oh, I never heard of that term before.
- [68:43]
Jonathan Bennett
It was introduced to me on a podcast. I heard somebody say it there, and me, too, went and looked it up. Went and looked it up and kind of liked the idea. Yeah. So it's a thing with Wayland. Wayland is literally designed by a convention, by a commission. Excuse me. And there's a reason that that's such a stereotypical trope. Like, oh, this was designed by committee. Well, Wayland is actually designed by committee. And there are some of those problems that have popped up. I.
- [69:20]
Jeff Massey
In my personal life, I found that design by committee usually does not work. It's better to throw something out there. Here's a framework of something, even if it's not right, just put something out there that people can then kind of build off of and fix. And, you know, rather than just like, okay, we got a blank sheet of paper. Let's all decide what we want. You know, you kind of need that initial direction to get things going. And then once somebody's focused on something, then, I don't know. I find it works a lot better in my personal experiences in leading teams and things like that, running projects.
- [69:59]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, makes sense. All right, let's talk about kde. We've sort of danced around KDE a little bit, and we've got the latest weekly update, and there's A couple of fun things in here we can chat about one of which and sort of the highlight for this week is the day night theme switching. And so if you want your machine to automatically go into dark mode once the sun goes down, you can now do that in KDE 6.5. And they've done quite a bit of theming work here. They've even got like the day and night theme versions of wallpapers, which is a lot of fun. There is now the ability to drag things to a panel itself rather than to a Task manager widget for 6.4.4, there's a bunch of bug fixes and crash fixes in 6.5.0. The Orca screen reader in 6.5 will now tell you when you have hit the CAPS lock key and which state it is in. And so that's pretty interesting. You can hibernate from the sddm, the Simple Display Desktop Manager login screen, which you probably shouldn't be hibernating your computer, but if you really want to, you can do it from there. Now, you know, lots of, lots of little things, little bug fixes stuff coming. So they are, they're working on 644 as their point update and 6.5.0 is about to come as the new big feature update and lots of, lots of fun stuff happening in both of those. Yeah, I think the day night theming is probably the most interesting there. I think that might drive me crazy, but it could be fun to play with.
- [71:51]
Jeff Massey
I think it'd be cool because just at night it's going to just dim things slightly so it's not so blinding. Oh, and they do mention still four very high priority plasma bugs, same as last week, and 2315 minute bugs, which is down from 28 from last week. So they're gaining ground there.
- [72:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Yep. Although it's always. You can't just, you can't just go based on the number of bugs. Right?
- [72:20]
Jeff Massey
Correct. Because. Because maybe eight got fixed and three got put in and.
- [72:27]
Jonathan Bennett
Right. But there's also the issue of like, just because the bugs are not written up doesn't necessarily mean that they're not there. And so part of the process of fixing a bug is getting it put into a bug report that isn't on the list. And so, you know, your 15 minute bugs going up in one week may actually mean that you're moving in the right direction because people finally were able to replicate the bugs and they got them written up and the process of fixing them sometime, sometimes the process of actually fixing the bug is very simple. It's figuring out how to replicate it. That's the hard part. Often the case.
- [73:02]
Jeff Massey
Very true.
- [73:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Often the case. All right, we want to get to some command line tips.
- [73:09]
Jeff Massey
I think we should, but I don't. Mine's kind of only sort of command line ish.
- [73:15]
Jonathan Bennett
Mine is a very command line tip, so we'll, we'll even out for the day.
- [73:19]
Jeff Massey
Okay, so this week's command line tip is open. Snitch. Now, this is a port for Linux of the Mac OS tool Little Snitch. Basically, it's a firewall which reports back network requests from applications, so then a user can create rules to block the request if needed. So why do you need this? Well, when an app says it doesn't need Internet access and suddenly starts sending out network packets, why would it need to do that? Is it sending telemetry data that, you know, was unknown? You know, it's not supposed to send telemetry, but it is. Is it nefarious software? Did somebody get into something and what you got isn't what you think you have? Or is it just simply maybe checking for an update? I mean, there can be legitimate reasons and there can be bad reasons. You know, it, it requires more investigation, but it's helpful to know first. So the article in the Show Notes has a link to the GitHub page where they have the prepackaged.deb and.rpm files. Now, if you're not, if you're not using those, there's of course, source code, and so then you can compile it yourself. Basically, you install the daemon and then you fire up the client gui. You know, install that and fire it up and start the service. Then you open the GUI and you can start making rules for your applications. You can enable or deny the traffic, or you can even limit it to a specific host. So, yeah, it's got to talk, but it needs to only talk to this specific ip. You know, you can set that up. There's. I won't go into all the details. The article goes into various things you can do to customize rules and a lot of details on how to use them. But if you just fire it up, you know, just. The basic deny or allow are pretty simple to use, you know, if you're not getting anything too fancy or crazy, you know, and with all the malicious software out there and, you know, people sometimes being a little rambunctious on their telemetry data, you know, opting. Opting you in rather than. And requiring you to opt out versus, hey, maybe I Would like the opportunity to say, yes, I would give this information out. So, you know, take a look at Open Snitch and take more granular control of your system and give it a try.
- [75:52]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, very cool. I'm curious and I'm sure this is. This was probably not something that was on your radar when you were looking at this, but what immediately comes to mind is I wonder how well this does defeating programs that sort of are intending to hide their network activity. Sort of the rootkit kind of approaches where you do things to avoid getting on the radar of somebody. So, for example, there was a security story from this week where a new technique was found where malicious programs were bind mounting. So in the slash proc directory, that's where the, the. That's where most of these sort of stats for processes lives in slash Proc. And there was this new technique that was found in the wilds. Malware was doing this where a malicious program was bind mounting another applications slash proc folder over its own. And so whenever these tools would go and access it, they would just, they would go by default to the one that was bind mounted. And so, you know, you would go to look up the da. The stats on this process that you're trying to figure out, and it would go over to something that was completely benign and the malicious process was hiding that way. It's just. That was a fascinating story to read about and sort of understand what was going on. But also with something like this, I.
- [77:17]
Jeff Massey
Always have to wonder, well, it would probably show up in the firewall. It's just what would it label it as? But you could maybe catch it depending on what it tried to hide as. Oh, I'm hiding under the web browser. And you're like, but I don't have my web browser open. And this thing is pinging. It's like. And maybe start looking at the addresses that it's sending packets out to. Or, you know.
- [77:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, so if you can't hide.
- [77:50]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, I think you could probably catch it. But you'd have to be paying close attention and checking out where's this actually going? Or.
- [78:02]
Jonathan Bennett
Absolutely, absolutely. All right, I've got something that's very different. I had a problem show up this week. I was working on someone's Windows desktop. We were trying to get a Windows 10 to upgrade to Windows 11. And it's like the hardware should be able to do it, but the problem was that it got. Got installed as an MBR Windows install instead of a GPT Windows install. And so we had to run. Microsoft actually has an application that will let you do this upgrade, by the way, to switch MBR to GPT. And I look, this machine has important stuff on it. I really don't want to kill this thing by this Microsoft tool going crazy in the middle of doing this. It's like, okay, let's get a backup of the hard drive. All right, so usually what I go to is DD Rescue to pull a hard drive image off, but it's like, okay, it's a one terabyte drive, but they're only using like 100 gigs. But I want to get something that's a disk image, so I can just go directly back over the hard drive if I need to. So I was sort of looking around what tools are out there that would let me do this, and I ended up with a very different usage for a familiar tool. And that is QEMU img that is the image manipulation tool for qemu. And one of the things that it can do is it can convert between different image types. And one of those image types that it supports is the RAW disk image, which is essentially what you've got with a physical hard drive that is essentially a RAW disk image just backed by an actual drive as opposed to a file. So you can use QEMU image to convert from the RAW over to something like a QCOW2, which is going to be a sparse image. So it's not going to take up the entirety of the 1 TB. But the other thing that you can do with this is that you can tell it, hey, in this Qcow2 image, I want you to use Zstandard compression. And so I ended up with a much smaller disk image saved on my RAID hard drive and was able to maintain a backup. And so if something had gone wrong, I could have flashed it right back over. So I've got the whole string here in the show notes. It's QEMU image convert. C I don't remember what all of these flags do, unfortunately. C P S512 that's set in the sector size and then O compression type equals zstandard F for the incoming file type we set to raw and then O for the outgoing type, which we set to zcal2m8 I think that sets how many parallel threads it uses. And then you give it the physical location. In my case it was dev SDG and then the image QCOW2. So I used that this past week, this past weekend, in fact, doing a. Doing a Windows 10 to Windows 11. The first steps of that upgrade use this to be able to get a good disk image for a customer. And again, I was very intrigued because it has a very different use than what we normally use QEMU image for, but it works.
- [81:25]
Jeff Massey
That is cool.
- [81:26]
Jonathan Bennett
That's.
- [81:26]
Jeff Massey
That's pretty hardcore command line there.
- [81:30]
Jonathan Bennett
I didn't entirely come up with it myself. It was based off of a. Was it a Reddit thread or a. I forget the name of the other place. Stack Overflow. Like either Reddit or Stack Overflow, one of those two. But, yeah, I was pretty impressed when I found that and adapted it to my own needs.
- [81:48]
Jeff Massey
Yeah, it's interesting how some of those commands, like, I did not know you could do this.
- [81:52]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep.
- [81:52]
Jeff Massey
Or use it in this way.
- [81:55]
Jonathan Bennett
Absolutely. All right, Jeff, you had something fun come up this past week too, didn't you?
- [82:01]
Jeff Massey
I did. So Rob has been gone for the, you know, like, last week and this week because he's on vacation. Him and the family are going to the coast. Well, he actually came by where I live. Well, in the metropolitan. Metropolitan area. So he. I drove about 15 miles to meet him, and we met in Nampa, Idaho, at a little bar. And I got my money, so everybody that donated coffee in my name, I got it. And we actually had a couple beers and we talked for probably a couple hours. It was a good time. We had to keep it kind of a little bit short just because he had to get up early the next morning. They were still driving, driving west to hit the coast. And. But, yeah, it was. It was great meeting in person. And we had. We had a lot of fun, and it was a nice, nice time. And I bought a Guinness with that first coffee money. So if you're wondering whether it was kind of coffee. Ish, you know, Guinness, same color.
- [83:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I buy it. It's a stout.
- [83:12]
Jeff Massey
Yep. Extra stout, but good stuff.
- [83:16]
Jonathan Bennett
Very cool.
- [83:16]
Jeff Massey
But, yeah, it was great actually being able to meet in person. So now we got to figure out getting down to Jonathan and Ken.
- [83:24]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, Ken and I have done a meetup because he's not that far away from me. I got sent up to Oklahoma City for a work call, and I'm like, hey, let's do lunch sometime. So Ken and I, we grabbed lunch. This has been probably a year ago now, but we did. We hung out together. But if you guys. You or Rob ever get down this way, we'll definitely have to do it.
- [83:41]
Jeff Massey
But we. We talked about sometime maybe meeting up down there, because between where he lives and I live, it's actually. You'd think it's closer for him, but it's really almost equal distance. I mean, I mean within, you know, I think it was like 50 miles or 100 miles or something. You know, it was, it was pretty close where same distance come down and maybe we get a, get a show where we're all, we're all in the, all in the basement with Jonathan.
- [84:10]
Jonathan Bennett
We can do it. We can do it. I've got the stuff to do that.
- [84:14]
Jeff Massey
Oh, we'll have to tell you. And then you can start panicking about the sound stage and how I'm going to have all, everybody in here and not cross talk and echoes and crosstalk.
- [84:23]
Jonathan Bennett
And echo is the difficulty. Yeah, yeah, might do it. Might do it real old style and just gather around a single microphone.
- [84:30]
Jeff Massey
Oh, that would be cool.
- [84:31]
Jonathan Bennett
That'd be fun. All right. Do you have anything else you want to plug or. We let.
- [84:38]
Jeff Massey
That was kind of my plug. I was not going to do a poem because I just want to talk about getting the coffee money and meeting up and it was a great time. We both had a blast. So.
- [84:48]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, great. All right. I do want to let folks know that if you want to find more of my stuff there is over@hackaday, hackaday.com that is where Floss Weekly lives these days. We're sort of scrambling for guests. We've had to postpone the show for a couple of weeks now, but getting people coming in again and so hopefully we'll be able to have a show this next week also. That's where my security column goes live every Friday morning. And then if you also want, you can, you can check out Club Twit. That is definitely the other thing that we want to plug and let folks know about. Uh, it's not much more than the price of a cup of coffee or two per month. And you get ad free access to all the shows and behind the scenes sneak peeks, all kinds of good stuff. Um, so if you're not part of Club Twit, you should definitely check it out. All right, thank you everybody for being here. We appreciate everyone that's here, those that get us live and on the download. And we will see you next week on the Untitled Lending show.
- [85:50]
Leo Laporte
Get your tech news exactly how you want it with TWiT TV. Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent delivers quick hit coverage and exclusive journalist interviews, giving you the inside scoop on breaking tech stories in under an hour. Now for deeper dives, I hope you'll join me, Leo Laporte and a great panel of tech industry experts. That's every Sunday with this week in Tech. We'll break down everything from AI breakthroughs to privacy concerns to cybersecurity alerts in the tech world's longest running and most trusted tech news roundtable. So, efficient or in depth, the choice is yours. Subscribe to both shows wherever you get your podcasts, and head on over to our website, Twit TV for even more independent tech journalism.